Burning rubber

I was just going to plop one of my poems in here in an act of obtuse laziness but since I haven't posted anything in a few days (days, year - same thing) I'd feel guilty, and I feel guilt... well, ridiculously easy. I was going to put a metaphor in there but the only two words that came to me right away were moth and butter and I couldn't negotiate the term 'guilt' with them properly without feeling inept and somewhat aroused.

Anyways, I strongly feel that the human race is 90% wrong at least half of the time, which mathematically equates to us fucking everything up anywhere from 110% to 240% of every waking moment, globally. Some people screw things around so magnificently that they double up the worldwide awkwardness for the rest of us and take up the slack for the unnaturally perfect who never do anything for the greater good.

We live in a constant state of TV-inebriation and advertisement-sanitization scrubbing our reality away (TEETH ARE SUPPOSED TO BE A LIGHT YELLOW! BREATH ISN'T NATURALLY MINTY! TOENAILS ARE... okay, cut the toenails) with no view outside of our homes untainted by some bipedal perversion of reality selling us purple Windex or Fresh-Alps-Sun-Dried-Laundry Febreze or manly steel-grey-colored razors/feminine pink-lavender-colored razors. Sure, graffiti is a crime, but that empty public space where art could be is taken up by some unattainable physique chewing Mentos because $ > society. 

Photoshopped-perfection wildfire-brandishes your cityscape, blazing a spotlight on that mole on your cheek, focusing a camera on your incorrect nose, and introduces your receding hairline to everyone around you like a guest of honor at a surprise party. They don't make nice clothes for the plus-size members of our population, so go buy some sweatpants and a baggy top to highlight your ostracization, fatty. Oh, and everyone? Make sure you feel bad and anxious all the time, too.

One bus-stop ad makes you unsure of yourself and anxiety-amped, the next one sells you an anti-depressant. 

But there I go again, grabbing my highly-decorated and quite obvious rant-flag to scream down the highway like I expect to be noticed, or like I don't think most people already know this but put zero effort into changing it because bills/rent/food/family/time/how-the-hell-do-I-do-that?/etc.

So like yeah.

This isn't about us being wrong because some cock-bag (hold it, hold it, hold it... wait - why is human genitalia [and sexuality, and products-relating-to: c*nt, d*ck, dildo etc] often or always deferred to when needing an insult?  They're the best parts of the human body - I mean, have you ever even touched some genitals? It's so much better than touching your eyeball or the black stuff under the fridge - so some questions about all this double-standardness arise) sits at a desk and thinks of ways to make all of us feel like shit because the new Crystal-Lite watermelon/goji-berry elixer didn't take off as expected, but about how we're so unconsciously trained by that shaved-body Adonis in Buffalo jeans shoving a bulge at us from the bus shelter at six A.M. before work to be uncomfortable in our own entities that not only our whole day is slaughtered in thinking, "that woman over there couldn't possibly think I'm attractive - I HAVE A NORMAL BODY.", but our lives are somewhat controlled to an extent as well.

(Wait. Did I just contradict myself about how this isn't about that but then it totally is? Good.)

Our eyeballs can't really escape "flawless" people, as they invade our vision non-stop wherever we go and it only ends when we look in a mirror in order to find natural things to unnaturally fix, and then in our friend's or co-worker's faces and think "geez, a little effort?" and it's all just horrible. 

And it's been going on for so long now that it's like some shitty "1984"-like auto-medication taken on a daily basis to ensure a populace so self-aware that entire industries from the ones pandering to depression and anxiety to Lululemon survive on it.

We're all wrong in this together; we fart and get caught picking our noses, vomit when it's least appreciated by ourselves and others, have unconcealable rashes on freshly-shaved/waxed, um, areas, and have unmakeupped-faces dribbling mucous while suffering a cold in front of someone we find desirable, so you're a human and start getting re-used to that. Remember when you were a little kid and it was all about being a free human? Find that again. I'm sure you can look past that pimple on their forehead; I believe in you. Fight the system. You're already fighting it by reading this, and you've won if I've made you think. 

Now here's something that has surprisingly little to do with that tower of words above, so put all that crap aside because we're heading back to 1964 to burn rubber and inhale some CO.

Nowadays things like this just make no damn sense, but drag racing was big in the 1960's. Really big. Car magazines, car-humor magazines, toys, model kits and sound-effects-albums like this beautiful thing existed in abundance. Seriously. And I'm not bashing that, either. Please bring all this back, somebody.

Echoing announcers giving indecipherable play-by-play; revving engines; squealing tires; crowds cheering. And an ambulance.

Sometimes I can just really go for massive burnouts with the bass up and the scared neighbors, and this does the trick. I actually have two copies of this: the stereo one pictured, and a mono version. No, I don't have that ability to tell the difference between mono/stereo unless the piano or feet or whatever is 'moving' from one speaker over to the next, it's just that the mono-version record is a gatefold with color photos and extra stuff in the packaging, so I'm a geek in an aesthetic rather than aural way.

And I'm very cynical in thinking anyone can tell the difference between engine-noises, so I didn't split any tracks up, settling for giving the two sides their places. So, sorry. But here's the track list if you care to do it yourself:

    A1 Super Stock Eliminations (Stick Shift)
    A2 Super Stock Eliminations (Automatic Shift)
    A3 Dragster Eliminations
    A4 Mr. Stock  Eliminator of 1964
    A5 AA/Street Roadster Eliminator
    A6 Top Fuel Eliminator
    A7 Top Gasoline Eliminator
    B1 The Sounds at the Finish Line
    B2 Blower Blowing Up On Dragster + Ambulance
    B3 A Two Engine Dragster, "The Freight Train"
    B4 The Sound of Shifting
    B5 "Troubles" at Starting Line
    B6 Stock Cars Lined Up Behind Ready Line
    B7 Dragsters Time Trials
    B8 Roadsters Time Trials

Download here:
vroooooom

How many c***'s could a c***-s***er s*** if a c***-s***er could s*** c***s?

When you're young and innocent and unaware yet of your own unique personality, you do things, say things, live things (?) without fear of consequence because you inherently just KNOW that everyone is like you: NOT like you, to an extent. Meaning, like you in that every individual is exactly that.

For example: in early elementary school (or all of elementary school),  there was "Show & Tell". You bring something to school, like a flower, or a picture of your mom, or a Barbie doll, or your new Knight Rider lunchbox with David Hasellbach's face on the thermos-thing, or you just point at your shoes, and then tell something about the whatever.

So in Grade 4 I brought in my working miniature model of a guillotine. "This is a gilloteen. The man lays down here all tied up, and then you bring the blade up [it was made out of lead, for the weight/striking action] with this string and then um, you let the string go and um..." and the little lead blade falls and the tiny man's head [red paint splashed around the neck] pops off into the little basket with a rattle.

The substitute teacher sort of looked nervous but smiled and said something like, "Hey that's really neat! Umm.... Nancy? Dear, what did you bring?" (pretty sure it was a Barbie doll). This was the same sub who earlier in the year turned off the lights in the portable-classroom unit and then played the track from Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", the track with all the sound effects and screaming and "I know that I'm mad, I've always been mad..." and then asked us to write down our thoughts afterwards.  

So thought that my model death machine would have impressed her into bringing to reality whatever pre-adolescent, pre-sexual fantasies I had of her. Nope. No being kidnapped and fed a diet of candy and Alpha-ghetti while watching cartoons forever and ever. (I really want to dive into that whole grey area period of life where you fantasize about whoever you're attracted to, that little window before you know about sex? And it's full of oddball undeveloped fetishes that either fade out of memory or stay with you, either repressed as a guilty "perversion" or shamelessly flaunted by walking around in a giant teddy bear outfit (I don't do that). But yeah, some other time.)

That was most likely the first time where something that I thought was totally awesome was regarded with... oh how about 'lack of enthusiasm', by my peers. (It'd make a manifestly cooler tale to say my parents were Addams-Family-esque and bought the model kit for me with earnest encouragement to one day level up, but the blame goes towards my Mom's brother, uncle Denny, who was the resident Black Sheep of that side of the family: when I was like eight or whatever age you are in grade four he gave me a huge box of original Aurora "Universal Movie Monster" models [all 1961-1964] - all completed and masterfully painted - along with about 40lbs-worth of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" and CarToons/Hot Rod Cartoons/Drag Cartoons magazines from the early-mid-'60s. Also the first four (and only) issues of "Big Daddy Roth" magazine which was put out by Pete Millar, the dude behind early CarToons and later his own Drag Cartoons, but my A-hole brother stole those and sold them some decades back. Today the Roth mag's can go to $100 apiece. Vengeance shall be mine....) 

Sure, once the shock wore off and they were reasonably sure I wasn't going to "show" them a butcher's knife not from a model kit, they gathered around with morbid fascination. But you get that from everyday people at a highway accident or the ubiquitous American school shootings/bullet-festivals.

Another way of going about the discovery that you're stepping outside the traditional margins (or careening back and forth drunken-insanely across five lanes) is by releasing some music that the general populace ignores, or runs screaming from while dropping all personal belongings in hopes that the flailing beast behind them becomes distracted long enough for them to hide safely.

I think this may be one of the latter. Contrary to the mentality of the status quo, though, the latter is quite a good thing.
Tripping over the corpse of HAIR's salad days (and from that magical era before AIDS and a fear-mongering media) in a sexual frenzy of most likely unequal proportions comes (...frequently!) Phil Oesterman, Earl Wilson, and Billy Cunningham's "Let My People Come" from 1974, obviously a take on 'Let my people go' and a self-purposed body-liberating musical celebrating every single aspect of squishy wet human rubbin's. Just try to find another recording with a chorus of "Gurgle, slurp!", and email me when you do. I wrote something else concerning this release right here, if you care to do a bit of scrolling.
I hope you do, because I go into a tad more detail there, if in a more frenetic and evidently drunken way. Suffice it to say, this ain't for the prudish, so there's the warning if everything else in this write-up didn't hint at that already.

Astonishingly, this thing has very recently been off-Broadway revived as of this past February. I just wonder if the music had been updated. If anyone managed to see this, please leave a note on the experience! 

Now if you don't mind, I'm off to tap me some Jack Daniels.

Track Listing:

Opening Number    
Give It To Me    
I'm Gay    
Come In My Mouth    
Dirty Words    
Linda, Georgina, Marilyn & Me    
I Believe My Body    
Take Me Home With You    
Choir Practice    
And She Loved Me    
The Cunnilingus Champion Of Co. C    
Doesn't Anybody Love Anymore    
Let My People Come

Download here:
 Come!

(PS - The post title is an actual line from the recording)

Dedicated to Scratch Records (R.I.P.)

The year was 1980-something. 1988? Okay. '87 maybe. We heard about this little tiny record store in downtown Vancouver. We were from the odious 'burbs against our wills. We were used to heading out every week to Odyssey Imports, to Track Records, to Collector's RPM and A&B Sound and Sam the Record Man, all on one strip (after Odyssey moved over from Granville St), then on a short bus ride to Zulu on W.4th, in another super-cozy space that I think once housed Quintessence Records. So here we had yet another record store to go to, on Cambie, near Hastings (apologies to non-locals - I know that reading about "familiar" street names is totally irritating).
It wasn't on street-level, it was just off the sidewalk and down some hazardous steps into a narrow pit that also housed three other shops - as far as I know, the only place in Van where such a thing exists - and second from the end before you popped back up the opposing staircase. Of the two, I preferred that other-end-staircase, but I can't say why.

Creak open the door, and shit; this place is small. Sort of triangular too. Nine out of ten times heading in and to your immediate left on the sofa behind the till was Keith Parry, owner-proprietor, music-lover of any genre and all-around swell fellow (as well as member of Superconducter, among others), with a How-dy! and we were like, "Uh - hey.", and hit the racks. We weren't used to benevolent - or non-paranoid, or anxiety-free - music-shop owners, but time went on and we eventually got on famously.  

Tons of vinyl we'd never seen before. A small table full of used 7"'s (I refused to pay $8 for a worn copy of the DK's first single "California Uber Alles" and now kinda sorta totally wish I'd bought it, since I think brand new 7"s go for the same amount these days) and weird stuff all over the walls and ceiling, including a giant homemade Residents eyeball-with-top-hat made out of macrame. No, paper-mache. Whatever. And rail-thin Keith with the hair down almost to the waist, perpetual smile and infinite (okay almost) knowledge on the local scene and anything vaguely underground. Tape cassette shelves on the walls, a small zine-display, some rarities and a GG Allin voodoo doll in the front-counter display, tiny video cabinet with obscure VHS tapes, and cheap dollar-boxes under the used bins filled with unexpected treasures, like when I found that 1982 12" version of BAD RELIGION's first 7" (when the initial 1981 7" sold out, BR repressed it the next year in a bigger size), and my buddy said, "Hey, cool - let me see that...". 
Yeeeeeah. The next moment I look up and the fucker was at the register buying the thing.
(I eventually got it back 22 years later.)

Carl (The New Pornographers) Newman behind the cash machine when Keith was out, malevolently staring down potential customers through a ton of red hair just daring them to buy anything that didn't meet his approval. Small surprises, like candy added to your purchase or doodled artwork on the other side of the printed plastic store bags. I actually still have my record bag with a big Scratch logo on one side and a life-size, multi-colored va-jay-jay adorning the back.
Mr. Parry giving me an original 11x17 gig flyer for the Dead Kennedys/D.O.A./Toxic Reasons show at the Commodore Ballroom from 1982 after he saw me eyeing it with insane lust.
It was just a warm, neat place. 

Then he moved shop.
Like half a block away, across from the ass-side of the ancient Woodward's building and permanently shadowed by the parking garage next door. I helped move a bit of stuff along with Claudio (where's he at?), but my S.A.D. was spiking and it was a little weird. The new place was way bigger and had an awesome secret: a stairway somewhat in the middle of the floor-space led down to a series of rooms (used for storage, parties and I believe photo-shoots) that, as you traveled along, became smaller and smaller until you ended up in a tiny dank-ish concrete area with a manhole over your head that popped you up into the middle of Hastings. The rear of the place opened to a tight alley that threw you out onto the edge of Gastown.
Only a few years later and Keith pulled up stakes and took a smaller location on Richards, a non-descript building with only a doorway and sandwich-board to let you know where you were. Head down the long hall and there ya go. At this point I had pretty much stopped hitting the place for stuff, maybe once every three months or so: all the record shops previously mentioned had bit the dust due to both rent/lease hikes and the CD "revolution", and Granville - once a main punk-hangout - was in the first stages of personality-suicide and getting downtown was less and less of a fun pastime and more and more of a depressing punch of reality we only fully feel in retrospect: things move forward and change has to happen. Other reasons being that old-school punk LP's in the used bins were on the decline, and all the new music I was getting introduced to wasn't really available at the shop. 
It was also a weird feeling being in Scratch without Keith ever in sight anymore (he retreated to the office for the distro work and other office-y business), and 2-3 new staff members busy doing figures or shuffling product away and not knowing you, or that you had been buying stuff from the previous incarnations of the place for like ten years. 
The laid-back relaxed vibe we felt had gotten necessarily replaced, and there we are being moved forward. 

Jump ahead to sometime last year and Scratch moves to a spot on Hastings. Like, almost literally a spot, something matching 50 square feet almost right across from Pigeon Park. Incredibly cramped but also kinda cozy, and I guess far too small to accommodate the both old and new stock needed for a venture to hold out for very long. Also, the two times I was in there, the clerk seemed to have ADHD and a nervous anxiety usually reserved for startled squirrels. 

After 25 years, the physical store is dead, fully survived, however, by their online services, so go there instead and order away. (Edit: the site hasn't been updated since '14)

It's something we never think about at the moment because really, why would you?: that amazing place you go to will not be there forever. Except maybe the aforementioned Zulu Records still around in their second location.


As something of a tribute, I serve up "The Sensuous Black Woman",  by "The Madam".  
The Madam was actually Lady Reed, a familiar face around Rudy Ray Moore (of many a Blaxploitation flick such as Dolomite and Petey Wheatstraw). You can hear Lady Reed in outtakes - tho' not from this LP - on N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton" on the track 'Gangsta Gangsta', if you're at all familiar with that release (and damn, you should be). 
But here she lays down the simple rules for sexually attracting, seducing, and keeping your man, and keeping him interested and horny for your beautiful Black pussy. 
And, if you're prone to discomfort around words such as pussy and cock, please, please do not bring these downloads onto your computer, because it's pretty much nothing BUT those words and better. Or worse, I guess. As the jacket says, "Rated for Mature Adults Only". Not the immature ones who are gonna start heckling their monitor drunkenly half-way through.  
And the album is produced by R.R. Moore as well, put out on Kent Records which had a roster including bluesman Guitar Slim Green and a group called Snatch and the Poontangs. The year? Sources say 1977, but it sounds like something from '70-'72.

Side one is her monologue on the subject, while side two is her giving a smaller version with a Q&A session, and it's hilarious. The audience of a seeming few is completely awesome. 

Caveat on the sound quality: my copy seems to have been played several hundred times by someone using a rusty axe as a stylus, and I've run it through a 'click & hiss' eliminator, so that odd aural activity in the background is not the tides of the ocean or elevator noises, but the dubious fixings of Adobe Audition.

(photo credit: me)

Download here:
 Sensuous Black Woman

Superstar From the Far East

Antony Villa - Superstar From the Far East Sings a Special Tribute to Elvis

Quick recap: Bad neighbors are out, new neighbors are pretty much up there like ghosts, have a new roommate. All of which equals less stress mentally and monetarily, so maybe I'll buy another record sooner or later. Everything's go.

So, here's another gold hit of vinyl that has had a fair run through the "bad LP" sites and has apparently also pleased/spiritually-benumbed many an unsuspecting listener over the many years since it's unleashment into this world: "Anto..." well just look at the title above again. 

Okay. Perhaps a year after E.Presley's ungainly death one might have had one's eye unceremoniously mugged with the 12x12" vibrant hues of blue/green jacketry offset by the familiar Bejewelry-implanted white jumpsuit now adorned by a fellow of seemingly Asian heritage while strolling past your favorite record-parlour.
I really don't know how an adult human brain functioned in 1978, but would an adult who was a fan of EP grab something like this product, maybe in a fit of grief or "dear-god-Elvis-will-never-release-another-album-again-because-of-all-the-deadness-so-THIS-will-help-deal-with-the-loss"-thinking? 
See, I simply don't know. Why the tribute album at all? If you like music and saw the mid-90's you also saw AT LEAST nine hundred 'tribute' albums dedicated to everyone from Nirvana to that guy busking outside of your local Safeway and how many of those survived any mental replay? Tribute albums have always been a higher form of novelty item, so why do people still throw their talent at the things like crumpled foil Teen-burger wrappers at a dustbin? For many it's the only way to showcase what they have if what they have isn't uhhh, say, history-making. In that, they went and wrote their own history anyway.

Antony Villa AKA Antony Starluck AKA Antony Starluck Villa-Real AKA "The Singing Inventor" recorded this LP here in Vancouver in '78 at Total Sounds West studios - a studio owned by Vancouver jazz player Dale Jacobs who also poked around some piano & synth on some tracks (and also had his own couple of bands, "The Dale Jacobs Group", and simply "Dale Jacobs" who a year later would release "Cobra" - something you've most likely come across in the thrifts, the cover featuring a very large snake let loose in a very fine apartment) and put it out on the ubiquitous (no, not really) "Golden Constellation International Records Ltd" label located at what is now Al Halal Meats up on Victoria Drive near the Dairy Queen. Tiny shop. 

Anyways, Let's look at the back of the LP cover.

READ all of that and decide not to hear it, I dare you.

The music is balanced out between soft rock-ish balladeering and disco, but a kind of disco that that group of older teens in the neighborhood worked for years at engineering, felt it was the high point of their lives and then later they all just went different ways and landed jobs managing lube-shop franchises in placed like Franklinville or something.
 
The mystery as to why this Ernie Manuel gets his own photo-box and blurb may never be resolved, since he only gets co-writing creds on one track along with back-up vocals. Other than this the internets reveal nothing on the man.
As for Antony himself, the man holds several patents - mostly on medical items - and still does musical work, although you can judge for yourself  if his talents have been honed to perfection in the years since. And then there's his own Facebook profile. A man of varied talents, to be sure.
 
You can preview what this thing will sound like here, just to see if it's worth downloading the whole album HERE.
Then we can all do the Moon Cat Dance!

Everything is back up.

Woo! Thanks to Blogger Rick Shide, all old entries are once again online and downloadable.

Back, sort of.

Apologies everywhoever, I... wow, a YEAR!? Man, that's bad. Soooo bad.

Several things why!: FACEBOOK. God Damn Facebook. I was warned, but I laughed it off. I fucking laughed it off.

Also, no $$$ for new weird vinyl since the roomie moved away. Been to thrifts like 10 times in the last year and it was all for clothes and stuff. Actually passed up a live album from that man/woman duet who do the slightly-off piano recordings in the 50's? Forget the names. Jack Davis art, too.

Also, spending a lot of mental time battling the upstairs neighbors who feel the need to share their music/TV/parties with everyone else but get horrifically offended when they hear anything else from around them. However, my subwoofer is now against the ceiling and I have 47,000 music/noise files on the hard drives as well as 6,000+ vinyl/etc recordings, so vengeance is at hand.... May start off with some Justin Beiber mixed with Diamanda Galas' "wild women with steak-knives (homicidal love song for solo scream)".

Also struggling with two types of S.A.D. and some other brainy-mental things which keeps a happy, productive spirit nailed to the floor much of the time;

AND still searching for a free sharing site, of which I've had a couple suggestions from viewers which I will hopefully investigate soon. That last sentence sounds wrong, but you get the idea.

Plus I've been spending my precious writing time doing up poetry (prose-poetry, sort of in the Bukowski vein - excellent way of exorcising some little demons, and mostly done when blindingly drunk) and gig/food reviews on the site which may have brought you to this thing.

SO, there's my plight. Want to get some more up here! Very much a "Once I get my shit together..." situation. This whole 'adulthood' scenario is really disagreeing with me....

 (tattooed backwards on my chest)

Let's Celebrate Freedom

Okay, many or most items here are now saved from mass distribution by being held securely in the loving arms of the all-knowing U.S. Government. As such, the same files will soon (heh) be available via some other file-thingie.

Notice about past posts!

It's been a while, but I should have some items up soon. In the meantime, I've gone back and zipped up all the music files on the blog. Well, most. Some of the 1-to-four track listings I left as is. But the rest are all one-time downloads, and boy I wish I knew about that when starting out.

In lieu of any audio this time around, here's a picture of a woman made out of typewriter parts.

(Jeremy Mayer)