MC5 Adventure in Ann Arbor!

Ever since I moved to Ann Arbor in November I've been meaning to visit some sites of historical importance/relevance regarding the great MC5. Today I got off my lazy ass and did just that.

I visited West Park, a nice little park where the MC5 (as well as the Rationals, SRC, the Up, etc.) played free Sunday concerts in 1968, before their heads exploded and they decided they were too big for that sort of thing.

This is the band shell. Those splotches are from paintballs, I think--and judging by the stuff growing in front of it, a big paintball target is probably it's only function these days. The stage looks out onto a fat ugly apartment building sitting up on the ridge running along one side of the park.

I can imagine the music reverberating off the apartment building, out of the park, and drenching the surrounding neighborhood with swathes of throbbing sonic nightmare. No wonder the MC5 and other groups were forced to move their Sunday freakouts to Gallup Park, a much less populated area, by August 1968.

Hands numbed by the cold, I made my way out of West Park and back to my car--and along the way I found a little iPod on the sidewalk! After getting home and charging it up, I found it works and is filled with lots and lots of horrible music!

But my adventure wasn't over with this fortuitous iPod discovery. I still had another place to visit. 1510 Hill Street, the MC5 house.

This old place is located right on frat row, next to a dental fraternity. And it's now a co-op. I bet you could find some pretty cool stuff hidden in there somewhere. I mean, John Sinclair ran his commune Trans-Love Energies and his underground rag The Sun from down the basement for christsakes!

On the other side (not the dental frat side) is 1520 Hill, where the Stooges lived. This place is also a co-op owned by the same company that owns 1510 Hill, and they are painted exactly the same. Here's a pic:

I'm thinking of going on another MC5 adventure in Ann Arbor in the upcoming days, maybe when and if it warms up a little. I want to find where the band played in Gallup Park. I've looked before and have come up with nothing (no band shell, though there should be one). Also, I'm interested in finding out if the psychedelic ballroom "The Fifth Dimension" is still erect. Posters I've seen online list its location as 216 W. Huron. Wait, maybe the Bob Seger System and Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes are playing tonight! I mean, it is Friday and I am in Ann Arbor.

J.D. Salinger, Dead

So J.D. Salinger is dead. Here are a couple interesting Salinger-related images I gleaned from online sources.

I am Satan, walk with me.

Recently, I watched a highly over-rated movie, Mario Bava's "Black Sabbath" (1963), and it got me thinking. Not about totally unthrilling Italian thrillers but about the band Black Sabbath and its wild and always drunk frontman Ozzy Osbourne. The first band I saw perform in concert (though without Ozzy on vocals).

Did you know Ozzy Osbourne could be Satan incarnate? Has his public persona the past ten years convinced you otherwise? Don't be fooled. Ozzy is still very likely Satan.

Why do I think so?

Let's go back nearly twenty years, to a dreary, rainy night in the fall of 1991. I was in the 7th grade. My older brother and I were doing our homework, listening to a cassette tape of Sabbath's greatest hits album "We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'N' Roll" on our cheap stereo. Great homework music. Suddenly, a volley of thunder and lightning from outside and the cassette player made a whirring, crunchy noise. The cassette stopped. No more "N.I.B."...Silence. I pressed eject to find a mess of tape. "We Sold Our Soul" had been eaten alive.

After some careful manuevering, I reeled the tape back into place, put it in the player and pressed play. The music was now backwards, a backwards "Black Sabbath", the song directly on the other side of the cassette from "N.I.B." Slightly intrigued, we listened, and then, just a few seconds in, we listened to Ozzy backwards-sing "I am Satan, walk with me." My brother and I looked at each other. I rewound the tape and we listened again. Same thing, right there in the slow, beginning verse of the song. Scared and slightly shaking, we listened to it a few more times. Ozzy seemed to be speaking to us. "Hey," he said, "it's rainy and cold outside but come on out and take a walk with me. I am Satan. Stop pretending to do your homework, bring some beer if you can find some, and walk with me." We played the rest of the song but found nothing, only "I am Satan, walk with me." I put the tape in my backpack.

I didn't feel like taking a walk with Satan or Ozzy. Neither did my brother.

The next day I took my walkman and some headphones to school and showed off my discovery to anyone who cared to listen. Many did. Many were never quite the same again.

Try it yourself. These days you don't even have to have a tape to manually fold over to hear everything backwards (btw, I methodically folded over and checked the rest of "We Sold Our Soul" and found zilch. Though I must say Tony Iommi's guitar work did sound pretty awesome).

Try it. I dare you.

(note: I originally finished writing this, clicked "Publish Post", and found my entry to be mysteriously missing. I closed Internet Explorer, reopened it, went back and nothing had been saved...no drafts, no traces. Coincidence? Hmm. So I wrote it all over again, remembering very little of what I'd originally written. Fuck you, Ozzy.)

FOUR LOKO

Have you ever stepped up and tried Four Loko, a premium malt beverage with artificial flavor, guarana, taurine, caffeine and FD&C blue #1?

No? Why not? You don't like the idea of drinking psuedo-methamphetamine out of a can?

You don't like the odd ticklish sensation Four Loko happily and instantly delivers to your stomach, liver and intestines? Are you ticklish?

Four Loko is for those of us who started with Boones Farm and Mickey's, graduated to Franzia, then moved along the desperate path to alcoholic 'energy' drinks, craving that extra little something, something like Sparks or JOOSE (no I didn't spell that wrong), then craving something even a little more extra. And that extra is FOUR LOKO.

I recommend the blue raspberry flavor. If you have taste buds, stay away from orange and watermelon, even though watermelon, I think, is 13% alcohol per volume. Blue raspberry is 12% alc/vol.. Blue raspberry is the health-conscious version.

The best SPARKS has to offer is the 'red' flavor at 8%...and I think JOOSE tops off at around 8.9% or thereabouts. WEAK!

Come on, FOUR LOKO is for true players. And at around 2.25 per 24 oz., how can you resist? Who cares that after the first 6 oz. you'll lose nearly all inhibitions. By 12 oz. you will not be able to form a solitary coherent thought. You will begin to sweat in areas you've probably never noticed yourself sweating before. You will shake a little. You will probably shake a lot. You will feel like lifting weights. You will feel a bit like Charles Manson feels. GUARANTEED.

Find yourself a can of FOUR LOKO! STEP UP!

And you will pee blue!

Fubu pajama pants

Platinum Fubu pajama pants (Fat Albert design), gray Hanes socks, hat I stole from a Mt. Clemens elementary school janitor

Big Fat Friendly Brown Squirrels

Squirrel. Sciurus carolinensis. Sciurus griseus. Sciurus niger.

Here in Ann Arbor we have a lot of them. We had a bunch in Ferndale too, but they were different: sometimes black, sometimes dark brown, always athletic and active. Fast little things. Ann Arbor squirrels are big, fat, light brown and friendly.

Ferndale squirrels are mean. So mean that they pushed the big, fat, light brown ones right out of the entire region. Evidently they won the war. My mom told me about this when she visited a month or so ago. She also pointed out the huge nests way up in the trees in my yard. I thought these were birds' nests. Big birds. I was wrong.

So the friendly brown squirrels, Fox Squirrels, are disappearing throughout Michigan and have been for a long time now. For whatever reason, the smaller, black and dark brown ones, the Eastern Gray Squirrels, haven't made it out to Ann Arbor yet.

But they could be on their way--a few days ago, I think I saw a little dark brown one scurrying up a tall pine. There's no way a Fox Squirrel could move that fast, especially in the winter, when they weigh nearly as much as a cat or small dog. This could spell the inevitable end for the big friendly squirrels of Ann Arbor.

Now when I say Ann Arbor squirrels are friendly I don't mean they crawl up to me and want to cuddle. I mean that they don't hiss at you like Ferndale squirrels. A low hiss, like a growl almost, whenever you get near. Fox Squirrels don't seem to do that. They're perfectly content to sit up in their huge nests, not disturbing anybody or anything. I don't even see them picking through garbage like those damned Ferndale squirrels.

The little dark mean squirrels act like meth-heads. The big fat friendly brown squirrels act like pot-heads.

DOWN WITH THE LITTLE DARK MEAN SQUIRRELS!

HIS NAME IS TROUBLE

1980s movies that I really want to see again (but likely won't turn out to be as entertaining now that it's 2010 and I'm older than eight)

Meatballs Part II (1984) -- I saw this at least ten times in the second half of the 80's, yet the only details I recall are that it involved an alien befriended by a bunch of kids at camp, they dub this alien "Meathead," and dress him up in yellow raincoat and hat. Meathead was hilarious. I hated E.T. and loved Meathead.

Making Contact (1985) -- I think this centered around some kid who gets freaked out by a possessed ventriloquist's doll that pops out of the kid's bedroom closet. Or maybe the kid wasn't freaked out at all, maybe it was little me that was freaked out. "Scarred" is probably more accurate. By the way, it took me a while to dig up the name of this one.

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983) -- I know I saw "Spacehunter" in the theater. I think think this was the time when the theater's AC system stopped working and it was the middle of summer 1983 and about 102 degrees outside. Nevertheless, I remember the movie being pretty cool, especially because of the cars and a train or something that had a big sail on top of it. And it was in 3D, I think.

Ice Pirates (1984) -- Wait, I saw this again about a year or two ago and it was horrible. Like Spacehunter, it ripped off nearly every popular contemporary sci-fi movie (Star Wars, Mad Max, etc.), yet Spacehunter was fun. Well, at least I remember it as being fun--we shall see (thank you, piratebay). Ice Pirates is stupid. And it stars Robert Urich doing his very own third-rate impression of Han Solo.

Vision Quest--Brooklyn, NY

My friend Jason's work is featured in this upcoming show:

VISION QUEST – A Group Show of Neo-Shamanic Art

Opening: Saturday, January 16th, 2010 7-10pm

On View: January 17th– February 21st, 2010
Hours: Thursdays & Fridays 3-6pm; Saturdays & Sundays 12-6pm

December 30, 2009 - Brooklyn, NY - OBSERVATORY and Phantasmaphile's Pam Grossman are proud to kick off 2010 with VISION QUEST, a group show of neo-shamanic art, on view from January 16th through February 21st.

A healer, a medicine (wo)man, a guide: the shaman is a figure who interfaces with nature magic and the invisible world at large, for the betterment of the tribe. Fluent in the language of symbols, and a perennial student of plant wisdom, the shaman is also a translator – bringing back messages from a place veiled thick with leaves, bones, smoke, ghosts.

This journey to the other side – to the innerside – is not just a flowery promenade of song and trance; of friendly animal spirits and ancestral reunions. For while this land is rife with vibrant, variegated beauty, it can also be a danger zone. Images of decapitation and dismemberment abound - though ultimately act as portents for personal transformation and rebirth. This shadowy terrain is trod only by those brave enough to encounter whatever may be found along the way, as each sojourn is mysterious, thoroughly unpredictable, and entirely individual. However, the results of the trip often prove invaluable, as the traveler returns armed with knowledge that will in turn illuminate and repair the community, and fortify his or her own soul.

While the role of the shaman has traditionally been fulfilled by experienced elders in indigenous groups spanning culture and time, VISION QUEST posits that our artists fit the bill as well. Today, with more of us living in an urban jungle rather than a real one, it has become all the more important to figure out ways to internalize the lessons of nature: its growth, its brilliant bloom, its death. And in an age of digitization and distraction, of wire vines and humming screens, it’s no wonder we long for deeper, more sensory experiences of self - with all of its darkness and divinity.

As such, each piece in VISION QUEST explores the archetype of the shamanic voyage, using the tools of paint, pencil, or paper in lieu of fire, flower, feather. Taken together this work represents a full spectrum of what it means to go underground and out of body; to go there and come back again, perhaps just a little bit wiser or, at the very least, more wide awake.


PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Jesse Bransford
William Crump
Scott Gursky
Juliet Jacobsen
Ashley Lande
Adela Leibowitz
Jason Leinwand
Christopher Mir
Joe Newton
Herbert Pfostl
Christopher Reiger
Christine Shields
Erika Somogyi
Jessie Rose Vala

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Pam Grossman is the creator and editor of Phantasmaphile, the premiere online destination for art aficionados with a passion for the surreal and the fantastical. An internationally beloved art and culture web log, it features daily spotlights on artists and events, as well as interviews with such visual luminaries as Thomas Woodruff, Nils Karsten, and Richard A. Kirk. Phantasmaphile was written up two years in a row on the Manhattan User’s Guide Top 400 New York Sites list, and Grossman’s previous show, “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists,” was featured by myriad taste-making outlets including Juxtapoz, Arthur, Upper Playground, and Neil Gaiman’s Twitter page. “VISION QUEST” is her latest curatorial effort, and she is proud to have it hanging at OBSERVATORY, the art and events space she co-founded.


ABOUT THE GALLERY

OBSERVATORY is an art and events space in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Founded in February 2009 and run by a group of seven artists and bloggers, the space seeks to present programming inspired by the 18th century notion of “rational amusement” and is especially interested in topics residing at the interstices of art and science, history and curiosity, magic and nature. The space hosts screenings, lectures, classes, and exhibitions, and is part of the Proteus Gowanus art complex. It is located at 543 Union Street (at Nevins), and is accessed through Proteus Gowanus Gallery’s entrance. OBSERVATORY’s gallery hours are 3-6pm on Thursdays and Fridays; and 12-6pm on Saturdays and Sundays.


Show image: Jason Leinwand "Accepting Fear Rather Than Trying to Understand It"

Some Favorite Interesting Recordings

Ramases and Selket-"Crazy One"/"Mind's Eye" (1968) -- If you want to read a really interesting wikipedia entry, go look up Ramases. Jesus. "Mind's Eye" is one of my favorite psychedelic tracks and one of my favorite b-sides, possibly behind only "The Warmth of the Sun" by the Beach Boys and "Brainbox Pollution" by Hawkwind (though this itself is in a tie with "It's So Easy", b-side of "Psychedelic Warlords")

Tangerine Dream-"Thief" (1981) -- A soundtrack for a movie starring James Caan as (you guessed it) a thief, or a safecracker to be more specific. But who cares about the movie, the music is just so awesome. Very catchy, dramatic synth melodies. Edgar Froese's guitar lines steal the show, especially on "Beach Scene and "Beach Theme." The review of the album on allmusic.com just proves how stupid and humorless the reviewers on that site are, have always been, and likely will continue to be in the future.

Giorgio-"From Here to Eternity" (1977) -- My favorite electronic dance LP. Though I'll admit I don't listen to many electronic dance LP's. Giorgio Moroder had been cranking out shining examples of disco/dance records for years, but with this his craft came to full fruition. And his vocoder work is unparalled. Makes Kraftwerk look like a bunch of twits. Later he would do the awesome soundtracks to "Midnight Express", "American Gigolo" and "Scarface" among others. He was the king of funny album covers--see his "Knights in White Satin" release for more of what I'm talking about.

Walter Wegmuller-"Tarot" (1972) -- Walter Wegmuller is a Swiss Gypsy/mystic who recorded his sole LP with the help of German hippy freak people Ash Ra Tempel/Cosmic Couriers amongst others. Never has an entire album been more "far out" in such a legitimate sense of the expression. Well maybe this one ties with Ash Ra's "Seven Up" release recorded the same year along with acid leader in-exile Timothy Leary. "Tarot" was released with a deck of Tarot cards painted by Wegmuller himself. In the 1980's Wegmuller designed a Swatch watch.

Two movies I would've killed to see as a kid

Always seeing its VHS cover in video stores as a kid, I always wanted to watch "The Warriors" but never got a chance to rent it. I fantasized what this moved would be about.

But forget "The Warriors." What I really should've seen was "Bronx Warriors" aka "1990: Bronx Warriors" aka "1990: I guerrieri del Bronx" and its equally mindless yet totally action-packed apocalyptic sequel "Bronx Warriors 2" aka "Escape From the Bronx" aka "Escape 2000" aka "Fuga dal Bronx"...even though the combined IMDB rating for each averages out to about 3.2, these come out to a 10.0 in the IMDBFCK (Internet Movie Database for Confused Kids). In my imaginary world, I WAS Mark Gregory, I had many automatic weapons and grenades, and I shot everything that moved.

Some awesome posters:



Bronx Warriors in Yugoslavia:

And the Bronx Warrior VHS cover (notice the enticing line at the bottom: "A heavy metal journey into an urban hell where everything has gone wrong!")


Bronx Warriors 2:

In West Germany it was called "The Riffs II" or "Flucht aus der Bronx"

And in Pakistan, the poster's focus seems to be on a couple gun-toting chicks who are barely in the movie, two beauties who aren't in it at all (the one posing in the background and the disheveled-looking blonde in the right foreground), and the crazy underground gang leader who could be mistaken as Pakistani.

Internet Scrabble Club

One of my greatest fascinations and addictions is the game of Scrabble. I will take anyone on. I will take you on. I will beat you.

And then I will laugh at you. I lack all forms of modesty or proper decorum when it comes to games. If you somehow triumph, obviously through the use of magic or trickery, I will probably come close to crying. But I won't actually cry. You won't see a tear, they'll be trickling down somewhere deep within me. I will hide my tears and I will definately swear at you and sullenly walk off to a place I can be alone with my sad, self-pitying, weeping and spoiled inner child.

A year or so ago I started playing online Scrabble, joining the "Internet Scrabble Club," so I could hone my Scrabble skills playing strangers instead of my friends or family who most likely don't want to play with my pompous ass anyway. Now I'd talk trash to the unknowns whenever I'd pull off a sparkling 7-letter word or a staggering triple word score. And they couldn't do a thing about it but talk trash back or get a more sparkly 7-letter word and handily defeat me. I would get beat a lot. There wasn't even anyone to pout to.

Luckily for my ego, my computer got a virus, I wiped my hard drive clean, and soon forgot all about online Scrabble. And I quit my job. That's where I'd play Scrabble the most. Regardless, Scrabble isn't too fun when you're unemployed and drinking heavily by yourself at home.

Well even though I am still unemployed and still drinking (much less now, in case you were wondering), today I joined the old Internet Scrabble Club again. You download a tiny freeware program/game--probably the most lo-fi game I've played since GATO or Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (just had to throw that one in)--from a site hosted in Romania, then you choose a unique username and password, your keys to this club.

I've won the first three games of my Internet Scrabble Club second coming (I forgot my original username, thus I had to start over with a fresh account and new username, "Hawklord78" for any of you dorks that happen to see me online and want to step up). Scored a 379 on the third game with a sparkling, double word score "wielded" as my first move--oh yeah, 82 points right there. So my rating right now is 804 or thereabouts. That's totally damned high, take my word for it. Or don't. Hold it, I need to tell you something:

BOW DOWN! THE SCRABBLE KING HAS RETURNED! I'M THE AWESOME PIMP KING OF SCRABBLE!!

For today, at least.

INTERNET SCRABBLE CLUB: http://www.isc.ro/

I Miss The Block

Sometimes I really miss the block. Not the idyllic block I grew up on, no--I'm talking about the block where I used to buy weed. It has been many years now and I find myself missing the adrenaline rush, the abandoned car and rotting houses scenery, the pleasant interactions and transactions with my drug-dealing friends.

I miss D-Bone, P, T, Tee and Lil' P. I miss Little T and Little C, D and Bubba.

Most of all I miss Terry, the original "T", who first went by the street name of Shady. I remember when he threw bullets out my window as I drove him around the block. He said he "just shot somebody." I remember when he asked me if I wanted to hang out sometime, if I could "take him to some parties and introduce him to a few ladies." I said sure, why not. Then he called me five minutes later. I turned off my phone, thinking it best we probably didn't hang out together. Ours was more of a professional friendship, a bond with lines that just couldn't be crossed. At least to me.

One day Terry vanished from the block. I didn't see him for more than a year. Then one day he returned, smiling and jovial as ever. He'd been in prison for whatever reason and now he was back, right back in the game and ready. Nothing would keep this dude down. He hugged me through my open window as I sat there, happy to see me again, and then he hooked me up with his trademark overflowing twenty bags, three for $20, and I was off, back to my safe, cracker-ass world just seven minutes away.

Yeah, I had it timed to just around seven minutes, taking into account the 80 mph-plus it would require me to travel down the freeway to get there within seven minutes. Then I moved out of my parents house and moved into an apartment only three minutes from the block.

But by then Terry was gone. I hope he's doing all right. He was a nice guy.

I used to have a lot of crazy dreams about the block. Here's one dated 9/15/02, transcribed from my journal of dreams:

I'm inside a house on the block, sitting on a long couch in a living room with a few dealers, we're all playing XBox. Suddenly there's a huge bang on the front door. The house is getting raided. The door flies open, cops run in, chaos ensues, we all run in different directions. Somehow I make it outside and keep running for a bit down the block. Then I stop--where am I going to run to? I don't even have a car. I'm not even wearing a shirt. I look down at my feet--no shoes.

I sort of miss having dreams like these.

Sci-Fi Party

The coolest bookstore in the Midwest is DAWN TREADER in my new home city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. This place has at least two times more science fiction than the famed John King Books in downtown Detroit (in about 5 times less space). Amazingly, the books are still in relatively awesome condition even though there are multiple gaping holes in the ceiling dripping peaceful drops of water on unsuspecting hardcore sci-fi shoppers.

When I first came upon this inter-galactic trove, located in the very rear of the store, I nearly fell upon my knees and started to pray. My hands became moist. I suddenly needed to take a dump. I haven't felt like this since I was 11 and bought an Incredible Hulk #105 and Marvel Spotlight #5 for two bucks each at a Camera Show with my dad (from two recently-released-from-prison-looking dudes who were very nervous and knew absolutely nothing about comics).

I have found some totally awesomely awesome books at this store, including Steve Wilson's "The Lost Traveller." (Pictured) How can you resist a book with a dude looking like Tom Savini in "Dawn of the Dead" on the cover? And for $1.50--no waayy...

The only novels I've yet to come across at Dawn Treader:
City - Clifford Simak
Fifth Head of Cerebus - Gene Wolfe

Everything else is there and waiting for YOU.