Libraries are open, at least for pickup, again!
One of the worst things about this Puta Cuarentena, besides how no one seems to want it to end, is not having a library to hide in.
If you need something to read, my latest 4.5/5-rated novel BYEBYE AND SHLORT is available at the following libraries. Use your interlibrary loan system!
Mt. View: book
Oakland: book
San Jose: ebook
Santa Cruz: book
On 14th and Alice in downtown Oakland about 11am this morning we ran into a group gathered across from the Malonga Casquelourd Center preparing to march to the KTVU Fox Channel 2 television studios. Presenters were reading the story of how KTVU intentionally selected a photo for broadcast portraying murdered 18-year-old Nia Wilson with the typical corporate television wash of poverty and violence, a tactic well-known to anyone who’s watched commercial television from Fox to CNBC. They called the decision “dehumanizing.” Other people online have published videos interpreting the meaning of the photo as well as gestures of sympathy.
The group was to march to KTVU and demand that KTVU publish an admission of guilt and that the producers in charge of the decision be held accountable. Artists present to help build the vibe included Khafre James of Hip Hop for Change and the group Samba Funk (hope the link is correct). Cops closed off two or so intersections to allow the marchers to fill the streets on the path.
In fact, East Bay Express’ Josh Slowiczek beat me to publishing this story by an hour, so you can read his more in-depth piece here. We can corroborate Slowiczek’s number of about fifty people in the march at any given time. Those interested in contributing should find the Facebook and Instagram hashtag #Justicefornia.
In order to understand, the reader must let go of the racist and classist conditioning that controls perception of people we see in media: the person of color is an aggressor, the white person the victim. Nia Wilson was 18. That makes her a fresh highschool graduate. She could’ve been any teacher’s student, any parent’s child.
Her skin color and socioeconomic inheritance put her in the lowest class in the US, a measly 12% of population for whom the country can’t find a shred of empathy. She was murdered at the MacArthur BART last weekend almost certainly by cracker John Lee Cowell, who was also charged with attempted murder of her elder sister Lahtifa (sources have also Letifah, Latifah; correct spelling unconfirmed –there you have it with the white media) on Wednesday according to SF Gate.
Video by Nick Taplin, Post-Consumer Records
Saw a video a few months back of Brontez Purnell reading from his up-and-coming book Since I Laid my Burden Down and had to get a copy as soon as it came out. Tried to read it with his voice in my head. The book has been doted upon with a marvelous thick library jacket by New York City University’s Feminist Press.
The punk rocker, performance artist and otherwise notable Oakland figure, whom I remember as one of the few interesting people on Earth in the vacuous universal hell of 2005, published the zine Fag School beginning in 2003. He has also published the Cruising Diaries in 2014 with the collaboration of Janelle Hessig, from whose Tales of Blarg I first heard of his exploits, as well as 2015’s diary-style Johnny Would You Love Me if my Dick Were Bigger. Since I Laid my Burden Down is sort of a Bildungsroman framed in a memoir. Is there a word for that?
DeShawn, blessed with the emotional receptivity that marks a faggot amongst his church-centered community, reflects during a funeral trip to his Alabama hometown of his trajectory in making his life meaningful, and not wasting his faggot people skills in the office of a rural preacher. Regardless of his shifting relationship with his mother, there is the feeling that he thinks his mother has limited her life becoming a preacher herself.
DeShawn is drawn as a product of generations raised by women, with men absent or devoid of father quality. The protagonist seeks mentorship and trust naturally, nevertheless, through his everyday channels, even through an older married lover. Despite making his own way, fleeing Alabama for California, DeShawn never really feels like he can stand the weight of his life on his shoulders, and has problems with memory and scale. Like a lot of us.
The book is full of family, church, death, sex, and the perverse distortion of time and place unique to being in one’s early thirties. Particularly rewarding are the terse but deft descriptions of family members, such as “DeShawn’s mother always spoke recklessly when it was unnecessary, and coolly when it was greatly needed.” Wait –how do they ever know when is which? Does the narrator mean this in hindsight or…?
Throughout the story DeShawn visits two funerals and relates cleaning out several dead people’s houses, visits the gracious and lovable mother of both an early lover and an early abuser, and wears out the patience of a girlfriend in New York, all the while taking stock of the relationships he put on hold or fled when he left Alabama. Along the way he sees some ghosts that grow more vivid and some that thankfully fade.
The prose is unadorned and direct, more diary-like in the beginning, with creams of sly humor beaten in. The back of the book features quotes that I personally found a little hysterical, such as “foul-mouthed and evil.” Perhaps these refer more to Johnny. Purnell’s narrator swears a lot, but only in that the book irreverently records the living language, and is meant to be read out loud. This, in my opinion, is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Anyone obsessed with Pitchfork-level simile-spraying could find any great oral art in corners of Brontez’ sentences, from beat literature to Henry Roth to … I don’t even know, I hate that phony free-association name-dropping stuff. Altogether I appreciated that the prose, though steeped in contemporary slang and naturally-occurring humor, betrays none of the lascivious revelry of Johnny but rather a deep and true affection and understanding for most of DeShawn’s characters, regardless of whether he gets along with them.
He knew feeling good was a setup
Reading the sexual escapades and mentions of a youth steeped in punk rock, it was kind of hard for me, at least, not to place Brontez himself in for DeShawn –as he placed himself as close to the fictional glass as can be in Johnny –so I recommend the reader enjoy the book first and then go cyber-stalk the poor, highly-exposed author. The night their post-Loma Prieta freedom punk warehouse gets closed down, even a fictional lover tells DeShawn “everyone knows who you are.”
I also appreciated how Purnell manages to fit the realities of Deep South life into the story in tiny but excellent bites. This stuff is unimaginable for us west-coast types with our Hollywood-deadened intellects, and the author even points that out in a funny moment. He relates how the principal at the school would remind DeShawn, when he got in trouble, that “your great-granpappy used to raise chickens for my family…” This is the medium of DeShawn’s family’s story that must never be overlooked: in the south there are these horseshit relationships that can be evoked as if to show loyalty, but are really just threats of force. In turn, the protagonists internalize this doublespeak and wield it on each other with varying degrees of purpose (we’ve got this out west with Latino immigrants too). Maybe I just found this insightful and brilliant as a dumb Californian beach bum. What am I gonna school the reader with, the abusive roundabouts of various pelagic fish?
It’s probably clear by now that my only challenge for Purnell for next time, should he decide to do a next time, is to work out before writing who the narrator is. This way the key emotion, be it sex-crazed enthusiasm or reflective love, can really shine through consistently. The reader also could really get cozy within the work’s world if Purnell takes the above decision, moving on some from the format that seems to have begun with Johnny. Finally, this will doubtlessly also address some nitpicky tonal issues I have with some parts.
Since I Laid my Burden Down is a document of a unique life within its unique time and place, an effective and efficient balance of the personal and the universal. Cut that self-conscious crap out about “I don’t recommend every book to everyone.” Get Brontez’ new book and have everyone you know read it!
I have to say, for myself, that I feel that more of these kinds of stories are auspiciously coming into my life. Not necessarily being written, but coming to my attention. Maybe I just don’t get out enough, I don’t know.
But anyhow, when I read Since I Laid My Burden Down, I enjoyed it in one way the same as I so immensely enjoyed Malae’s What We Are: in that the books are full of people I would be friends with. It’s not so simple as “an outsider,” because the question would be, outside of what? Rather it’s a member of a certain socio-economic group who has made certain socio-economic choices within the flush of cash of the Bay Area, a consciously growing and becoming, empathetic scumbag, with no time for the oppression of success, health or other bullshit. Stuck in a phenomenological spiral. The kind of people whose extinction I constantly fear after years of living in Santa Cruz and San José. When I read these books I feel like they were written for me!
Incidentally they both dropped Bukowski’s name, who may well have been highly empathetic besides being a scumbag. Some scholar can comment below about that.
I feel, further, that this book’s approach belongs at least in part to the great tradition of “pack all my youth into some stories so I can stop trying to remember every last bit of it and get ready for the all-out fuckery of maturity.” Brontez certainly demonstrates in Burden the wisdom and ability to handle time and memory necessary to do so, and he certainly has a fascinating maturity and decline ahead of him, unlike most of us. The Savage Detectives is also a great example of this approach, and even I myself, at least as concerns dialogue, am dumping all the silly shit I ever heard from fifth grade up into the mouths of my characters in Byebye and Shlort, the thing I’m working on. I’m excited to see what Brontez comes up with next.
Spring is in the air. Stretch insists that he’s sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure, and that moreover it affects his beer consumption.
2-Strats goes to visit a local amplifier repairman. He gets more than he bargained for! Or does he??
Our man 2-Strats sends in an update from the Denver Airport in white-supremacist shithole Colorado. Bimbos overflow. People who live in Colorado must have a constant messianic, apocalyptic fury and hold themselves for the last Americans that “they” will get, hiding out in the stronghold of the Rockies in the middle of the continent.
Photo by the Great, the Only Adam Gochnauer
20 December 2015 – interview with Denney Joints, Gaumenkitzel, Oakland CA
We met Denney Joints already a month ago to talk about his new album, The Cairn, which we found on Bandcamp. It’s the latest already since 2014’s Despechado y deslechado, which is hard to beat. Denney Joints is an old hand about Santa Cruz and Oakland, has self-released innumerable albums, and played in a half-dozen bands including Happy Meal and Dead Daughter, and groups playing his own material by names like Midnite Snack and Sweat Dreams, the latter with Micah Warren of Glitter Wizard etc etc.
These days, according to his Facebook, he’s calling his stripped-down sound “post-industrial.” Not the industrial of 90s indie rock nor the Situationist industrial of Throbbing Gristle, but post-industrial as in no one in North America thought about how the fuck they were going to house themselves after surrendering the means of production in order to keep their consumption unnaturally cheap, and now it’s a good idea to be able to entertain with the body when it’s impossible to hold a rock band of wage slaves together.
We came into the conversation with a lot of baggage or data about his music, but this was useful, because it allowed us to notice how different Joints sounds on this new album compared to previous ones. To wit, he seems relaxed, satisfied with his tones and timbres, and inhabits the songs much more comfortably. The songs for the most part consist of Joints with his acoustic guitar (leather pants doubtlessly on each take), his voice and a pulsating synthesizer that he’s probably wapping on live between upstrokes.
Besides the self-contained efficiency of the songs there is also a distinct tone. The disaffect, weirdly romantic longing and desperation to get stoned are still present, but songs like The Dead Sea also concretely take on the bay area’s fucked-up evil economy, as well as pose the themes in a long, almost mythological time-space. Early on he assumes the voice of Jesus of Nazareth and counsels us that “the world may never be better.” Toward the end My Freaky She pops up, a song by the Santa Cruz favorite Sin in Space, who were supposed to get huge alongside Rilo Kiley. Those who were around will recognize that this encodes a place in time, with corresponding nostalgia, to be found in all of Denney Joints’ solo material.
In any case we had to let Joints describe the album himself rather than postulate about it like some Pitchfork dipshit. We trusted Joints, who speaks in manifestoes as much as this writer does, to deliver an essay on the album. We found that he still had a lot of weirdly romantic longing, nevertheless, with which to leaven his dispensations of life advice.
N So, what’s the deal with the cairn?
DJ The cairn? (Laughs) That’s an inside joke, but …
N Well, it seems like midway through your album it has some kind of big meaning.
DJ Well, yeah so like, for me it’s kind of like … that particular song is about this place that you build to keep all your denial … it’s like digging a tomb for yourself before you’re dead, yknow, and living there the rest of your life. It’s about denial … yknow, that song I actually wrote because my dad called me to tell me that his mom had died, and they weren’t gonna have a funeral or anything, and I just imagined him and his family just not talking about it and, that whole opportunity to be a family, they just ditched out on it.
So that song is more like … that song came out of a musical cairn structure, so the rhythm is really open at first, and it’s like longer notes, and it’s like the big stones at the bottom and it gets narrower as it goes to the top, and there’s that pipe sound that I do at the end … the cairn is just like a joke, we had this whole thing about living in a cär, and living in a cärn (his spelling), and anyway I decided to call my record that because it’d been just a thing for so long. And also, constructing your own musical practice and your own musical space, so my whole life is like living in a cairn for a year and trying to figure this music out.
N Is there a theme to the record?
DJ Well, only … the theme is I’m playing everything, I’m not arranging or … it’s just me playing my instrument. Is that the poundcake? … So the theme is this whole process of making time to be a musician and not just writing down what comes out of my head … this record is about, like not really writing anything. I wanted the songs to be … I wanted to be able to play them forever, there’s not necessarily a right correct way to play them. They’re kind of more like meditative. Like living in a cairn, really.
N Really it seems thematically quite different from the other things you’ve done.
DJ Well yeah, I mean most … the Bedtime record I did was like stuff that I wrote while I couldn’t be playing music, and then Despechado y Deslechado is music I wrote because I was trying to reinvent what I did as a musician, on the 12-string guitar. Thematically it’s really just about finding the time every single day where I can actually be the musician I am and not just be trying to make some thing that I … cause I can make any music, right. But I wanted to figure out, if I’m gonna go out and do this by myself, how am I gonna make art out of just guitar and your voice or whatever. And I thought about what kind of art am I trying to make? And it’s not … Despechado is kinda a minor key record on the 12-string guitar. This record is about music in the abstract, like what am I gonna do on the 12-string guitar that has nothing to do with … rather than the guitar being a chunk of the whole spectrum of the orchestra, I wanted it to be the whole scope of the music is the guitar, the lowest and the highest sounds. So that’s the theme, as a performer, what am I trying to say all this time, and how do I play that on the guitar.
N The first song sounds like, both with the musical piece that’s sampled in the front, and with the lyrics, it seems like the song is taken from some other piece of music.
DJ The second song you mean? That’s Felix Mendelssohn. He does an oratorio called Elijah and it’s about God destroying the world or whatever. I was in the choir at Cabrillo and that was like the second thing I’d ever sung in the choir, so the summer of 2008, and as a self-taught punk rock guitar player I couldn’t read a fuckin note of music … there’s that one part with the major chord, the harvest now is over and then it goes down, the harvest now is over, and that sounded like every Gary Numan song, or every two-chord British rock song. So for someone who couldn’t understand polyphony at the time, that was the part that stuck with me all that time was that chorus, I’m just gonna do that chorus. The harvest now is over, the summer days are gone. Then I wrote the song, that part I just had, the tune for that chorus I just had, those two chords on the guitar. And the lyrics are just about all the people I know who’re miserable and don’t take any advice and just do the same stupid things over and over, and just, they have their story and their belief, and they reinforce their belief with their story about their life and what everyone’s doing to them.
N There’s more stuff I’ll try to get to, you can correct me if it’s all my own illusion. But one of the fun parts of that song is that you keep saying the world might never be better.
DJ The world may never be a better place for everyone. Cause there’s some people who aren’t gonna make the world better.
N So what do you do with that?
DJ They sink into their own mire of unfulfilled failure and everything else we don’t want.
N What’s an artist do with that realization?
DJ You gotta let go and let these people … yknow there’s people who you wanna touch so much, people you wanna relate to, people that you have something to say to. Even if you go out and say that night after night, on stage, people aren’t ready and wanting that, then it’s never gonna make a difference. I’m gonna live the good life and they’re gonna stay down in that shitty, self-destructive place that I know, I never had it too bad but,
N Do you spend a lot of time in places where people aren’t getting the message?
DJ Yeah, yknow, I hang out … there’s always some people around who … and maybe I see it in everybody more than most people do. For almost everyone I can see them living their own story that they keep up.
N The music suggests that … I don’t wanna be moralistic and say there’s a character flaw but there’s like a lost opportunity …
DJ The point is that they’re insisting on not changing what they do. They’re insisting on doing the same thing even though it totally destroys their life.
N So that kind of language … cause I was really paying attention to the words …
DJ The words I wrote in one shot. (Laughs) Like in ten minutes.
N It comes back in some other songs. My favorite song is the dead sea song. Where you kinda got … one thing I found really different from your other albums – which, in my writeup I talked about smokin weed and other things your songs are about. But this one is on a mythological time-scale, or a non-western time-scale. The dead sea song seems to bring together this loathing for the way people use their time in their head, with a longterm historical, ecological thing.
DJ Well yeah. Right now we’re watching people willingly, willingly ignore – and telling other people to willingly ignore – the facts of the world we’re living in, because it doesn’t mesh with the extremely narrow and terrible sale points that they sell to their extremely ignorant contingency. It’s not like the world’s gonna be extremely different if Hillary or Bernie is elected, but there’s a whole contingency of people who’re gonna vote for the most outrageously stupid. We’ve been watching that go down for the last fifteen years at least, where it’s just this insanity that’s become mainstream. And the Dead Sea is like, well I’ve already accepted that things’re gonna completely change. What’s that first song I wrote in my bedroom at like ten years old, that’s, okay, now I live in a place that’s toxic. And this shit plant by I-80 fuckin overflowed with sea water and now there’s shit water and yknow, there’s toxic crap that’s mingled with every part of the ecosystem.
N Can you see yourself doing other songs with ecological,
DJ Definitely, I mean my songs’re all about solutions to what we’re living.
N Well, you said that earlier that you don’t like how people live their life, but what is the solution?
DJ I didn’t say I didn’t like how they lived their lives, I said that there’s a way to solve,
N There’s a willful ignorance,
DJ A willful self-destruction.
N So what’s a solution to that, that’s in your art?
DJ In my art? Well, to be perfectly, selfishly honest, my art is about dealing with accepting that they’re just gonna destroy the world no matter what I want. That’s really it. What do I do about it? I don’t do anything about it. I continue to make more absurd humor, hoping people’ll get it. Yknow, I read Mad magazine as a child. Where they have a punchline that’s cutting through the horseshit. But people have shifted so far away from accepting what they have to do in life, to change their life, they go for the nearest, most convenient little hole to stick their head in, and that’s what all the songs are about. So as an artist, I mean yeah, I just show people that aren’t fucked in the head that there’s different ways of thinking. I don’t talk about one point of view or the other, but how in the middle of those two points of views, what’s really gonna happen between the people in the world. I’m not gonna paint an apocalyptic picture or an ideal picture, I’m gonna show like, given the level of willingful ignorance and the people trying to be progressive, things’re gonna pan out in the middle. As a sign of how these people live, as evidence of how they live.
N And the song Don’t Love Them is obviously taking the voice of people like that.
DJ Yeah, so I just think of all the people I know … I play in Santa Cruz frequently, and always have, and there was a time when we were all really young and stupid and wanting to be dirty and not wash our hair … and it was cool. Yknow, it was great. There was years, yknow, 21, 23, 24, you’re dirty and you don’t give a fuck. Yknow? You’re stoned and you don’t give a shit.
N I miss that too,
DJ But um … to be 30 years old and to be uh … still … I think a symptom of living here is that it’s easy for people to get stuck. Especially at that young age, yknow there’s always that old guy at the record store and that old guy at the cafe, yknow, who worked there for their whole adult lives. And I think Don’t Love Them is about the relationships I see that develop between people who have no reason to be where they are, no reason to do what they do, and meanwhile they find someone who they think is fulfilling them, who they think is the answer to all their loneliness, when in reality … and this is my, yknow, very close family members have relationships like this where they just jump from whoever will take them, from one to the next. So on the one hand … I used to play Tell Me You Love Me, cause I wrote that first, right. Which is like, tell people you love them now, cause tomorrow is too late. Even if you think, like, I have to die for you if I tell you I love you, or like, if I tell you I love you, that’s it, cause you have to be my wife, or my girlfriend or you can’t be around me cause I’m always gonna stalk you or … so that song is I don’t wanna control you or marry you, I just love you no matter what, even if I never see you again. I can either feel that way, or I can feel deprived of them. And it’s like, I’m not gonna feel deprived, I’m gonna love them anyway.
N I think the Don’t Love Them does that really well, it demonstrates the consequence of not just getting your balls out and being yourself.
DJ So now it’s like here’s someone, and we both like spaghetti … and there’s always these couples, and they’re both fucked in the head, right, they’re both dumb as fuck, but they stay together because they both like spaghetti, and that’s all they’ve got. So that’s what Don’t Love Them is about.
N Did you intend for there to be a mythological vibe to this album?
DJ All of them! Whatta you mean mythological?
N A long-term thing.
DJ Well yeah, always. My work is aggregating into something that I hope will be self-explanatory, I mean not all my stuff has been self-explanatory, but it’s still a pile of what I love,
N Well, that’s the difference between this one and other ones I’ve heard, is that it’s not nearly as personal … or self-consciously personal.
DJ Right, right. No, it’s not. This is me saying and playing whatever I want. And knowing it’s not the last thing I ever do. It’s just me getting a grip on what I fuckin do. The quickest, easiest, simplest, most direct … and I have all these ideas and I’m still going for this ideal, instead of like, the looseness.
N What’s the ideal?
DJ Well, if there was a perfect mesh of this music and rhythm and melody, and the very limited way and instruments I’m using, I’m always trying to aim for that. But you can’t make art that way, I have to throw everything out and then try to make it ideal from there. But you can’t start with the finished image and cut it out with a pair of scissors.
N One thing that perhaps is personal, however, is the Freaky She song. So, I know you from Santa Cruz, so we get it, but for everybody else.
DJ So I had played that song one night and recorded it, and did a little video of me singing it and all of a sudden for no reason … so also like uh, I’m always wanting to reclaim old things that I love, that for some reason I thought I was looking for something else that I didn’t realize was right in front of me, yknow. And the guy who wrote that song is dead now, um, and I grew up with that song. That was like the soundtrack of me and my first love, and it was the first band I ever knew (laughs).
N What’s your favorite Sin in Space song?
DJ Either Take Me Aboard or um … Trigger Finger.
N The only one that comes to me in the middle of the night is Astronaut Waltz.
DJ Yknow I haven’t head that song in so long … so I had put that video of me singing on the internt, and yknow the ex-girlfriend of the singer, who that song (My Freaky She) was written about, was very happy.
N That feels good!
DJ Cause that song hasn’t been played in ten years. In public. More than likely. What year is it? So maybe it has, I don’t know. But anyway, so she said that uh … I had said that Astronaut Waltz was one that I always liked, and I always knew the chords to the songs, yknow. (DJ and EN hum and sing parts of the song together).
I used to play that on the guitar all the time. Anyway, I played that song and I just thought, well, okay, here’s one more song that’ll make the record exactly the length of an LP, and I just had fun, did it in a couple takes, and had the Roland Jazz Chorus going, for the guitar, and it was good time.
N So you’re in another band right now, aren’t you? Is that what happens next, is just getting bands together? (The band is called Whisper)
DJ Well yeah, I’m in a band now that is um … everything that I do by myself, everything I’ve ever done, goes into this band. And uh, always having felt like no one got what I was trying to do, this is the band where we all three totally understand halfway what we’re all going for, and we don’t sit around talking about it, because we don’t have to. When we get together, what we do is what we’ve always loved. We’ve all dorked out on it … not that we needed to, but we did, and we do. Our whole meaning with this band is to share all those secrets that we’ve always wanted to share about ourselves. So in this band we go out and play that, and people get it right away, and they love us.
N That’s a perfect segue. So what should people know about you that I didn’t ask?
DJ Well, that this is something I’m gonna do forever. Everything I do, you just get to go along with me in your own way with this whole process, and um, and knowing that all your secrets are not only safe with me, but we’re all gonna enjoy them together, and all the things we always wanted, we’re gonna enjoy them together.
If the reader should perceive contradiction, or at least non-western balance-swing in Joints’ responses, please know that these are faithful transcriptions.
As an aside, some scummy vampire website called Oh My Tracks claims to have all the Sin in Space songs lifted from Last.fm. But when one tries to play Astronaut Waltz, the fucking thing plays Strauss. Try it, and send this site flame mail.
Need something to read, jolines? Fire to the Prisons, which has been documenting the frustrating work of anarchist direct action –yes kids, sometimes less than peaceful –sometimes yearly, sometimes biennially, sometimes not at all since 2007, is back in action. Print your own damn copies and distribute it!
The paper includes some good writing about Ferguson (including a link to directly aid detained Ferguson citizens), Kobani, gentrification, looting and rioting, and ecological disaster. There’s also the usual list of reported resistance actions against the state and its agents down to little things like prisoners hitting their jailers back, something you also read in Black Seed, etc.
Like what you read? Why don’t you get off your ass, measure your system and contexts, and write for them? They’d probably like the help!
Eugenio Negro Comics 