RELICS AND WINGMEN... Date- 08/09/05 08:04:00 PDT From-Wrenchskiwrenchski@aol.com
(excerpted from THE ALCHEMIST'S NEGRO)
HEY- I've found the O'sweaty basement smallblock to be about useful as a halfblock... seems it's what's left of an old boat motor that was left out in the winter and frozen to uselessness.
This leaves us with a well worn Chevelle sporting a sprinkler pipe rollcage, one usable cylinder head, a rearend and what seems to be a serviceable three speed stick. I mean, we don't own a helmet, firesuit or TIRE for that matter... and we have no jobs.
He decides we'll go to his new girlfriends house and smoke some dope. My primered burned-out-glasspack'd Chevy II wagon rolls up in front of a three story shanty on the wrong side of the tracks with what seems to be a four car garage out back... skinny wrinkled old man bent over a fender doin' something to the six or seven cars in the drive...I wave "O" up the front porch stairs while I investigate.
Phone rings in the house and the ol' man throws a spark plug wrench to the ground SONOFABITCH fucking phone won't leave me alone. Looks like he's doin' a tune-up on the old 63 Impala... damn look at the old sedans and coupes backyard's full of 'em.
Some of 'em got numbers on the doors... a closer inspection reveals the name DON WESTY painted over the drivers side windows of several... well FUUUCK MEEEE.
Westy was the legend...he was the standard all others were judged by. "Yea, that kid is good, but Westy woulda tore him a new asshole" was heard by me on many an occasion... it was rumored he'd run off with the Anchor Chain Lounge's owner's wife and never been heard from again.
"And YOU are...fucking WHO?"
He's back outside standing right behind me...I was lost in a special place in my mind, coupes and sedans careening around a short oval banging into one another and the old bastard had walked up behind me and shouted in my ear.
"I am... am... I'm the guy D.C. Carmine sent over to install a telephone in your garage...I'm Flaco..." I swear I didn't know I could think that fast...I knew I was short on resources, knowledge and money and THIS was the man who was gonna get me my two outa three ain't bad.
"Kid, D.C. won't be sending anybody anywhere soon... he's been dead for a couplea years, nice try. now GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE."
"Well, my pal's up in the house visiting, I suppose I could wait out front in my car..."
"Your PAL? y'mean that big redheaded Irish kid think's he's gonna be a stock car hero? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA..."
He turns back to the Impala... I stand there for a few minutes... God taps me on the shoulder and says...
Flaco...meet your new Rabbi. Show him the com wire and telephones in the back of your Chevy. You're not worthy yet, but...you'll scrape road grime and change tires till you are.
THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA EXPLODING INEVITABLE: THE EPIC SAGA OF THE SURFERS Date- 07/12/05 17:33:07 PDT From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
There is philosophy of the world which states that there is a common realization about the interconnectivity of all things physical and spiritual -- that there is a unity at a profound level -- and that our actions have somewhat infinite repercussions. This discipline is known as Zen. In the mid-1960s, it was a philosophy that was integral to the machinations of an offbeat trio of Nitro Bums from the west side of Los Angeles, Bob Skinner, Tom Jobe and Mike Sorokin, aka "the Surfers." It defined their approach to the application of nitromethane vis-a-vis compression ratios and blower speeds. It defined who they were as individuals.
This is the story of how these three men stood the World of Drag Racing on its ear via their theoretical approach to life as applied to a Top Fuel dragster. It is the parable of two abstract yet linear thinkers, Skinner and Jobe, and their driver, Sorokin, and how they discovered that the path to Drag City and the trophy queen was also the path to nirvana and enlightenment.
It all began just a few lunar cycles before Baba Ram Dass coined the phrase "Be Here Now," but this chestnut of wisdom could have been the Surfers' mantra. For these shrewd and mischievous nitromaniacs, the drag strips of Southern California were a blank slate to gingerly project their desires and sensibilities in much the same way a Zen Master approaches the mysteries of life: Head First. With No Rear View Mirrors. This was not just about merely kissing a trophy queen on Saturday night. This was an exercise in all things theoretical and philosophical. It was an exercise in consciousness expansion. It was a journey.
And it was the ideal time to catch a wave, so to speak. The opportunity to express one's self in the State of California then was as wide open and infinite as the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. The only limits were one's resourcefulness and ingenuity...And for approximately three revolutions around the sun it was absolutely high tide for the collaboration between Bob Skinner, Tom Jobe and Mike Sorokin. The Surfers' ruled.
Although the Surfers made the universe shudder with their unique approach to both Top Fuel racing and, uhh, life itself, the genesis of their racing endeavors was much more prosaic than you would imagine. Its germination was in the days of Ozzy & Harriet and Googie Hamburger Stand Americana and it specifically took root on the corner of Jefferson & Sepulveda in Culver City, California. There stood a burger joint known as the "Nineteen." Named eponymously after its nineteen cent hamburgers, it was the epicenter for Cafe Society as interpreted by street racin' Southern California hot rodders. And its atmosphere, vibrations and "extracurricular activities" resonated deep in the soul of Mike Sorokin, at the time a lead-footed Venice High School student.
"The thing about the Nineteen was, not only did they have cheap food and 19-cent hamburgers," recalls local digger driver and one-time street racer Ron Hier, "they had a great big parking lot. We used to hang out there because we used to street race and 'Sork' was one of the guys who hung out there.
"When we first started hanging out with Sorokin at the 19," Hier continues, "there really wasn't any dragstrips -- except for one all the way out in Santa Ana and there were no freeways in those days. It was Gene Adams, Craig Breedlove and his '34, Leonard Harris, Mickey Brown, John Peters. That's what got into Sorokin into racing was hanging out at the 19 and street racing with the guys." After describing a crash "near the railroad tracks" involving a particularly now-mega-famous race car driver (who shall remain nameless) Hier concludes that "I can't believe none of us got put in jail."
Hier, who sold Sorokin a '34 Ford that was used to drag down Sepulveda Boulevard, mentions that Sork's desire to race lead to an ego battle with his old man, a conflict stereotypical of the era's teenage rebellion. "His dad did NOT like drag racing...he didn't like street racing, he didn't like drag racing, he did not want Mike driving. He would come over and try and talk all of us out of racing." Suffice it to say, the elder Sorokin's pleas were the proverbial fallen tree and the "fast crowd" at the Nineteen was its empty forest. Ben Sorokin's admonishments fell on deaf ears, mostly because he couldn't be heard over the roar of unmuffled internal combustion engines and squealing tires as they roared down Lincoln Boulevard.
Simultaneous to "Sork" sharpening his reflexes on the malt shop circuit as well as in gas coupes and a D/Fuel dragster on the strip, Santa Monica City College students Bob Skinner and Tom Jobe began tinkering mischievously in academia with what, in essence, was the pursuit of a double major of chemical pranksterism and the theory and application of nitromethane. And as the dragstrips and the freeways experienced its concurrent boom, these two whiz kid brainiacs pooled their brainpower with a local construction worker and schemed together on running a Top Fuel car out of a motel garage. It was the perfect opportunity to apply their studies to the real world...
"Skinner and Jobe, when they put the car together," Hier recalls with bemusement, "...it was just a hare-brained idea." Bob Skinner doesn't dispute Hier's assessment. "I had dabbled in street racing. I briefly ran a B or C/Gas car," he recalls. "I had just got back from a 3 month vacation and Tom Jobe and Jim Crosser said to me, 'Okay, we want to build a fuel car.' And I just said, 'Okay.' Most things that I have done along the way have been sort of spontaneous impulse without a lot of thinking about it. So when I came back and they said, 'We want to build this car,' I just said 'Great' and we just kind of got into it."
Hier remembers how the team raised its venture capital: "Skinner and Jobe got together with Bob Skinner's mother -- who owned the Red Apple Motel there on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica -- and got her to sign for a 'furniture loan' for something like $5000." Skinner and Jobe immediately cashed the check for the non-existent "furniture" and began gathering parts and pieces for their AA/Fuel Dragster which was kept in a spare garage at the Red Apple.
Jobe sums up their rationale for running a Top Fuel dragster out of his Mom's motel's garage thusly: "It was a time when anybody could participate. When we started all we had was enthusiasm. We didn't know nuthin'. We were just a bunch of street racers from Santa Monica," he says. "My brother raced in a stock class with a Chevy and I was his motor man. He street raced six days a week and would go to the drags on Saturday night, but we just got tired of the 'class' deal. He won the Winternationals in '60 and runner-upped a the US Nationals, but he was always getting torn down and all that crap. We all kinda' dabbled with C/Gas Willys and Mike drove a (C/Altered) roadster coupe with George Bacilek," he remembers. "Anyway, all of us had messed with different classes and we finally said: 'Classes? That sucks! Let's build a dragster,' but we didn't know how to build one, you know."
In other words, the only "competitor class" where the Skinner and Jobe could dwell as free-thinkers was a class whose structure had no real...structure. Top Fuel.
So Skinner and Jobe began tugging on the shop apron strings of the local chassis builders and fabricators like a pair of hyperactive nephews that forgot to take their Ritalin. "There were a lot of (dragster) guys around here," Jobe notes. "Every day after work we'd hit all the garages -- there was a bunch of them in Mar Vista -- we'd go to every one of them and ask some questions 'til they'd throw us out and then we'd go down to the next one. We (finally) found out enough stuff because we had to build the whole thing ourselves; we didn't have any money to buy anything."
They might been strapped for cash, but Skinner and Jobe were loaded with an intellectual camaraderie that couldn't be bought. "Tom and I had a great ability to work together," Skinner acknowledges in references to the sculpting of their short, scruffy, minimalist dragster. But their other colleague had a somewhat less theoretical take on drag racing and according to Jobe, "Our other partner just dropped out soon after we got the thing running."
But just getting their homemade dragster running, nay just getting the digger to fire was an excruciatingly painful learning curve, according to SoCal drag racing fixture Tom Hunnicutt, who was crewing for his friend Jim Boyd's "Red Turkey" AA/Fuel Dragster the day the Surfers unveiled their creation at Lions Drag Strip in early 1964.
Hunnicutt says of that afternoon, "They keep pushing up and down trying to get the car to fire and it wouldn't fire," he laughs. "I don't know if they had the magneto in wrong or what, but they kept pushing it on the return road for a long time -- it wasn't just once. It was a bunch of laps." About this initial impression, Hunnicutt recalls thinking derisively, "'These guys aren't drag racers, who are they?' They were kinda' geeky."
This is the phase were Skinner and Jobe were fine tuning the chemistry of all things material and physical -- and enduring the scorn of their opponents because their homemade, homely digger was a real backmarker. Even if they could get the motor to fire, part of the boys' dilemma was that they had yet to settle on a shoe who could viscerally and intuitively interpret their cerebral approach to Top Fuel racing and run it through the lights with the butterflies horizontal. Before Skinner and Jobe ultimately settled on Sorokin to shoe, there were a litany of drivers who attempted to hang ten in the cockpit, including "Lotus John" Morton, a journeyman sports car racer who was sweeping the floor at Carrol Shelby's place of employ (where Skinner also punched a clock). Morton, who had a reputation as being absolutely fearless and could handle any piece of machinery that had a throttle, describes his one-day tenure as shoe of the Surfers AA/Fuel dragster this way:
"The dragster ride happened when I was at Shelby's," Morton states in a passage from his biography, The Stainless Steel Carrot. "I got in the car at the strip. Really got packed in. I was sitting there in that thing thinking, I have really got myself into something. Here I was a sports car racer and had never driven anything down a drag strip before, not even my dad's car, and I was about to drive the fastest thing they made. I was scared shitless. The thing was so powerful the centrifugal force of the clutch was trying to push itself out. I revved the engine and the sound ripped out like an explosion. My whole leg was trembling on the clutch.
"I let it out. Everything was a blur, the whole world went fuzzy. I let off for a second, just a tiny bit, and got pissed off at myself and floored it again. On my other runs I never let off but it didn't matter; the thing was so fast I did a hundred and eighty my first run and that was it, never any faster. I put the clutch in at the end of the run and waited for the thing to stop. By the time it did, I could feel my leg was still shaking, like a dog shitting razor blades. But I did it. Something made me do it."
Morton's eloquent and punchy account reveals something about the state of the Surfers' racing effort: For a couple of geeks, all of a sudden Skinner and Jobe were making beaucoup horsepower. But they lacked the final piece to their puzzle: A driver who could harness all that horsepower and ride the bulbous, minimalist machine bareback. And then Sorokin passed Skinner's reflex test of catching a series of falling coins, hopped in the saddle and history was about to be capsized.
According to Skinner, "It's hard to say how it all evolved because we had (Bob) Muravez driving and we had Roy Tuller driving, then 'Lotus John' drove, then we had Mike driving for us and we got rid of him and had other drivers driving for us. Somehow we came back to him (Sorokin) and things started to work better for us. Maybe we got the car running better, maybe he got better but I feel like we all kind of evolved together."
For Sorokin, this was nirvana indeed. His ambition was to be a professional dragster driver and here was an opportunity to hammer the throttle, kick out the jams -- and get paid. Notoriously hyperactive and quick as an outhouse mouse on the Xmas tree, Sorokin was a fearless capsule monkey who thrived on going into orbit no matter how sketchy the conditions on the launchpad. Sorokin had Go! Fever as bad as any Southern California boy, and he was willing to get himself strapped into a nitro-burning rattletrap rocket no matter what the circumstances.
"He was so damn good at what he did. And all he wanted to do was win," remembers Jobe. "He wasn't interested in arguing about the nuts and bolts, 'that's your problem;' he didn't even care."
With the triumvirate simpatico, and Sorokin dependent upon winlights for his rent and lunch money, the Surfers arched more than a few eyebrows amongst their contemporaries and competitors with their fashion sensibilities, their engineering prowess and uncanny knack for racking up Top Eliminator trophies. This unnerved the competition -- a couple of Surf City hodads were killing 'em at Drag City -- but it thrilled the railbirds and it gave the media a human interest "hook" to ratchet up their race reports. The whole "Surf" thing, however, was a ruse...
"None of those guys surfed," remembers Hier. "None of 'em had a board."
Sorokin tried to keep the image of beach bums in perspective."Surfing kind of scares me," he confessed rather dryly to Drag World. But his droll backpedaling was too late. The dye had been cast.
Jobe, musing on the "Surfers'" sartorial ensemble of pendeltons, deck shoes and skateboards, says, "They didn't know what to think of us, we were thought of as just...this was before hippies...but we were thought of as just some long-haired freaks from the beach."
"They were definitely different," recollects Roland Leong, nowadays the pit boss on Don Prudhomme's Funny Car but then proprietor of the infamous "Hawaiian" AA/Fuel Dragster which claimed Top Fuel Eliminator at the '65 and '66 Winternationals. "I remember seeing these guys at Fontana and Bakersfield and they pulled in their with an open trailer with a '55 Chevrolet and uhh, like uhh, 'Who are these guys?' They called themselves 'the Surfers,' right? And me, coming from Hawaii, that wasn't my idea of a surfer, you know what I mean? I guess in California terms they looked 'beach' kinda' guys, but in my eyes...
"When you think about it, at the the time we were all young and the word 'nerds' wasn't in our vocabulary," Leong adds. "But looking back, they looked like the intellectual-type as opposed to some greasy drag racers, which is what we were all known for at the time."
Regarding the perception as the Surfers as beach bum misfits and geeky oddballs, Skinner -- who now answers to the name "Roberto" -- was oblivious. He says, "Some people live their lives and other people live their lives but at the same time it's like they're standing off at a distance and watching themselves. I've never been that observer."
Skinner maintains there was no contrived image, but others theorize that the persona of beach buffoons with sand-in-their-snorkels was a calculated, theatrical red herring. But arch rival Leong saw through the skullduggery of the Surf City minstrel show. "All of 'em were pretty smart guys," he says. "With the budget they had to run on, they did an excellent job. They didn't have the funds, so a lot of their stuff they had to make or spend the money very wisely. They didn't have a lot of what we call perks, you know what I mean?"
"It wasn't very long before they were pretty dialed in," Hunnicutt corroborates.
Indeed, soon the dragstrip world was talking about the beatniks from the bay, not out of bemusement but out of respect. It was obvious the Surfers were onto something...Just ask the denizens and the vanquished dragster drivers of San Fernando, Long Beach, Fontana Drag City, Riverside, Bakersfield, Irwindale, Pomona, Fremont, Amarillo, Salt Lake City, Pocatello, Union Grove, Rockford, Maple Grove, Atco, and Denver. At every one of these venues, the Surfers either bagged Top Eliminator, recorded Low Elapsed Time or turned Top Speed of the Meet -- and sometimes all three. (In Amarillo, they won two match races on the same day. Roland Leong's "Hawaiian" AA/FD was bongoed in a towing accident so the track manager enjoined the Surfers to go best-two-out-of-three against local hitters Eddie Hill and Vance Hunt...the Californians swept both matches.) They were no longer geeky gremmies. They were Heroes.
*********
To: Joe Buysee, Lansing Michigan From: Mike Sorokin, Mar Vista, CA
Hi Joe,
Thanks for the nice letter. I'm glad we didn't disappoint you at Bakersfield. It's fans like you that make our efforts worthwhile.
I'm sending you a t-shirt. It's used, but clean. I'm sorry I have to send you a used one, but there are no new ones around. I don't think we will be in the Michigan area this year, but maybe next season.
Sincerely,
Mike Sorokin & The Surfers
*********
The wave continued its crest. Skinner asserts that, "At that point in life I would say that we were totally focused on our deal." In a separate conversation, Tom Jobe agreed and then elaborates on their approach to conquering Top Fuel. "We went at it in a very conventional fashion," he said. "All the guys that had the goofy combinations were never gonna do it...(and) if you had a mainstream deal you couldn't get banned. We had a very clear view of that. 'We've go to attack this from a mainstream angle.' That way your advantage is invisible."
Ron Hier explains one example of their focus and aversion to "goofy combinations" was to remove parts they considered superfluous. "They never had ran an idler belt on their blower," he mused, "because Tom Jobe felt that it was just another accessory that they might have a problem with, something else that could break. So when they put the motor together and they wanted to change belts, they would unbolt the blower and tilt it forward until the pulley was underneath the belt and then push it down onto the manifold and bolt it down. All during the time they were running that car, they never lost a blower belt."
On the absence of the idler pulley, Skinner is nonplused. "We figured we could just get along without it, so why have it if you don't need it?"
*********
Hi Joe,
What's happening? Not too much going on around here. We're building a covered trailer for our tour and we don't have much time for racing at the present time. Our race with the Goose will be our last local race.
Our car isn't exactly beautiful, but it IS functional. Beauty doesn't always get the job done. We are building a new car which should be pretty nice looking. Full body and all that trick stuff.
Well, maybe I'll see you pretty soon.
Mike
*********
In 1966, Roland Leong's engine czar Keith Black went on record in Hot Rod Magazine as defining a 75% nitromethane mixture as "heavy." Ergo, 100% was not just volatile -- it was certifiably insane. Of course, this was the percentage that Skinner and Jobe considered ideal for their tune-up. To the mighty Surfers, cutting the nitromethane with alcohol was even more absurd and non-linear than using a blower pulley. More is good, too much is better, right? But were these yin and yang yahoo alchemists pushing the envelope of internal combustion beyond its tension threshold? Were the Surfers off their trolley? Had they gone too far? On the contrary: At this moment the Surfers were the manifestation of a phenomenon that happens in physics all the time: When envelopes are pushed, the parallel lines of, say, method and madness, bend and distort, and at some point are they no longer parallel, at some point they actually intersect. Method and madness become the same thing...Madness becomes rational. The Surfers had reached that lucid intersection.
Ron Hier depicts "the lunacy" of Skinner and Jobe's fuel mixture: "They originally started at about 50% nitro but Jobe didn't like the (lack of) accuracy of the hydrometers. He thought they were a bunch of crap because they couldn't get the right mixture on them, you were never sure what it really was so he said, 'If you just pour it out of the can we could eliminate that (uncertainty).' That was Jobe: Eliminate all the mistakes. So instead of mixing it and getting a bad mix he said, 'We'll run a 100%.'"
Another theory was that the beakers were too expensive for the Surfers' budget. Ironically, this is a rumor the Skinner and Jobe started themselves. It was really quite unnerving to see Sorokin gleefully pouring pure, undiluted nitromethane into the tank -- all because his team couldn't afford any more beakers. Skinner expounds on the "no hydrometers" rule this way, "What we used to say was that we didn't want to break the hydrometer," he said, "but basically what we were trying to do was get as much energy out of the fuel as possible. Our game plan was about efficiency...to try and maximize the potential power that was available in the fuel. It took a long time to do that."
So what was the percentage? "100%," he answered. "Well not 100% but close...we had some stuff we put in there, y'know? We had some additives that took some percentage, something anybody could buy to stabilize things a little bit...in the neighborhood of 1 or 2%."
Jobe concurs about the percentage, but adds that the decision to run this outrageous percentage was strategic on a variety of levels; most importantly, it shrewdly negated the Surfers from falling prey to their own pranksterish tactics. "Since most of those guys could add nitro and kill their motors -- we couldn't add any more because we already had the whole thing, right? We had it planned that you couldn't destroy the thing almost no matter what you did. The other guys would typically run 70 to 80% nitro and if you could get them panicked they would add another 5 or 10% and blow the thing up."
Yep...Despite their public image as oddballs who ran 100% nitromethane because all their hydrometers were broken, an image they helped cultivate themselves, in reality this cagey alchemy was another trump card for these wiseacre college kids from Santa Monica. It was a pearl of wisdom they had gleaned from their academic studies...
"I was going to college -- mechanical engineering -- and I just set about studying nitromethane," explained Jobe about what led to a witches brew of pure nitromethane. "I would get the head of the chemistry department or whoever and get them all involved in what we were doing -- and they'd cop a plea right away and say, 'Hey, I don't know how to do anything really, I'm just a teacher' -- then they'd find out what we were talking about was going to get drug out to the starting line on Saturday night...So I'd say, 'Hey, you've got to keep me straight on the theory, I want to make sure I don't start deciding that gravity pulls from the side and get screwed up out there,'" he rhapsodized.
"So I set about studying how nitromethane worked," he continued. "The reactions, both when you burn it and when you detonate it and how they differ; what causes it to detonate versus burn; what attitudes increase or decrease the tendency to detonate. At that time there was a lot of literature out because there had been some train car explosions and other unexplained explosions that happened with nitro so a lot of research had been done where they dropped 55-gallons drums of the stuff from towers and shot it with 50-caliber machine guns trying to figure out how these tanks cars went up in, I think, Illinois.
"That was the basis of what made our deal run good," Jobe determined, "figuring out the nitro angle of it. And then figuring out how many btu's were in 60%, 70%, 80%...Also," he proffered, "I was old enough to where I had watched the transition from gasoline to alcohol at the dragstrip; when I was, say, ten years old I watching 'em put together alcohol and gasoline -- which don't mix, right? -- so at the starting line one of the crew would come up and grab the frame of the dragster and start shaking it to mix the stuff up, and I'm watching this as a little kid and going, 'Man that's stupid. If alcohol is good, why not just throw the gasoline away and go with the alcohol?'"
Remove all obstacles in the path, eh?
"When we did our deal we were going, 'Why use alcohol? Let's just throw that shit away. That stuff doesn't make it go...It's just pollution.'"
Jobe's old man was a jeweler and his workshop became the Surfers' impromptu research and development laboratory. "We continued our experiments at my dad's factory in Santa Monica," he says. "He had some jeweler's lathes that we used to make all kinds of goofy nozzles. Do you remember in Science Class, Bernoulli's equation? That defines all the stuff you need to know to make a nozzle...Anyway, we made 'em look just like the pictures in the science book."
The "Kinetic-Molecular Theory of Gasses According to Jobe" is indeed the crucial element to the Surfers' success. Beyond that, it is also a blueprint on the mechanics of running a Top Fuel dragster -- thirty years later. Outrageous nitro percentages, thin nozzles subjected to ludicrous amounts of pressure, and low compression are de rigueur for a contemporary fueler. But in '64, it was considered radical and suicidal. The Surfers debunked this as myth...by using a water faucet as a flow bench. Yes, a water faucet...
"We made us a flow bench out of a water faucet that had 60 lbs. (of pressure) which, at the time, was what most fuel injectors had. Ultimately, we made a whole fuel injector but then we found out that was stupid because then you don't get any contingency money from Hilborn or whoever. Why throw away contingency money? So we just used Hilborn, but we made all the nozzles -- we were into 200 lb. fuel pressure but we never told anybody. We had little tiny nozzles, but lot's of 'em, in order to atomize the stuff. You can't burn liquid," Jobe clarified.
"We found out that we could up the ignition's amps, we could take fuel out of it." Why less fuel volume? "All it's doing is flattening your wallet. The more you atomize it, the less you have to put in to get the same amount of burnable, combustible stuff."
The r&d at the jewelry workshop yielded a tangible, palpable difference between Skinner and Jobe's digger and virtually every other machine at the race track: That is, the way it sounded. Tom Hunnicutt explains, "Their car sounded like no other car. You could tell when it was their car. If there were 100 Top Fuel cars and they all sounded the same, their car was completely off by itself. Their car was louder than anybody else's and it had all more fuel lines on it than anybody had ever seen." Hunnicutt says about their swift conquest of the fueler wars, "They were kicking ass and not breaking anything. It was the perfect team."
Skinner describes the Surfers mechanical ethos this way, "Efficiency, reliability was important to us," he said. "Occasionally we had to take the head off or something. Occasionally we would break a roller tappet, occasionally we would lose a head gasket. When we ran the 64 cars at Bakersfield we didn't have any problems."
Because the Surfers were such a well-oiled machine and maintenance manhours were minimal, this created ample opportunity for these free-thinkers to, uhhh, skateboard while the rest of the fueler guys were thrashing between rounds of competition.
"Skinner always had some skateboards to play with because we didn't work on the car a lot like everybody else did," Jobe says. To compensate for the a lack of fiscal horsepower, the ingenuity of the Surfers manifested itself on the plane of psychological warfare; The boys occasionally deployed the skateboards as a weapon to combat their opponents deeper pockets and cubic dollars.
As Jobe tells it, "On the way to the drag strip we would talk about 'What can we do to them today?,'" he says. "'What weird thing can we lay on 'em?' in ways they wouldn't even figure out. We needed all the advantages we could get. A lot of the guys we had to compete against were well funded...The Lou Baneys and the Keith Blacks. All of those guys had really nice stuff. They had, like, new parts."
Jobe remembers, "...a Sunday afternoon race at Fontana. All the bad guys from back East were gonna show up," he says. "They were all puttin' the mouth on us in the press saying what they were going to do to us West Coast guys. It was about an hour's drive to Fontana from Santa Monica and we were talking and riding along and thinking, 'What should we do today? Let's not work on the car. We'll come down and pick up the car at the other end and while Mike and his girlfriend pack the parachutes we'll service the thing.' We could service the whole thing in about five minutes. We said, 'We'll push right past the pits and we'll put it right back in line and we'll get out the skateboards and we'll go torture 'em in their pit area.' So we did that -- fortunately we didn't break any lifters or anything," Jobe remembers. "So we'd get the skateboards out. We go over and watch these guys (tear down) and we'd say, 'Man, you guys sure are smart; you guys know how to work on these things and everything. Man, you guys are good!' They didn't know what to think of all that. By about the third round one of these East Coast hitters said, 'Damn, don't you guys ever work on that thing?' We said, 'N-o-o, we don't work on it because we really don't know that much about it. We'd just screw it up, it's better just to leave it alone.' And this guy is like, '(slowly) What-the-****-is-this-all-about?' In the last round we got the mouthiest of the bunch, Bobby Vodnick, and we beat him and left 'em all shaking their heads."
"Nobody ever found about the mind games, because we never talked about it," he concludes.
*******************
To: Joe Buysee, Lansing Michigan From: Mike Sorokin, Mar Vista, CA
Hi Joe,
We will NOT be at Union Grove until June 25th. You can bet we will be trying to beat the Goose, we haven't run the car for a month and I'm forgetting how to drive the darn thing. I hope your pal loses his buck. I think he will. We still have a few tricks to try.
I have been married for about a month. I like it.
We are not worried about the strip conditions. The car handles good and it has two chutes. We actually made No. 1 on the Drag Racing Magazine poll for the west. We were very happy about that.. We are planning on running the US Nationals..
We didn't get any color pictures in the article because our car isn't pretty enough.
You don't have to thank us. It's a pleasure to meet fans like you. I just hope our future performance doesn't let you down.
Well, I'll see you later.
Mike
************
"Sorokin was a real high strung kind of guy, very nervous," says Tom Jobe. "He kept to himself and he loved to race." On a typical Sunday morning, after rendezvousing at the Red Apple, the Surfers would stop for breakfast whilst en route to San Fernando Raceway. Once seated, Jobe describes Sork's hyperactivity thusly: "Mike would be sitting there and he could not keep from bouncing his feet, jumping up and down and vibrating at the table.
"The guy was so high strung that nobody could beat him at the starting line. And if you wanted him to be just a little bit quicker, you could just wind him up: You know, 'Mike, so-and-so was saying that their driver could whip you' and that would really make him vibrate. And if somebody actually pissed him off they could forget trying to be beat him. I don't know if he went into higher revolutions per minute or what, but he would really be quick," Jobe remembers.
"He would just drive anything, but fortunately by the time we got rolling he was getting tired of all the coupes and roadsters and he wanted to drive something fast -- and make some money too."
The biggest test of Sorokin's mettle transpired during the '65 UDRA meet at Fontana. During a semi-final heat the boys had the blown the side out of the block. It was their only bullet in the entire inventory and until that moment, "it lived like Methuselah," according to Sorokin. But rather than pack it in, our heroes improvised. They turned the car on its side, jammed the piston all the way to the top of the bore, removed the dead hole's connecting rod, taped the crank journal and wrapped it with a hose clamp, taped cardboard (!) over the gouge on the inside of the block to keep from hemorrhaging oil and threw the pan back on. For the half-dead 392's swan song, they dosed the remaining 7 cylinders on 99%, fired it up and Sork staged the discordant, vibrating wounded machine like nothing was out of the ordinary. Despite the frenzied thrash, Sorokin expertly cut a gatejob that was sharp as a switchblade, and was scarfing up asphalt in a discombobulatory pell-mell fashion until the entire backfiring mill detonated and went kablooey at the top end. They lost the match, but won the respect of the entire drag racing community with that gonzo, anarchic attempt to win a $1000 purse. Sorokin got more ink than the event winner...
"When we got done with one of those deals, Mike would just look at you like, 'Is it time to go?' and he'd hop right in knowing full well that the whole side of the motor is made out of cardboard and silver tape. There was a hose clamp around the crank where a rod used to be," he concludes. "He didn't give a shit. 'Oh yeah, let's go.' He loved it."
As the Surfers' star continued to rise, Sorokin met Robyn Rains, a part-time trophy girl at the digs. "She is the best parachute packer I have," said Mike, "and it's nice to have a pretty girl to look at instead of all the racers."
Robin packed the chute at all the races, including the '66 March Meet at Bakersfield, an event that has been described as "the purest drag race ever." It was an absolute orgy, there were 102 AA/Fuel Dragsters entered in Top Fuel Eliminator that weekend. The Surfers outlasted 'em all -- and for punctuation they set a National E.T. record of 7.34 seconds.
Skinner reflects on Sorokin's contributions to the Surfers' triumph at Bakersfield like a calculus problem: "You can't really pinpoint who does what," he reckons, "but in order to win some drag races the car has to be running, the driver has to be able to not only get the thing down the track but leave at the right time. Plus after a while he got to where he could control the throttle, where he initially what he used to go was start the thing up and put the throttle down.
"I remember one thing that he said at Bakersfield. We ran the first round and ran a 7.40 and he said, 'The track is really good, I think I can put the throttle down all the way on the next pass.' And he wasn't used to being able to do that. He definitely developed some finesse."
But it was definitely a culmination of elements, including all that r&d on the jeweler's lathe, according to Skinner. "We worked a lot with our fuel injector -- we evolved the fuel injector," he said. "Up until we won Bakersfield we never had a new blower. At Bakersfield we had a new/used blower. We were never on the cutting edge with expensive gadgetry."
But the Surfers' ken and karma transcended the limitations of their gear. It was their awareness that was "bleeding edge." Intuitively, if not intellectually, the Surfers knew that matter and energy are interchangeable and both are keys given to humanity to open any door we seek. The Surfers chose the door to the Kingdom of Nitromethane, whose sacramental temple was in Bakersfield.
In the Winners Circle at Bakersfield, the paparazzi went bananas, with flashbulbs bursting like asteroids during the Big Bang itself. It was glorious, with the bespectacled Skinner mugging for the camera in the reflective light bouncing off the Miss Hurst Shifter Trophy Girl's cleavage. Fame. Wealth. Top Eliminator. The Madcap Savants from Surf City put 'em all on the trailer. And as stars shone on Kern County that night, as oil derricks teeter-tottered off in distance, the grunions were running at a motel in Bakersfield: Mike and Robyn Sorokin celebrated their triumphs in a cosmic sense and their son Adam was conceived. All across Creation, the Surfers were shooting the curl. Finally, they had achieved a spiritual duty greater than themselves.
But at their zenith, the Surfers encountered a fork in the road. Skinner and Jobe were burnt on drag racing and sought new challenges."Skinner and I could see that the only guys who were ever going to make a living in this deal were the owner/driver/operator; the Prudhommes, the Garlits's, the whatever," said Jobe. "You could see that it was already headed in the direction. We worked a lot of hours," he continued. "I went to school and had a part time job and worked on the dragster. We were always just scraping by -- and just barely. A lot of times we would we show to the drag strip with a crank that wasn't even balanced...Mike wouldn't be able to even see once he got half way down the track the thing was vibrating so badly...He didn't care, 'Whatever...Let's go.'
"We told Mike, 'Hey, if you don't think that you have to do this for the rest of your life, why don't you look at it from the standpoint that we went out and did a bunch of wild shit, had a great time, kicked a lot of ass, took a lot of names and we're all in one piece and we don't have a nick on us. Let's just forget about it.' He said, 'No, I think I want to keep going. I like doing this.'"
Skinner says, "We were really able to walk away." Sorokin, however, was a different story. Sork was totally wired on driving a digger. Quitting the business wasn't an option.
Sorokin reflected in the Santa Monica Evening Outlook on his perpetual yen to kick out the jams on the drag strip. "I spent two years at City College studying electronics because I thought it was the thing to do," he said. "I found out this is what I wanted to do most. I think everybody has some kind of dream. This was mine and I'm living it. You can't ask for much more."
*********
Hi Joe,
How are things in the armed forces? Drag racing is getting rougher & rougher. We ran at Irwindale yesterday. It took a 7.57 sec. to qualify in a 16 car field. We broke in the third round after beating Gotelli-Safford and Tommy Allen. My writing is bad because I am holding my month old son, Adam. Very good looking kid.
Anyway, in about a month, I think I will be driving the Hawaiian. The new car we were building when we quit racing is almost finished and it is without a doubt THE best looking car in drag racing. Richie Bandel, from Brooklyn, bought the car. We all hate to see it go. The old car is still for sale.
Well, G.I. Joe, take care of yourself and good luck.
Mike
*********
Sorokin's next gig was driving for another titan of engineering, Ed Pink, which lasted for a couple of months. He then drove for Blake Hill for a month. Next, he got the call when Roland Leong decided to campaign two fuelers, one powered by a Chrysler 392 and the other sporting a newfangled 426 hemi powerplant. "Sorokin drove the 426 car," recalls Leong, "and we won the Stardust meet in '67 at Vegas." Keith Black was wrenching, Roland was cutting checks, and Sork was swapping pedals -- a formidable collaboration on paper, but one that failed to set the world on fire in reality...It's not like they stunk up the joint, they didn't; it's just that this combination just did not crush like Black, Leong and Sorokin were all used to. When Roland downsized to one fueler, he went with Mike Snively as the driver.
*********
Hi Joe,
How's things in the Army? Good I hope. I was very happy to have won in Las Vegas. The win was badly needed.
It doesn't take people very long to forget past accomplishments. I hope this won't be the only big win. The cars around here are unbelievable. We ran 7.26 last week and didn't qualify!
Keith Black is a pretty good guy to race with. He is plenty sharp. (My writing and spelling is terrible)
Well, goodbye for now, say hello to your mom.
Mike
*********
Reflecting on the trajectory of the Surfers' endeavors, Skinner said, "It was kind of a curiosity, kind of an adventure to go on." His reward was the process and not the goal..."I've taken a different path in my life than most people have," Skinner said. "I'm interested in life-long learning and I'm trying to continually grow as a human being. My interests are much more spiritual and philosophical than trying to be famous or achieve something on a material level."
For Skinner, his drag strip endeavors were informative on an almost existential level. "I'm sure that having the success (we had) did something for my level of confidence," he said. "It helped me realize that I could be independent and I could solve problems and solve them in a different way than the average person. I see myself struggling with....structure."
Ironically, drag racing hipped Skinner to the structure inherent in the symbiotic relationship that exists between humanity, technology and a given environment. "Tom is the person who masterminded our combination for the engine," Skinner continues. "A lot of it really was kind of like a science experiment. It was nice recently that we were honored at the banquet for the Drag Racing Hall of Fame. I thought to myself, 'What if someone asks me, 'how did we do that?' I'm not really sure, but I know on some level we made friends with all the parts and we had very intimate relationships with each of the parts. In order to do that, you have to be able to look at the part and on an abstract level. You have a conversation with the part. You look at the bearings and the bearing kind of talks to you and tells you what it needs so it won't get hurt."
*********
Hi Joe,
It was really saddened to hear about (name is illegible). He was a VERY nice guy.
I was layed off at work. They didn't appreciate my taking two weeks off to go to Bristol.
We didn't even qualify. A 7.35 in the first round was good enough, but a 7.40 in the second wasn't. Plus the engine melted a couple of pistons. That engine is extremely temperamental. Only 6 days to the meet at Lions. I hope Black does the right thing and performs some of his miracles. He was talking about using an Enderle injector. That's the only thing that hasn't been changed in the engine.
Well, I'll talk to you after the 15th.
Mike
*********
In the waning months of '67, Sorokin was back at the strip, shoeing a somewhat generic slingshot under the employ of Bakersfield racer, Tony Waters. In their three races together, they went out in the first round of competition each time. Sorokin and Paul Gommi, a fellow SoCal fueler freak, had ordered a new digger and they picked up the chassis on December 29th. The two of them looked forward to the holidays to blow over so they could get the car ready for the new season. "I talked to Mike the morning before we went to race in Orange County, see?," recalls Leong. "And what he did was he just picked up a brand new chassis from a guy in Colorado I guess, at the airport."
This was the last race for Sorokin as a hired gun. With Gommi, he would now be owner/operator.
"He didn't like the car he was driving, but that was a ride, right?" Roland says. "He was going to start putting together this brand new chassis, he bought the chassis with his own money and he wanted to know if I had some parts that he might need to finish the car up. I said, 'Yeah, we'll talk about it. Then he asked me if I would be home Sunday..." Leong pauses when he remembers the weekend of December 30th, 1967 when the flaws in the clutch technology were showcased in a most grisly manner.
As Morton alluded to in The Stainless Steel Carrot, clutches had a tendency to pull the bolts out. After a few laps under maximum torque, the asbestos disks would periodically shred apart and would create a domino effect throughout the bellhousing. Ultimately, the flywheels cut through the aluminum bellhousing and the chromemoly chassis like a buzzsaw through Brylcreem. This was one of those nights.
Tom Hunnicutt was sitting in the bleachers with Jim Boyd during the first round of eliminations. "Sorokin left the line and got about half way down and I remember this horrendous metal sound. I remember looking straight down (from the bleachers) and as he went by, I remember seeing the light off of the top part of his helmet," recalls Hunnicutt. "The rear wheels had stopped -- this was at 220 (mph) or whatever -- and the front part of the car was gone." At this point the bolts sheared and the flywheel cut the chassis completely in two. Worse yet, the rear end seized and was freewheeling inside the rollcage at 218 mph. This forced Mike out of the cockpit. "He was half out of the rollbar. I thought to myself, 'Maybe he's trying to get away from it...why is he standing up?' About that time the tubes dug in and he started tumbling. And every time it went over, it was like a rag sticking out of a ball all the way down the dragstrip, all the way to the end...It was the worst thing I have ever seen."
After the horror and the screaming and the godawful grinding subsided, there was silence. Everyone on the premises was stunned. Some folks were literally in shock.
"We walked back to the pits," Hunnicutt continues, "and I remember Frank Pedregon was putting his car back on the trailer -- and he was in, he was qualified. Jimmy was in denial and kept asking him, 'What hospital are they going to take him to? Maybe we can go see him.' Frank finally had to tell him, 'Jimmy, he doesn't need a hospital.' It was one of those things you don't forget for your whole life."
"Anyway, even in the staging lanes I talked to him a little bit about it (getting together on Sunday)." Roland recollected. "I guess as long as I've been doing this, I've kinda' seen it all so to speak...But it's kind of an eerie feeling to just talk to a guy before he gets pushed down and the next time you turn around he's dead."
Once again, the universe shuddered because of Mike Sorokin. But this time it was from his passing. Sorokin's son was a year old. He vaguely recalls the phone ringing and hearing his mom screaming when she was given the news. It was perhaps drag racing's darkest moment, and at the very least, an ugly punctuation to legacy of the Surfers.
*********
April 11, 1968.
From: Roxanne Gibson (Note: Mike Sorokin's sister-in-law)
To: Pvt. Joe Buysee
Dear Joe:
I just finished reading your letter, it's so sweet and thoughtful of you to find time to write me, I know how hard it is to keep up with your letter writing. I don't know how you do it.
Joe, I just feel sick inside about all that goes on over there. I wish like crazy you American guys didn't have to be over there. I also received today a letter from our gal Robyn. She's fine and Adam too. They left for Spain April 7th.
That's too much about your license plate, my birthday is April 18th, so I'll be thinking about, "Roadrunner" except I'll be 28...wow, 27 years older than your car.
So long for now, Joe.
Roxanne
(Pvt. Joe Buysee died of a rare brain disease in December, 1970. Depending on whether you ask his family or the government, it may or may not have been related to exposure to exotic, strategic chemicals during his tour of duty in Southeast Asia.)
*********
And the Surfers was this: They took the promise of America tipped it over, and ran it out the back door. They choose their moment, took the trappings of our American Dream and manipulated it to their own ends, baby. And then they moved on because everything is ephemeral in the universal scheme of things, a theorem proved by Sork's shocking and profound passing. The memory of the Surfers and their exploits, however, continues to influence and affect everybody who was touched by their presence and anybody who saw them run.
In March of 1997, the Surfers were inducted to the Drag Racing Hall of Fame. Skinner didn't even know it existed. He showed up at a black tie affair in striped two-tone red pants, a flannel shirt and a Panama hat. Jobe was equally perplexed. Ron Hier relates the following anecdote from the ceremony: "Like Jobe said, 'We did it and that was that -- and now I'm in the Hall of Fame, I can't fathom it, how did this happen?' So I told him, 'You gotta look into it a little more and understand what happened to drag racing after you left.'"
But Jobe is nothing if not a crisp, clairvoyant thinker and he knows the perfect wave is rare, indeed. He saw that the parameters and the scope of drag racing would be narrowed into a diameter thinner than his own fuel nozzles, that the scope of something defined as unlimited would narrow into something quite finite. "Rules create a funnel," Jobe explained in very matter-of-fact tones, "and at the end this just creates red dragsters and green ones and blue ones." He continues to describe the inevitability of homogenization. "Rules end up defining the vehicle: The wheel base, the height, the width. The only thing left is the color," he said, "and that is taken care of by the sponsor. That's evolution." One hundred percent.
Green Acres Date- 05/28/05 13:23:56 PDT From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
Eddie Albert -- the city slicker cum farmhand on the 60s sitcom "Green Acres," just kicked it. Tom Lester, who played "Eb," the indolent farm hand, is the only member of the original cast who is still breathing.
In 1975, I witnessed "Eb" delivering a sermon at a Baptist Revival for teenagers in Tupelo Mississippi (birthplace of Elvis Presley, dontcha' know).
Once the "aw shucks, y'all will never believe what they do in Hollywood" portion of his speech/act/sermon reached it denounement, the whole thing turned into a screed against the "devil's music," replete with some holy roller playing Jools Holland-ish boogie-woogie piano as a medium for underscoring the wanton grunt that is the cornerstone of rock 'n' roll.
Name checked that night were Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep (or a good 1/3rd of my record collection).
Religion is really nutty, but it takes that special synergy of Hollywood and the Deep South to showcase how bizarre it can get.
BRAINDEAD SOUNDMACHINE Date- 05/04/05 13:30:19 PDT From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
BRAINDEAD SOUNDMACHINE (1990-1993) have rip corded on the music business and now live in a dormant wind tunnel on the Morgan Salt Flats, east of China Lake Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. The facility also features a natural hot spring, a small cafeteria, and a sculpture garden consisting of welded early 70s muscle cars. The wind tunnels themselves are modified Navy diving bells powered by gas generators and automobile batteries. With mixed results, the former musicians promote their "Nitronic Research Wind Tunnels" as a point of interest for travelers on the way to nearby Death Valley.
BRAINDEAD's lineage can be traced back to the late 60s, when former Strawberry Alarm Clock keyboardist Ikky Shivers performed his rock opera "BRIAN WILSON" in the abandoned warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles. In 1985, after having disappeared for some years into the not entirely unconnected worlds of Japanese pornography and top fuel drag racing, Ikky turned his head in a Hollywood Denny's restaurant and saw that the man next to him was also reading a copy of NO TIME FOR RIMJOBS, the autobiography of Kenji Yoshi, a Japanese cross dresser who holds the unofficial speed record for unlimited top fuel funny cars after hitting 331 mph at Badwater, Utah in front of approximately 34 Jehovah's witnesses, none of whom were accepted as recognized corroboration by the proper sanctioning bodies. I'm Not Carrying Your Corpse Down This Mountain Date- 04/26/05 11:47:09 PDT From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
excerpted from VESTIGES OF METALLIC FRAGMENTS
The other day BZ, Tottenham and I hit some hot springs near Death Valley and then went on some hare-brained hike through the Armagosa Chaos and into the Black Mtns.
We c-l-i-m-b-e-d up some forgotten mining "trails" for *hours*, while whistling the theme from Bridge on the River Kwai... (it was a rather brutal ascent...)
Sample dialogue (upon finding the grave near Desert Hound Peak): "If one of you fuckers croaks up here, we're burying you where you drop. I'm not carrying your corpse down this mountain. We'll cover you with dust and mark the mound with some lava rock." (Due to the altitude, tempers were a little frayed at times...)
postscript: we drove back to Los Angeles that night and BZ checked himself into a hospital. (I'm not making this up.) No worries, apparently: The cardiologist sez he's fine.
But without the cloud cover that day, we never would have made it even to the grave.
TIME'S ARROW AND DARK MATTER Date- 03/07/05 17:55:27 PST From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
The journey continued. Night had fallen and a cassette tape of Link Wray instrumentals rumbled on the car stereo. We burned down a rather deserted stretch of desert in time with the music, the swanky and ferocious beat acting as a syncopated counterpoint to the soothing thrum of the Pontiac's smoothly percolating 400 cubic inches of internal combustion. These were the only sounds to permeate the mute omniscience of the California moon and interrupt the stillness of the surrounding darkness.
I pulled on a styrofoam big gulp of jake, thick as motor oil and twice as sour. The brackishness of the caffeine was exacerbated by the faux liquid creamer, which had a consistency and overbite reminiscent of a night in Akron, Ohio. Despite the brutality of the acidic bile in my styrofoam cup and the realization that if I didn't drink this stuff we would never reach Black Rock, Nevada in time for Breedlove's record runs, nothing could harsh the mellow of a night that seemed to be harmony with the cosmic consciousness.
"The sound of a well-tuned V8 is the sound of the universe at peace with itself," I said.
Roy agreed. "It is the perfect rhythm section for a twangin' guitar," he nodded, reaching to crank up the volume pot on the tape player.
Like Link Wray, Roy is a North Carolina boy and he grew up around the souped-up V8s of stock car country. Neither of us are particularly mechanically inclined, but we both have a profound appreciation for an internal combustion engine and all of its trappings, not the least of which was the different ways one can sound depending upon fuel type, air/fuel induction system and cam grind.
Roy can find the harmonic overtones of this world from a variety of fountainheads, but he has a real penchant for picking out the symphonies buried in thermodynamic sources... Many times at the drag strip as I fought for elbow room amongst the bleacher bums and photographers Roy would just stay in the parking lot and recline in the front seat of the car, content to kick back with a sixer and listen to the different types of drag racing machines gear up and wind down across the pavement. It is music to his ears, like the sound of bird calls to somebody in the Audubon Society.
"It sounds like you are down on compression in the number seven cylinder," he said during a lull in the cassette.
I was colored impressed. Roy's appreciation of the sonic qualities of an eight-cylinder internal combustion engine makes sense when one factors in that his home town, Ranlo, is not more than a three beer drive from a triumvirate of company towns whose main industry nowadays is stock car racing and its spinoff industries. In recent years, surrounding cities such as Charlotte, Hickory, Rockingham, Winston-Salem, Spartanburg, South Carolina et. al., have all blossomed and roared with commerce as garages, shops, wind tunnels, checker-flagged themed coffee shops and other havens for horsepower research and development for stock cars replaced or supplanted the region's rather moribund textile industry. Each of those cities is a point on a circle that envelops the modest digs of Roy's childhood in the podunk burg of Ranlo.
The conversation turned to North Carolina and its recent history. We talked about textile mills and relatives with missing fingers; we talked about how Link Wray and how North Carolina had changed since the days of rockabilly and moonshine. We talked about the jail terms of the first wave of stock car racers.
Ahhh, the checkered history of stock cars in the Crimson State. The phenomena that became stock car racing as an industry transpired the moment when federal revenuers and local Good Ol' Boy law enforcement were empowered by the sudden ubiquity of inexpensive radio technology in the 1950s and 60s. This finally allowed them to stop (or at least stem) both the rampant bootlegging of corn liquor and its co-efficient, tax evasion. Sure, a hot headed soda cracker moonshine runner could out drive the local sheriff's deputies, but good luck in outrunning radio transmissions carried on modulated electromagnetic waveforms that travel at the speed of light. So the daredevils who were at one time runnin' shine and who were the object of hot pursuit from law enforcement became stock car drivers. Many had gone to jail at one time or another (and another), but these days they are respectable businessmen and/or tooth-capped spokesmen for boxes of Corn Flakes and laundry detergent who are racing for maximum exposure on the boob tube--i.e., master capitalist stock car owners, drivers and parts manufacturers--catering to the needs of the racing crowd and its Fortune 500 sponsors, their tawdry occupation of outrunning the law now firmly vaporized in life's trail of exhaust.
"A bonafide hillbilly guitar player can't get a job in county music no more," Roy mused. It seems the landscape had been gentrified with corporate stock car bucks and Starbucks, he said and in reference to the motorsport that was once the domain of moonshine runners, he added that, "and all of those famous stock car boys can't talk about their vacations in the big house neither."
Stock cars in the Deep South. Corn liquor squeezin's. Hillbilly guitar players. None too shabby a cultural backdrop for life east of the Mississippi, but for Cuz'n Roy these trappings were not enough. As a kid, he had been exposed to the surf and drag culture of California via exploitation films and sound recordings. Throughout Roy's youth it was, by day, surf guitars mixed in with hillbilly honky tonk on a dime store phonograph or transistor radio and, by late night under the blue cathode glow of a rabbit-eared teevee set, beach movies with gratuitous dragster crashes shoehorned into the plot and then the world fell into a sine wave and a test pattern. This imported culture shaped and informed Roy's appreciation of the California and fired up his sense of wanderlust.
(Early in our friendship while watching the vintage surf and drag trashploitation flick "Bikini Beach" on videotape, he told me in solemn tones that, "Every time I went to drive-in movie theater in the deep South and I saw these beach movies with dragsters racing alongside those majestic mountains, or whenever I heard a song by the Beach Boys on my AM radio, I knew there was something going on in California I needed to experience.")
Back in those days, for kids in the hinterlands, pop culture--late night television. AM radio, surfing and drag racing magazines, etc.--taught its impressionable viewers that California was not just a place on the map, it was the last stop for the Manifest Destiny. It represented an ideal, opportunity, the last stop on the trail that began at the Gateway to the West, a logical extension of the last chunk of real estate within the borders of the Continental US. In fact, it is where the pavement ends and where vision begins for passengers riding the American Dream, a notion encapsulated in the idiom of Breedlove's choosing, "the Spirit of America."
As a transplant, Roy was the natural guy to tap into what that meant, i.e., to figure out what resonance and deeper meanings, if any, could be summoned from the whole Spirit of America gag--as a phrase, as a concept, as an approach to life, as late as 1996. California had changed; America had changed...all of which is natural, as life is nothing, if not change.
The drive continued. California became Nevada. Posted speed limits were ignored. The conversation died and the mix tape of surf music spooled out. I ejected the cassette and scrolled through the dial of the AM radio. We found a talk station out of Reno, which through a quirk of electromagnetism, was able to transmit to I-15 west of Needles with minimal fritzing. Late night radio in the American Desert is truly free from and tonight the screed from the deejay in Reno was particularly temporal and metaphysical...
"... Nothing-uh is static-uh," the voice from the radio said through some static. "Things move both forward and backwards, as a function of space and time, but things move, my friends. Stars move, galaxies move, everything moves away from everything else. And the further away they get-uh, the faster they move, which indicates the universe is expanding and constantly changing. Only when something ceases to move, does it cease to exist. Can I get an amen-uh?"
"Ah-men!" Roy yelled and pounded on the Pontiac's cracked upholstery with his mammoth mitts. "It's like this guy is talking about the car crash we drove through today."
"... And everything will keep moving until the Universe collapses into itself-uh," the voice on the radio rattled the speaker cones like a snake handler. "It is a matter of chaos-uh and prob-uh-bil-uh-tee as the tendency towards disorder is the most universal manifestation of time's arrow. Our galaxy is traveling at 600 miles per second towards a collision with infinity and oh-bliv-ee-un-uh. And there is a man in the desert who, come morning, will endeavor to defy physics and common sense by uhh-temp-ting-uhh to break the sound barrier in a stream-uh-lined, jet-powered five-wheeled ahh-tow-mow-beel." The station cut to commercials about radar detectors and military-quality ready-meals.
"Well I'll be dipped in the primordial soup," Cuz'n Roy guffawed. "This guy is talking about Breedlove. He sounds just like a weird, soda cracker version of Cleavon Little in that movie about benzedrine and muscle cars. You know, the one where Cleavon played the soul brother deejay, 'Vanishing Point.'"
"That's exactly what this dude is talking about," I said, leaning on the accelerator. "The vanishing point. Like he said, 'the intersection of infinity and oblivion.'" I gave it a beat to organize my thoughts and then told Roy that, "it's like we--as a society, as individuals, as wannabe gearheads, as land speed record setters--go racing to the vanishing point like lemmings or something, like splinters of iron drawn to a magnet, no, like an electron to the nucleus of an atom and when we get there we disappear, like the collision of matter and anti-matter."
The talk show returned from the commercial breaks and the noises in the car became a jumbled cacophony of confusion and overlapping dialogue with me trying to find the intersections of the biological and cosmological imperatives, the voice on the radio riffing extemporaneously on Craig Breedlove not heeding the laws of some Grand Unifying Theory and Roy speaking in tongues, which I gathered was a loose recitation of chapter and verse from either Genesis or Revelations (I wasn't sure which...).
"Yes, my friends-uhh, light is always going 186,000 miles an hour faster than the person observing it," the voice on the radio continued, briefly modulating in an intermittent tremolo interspersed with emf noise as we passed under some high tension lines. "Light is traveling at the speed limit of the Universe. And no man can travel-uhh at the speed of sound in an ahh-tow-mow-beel."
"There are no speed limits to the Universe, you Luddite Quaker philistine," I shouted at the voice on the radio. "Einstein was wrong and so are you! Breedlove is going Mach 1!"
I drove like a ball of lightning. We had a preponderance of pavement to cover before the trip was done. As Roy began rolling a left-handed cigarette the voice on the radio segued to a rambling rumination about "anti-particles traveling backward in time-uhh" and then it hit me...the cosmic significance of the Spirit of America and potentially breaking the sound barrier in the Great Southwestern Desert of the USA was thus: "I know what this guy is trying to say," I said to Roy, between sips of that now-tepid godforsaken excuse for coffee. "By going Mach 1, Breedlove's trying to subvert the passage of time and prove the cynics wrong. He is trying to steal fire from the Gods, y'know? Prometheus stole fire, which was one of the Greeks four elements. In the atomic age, the space-time continuum has replaced things like water, fire, air and earth as elements. Breedlove is a post-atomic Prometheus."
"What?" Roy asked and stopped rolling in incredulity.
"Look," I said. "It's like this: Einstein said that time bends with the gravitational pull of the cosmos. Newton said it didn't, that time and space were two discrete elements... By going Mach 1--the known speed limit of an automobile--Breedlove is of the quantum theory as opposed to the classical theory... he is trying to bend time; he is obeying Einstein's Laws of Relativity and foisting those laws upon a Newtonian object: his new streamliner, which, ironically, is the same basic design as what he used in 1963. It is the design of an arrow, the perfect aerodynamic shape. It is time's arrow."
I exhaled. Roy whistled and then sparked up. My stomach and brain imploded and then expanded like a sponge, physiological effects from a night of truck stop coffee. During my epiphany the radio had broken for a commercial about 1-800 numbers and hand crank short wave radios that would still function despite the advent of Armageddon. The break ended and the voice on the radio continued its exegesis in excited tones. "...uhh-ccording to Ernst Mach and the Mach Principle acceleration-uhh can be defined only relative to the distant stars, the farthest corners of Val-hall-uhh. Ernst Mach thought the universe was mostly a vacuum. He didn't take into account the dark matter that makes up 90 percent of the heavens."
The voice out of Reno said that if Breedlove screwed the pooch at 700-plus mile an hour that he too would join the great void of dark matter. "Yes, my friends," he said. "The vanishing point-uhh."
"Whoa," Roy said, dropping his lit left-handed cigarette.
We lost the station not long after that and drove more or less in silence for the duration of the trip. And so it went into the black vacuum of the Nevada desert. Vegas. Beatty. Tonopah. Hawthorne. Reno. By 3 AM, all were road signs in our rear view mirrors. Nixon. Little Nixon. Black Rock. We spent the night in Gerlach, Nevada, with me on a pool table and Roy on the floor of a joint called Bev's Miner's Club, whose back door was the lip of the dry lake bed. This next morning we drove out onto a ridge overlooking the dry lake bed, shared a batch of campfire coffee with some backpacking survivalists, brushed our teeth with salt and bottled water, and then spit the wash on gypsum dust white as the fossils of time.
The morning was calm, but there was a palpable tension amongst the spectators and the engineering types milling about the barren floor of the dry lake bed. Once or twice the streamliner's jet engines spooled up and purged its afterburners and then shut down. There was an aura of confusion around the Spirit of America as it sat in its staging area for hours, all the while with Craig Breedlove suited up and strapped into the womb-like cockpit of his homemade missile. Desert winds began to kick up dust and storm clouds blew in and cast a pall on the entire landscape. The mood seemed to darken with the weather, as was a function of the fact that the Spirit of America's permit from the government expired in a couple of days.
BLACK BEAUTY Date- 02/25/05 10:49:41 PST From-wrenchskiwrenchski@aol.com
excerpted from THE ALCHEMIST'S NEGRO
Leon Ivory would look as if he just stepped out of a cartoon today... fur coat fur hat,a pinkie ring with a diamond on it so large the pinkie drags the ground it seems... he's driven into the low-rent car repair facility I'm working in down the wrong side of the tracks, and it's my watch behind the counter... he's driving a '65 Buick electra 225, AKA duece an a quatah... many, many layers of black hand rubbed laquer a mural on the trunk says "BLACK BEAUTY" in olde english script...
Leon is a pimp, nightclub operator and few of the living know what else. At the time, bein' the only thing passes for a white boy on the premises, I got no idea WHO or WHAT he is, I just know his ride runs like shit. And as the only one here who can run the Sun diagnostic machine, I'll be working... on the car... and on notions of how the "other" side lives and plays.
He doesn't stop at the desk, goes right around out back where ex-heavyweight boxer and current truck-tire repairman Crusher is swingin' a 15 lb hammer to pop rims out of 11.00-22 truck tires... leaves, and Crush comes to the counter to set me straight... "BOY, you fuck up dat car, Leon gonna make you dis-appea, hea?"
I open the hood and godDAMN... 430 cubic inches of Buick topped by a pair of four barrels... put it on the Sun, and... 2 burned dead plug wires, somebody left 'em on the...headers? HEADERS on a LAND YACHT?... too quiet for headers... there seem to be FOUR mufflers under this beast... wonder how he can hear the radio, solid core packard 440's should leave nuttin' but static where Frankie Crocker oughta be... the carbs are as fucked up as homeytown on father's day, EVERY adjustment from the floats to the linkage to the idle circuit seeminly set by a blind blacksmith thought he was workin' on a polo pony... in a couplea hours I straighten it out... can't get the lope outa the idle... vacumn gauge says valves, compression gauge says reground camshaft... didn't know Mallory MADE a distibutor for Buicks... Crush comes back in the shop to see how I'm doin'... I explain I've done all the tuning I can. If Leon's gonna drag race THIS car he's gonna get beat by EVERYBODY in SPITE of what he mighta spent on parts...
Crush says DRAG race... that for WHITE BOYS, brothers do it there OWN way... Turnpike it and shit.
Turnpike it and shit?
Crush explains drag racin' ain't SHIT, over too damn soon... the brothers go up on the TURNPIKE off season, and hit it from 60, on a roll...
I ask if Leon would mind if *WE* test drove it...
PERSPECTIVE ON MILLIONS OF MPH...TWO WORKER BEES TALKING...NO VICTIM NO CRIME... Date- 12/06/04 23:14:31 PST From-Ruben BermudezRubenbermudez@aol.com
Hear that sound, sparky? It's... Jimmy Buffet you say? "Some beach..."? Fuck is that? Cute play on words for sixth graders?
Look... down in Texas, there's about 14 miles of tunnels, only 7 miles short of the goal of 21 needed... Supercolliding Superconductor they called it... particles were gonna be accelerated, Sparky... and they were gonna hit each other, we MIGHTA found the origins of the universe, we mighta seen GODLIKE things... they couldn't find the MONEY, Sparks... NOW, it's just a fucking expensive hole through the dirt down in Texas. South of Dallas I think, might run RIGHT under the grassy knoll...
And what it's got to DO with the song?
The Dickwipe singing the song is generating HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars, bub... and spending it on that swill mexican beer with the lime in the neck... and strippers no doubt... fuckin' 'em three at a time I'll bet, and the secrets of the universe are still safe from us thanks to the NASCAR longneck mentality that spawns a dozen or so of itself every five minutes...
yea, there's no hope... I'm just glad we were here before the human race began its downward spiral... wadda' ya think I should drown it out with, Ian Moore's "Muddy Jesus" or some more James Brown?
INERTIA VARIATIONS: I Date- 11/23/04 12:48:31 PST From-John Tottenhaminertia@kerosenebomb.com
I lie on the sofa, stretched out like a corpse,
With eyes closed against the dying light,
Lulled by the silence beyond the waves
Of traffic. Until, eventually, the good-humor man,
On his last go-round, penetrates the fog,
And I resign myself to another final squandered
Afternoon: to not being able to function at this
Or any other time of day.
... ... ... If only... ... ... If only they knew... Clouds billowing, muffled Alps, they draw the air and the electricity in and away. Mushroom edged underneath heaven, the snaky vectors of my bad intent are written out in longhand. Elephant trunked and bilious, the clouds portend something. They are under the scored planes... ... ...
ONE.
Happy Now? I'm here again. It's me... Buffy Strangelove... Remember me? It's time for re-entry. Turn the mobiles off. I'm under the floorboards and in the waiting room. I'm needled. I look around and cultivate contempt for my fellow passengers. All except Dionysia, my intended. I love her, because she's like me, because she is me. I forgive everything where she's concerned. I'm looking out at the planets and I'm flirting with rage. I've just had my 6th, one drink too many and I'm eyeing up a suitable target for dischargeable anger. When the gods fall out, mortals tremble. And I'm raged up, full of anger. My last re-birth was ineffectual. I blew it. Big time. I flew in at 8:00am a reduced presence. Never got used to the stomach churning pressure bursts that characterize cheap economy flights up and down the world, never acclimatized to the sudden loss of altitude, scoring a cheap lesion of freighted panic in my temporal lobe, electrical circuits suddenly billowing with undischarged energy...
Planes cleared for landing choreograph a mimetic ballet of grace. In and out over the sea, lugubrious and of undisclosed tonnage, the planes score out these vectors of intent, bad intent, whose directness mimics their passengers' incorrectly assumed infallibility. It's a conspiracy of complacency, airline placemen affecting indifference, producing a kind of somnambulant acceptance of the inevitable. Out to sea and a few circles described gracefully against the nothingness before banking back towards dry land. Birds of a feather, ironclad, bursting energy barriers, and churning the uptight stomachs of raged-up economy fliers, back from backpacking holidays and mini-breaks to the continent.
I have to admit I don't seem like the best of flyers. I act out like a novice, wincing and palpitating with fake anxiety. I grip the arm rests in simulated panic, my furrowed brow describing an outright unease, a pretence which keeps in check my propensity for flight violence. I feign a nervousness I don't feel, affecting a satirical antidote to the spurious serenity of my becalmed and complacent fellow passengers. I scream suddenly and ridiculously, a falsetto shriek of comedy horror, and harvest the baleful looks that are cast in my direction. Every narrowed eye, each gritted tooth a scalp, a trophy on the sideboard of my petty shadenfreude. I'm famous, or infamous, for brawling on charter flights, getting boozed up and petulant, peevishly niggling at fellow passengers, laughing as we hit turbulence, giving the attendants a hard time, asking for yet more booze, tsking ostentatiously at the way people recline in their seats. I'm always good for half a page of tabloid jokiness.
As we come in to land, engines throttling back, I discharge gently I'm noticed, a turn of the emanatory head a goddess well known to me is sitting three rows in front. My wife Dionysia, beautiful and stylish household goddess, flame headed and heavy lidded, knows from this gesture of infinite tenderness that I intend to become her, at least until customs are cleared. We sit apart so as not to attract attention. We are twins, separated at birth, and re-conjoined in love, mutual dependence, respect and gnosis. Elephant gnosis . The energy flows are open (yeah!) re-birthing season is again upon us, the elephant tracks are re-emplaced and we are about to re-open London for numinous devotional action. The electricity reservoirs are dangerously full (again), all gurus, accountants, PR men, friendly politicos, personality broadcasters, agents and commissioners of TV documentaries (and parody documentaries, and reality shows and all cable blether shows, niche slots for insomniacs and the needy mad, the belligerent mad and the quietly desperate) are primed for action. Disqualified from appearing on any of my shows are the disenfranchised who, under common law, are "idiots" and "lunatics in their non-lucid intervals". The country, opened up to the clandestine presiding spirits, like all potentially numinous countries repeals freedom as and when it suits. A show of selective "democracy" is enough to get us fighting mad. We hate that. If the greasy politicians and psycho-secular power brokers knew we were landing, the shit would really hit the fan. So for now, I have to secrete myself. We'll clean up here, not from a coarse desire for attention, fame or money, but out of love. Love, hate and fecklessness. We are boozed up already. We'll spread out in London.
I wanted to marry Dionysia many years ago, but she was from a different caste, and was disadvantaged in my dreams by the furious opposition of her mother and especially her father from contemplating a re-birthing with me. But I overcame all opposition. I always overcome all opposition. I'm a can-do kind of guy. I operate out of rage, from under the floorboards. I nurture bitter obsessions and nurse vendettas in my bosom. People better watch out for me. I killed 'em all. Palace coup, gunfire ringing through the windy corridors, made to look like an accident. But anyway, as I say, Dionysia and I were joined in birth, joined like royalty at the head. The shared brainpan eventuating massive Gnostic capability, approached in intensity only by the larger mammals. Like elephants. Whales too, although cetaceans don't have their unlimited power. Unfortunate associations and alignments with navel gazers and earth huggers circumscribe cetacean power. They're too closely identified with bleeding soul types, tainted slightly by association. But we're self-selecting see? Our kind of exhibitionism is beyond the scope of satire. We appear as we are, self selected. The best surgeons were dismissed and we were subsequently enabled to separate ourselves. Tripartite separation oh, did I mention Frank? No? Well Frank's a bad man. He was involved somewhere. We killed him though. Oh, later on. Frank doesn't have a psychology. He doesn't behave as you might expect, doesn't conform to traditional narrative linearity. He was married to Dionysia before me. He was my brother, but like I say, I killed him. He became an academic, reason enough one might assume for fratricide.
Through customs, I blend in. Not willing to attract attention to myself, I am secreted in translucent carrier bags; I morph into more seductive forms. I become sexy, stylish, high heels clicking over the parquet. Giving out pheromone signals, I turn heads, distracting attention from the fact that I am toting a good deal of surplus electrical baggage. At this stage one of my clandestine familiars, a gentleman dressed in the American style, with long unkempt hair and with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, approaches the customs officials and introduces himself. After an eternity of pretended efficiency and half-arsed officiousness, they are still staring bleakly at him. He then pleads for clemency on the grounds of his own stupidity, a plea that is rejected. Meanwhile I am able to sneak through with the minimum of fuss, the sniffers' attention distracted by the American who continues to loudly proclaim the innocence of the camera which he wears around his neck, which he claims is a dependent. My essential being meanwhile is hidden under a starkly effective mink, a cosseted fetish in furs. Frank is in a duty free bag and Dionysia is me again. The customs men are, as I say, too pre-occupied or dazed to realize that all other observers and potential troublemakers are in the throes of love. I am able, from the bag, to capture the desecrated hearts of all men and women in the vicinity with a capacity for beauty. They are suddenly aware (in some cases for the one and only time in their lives dimly recognizing that there is something they've forgotten to take care of, something intrinsic, something fundamental) of the over-riding need for love . These people immediately break down sudden emotional incontinence, hugging each other, spontaneously keening and moaning. Low level heartbreak, all the more poignant as it is of course merely a temporary window into their forsaken-ness, mischievously and maliciously opened by me, a window whose existence they'd always thereafter be aware of, but which they'd have no means of re-accessing. Heartbreaking all round. They sense for this one transcendental moment that their lives have up till now been lived according to un-likely and highly spurious rules. And because of my ersatz malevolence they will forever after be obliged to live with the memory of something they can never recapture. Like I said, I'm a can-do type of a guy. I have to hurt to make the connection. Ruthless honesty and soul searching, in the quest for personal attention, must be rigorously applied. I plan to re-awaken the urge to seek attention, to recapture the briefly enlightened moment of transcendence. Otherwise they'll never know. But this is only a foretaste. This is only the beginning. There's more to be done, electricity to disperse.
In a dream, they watch me pass through customs as though they've seen an angel. As indeed they have. I've always been a prick-tease like that. My beatific countenance always evinces a beatific spirituality co-mingled with deadpan whorishness, a devotional come-on, Hollywood inspired. So, this brief inner stirring, this all too transient tumescence of the soul is, for these tormented individuals, for whom the presence of angels is heartbreakingly only for this one moment among many a possibility, so sad. So sad. Oh well, things to do. Tracks to lay, agents to contact. I'm actually lying when I say that my actions are born out of malevolence. But I can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. I needed we needed, to clear customs intact.
So this is how Dionyisia and I skip customs. We show them the light, briefly enough for their hearts to be broken. Our custom is thus to slip un-noticed although fully re-birthed into country after country, onlookers in the reception lounges uneasily aware of an incipient divinity within their grasp. It's a responsibility we don't intend to evade. I've lived under the floorboards too long. Through a natural talent for outsider intransigence, I spin webs, spiritual matrices to catch the souls of those willing and able to see us our visions, to re-cog us as the angels we may well be. I'm traduced for this by apostate ex-gods, stethoscope toting functionaries, obsessive demiurges, surgeons of the base levels who stalk me and my dreams, who are in pursuit of me, who are switched off, who don't believe in this thing that we've become. Non-twinned and from the lower castes, they eke out a living carving out the tumours and lesions that mere flesh is prey to. They are hospital vampires drinks parties with the admin whores, civic unction displayed at all times, kickbacks from the drug companies, reliance on pure hospital grade morphine, holidays in the darkness of needless operations.
They say:
"I help people... people like you...."
To which their patients reply
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning... what you want it to mean..."
"You... you just leave... my wife... alone!"
"If you've got a problem with your conscience, it's gonna get a whole lot worse afterwards, believe me."
The above dialogue filtered through to me from a distant place. Some sort of waiting room. A place in which the vengeful pursuit by Ahab of my tripartite godhead had been ruthlessly fictionalized, for a purpose not of my own making, brought to life by second rate actors. My life had, in this tarnished version, become cheap (although expensively assembled) Sunday evening drama. It was an echo from a pre-birthed age, a psychological past, and a past in which people were able to believe in a narrative psychoanalysis of their motives. An age before psychology had not yet become entirely coffee table. An age of production values, devalued intent, faces upon which expressions can be read, no matter how artful the attempt to conceal motives. Faces lit ingeniously to capture the spiritual essence of this or that character. Like we ever believed in that. Maybe some did. Maybe. But I resolved to use it later on in my dealings with Frank, who would need some careful handling when it came out about me and Dionysia...
(other voices intervene here) There might be a way around this though. Let this drift, till management takeover. Finance? Overdraft. Also, don't minute this. Divisional stringency and a lifetime's drift. In Academe. I WILL be at future meetings. Wankbait has som.th. to say. Review progress -> instigation. Human remains/resources fr. Rebirthings. Scumcunt. We can't review this until we ourselves are reviewed. I am process/in review. Hellenic. Subjudice. Mythological format to confound psychologist linearity. Suggested alter-ego - Nobby Wyse – English and Foreign Livestock. Be more fruity. Tombstones of the failed re-birthed observed on back of pick-up trucks all over N.London, instigating enquiry. The permanently dead now taking up valuable space. Pachydermal hints already picked up by, er, "switched on" types in city slacks. Mobile phones are humming with incidental intent. Click, bzz, crkk…this is how we know. It's Walkman interference. Matrices are in confusion at this time. (Some say) tragic metaphysician, under the influence of half-baked occultism: lounge music (wink) cocktail music, dinner jazz intonations at odds with the badness of the intent. Me I'm the only boozer who's not intimidated by Frank, he don't scare me. That's what normal people do – whistle. I whistle right in his mug. He seems confused. Medusa Rappa the ex-witch has SHOT her newest lover but being her ex-husband I fully support her actions. I understand misconceived intent. This is now burnout. There is a residue of superfluous electricity. The newly enfranchised (locators of the soul in the SELF) have devised extreme hedonist templates for city living. Result: too much electricity. Rectify this as a matter of urgency...
...Speaking in tongues like some dippy fucking fairground fortuneteller, I come over like some recidivist psychopath on the revenge trail. The guys in peaked caps look askance. They're immune to this pheromone jazz. It happens, fellas, but I can see I need to explain to you how I reviewed this received information for future boardroom level emanations. I am a man of authority and command respect in the City, my solutions to multifarious spiritual problems generally praised if not entirely understood by the dipshit moneymen, the currency grinders and power brokers for whose soul needs I have undertaken a kind of responsibility. It's about electricity. Superfluous electricity is produced here by "irritation", a very modern phenomenon occasioned by close proximity to other power sources and over use of gadgetry. And by over-reliance on therapy fetishism, a synonym for extravagantly lived, hyper-solipsistic lifestyles. The have it all mentality. Only gods can have it all. Mere pre-birthed individuals produce, in the attempt to "have it all", a superfluity of electricity, which needs to be discharged somehow. I have the key. City bimbos routinely assume a countenance of objectively perceived glamour, behaving as though actions don't have consequences (and of course they don't -but they don't know that) and as though celebrity debauch is in and of itself transferable to their own quotidian realm. They behave as though there is no price to pay. The tab is never picked up. The bars are full of raged up X chromosomes, heedless of excess. They are no different in appearance to the fallen stars of their imaginations. They fall into and out of nightclubs; get blotto on tomorrow's mortgaged time.
Or again, for example, excess electricity is produced in extremis by macro-biotic types who've developed an "interest" in eastern religions, a misguided yearning after elongation of personalized Terran linear time span. The doomed quest is heart breaking. The quest for re-tumescence of the perceived Inner Core of Being, being itself putatively located in the inner core of the so called Showoff and Display part of the brain, the temporal lobe, located next to the hippocampus. This proximity produces in pre-re-birthed individuals a surfeit of electrical activity, of bad intent, intent which if not discharged in ritual peregrination of the old bus lanes ends up surging impotently around the city precincts. Hence the importance to all personalized spiritual efforts of this organ within an organ, this wheel within a wheel, previously (wrongly) assumed to be concerned exclusively with locomotive and direction finding abilities. Of course, all (so-called) primitive cultures invoke power over nature via repetitive and ritualistic perambulations, an evocation of divinity via the obsessive treading and re-treading of pre-determined routes. Rain invoked, or in this case dispersal of a surfeit of electricity, achieved by treading the elephant trails, mythic route-shapes which, when viewed from above (from a space ship or whatever) delineate a vast Picasso sketch, a domed trunked head; trunk and ears, dome viewed head on. This is of vital importance to all that follows. Everything follows from the nature and shape of the city's ex-bus lanes. You following me fellas?
The hippocampus is thought to be one of the most important brain structures involved in memory. The case of the patient Medusa Rappa, one of the most famous case studies in neuropsychology, strikingly demonstrates the importance of the hippocampus. In 1983, as a 27-year-old woman, MR underwent brain surgery to control severe epileptic seizures. The surgeons removed her medial temporal lobes, which included most of the hippocampus, the amygdala, and surrounding structures. Although the operation successfully controlled MR's seizures, it had an altogether unexpected and devastating side effect: MR was unable to form new long-term memories in a way that she could later retrieve them. That is, she could not remember anything that happened to her after the surgery. She could not remember meeting new people or new experiences for more than a few minutes. This resulted in her later shooting dead a former lover, who'd come round to try and effect a reconciliation. Still in possession of a latchkey, he'd insinuated himself one morning into her flat and then her bed in confident anticipation that his overtly romantic gesture would meet with her eager approbation. Instead he awoke in her a startled revulsion that found immediate expression in action of the most affirmative and precipitate nature. Amazed to find a man she didn't recognize in her sleeping quarters, and to make matters infinitely worse a man sporting a lascivious smirk, a smirk which he imagined was the precursor to renewed and impassioned relations, she expediently reached over to the bedside table, picked up her shooter and blew a hole in the centre of his forehead, rendering his own hippocampus, along with the rest of his brain, permanently ineffectual. His memory, both short and long term, underwent a sudden and irreversible turn for the worse. Notwithstanding this inconvenient episode, her memory of events prior to the surgery was mostly intact, and her reasoning and thinking skills remained strong if somewhat febrile. A further side effect, which was noted at the time but suppressed (for reasons we can't guess at) in the case history, involved a loss of spiritual intent and capability. Friends noted that she'd become indifferent to matters of the self, to the renewability of the soul and was turning up late, if at all, for Polarity Massages and Mythic Rejuvenescence sessions. Researchers concluded that the hippocampus and its surrounding structures in the medial temporal lobe play a critical role not only in the encoding of episodic memories, especially in binding elements of memories together to locate the memories in particular times and places, but also in spiritual capability and devotional direction finding (peregrinatory invocation of divine intervention)...
...Whole daze. Days. Forgotten to talk. Neighbourly watch, even at the moment of crisis I cultivate error correction. Collective error correction. I am aloof generally. Lazy bastard in other words the city's former bus lanes, now reserved for elephants, are vital as conduits for electricity dispersal. I want to live but there's too much other stuff. Stuff I created. I can't live in this pre-corrected state. I'm here in the waiting room, eyes half open. My sight's going, I see my reflection in you. Or me. I can't tell which. I am psychoanalyzed by Ahab, and I went AWOL. I slept in Finsbury Park. I wasn't there. I don't know why not...
...To get back to me: through customs, re-entry via the channels of no resistance. I do not resemble my passport photo and it's pure sleight of hand that I get through. I am Dionysia and she is me. I am in her duty frees, a perfume of incalculable seductiveness and overpowering pheromonal effect. We are each other, joined at the head and arse, at birth, and now split asunder. Otherwise like last time, it's air rage re-entry. Cause, by misbehaviour in and around the cockpit (ritualistic slagging of the pilot and his/her sexual orientations) a nosedive and potential disaster that is only averted by some pretty sharp thinking on the part of the airheadhosts and hostesses. I've been wrestled to the ground and subdued on more than one occasion, Dionysia observing me from a window seat with a quiet smirk of appreciation. It assures us safe passage through customs. But I don't want to use that too often. Good gags should be used sparingly.
So anyway, back in town, in the waiting room, the walls seem to press in on me. (Hi fellas! It's me. Buffy! I'm here again!) Single 60 watt bulb, attendant hosts and hostesses in night robes, masked and scrubbed, are seemingly intent on psychoanalysis. Can you believe that? In this post-psychological world, they cling to outmoded forms as jealously as would a visiting academic to the impression that he might still possess (as though he ever did) some form of sexual charisma. I am obliged to recount, under hypnosis, my impressions of the guiding principles of my, er, philosophy, for want of a more appropriate term. I glance mischievously at Dionysia, who turns up the volume on her walkman. The faint tss tss of escaped sound announces that she understands. She increases the volume and I notice, although the flight attendants don't appear to, that there is a faint blip in the electrical power supply to the building. She turns it up some more, and finally even the personal trainers/therapists in attendance on me (rather too closely for my full comfort I have to admit) are obliged to notice a significant diminution of the power supply. Their perturbation is a picture.
I am of course merely playing a role here. I've never been in a hospital in my life. I don't believe that there can ever be a reason to enter these establishments unless accompanied by a camera crew and with full SAR-B (suicide assisted re-birth) accreditation. I realize that in my very English assumed self-loathing I cut a very Bogardian figure, a sort of nervy academic type, with military bearing but suggesting a history including some deep personal trauma that might account for my, ahem, psychosis nurses falling in love in discreetly British fashion with my tortured countenance. I am just a poor boy, not a man, a boy in need of love and understanding, a manboy endowed with the face of a neurotic, a monkey-genius. English nurses go for that one big time. More than once, I've woken from general anesthetic proclaiming my love for some sweetly countenanced English rose and more than once I've observed that love reciprocated, if un-acted upon, these gorgeous creatures unwilling or unable to abuse their therapeutic position. I wouldn't mind a bit of abuse. I'll tell you that for nothing.
The head shrink Abrahams is pushed to and fro on a sort of metal trolley. He assumes the aspect of some sort of panjandrum of self-importance, issuing orders to his underlings, imperiously barking out directional commands like the captain of some circumscribed vessel that's destined for the rocks, his messianic expression clearly indicating the essential obsession with which he endows his every action. He's a man possessed. I fancy He imagines Himself as Ahab, and I am His Great White Whale. Not that he actually has any need to assume this dictatorial and frankly ridiculous, self-aggrandizing posture, his absurdly self important conveyance entirely at odds with the actual role he fulfils, which is merely that of facilitator of my dreamtime musings. Like all limited (non-twinned) professionals, he can't bear not to be the centre of attention. Very like Frank in fact. In fact, maybe he is Frank.
So anyway there I am lying there in Finsbury Park, watching the scored planes fly overhead, a whisper of breeze, the shadows of the nearby trees looming large and grey. I notice that the tune on my Walkman is increasingly compromised by a variety of electrical blips, squeaks and buzzes. Interference. The ether is loud enough in itself, so I wonder what's causing this. My listening pleasure is somewhat diminished, my ears full of electrical discord. I see quite suddenly, at the crown of the hill, a small herd of elephants, intermingling with the shadows. The electricity seems to ebb and flow as they move into and out of my immediate vicinity. A group of mobile-toting life-stylers saunters past and the electricity seems to swell. The ckk,bzz,tss,crkkk intensifies and then recedes. But still there's a residual pool, a reservoir of understated voltage disturbing the general ambience. And then it happens. Something happens to alarm the elephants. They are distracted by some commotion at the other end of the park. There is a trumpeting, a honking, they relinquish the sanctuary of the trees and the crown of the hill up by the running track and the lake and stampede down towards the Seven Sisters' Rd. And as they go, I realize that suddenly the air has been cleansed of previously stagnant electricity. They have somehow contrived, by their sudden removal, to decontaminate the surroundings of stale electricity. The air has been purified, somehow distilled. The tune on the Walkman is now crystal clear, the ambience somehow divinely regenerated. To say that this discovery is a watershed in my pre-birthed existence would be an understatement. Literally an understatement. Everything follows...
As a result of this epiphany the city's abused bus lanes have become, by my divine Gnostic agency (soul regeneration), elephant trails. They tread the well-scored vectors, all around the city, dispersing electricity by ritual peregrination. This divine act occasions in the tuned in citizenry a kind of spiritual calm lays the tracks for intense post-psychological soul searching, or Elephant Gnosis as I've termed it. Via this patented and affordable technique, citizens are afforded previously hidden opportunities for spiritual Rejuvenescence and suicide-assisted rebirth. It's no secret. I'm a big noise in the city and in the channels of mediated power. I assume multitudes of personae, electricity flees my agents, and I re-birth at will. I enter and re-enter. I have discovered previously hidden secrets, the divine and arcane secrets. I fictionalize and re-fictionalize, adumbrating the outlines of Gnostic self-therapy. Multitudes of additional personae are re-birthed, multifarious aspects of the self, all interchangeable and clamouring for attention. The self is (needless to say) the most precious commodity, the currency of ubiquity in this meta-therapeutic age, and I have hi-jacked all available outlets. I hold the leases on all franchised outlets. Elephant Gnosis has been patented. I precipitate as many elephant-gnostic emanations as I choose. I am plurality, in a newly minted pleroma of inconsequence. Hot shit!
GOOD VIBRATIONS Date- 09/25/04 19:13:09 PDT From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
(excerpted from VESTIGES OF METALLIC FRAGMENTS)
Sir Paul McCartney has repeatedly acknowledged that the Beatles were aghast at Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys knocking pop music off its axis with their record "Pet Sounds" and that the stakes had been raised by the Beach Boys, ergo they (the Beatles) felt compelled to rise to the challenge and get more experimental. Pet Sounds was just Wilson tuning up, however.
His next recording project was an experimental lsd-influenced epic, Smile. Unfortunately, it was never finished. Funds were pulled and the ever-increasingly fragile Brian went in to a tailspin/nervous breakdown that he never recovered from.
The only piece that made it onto vinyl more-or-less intact was "Good Vibrations." Everything else was either trashed altogether or was re-recorded (feebly) and released years later as something known as "Smiley Smile," which is to Wilson what "The Magnificent Ambersons" is to Orson Welles.
As a funny aside, one night in '92 or '93 my pal Rob (who was new to LA at the time) and I were drinking for free at the Clown Room and as the deejay played Quiet Riot's version of "Good Vibrations" a dancer climbed off the silver pole and produced a buzzing marital aid. Rob began weeping about "how dare they" and how that song meant so much to him as a child and even influenced his decision to move out to Cali, bro'.
I tried to comfort him and told him about the rumors of a master tape containing an unreleased 18-minute version of Good Vibrations and other outakes from "Smile," which had been stashed in a vault adjacent to the parking garage at the Capital Records building. I knew a janitor that worked nights at the Capital building, and for reasons of his own, he liked to frequent a Japanese transvestite bar at the
t-intersection of Hollywood and Harvard before he started the graveyard shift at Capital. Rob and I got to the crossdresser bar right after midnight, and sure enough, the guy was there, sipping shooters and yelling "Kampei" and re-living debased nights in Okinawa or Shanghai or wherever it was that he developed his taste for pai gow poker and Nipponese fuckee-suckee.
I bought drinks and we told the guy we had hatched a plan to liberate the missing Smile master tapes and start an underground record label and "you know, Fight back and make a difference" is how Rob put it. The guy was genuinely touched and freely dangled the key chain that promised us passage into the secret vault -- a little suggestively, I
thought, but we were all pretty sauced at that point, and we were on their turf, after all.
More drinks followed -- with Kenji the host(ess) bartender generously and repeatedly pouring free shots and giving me quarters to play only Beach Boys and Abba songs on the jukebox -- and after awhile I staggered into the unisex bathroom to throw up. It's all pretty fuzzy at this point, but I do remember overhearing Kenji tell Rob -- in
broken English, mind you -- to "just think of it as a swollen 4-inch Asian clitoris" and the whole bar laughing like gesiha hyenas.
We never made it to the Capital building and I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but after that night Rob and I never talked about Smile or Good Vibrations ever again. An Apprentices tale in six minutes and thirteen seconds Date- 09/07/04 03:11:49 PDT From-SkiWrenchski@aol.com
(excerpted from: THE ALCHEMIST'S NEGRO: My 30+ Years as a Motorsports Bottomfeeder)
Big Head Todd and the Monsters are playing "Bittersweet" thru the new 400W computer sound system... Todd Park Mohr is getting sounds out of a geetaur that effortlessly drone on and on... and that last conversation with my Wife about why the fuck I leave home at a moments notice to drive across the eastern seaboard and help somebody else with a race car/boat/tricycle insteada stay home and fix up the house is rolling thru my mind like I've once again found the answer.
"I do this because it's supremely difficult".
It ended the argument.
Trying to explain to ANYONE who doesn't have the disease is like trying to describe a sunset on acid, or what you found appealing about your one true love at first glimpse.
It cannot be done in words. There is no medium of communication that will convey what the hour before racetime feels like... before the green flag drops, and the bullshit stops, and all of existence drops away leaving nothing but the moment, the payoff for working on a vehicle that consumes a hundred hours of labor for every moment of performance.
It is SUPREMELY DIFFICULT...
"WHAT? You don't have that thing DONE yet"?
No dear, it's never DONE...there are so many different pieces of the recipe to speed, if you were to write them down you would suddenly find yourself doing nothing else...ever. It changes. Last weeks tune-up that showed all the promise of a newborns first cry comes off the trailer slow... for no reason. The diagnostic process reveals nothing. So you test everything again...and you test the things you fogot...and you call everybody in the free world who has ever run one of these things and you ask...
"Hey...has yours ever done...THIS?"
And they tell you all they know, and you check all the told, and there's STILL no reason for the loss of speed.
So you start to remove everything you've modified, tricked up, and tweaked. and the damn thing goes RIGHT back to where it belongs...and you start to put the magical pieces back in 'er one at a time, and the process begins again.
From the top.
And you're booked at a race a thousand miles away. In less than a week. And you wonder if the damn thing is gonna go fast enuff to get out of its own way. And the Owner is pissed/paranoid, and the driver has no idea he might not get the rocketship he stepped out of onto the podium and got his trophy for last time, and...
Like I said...
Supremely difficult.
And as soon as I find something else that makes me feel, and think, and goddamn feel just ALIVE the way this does, honey, I promise... Trapped in a counterclockwise rotation Date- 09/07/04 03:05:09 PDT From-ruben bermudezrubenbermudez@aol.com
So I'm eating lunch with Bagadoughnuts and his gypsy squeeze in a local saloon...local a location AND what you call anybody in Florida that didn't fly in that morning.
And I remember this place two owners ago, and much the same, the decor probably hasn't changed in three decades, the owners change as they make their fortunes and move on to other hard ways to make an easy living.
"B...B...I took Red here on our second date,
and thats when I knew she'd be around for the rest of my life...you remember Cousin It?"
Cousin It was a short waisted large breasted tattoo'd trailer queen type I was horizontal bopping back in the 80's...had absolutely the most amazing mane of dark brown hair on the planet, went 5 and 1/2 feet to the floor, you could hide the horn section from a marching band in it...
"So I was driving around with Red lookin for something to do...a place to land...ended up here.
Knew a bad idea when I had one, and came on in anyway, all these folks...well, the folks hung here back then...were It's friends, But I didn't give a fuck, part of the test is always to see if they can hang when it gets weird, really weird, Rod Serling sipping a Shirley Temple playing backgammon with Sly Stallone's naked mother weird."
B is looking down at his drink with a grin on his face knowing after 30+ years with me it's ABOUT to get fucking weird, and with any luck his squeeze won't stop inviting me to dinner...like the last one did, after I asked her when God was gonna be back and she could stop running all the little things in other peoples lives, like breathing...
"We take a small round table with four chairs...there's a pool table there now...and sip drinks, swap spit...when It walks in the door, her husband in tow...and I think, I'm REALLY gonna HATE kickin' this guys ass, by all reports he's a nice guy, I always figgered her kids sure weren't nice by anything SHE did, even though he spent most of his time out-of-town selling electronic parts to pay for an expensive address where I'd do...the things HE should be doin' to his wife in HIS bed...I mean, guy pulls up in your neighbors driveway on a motorcycle, spends the night when the husband is outa town and leaves in the morning, what are ya to think?"
Nodding...Gypsy is wide eyed and open eared...what kinda friends does B have, talk shit like this, I can read her mind like I'm IN it.
"And the four of us at the small table, the little traveling salesman doin' his best High Plains Drifter, boy has seen to many Eastwood movies, wonder if It told him what happened to her boytoy before me when he pulled similar shit? Maybe he figgers he'll not lead with his chin and get his jaw wired shut for his trouble? And Red gets up and goes to the ladies room...and It follows her...I figger Red's a coal miner's Daughter, and It mighta bit off a tad more than she could chew...never been on a date where me AND my date had a fight story afterwards, THIS is interesting...and sales-boy says in his best low key imposing voice..."
"Y'know, if fucking YOU makes my wife as happy as making MONEY makes me, I think you oughta go right on ahead and keep doin' it."
"I hadn't expected that, and suddenly wondered how the ladies room was doing, not much noise comin' outa there...don't even remember what I said...something about declining his fine offer, something about I'd moved on, and planned to stay moved. it was a moment in time, maybe the only moment, maybe a series of moments...where I had read the signs, and read 'em wrong. Red cam outa the ladies room and sat down like nothing happened, it came out, stood by her ol' mans chair lookin' sad...her ol' man said thanks, they walked out hand in hand.
It was the day I learned the true difference between Love and Sex."
I threw a twenty down on the bar, told B and the Gypsy I hadda go back and feed the animals, or some such shit. From the look on the Gypsy's face, she's a keeper. Dinner at 8...
Paying Courtney Love's College Tuition Date- 08/28/04 15:58:01 PDT From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
(excerpted from the collection VESTIGES OF METALLIC FRAGMENTS)
"The abuse that Courtney Love receives comes across to me as a sort of bitter-minded sexism."
This is the exact conclusion I came to one night back in the day, while watching Courtney Love strip to Motley Crue songs at Jumbo's Clown Room on Hollywood Boulevard.
It came to me at 1:30 in the morning, when I was torn between stuffing my last fiver into Courtney's g-string or buying my pal Rob another watered down beer, but he said something about "empowerment" and how maybe she'll buy both of us a beer if I put the money on her "just right."
And you know what? She did. It was just before last call and everything.
When her shift ended, we all clinked our mugs together and Rob says to her, "Y'know for a 'college student just trying to make some money for tuition and books,' you legitimately rock!"
Oh, he we laughed out loud.
Now leaving happenstance, all aboard... Date- 08/28/04 10:43:08 PDT From-SkiWrenchski@aol.com
(excerpted from: THE ALCHEMIST'S NEGRO: My 30+ Years as a Motorsports Bottomfeeder)
I've managed to carve a small area out of the garage in an attempt to build my own car...
if the 'rents would give up more space by throwing out some of their precious garden party accoutrements it'd almost be easy.
Be anything you want to be son...
just not a fucking grease monkey.
you're too smart for that.
I've got the car, I've got the engine and parts, now I need an engine hoist to put 'em together.
I notice a few blocks away what looks like an Irish shanty, complete with Irishmen...mailbox says O'Sweaty, or something like that...several cars up on milkcrates, and a swingset style engine hoist made out of old steampipe, seems to be portable.
A knock on the door reveals a woman aged far beyond her years by childbirth, and the after-effects of same scattered about the room watching kiddie shows on TV sucking down Scheaffer beers...I introduce myself and inquire on how much it would take in cash or trade to borrow the hoist...the oldest of the brood tells me he needs an intake manifold and carb for an engine he's having built...and maybe some other pieces too.
We step down into the dirt floor cellar by way of stairs built by someone unfamiliar with levels and straightedges...spread out under a 60 watt bulb on an old Mickey-mouse comforter would seem to be a greasy old small-block Chevy..hard to tell under all the dirt and grease...O'S tells me as soon as he gets to the point in his vocational school training where he can put one BACK TOGETHER, he's goin' stock car racing down at the speedway...and say, isn't your name...Fucko?...FLACKO...yea, he'd seen me helpin' the guy didn't speak much english, and wondered if I'd like to help out.
Fucko...boy...glad THAT one didn't stick!
The Hives, Baseball, Nazis, and Drugs Date- 08/06/04 21:49:43 PDT From-Mark B.marbeau@excite.com
My brother, his Irish friend Pat, and I were lunking along on the 10 freeway in downtown L.A. in bro's '86 Volvo wagon on our way to Phillipes for a quick dinner before heading onto Hollywood to have our ears blown to bits by The Hives and their opening acts at the Fonda Theatre when after conversations about baseball stadiums, the lack of mass transit and alternative fuels in the 21st century, and this years political season, Pat blurts out he had read that a Nazi recipe for making Methamphetamine in 7 hours instead of 3 days had been found. Bro asked, isn't that stuff volitile? Pat replied, yes, and added, "I guess that's German engineering. Either make it go fast, or make it blow up."
Unsanctioned godness... Date- 07/18/04 06:01:46 PDT From-SkiWrenchski@aol.com
(excerpted from: THE ALCHEMIST'S NEGRO: My 30+ Years as a Motorsports Bottomfeeder)
And the wheel was invented, probably by accident like everything else, maybe some nomad's fire ring rolled downhill while he was moving it and he wondered what it would be like to RIDE that sucker...
He was gonna be the first racer and didn't know it yet.
Fast forward to a time of mechanical mayhem.
Kids who found algebra too tame after evenings of making parts for old farm tractors discovered the old tin lizzie behind the barn and used it to invent motorsports...what was the reason to speed up the machine if you couldn't prove your superiority by trouncing the kid next farm over... a whole sub-society was born.
They didn't like the company of other people... when you tightened up a nut on a machine, it stayed tight or had a VERY logical reason for coming loose.
Not so with the human engine... it was born loose, and often stayed that way.
One of everything... one vehicle... one driver/mechanic... one toolbox, one spare whatever, a homemade towbar between the racecar and whatever you could borrow to drag the no-longer-legal-vehicle to the racetrack...
He was dirty, broke, smoked, drank, fought, fucked and pretty much did everything by himself for himself and didn't care what anybody else thought about his actions.
He did not band, bond or hang around with a group...he was alone in his own thoughts... no desire to stand out in a crowd, his actions stood above them all and as groucho put it... wouldn't join any club that would have him for a member.
And the promoters found him... people who could not show you a tangable product for their days work... they neither built, nor repaired.
They packaged.
They took yours... and they sold it to others... they sold the abilty to stand right close to what you were doing, and bask in the dark sunlight of your deeds.
And you were left helpless by your inability to band together... you were rivals... you were combatants... you dreamed of ways to stand above crowds, not herd them together and empty their pockets.
The animals couldn't run the Zoo. COIL SPRING ANGELS AND OTHER STRANGERS Date- 07/04/04 12:33:06 PDT From-WrenchskiWrenchski@aol.com
(excerpted from: THE ALCHEMIST'S NEGRO: My 30+ Years as a Motorsports Bottomfeeder)
Julio started up front in every heat race he ever ran...
this is a BAD thing, as the fields are inverted.
Pole Position means you're the slowest son-of-a-bitch out there, and get passed by the whole field in a couplea laps... mother nature's way of telling ya your shit is too slow and needs to be fixed. Usually somebody else will take pity on you... unless you migrated from another country and speak broken english... then you're a good place to run the jokes thru, as you have no friends.
I'm a year or two into Stoogehood... the only time the crews, drivers and owners don't look right past me is when I'm in the way, or bringing White Castle burgers and booze back after the races for the bullshit sessions.
This night I'm in the pits and out of work... everybody has their regular crew in place, no weddings or funerals to bring them out of town, and Julio is parked in the corner of the paddock by his ownself as usual cussing at the dilapidated 62 chevy like always because nobody will help... hard to help when he stares right through ya when ya attempt to communicate.
My idea of communication is to walk to the back of my station wagon, pull out a pair of rear springs I *KNOW* will work better than the heated-with-a-torch-till-the-bumper-drags pair he's currently spinning out on every race... And walk over to Julio's pit. And stand there...
He notices me...his greeting is, "Flaco, FUCK joo thin DOSE gonna do?!?!" I shrug,"Couldn't fucking hurt...?"
He jerks his thumb towards his floor jack and opens the toolbox swearing in spanglish...springs installed out for the first heat...the heat he's been starting first and ending last in for as long as I can remember... everybody knows if he DOES manage to hang on to his car into the first turn, a light tap on his rear bumper goin' into the third turn is enuff to send him out of control and the whole field can freight train by him and get down to business... makes the first turn at a pretty good clip car length lead on second holy shit THAT'S never happened before Jablonie's in second he'll spin him in the third turn just like... fuck, he's still a car ahead... fast guys coming up now no problem tap him and... he just keeps goin' like nothing happened car kept just wide enuff with the steering wheel so's nobody can get by don't know if its working that good or the rest of the boys are in shock from the sudden performance of a guy who couldn't hit his ass with both hands before tonight.
Checkered flag... fuggin' spic won a race... why am I the only one smiling?
HELL'S OWN ROADIES Date- 05/26/04 12:33:06 PDT From-SkiWrenchski@aol.com
(excerpted from:THE ALCHEMIST'S NEGRO: MY 30+ YEARS AS A MOTORSPORTS BOTTOMFEEDER)
I like to think of my kind as populating the pit gates of america's short tracks in groups of two or three countrywide... I think we once did.
Underage jeans work boots denim jackets over sleeveless t-shirts... nervously
smoking cigarettes underage but hoping to appear large enuff to be 21... waiting
for tired men in old sedans and borrowed tow trucks to pull in without their
regular help..."HEY KID, are ya here to stooge, or just stand around lookin'
tough..." Ol' Red would say that, and you'd hop in his overheating Caddy
pass the pit steward and for toting tires fuel and pushing his TQ midget
up to the track you got free admission and an eagle's view of the racing from
a first turn area marked CREW ONLY... we were hell's own roadies...stooges
they called us, as in "Who ya stoogin' for tonight..." Checking air pressure,
occasionally removing the warm -up spark plugs and puttin' in the colder
racing ones if the guy knew ya well enuff to let ya TOUCH his engine...and
brandishing brused knuckle fists AFTER if somebody objected to YOUR driver
putting HIS into the wall or sending him spinning into the infield out of
the money... we were HELL'S OWN ROADIES, boys... we changed rear end gears layin
on towel covered cinders hot grease dripping from our elbows and all the
girls too young for a driver fell into our waiting arms... the beer and whiskey
flowed afterwards and tall tales verities and balderdash flew... we would
live forever, and nothing would replace us.
Nothing.
It was the sixties, into the seventies, and we never changed.
The game did.
HIGHWAY STAR Date- 05/13/04 21:34:34 PDT From- Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
(excerpted from VESTIGES OF METALLIC FRAGMENTS)
It
was after one in the morning last Sunday, and somewhere between Riverside
and San Berdoo, graveyard-shift freeway construction had closed all westbound
traffic on Interstate 10 except for the slow lane, leaving thousands of purple-haired
Radiohead fans bottlenecked in their automobiles for 10 miles or so, back
toward Indio-way and the Coachella Valley Music Festival we were all trying
to leave in our rear-view mirrors.
Even from the VIP seats, it had been a long Saturday in the desert,
watching 50,000 or so twentysomething indie-rock ravers vomit out Red Bull
and ketamine in an audience holding area that resembled a concentration camp
somehow tele-transported into the parched playas of North Africa. As the
kids danced, whooped, and threw elbows to new-wave nostalgia acts like the
Pixies, Stereolab, and Kraftwerk, dust storms towered over the proceedings
like the dinosaurs at Cabazon. By the time Kraftwerk and their laptops sang
“Auf Wiedersehen,” right around midnight, the gypsum dust of the desiccated
high desert Empire Polo Field capped my teeth like the Devil forgot his Astro-Glide.
Oy. After a day of insanity, I was in no mood to sit in what, essentially,
was another parking lot masquerading as a freeway.
“This is bullshit,” I muttered, and Tara stirred in the passenger seat
as I punched the throttle and gave ’er plenty of rudder. Directly behind
me, a big-rig tractor-trailer driver had the same idea – i.e., rip-cording
on the silliness of sitting in traffic six hours after sunset – and sucked
my draft onto the freeway’s off-ramp, his headlights blasting my rear-view
mirror like a low-beam Hiroshima.
After my retinas adjusted, I found an AM/PM open on the frontage road
and decided it was the right moment to gas up, get caffeinated, and re-think
getting back to Los Angeles County. Maybe buttonhook back to Route 60, take
that west, then grab the 15 north. Or maybe use surface streets as our own
personal express lane, blow by the stalled caravan of cars to our left, and
eventually hit the Foothill Freeway in Fontana. I knew if we just stayed
off the 10 for a while, eventually I could really lean into it and tickle
the speedometer’s triple-digit mark all the way home.
At the convenience store, I inquired about the frontage road and Tara
did ladylike things in the loo. As I paid the longhaired mustachioed cashier,
I got rather existential in a space-time-y kinda style-e and asked the hirsute
Riverside rocker-type a question.
“Is it just me, friend, or did you ever have the feeling you were hit
by flying debris off of Ritchie Blackmore’s broken Fender Stratocaster at
Cal Jam 1 and knocked unconscious for 30 years?”
“Brother, it ain’t just you,” he nodded. “I know just what you mean.”
As I left, he began playing pulmonary-mouth guitar, grunting out the
opening chords to “Smoke on the Water” through bristling upper-lip hair and
a couple of missing teeth.
As I eased onto the frontage road, a freshened-up Tara asked what the mini-market mullet-man and I were talking about.
“Umm, we were trying to reconcile Bertrand Russell’s Liar’s Paradox with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”
“You are so full of poo.”
She was right, of course. So I told her what we really talked about.
“Who’s Ritchie Blackmore, and what’s Cal Jam 1?” she asked. Her blissful
ignorance of useless pop-culture arcana is one thing I really like about
her.
“Ritchie Blackmore was the guitarist for Deep Purple. He smashed a bunch
of television cameras with his guitar at this rock festival put on 30 years
ago at the old Ontario Motor Speedway.”
“Where’s Ontario?” Tara asked. She is a Westside girl.
“We passed it on the way out. I’ll show it to you in a little while.
They bulldozed the speedway 20 years ago. Now, Ontario is just a bunch of
methedrine labs in trailer parks, buttressed by some wholesale retail outlets
for Liz Claiborne shoes or something.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“You’re not mad we’re not going to stay for Day 2 of this Coachella
festival, are you?” she asked as she slowly closed her eyes again.
“What for? So we can watch the singer for the Cure’s mascara run in 100-degree heat? On a Jumbotron?”
“So you’re saying this Ritchie Blackmore fellow had the right idea 30 years ago?”
“Marshall McLuhan still wants to shake his hand.”
I’m not sure she heard me. But I had us home an hour or so later.
THE MIX Date- 05/13/04 21:33:55 PDT From-
Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
(excerpted from VESTIGES OF METALLIC FRAGMENTS)
“We
have done electronic accidents. And it is also possible to damage your mind.
But this is the risk one takes. We have power. It just depends on what you
do with it.” –Florian Schneider, “Kraftwerkfeature,” 1975.
Ten or twelve years ago, I was doing a sound gig for chump change, mixing
a couple of quiet little alt-rock bands on a Friday night at some beer-smeared
beatnik-bum beach café on the Venice boardwalk.
It was a small venue with a public-address system more suited to, say,
a Catholic church in East L.A. than an r’n’roll club, but, as a sound engineer,
I wanted to “tune” the room – adjust the sound to match the club’s acoustics
and squeeze as much cackle out of the amps and speakers as inhumanly possible
without blowing anything up – before the musical acts began their sound checks.
To that very end, I carried a copy of electronic pop-music pioneer Kraftwerk’s
then-brand-new-hot-off-the-waffle-iron greatest hits compact disc, The Mix.
Why? The Mix is perfect for “tuning a room.” Like every recording Kraftwerk
has ever made (be it Trans-Europe Express, Die Mensch Machine, Computer World,
or the new Tour de France Soundtracks), it is sonic perfection. Kraftwerk
– Ralf, Florian, and two other Krauts who answer to anything from Wolfgang
and Klaus to Fritz and Henning – understand how electrons sing.
Ahhh, The Mix. In the early 1990s, the members of Kraftwerk had felt
kinda cheated by the state-of-the-art in recording, as digital consoles,
tape machines, and hard drives were immediately supplanting the analog analogues
they had been using in Düsseldorf, Germany, since 1969. From the beginning,
they were always ahead of the means available to capture their music – lush-yet-minimal
aural landscapes that some pop-music critic once labeled “a postcard from
the future.”
Kraftwerk – cutting-edge musicians who built their own rhythm boxes
in 1974, because contemporary drum-machine technology would just not do –
could not just put out a greatest hits package. Nein. Recording technology
was catching up with the quartet’s sensibilities, so they RE-RECORDED their
“hits” (“Autobahn,” “Pocket Calculator,” “Radioactivity,” etc.) from scratch
and said “take that” to Eurythmics, Aphex Twin, the Orb, Depeche Mode, and
every other soda-cracker musician who hit one white key on a “digital workstation”
and called it macaroni.
But I digress … . It is 1993 or so, and I am in a dank, besotted nightclub,
flipping switches on amps and power supplies, oblivious to the rainbow coalition
of beach city and dogtown drunks and hoodlums who have gathered to watch
the Lakers in an important playoff against the Phoenix Suns on the bar’s
big-screen television. I hit “play” on The Mix and …
“We’re charging our batteries/And now we’re full of energy …/We are ze robots …/We are ze robots …”
The two dozen or so lowlife hoops fans gathered around the Lakers/Suns
broadcast are mortified, and plastic cups of tepid beer fly in my direction.
It seemed innocuous enough, stress-testing tweeters and woofers with a blast
of Kraftwerk chanting “We are ze robots” over synthesizers purring like a
pushrod Mercedes engine at full song down the autobahn. It wasn’t.
It becomes a near-riot. But, as I dodge cups and dive for faders and
volume controls, something very strange happens. The music stops, but the
jeers continue. Unlike the white dudes and the Mexicans, the African-American
basketball punters are pissed that I have turned the CD off.
“Yo, man, that’s motherfuckin’ Kraftwerk! They dope!”
“Motherfuckin’ Kraftwerk? Man that shit is BAD! Uh huh!”
“Homey, I was in Amsterdam, and that’s all the DJs motherfuckin’ played.”
You could have knocked me over with a motherfucking function key.
The next day, I told my pal Ikky Shivers, also an electronic musician,
about how I nearly started a riot twice – first by white folks, for putting
on Kraftwerk, and then by black folks, for turning it off.
“You do understand that Kraftwerk is really just soul music, yeah?” he asked.
I answered in the affirmative. “Jawohl,” I told him.
BIG JESUS AND MARY CHAIN TRASH CAN Date- 03/18/04 21:49:32 PST From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
(excerpted from VESTIGES OF METALLIC FRAGMENTS)
"So are you going to pan this show or wot? Caption it with something clever like 'No, No, No.'"
Tottenham and I are having pad thai on Hollywood Boulevard, a pre-emptive,
high-carb soak-up of imminent libations to be imbibed during and after the Yeah Yeah Yeah's
performance down the street at the Fonda. Tottenham is a dandy-ish arty,
lit-savvy Brit who has never heard the YYYs, but says he saw them slumming
in an eastside coffee shop recently.
"Ummm, you can keep your headline, but yeah, I'll probably bag on those
guys. From what I've read, nobody has really dissed the Yeah Yeah Yeahs yet
and it seems like they are at least due."
"Good for you. Their fans don't care about music critics, anyway. It's
so over for you and your lot. Like all that shit that runs in the Calendar section of the LA Times. A bunch of useless dross by Hilburn and all those other tossers. Nobody cares what you have to say." He points at me with his chopsticks.
"I know it is an exercise in futility, Mr. Tottenham, but I have to
say something. Lord knows I can barely be bothered to endorse a check, must
less power four cups of Cafe Bustelo and attempt to hammer out 650 words
on this month's KROQ darlings."
"650 words? Well here's something to pad your word count. Say that 'the
problem with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and today's 20-something musicians in general
-- today's legion of post-modern posturers -- is that the world is ready
and already waiting for them.' Say that. Say: 'When we were in our 20s, the
world was not ready for us. It's not the Yeah Yeah Yeah's fault, it's just
the way it is.' Go ahead, write that down."
"I can't write that down."
"Why not?"
"Because you said it and I didn't. I have a certain journalistic integrity to maintain."
"That didn't stop you when you reviewed the Country Teasers a couple
of months ago. You quoted me as saying, 'Flannery O'Connor, I always hated
that bastard,' which I didn't say, you did
and then you told me, 'don't worry, everyone will get the joke,' which no
one did, so I came across in your little newspaper looking like a total moron,
not somebody whose book smarts and intellectual abilities work on a meta-level."
*****
We pay the check, get in the car and go to will call. Upon pre-gig pat-down,
security knuckleheads halt Tottenham's ingress when they find his felt-tip
ink pen in his coat.
Having just finished my own penitentiary macarena with the rent-a-cops, I turn around, listen and observe.
"Sir, you can't bring that in here."
"Why not?"
"Well, what's it for?"
"It's to write with." (Tottenham removes the cap and then proffers
his notepad; shaking it at the security dude as proof the pen isn't a weapon.)
"Sir, what kind of writing do you do?"
Meanwhile, I had smuggled in two cameras, one the size of a thermos, under my sport coat. Upon security feel-up, I was asked, "What's that?"
"It's a cell phone."
"It sure is big."
"I have a lot of calls to make." (search continues, security bro' feels up a second camera)
"Okay. What's that?"
"That's another cell phone."
"Why do you have two?"
"I told you I have a lot of calls to make."
*****
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs play for about 40 or 50 minutes. Two guys and a girl.
The arrangements toggle between two sound pressure levels: pretty loud and
really loud. The girl yelps and screeches, throws a chair, and rolls around
on her back like the flapper Wrath of Fatty Arbuckle; the guitar player summons
an absolute tsunami of gnarsome soundscapes, ripping a hole into the very
fabric of space and time; and the drummer... drums.
Tottenham begins scouring my notes after the gig.
"'Big Jesus and Mary Chain Trash Can?' Nobody is going to get
a Jesus and Mary Chain shout-out, much less an obscure Birthday Party reference.
Anybody who remembers Nick Cave's old band overdosed ten years ago."
"You're right. But you have to admit that's where that young gun-slingin'
guitar player got his haircut and his shtick. Did I tell you that I saw the
Birthday Party in 1983?"
He ignores me and goes back to rifling through the notepad.
"'Patti Smith from Riverdale High?' 'Menstrual cramp anti-rock?' 'Pole dance instructional videos?'
Is that the best you can do in describing that saucy little vixen? I say
she is a spirited lass and you are not going to do her justice with your
purple doggerel.
"But you do have to mention the bit where she was groveling on all fours,
with the microphone stuck in her pie hole. I rather enjoyed that. Oh, and
mention that tunic waving she was doing, you know: the constant opening of
her skirt," he says, distractedly turning the page and ignoring its contents.
"I'm way ahead of you, pal." I point to a passage in my notepad. "Right here: 'The airing out of the bread factory.'"
He laughs. I order more wine and he goes back to perusing my notes.
"Hang on. What's this, then?" He begins reading: "'...the problem with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and today's 20-something musicians in general...'" WISE BLOOD IN WING TIPS Date- 03/18/04 22:09:23 PST From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
(excerpted from VESTIGES OF METALLIC FRAGMENTS)
"I know it's late on a Sunday night, but since tomorrow is a holiday, do you think we'll get a good turnout?"
It is, in fact, a Sunday night and the Country Teasers
are killing time in a downtown LA tacqueria, washing down carnitas with cerveza
and lime, and cerebrally tuning up for their concert an hour or so later
at the hole in the wall affectionately monikered the Smell. Coincidentally,
my pal Tottenham and me are doing the more or less the same, sitting down
at the counter and drinking Mexican beer.
Tottenham, a Brit like most of the Teasers themselves, chimes in: "I
don't know, pal; the only people who get off for Martin Luther King Day are
clerks employed by banks and government workers. Every other punter has
to punch a clock tomorrow morning."
"Perhaps we'll get a nice crowd of bank tellers and government workers then."
"Government workers are the LAST thing you want at a Country Teasers show," I tell him.
"What makes you say that?"
"For fuck's sake, man! You have albums titled 'Destroy All Human Life.'
And that's one of the nicer things you say. I don't know if you guys are
completely misanthropic or merely misogynistic. Regardless, you guys are
one big hate crime against music. Government workers won't be able to tell
if you are taking the piss or if you really mean it."
"Mean what?"
"You're gonna' make me recite your own lyrics? 'I love the swastika/I love the Jew/I love the Negro/And the KKK too'?"
"Oh well, that's the obvious one, now isn't it?" Tottenham sniffs.
"People don't know when they are being sent up, do they?" the Teaser asks.
"Look," I says. "I know you guys are the lo-fidelity, Luddite Flannery
O'Connor of r'n'roll, which, not to speak for Tottenham necessarily, but
I think that is a great concept."
"Not me pal," Tottenham says. "Fucking Flannery O'Connor is a tosser. I always hated that bastard."
*****
The Smell is Dante's reverb chamber, rectangular in shape and lined
with dense brick and concrete so relentlessly reflective that the sound swirls
and bounces like a fire hose in a parking garage. The acoustics are every
bit as confrontational as the Teasers themselves. Just before midnight, the
Teasers, garbed in wing tips, dress slacks and sports coats, turn on their
amps and present a united front of L-O-U-D guitar ballistics, three axe men
and a bassist, whose arsenal is complemented by a steady-as-a-six-pack 2/4
shuffle beat and occasional cannonballs of cheap synthesizer noise. The synth
is controlled by the guy who had been sitting next to us at the tacqueria,
and he toggles the micro-synth's switches and twirls its plastic potentiometers,
as voltage controlled filters open and a plague of locusts dive-bomb out
of the p.a. system and attack the hapless assembled.
There aren't many government workers at the show, nor bank tellers neither,
but a half-empty/half-full smattering of indie-rock kids and couple of grumpy
of old hipsters. Lead singer B.R.Wallers somehow manages to sound just like
he does on his recordings, a narrow mid-range of pure id, wanton libido and
spiritual paranoia, pulling from a body of work such as Satan Is Real Again, Science Hat Artistic Cube Moral Nosebleed Empire, and the new collection, Secret Weapon Revealed At Last.
"Anna Kournikova was 13 years old/When she entered the world of sex... I mean success,"
wollers Wallers on "Success" and the other guitar dads saw on one string
at a time at extreme opposite ends on their vintage guitars' necks. The moment
is not atypical of the entire performance.
At one point, the bass player breaks a string and fumbles in the dark
for a replacement and the Teasers sojourn on without him. They sound a little
different, but not much. Once he is sorted with a new string, he straps his
bass back on and joins the fray. Later, the lads hit their one-fret-at-at-time
chromatic-scale jam, "Prettiest Slave on the Barge," and the Country Teasers
are in a punishing, stomping waltz and the treble speakers on the right side
of the Smell's sound system blow up, melt and fry, and the Teasers don't
sound much different. They certainly don't sound any more distorted. I don't
think anybody even noticed, really. THE DAY OF THE HOUSE OF PIES Date- 03/12/04 08:59:17 PST From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
THE DAY OF THE HOUSE OF PIES
(excerpted from COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS AND MAKE MY BABY)
I meet BZ the Screenwriter for a cup of jake and some lemon meringue
at a place called the House of Pies on Franklin and Vermont in East Hollywood.
The H0P's habituŽs are old folks, the last vestiges of another Los Angeles,
another Hollywood. Or maybe another lifetime on another planet. They are
from an era when folks dressed in suits and put on a hat just in anticipation
of a trip out of the house to get a piece of banana creme pie. In those days,
pie was an occasion.
The House of Pies. Its architectural design
is a weird, flattened variation on the Googi architecture that dominated
the landscape in Southern California back when the car culture really took
root in the 1950s and 60s. Sharp, salient and pointy, Googi would puncture
the sky and catch the attention of passing motorists by its very shape.
*****
Except for the House of Pies and some forgotten car washes in the
ghetto, Googi has all but disappeared. Los Angeles has always possessed a
real hankering to obliterate its past. It has no sense of history, and doesn't
want one. What earthquakes and fires fail to accomplish, the limited intellect
and attention span of Los Angeles does. Most examples of Googi architecture
were razed and bulldozed long ago, but somehow Ñ perhaps because it
was a muted variation on the style Ñ the House of Pies survived the
purge. In that tradition, the House of Pies angles are smashed two-dimensional
and obtuse. It is one of the few buildings left that survived LA's architectural
purge of the 1980s, when boxy mini-malls, industrial complexes and 99¢
stores infiltrated the landscape like a virus.
BZ fits right in at
the House of Pies. There is something about the old gomers there that makes
him feel right at home. BZ is also not of this time. He considers this modern
era Ñ the Infotainment Age Ñ a mistake.
*****
I am late and when I get there he is already working on his pie as well as a weathered copy of the Nathanael West novel, The Day of the Locust.
I order a cup of jake and a piece of pie. I ask about the plot and the theme
of the book, which BZ tells me debuted in 1939 and scandalized Hollywood
as an expose« on the damaging effects of the motion picture industry.
"West
not only tapped into the hubris of this town, but how the Dream Factory creates
not just illusion, but its logical byproduct, disillusionment." BZ stabs
the air with a forkful of gooey pie foodstuff."It's not that different from
the people who make this pie filling."
Jump-started by gobs of processed
sugar and caffeine, BZ is off to the races, kicking into high gear on a soliloquy
on the Entertainment Industry as the New Military Industrial Complex.
"Hollywood
is a self-perpetuating cottage industry," he continues,"that must churn out
more and more entertainment in order to survive. To grow. To flourish. Its
insidious nature is such that it has to convince the Locusts, the consumers
that they need to purchase and absorb this stuff in order to make their lives
meaningful. Which was a lie worthy of Goebbels, who was just beginning to
reach his stride in the Third Reich when The Day of the Locust was written. West was prescient in that he knew that entertainment is merely cultural fascism."
"Are
you telling me that there was little difference between, say, Irving Thalberg,
Paramount Picture, pie filling and the Third Reich?"
My coffee and rhubarb arrive.
"The
manufacture and distribution of pie filling is the least problematic. There
is very little difference between what product is coming out of the studios
and what propaganda was issued from the Politburo or the Reichstag after
the fire."
"But isn't a screenwriter such as yourself equally complicit?
Aren't you as evil as, say, some Kraut in a guard tower at Dachau?"
"That
is where you are wrong, sir. It all boils down to self-awareness. Read this
book. No one in it is exempt from West's wrath. But the protagonist-slash-anti-hero,
Tod Hackett, shows uncanny and astute self-awareness that makes him the least
dubious character in the entire manuscript."
"Self-awareness?"
"Yes,
self-awareness. It makes all the difference. Tod Hackett shows such traits
in a painting he calls ÔThe Burning of Los Angeles.' Hackett finishes
this painting just as Locust reaches it dŽnouement in the form of a holocaust of fire on Hollywood Boulevard."
"So this book is about the Apocalypse?"
"Yes. Rapture. The Judgment."
"So
you're saying Hackett's self-awareness spares him somehow? Umm, I still don't
see how self-awareness gives any of us an exemption."
"Of course you
don't. You do not possess any. You are lost in East Hollywood and you happen
to play guitar, the most reductive form of expression since the Sex Pistols
immolated in San Francisco in 1978. You have this delusional idea that music
is somehow different from the other forms of electronic media that corrupt
the sanctity of the human spirit."
"I am trying to reconcile this with your script, Zombie Cop."
"You
are missing the point then. As an artist, you are fucked but you do not
know that you are fucked. Therefore, you are truly fucked. On the other hand,
I am fucked, but I know that I am fucked. Therefore, I am not truly fucked.
"Do you see the difference? Of course not, because you are truly fucked." THE ORSON WELLES HOUSE Date- 03/08/04 09:55:53 PST From-Cole Cooncecc@kerosenebomb.com
THE ORSON WELLES HOUSE
(excerpted from COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS AND MAKE MY BABY)
It is mid-December. The Soundmachine's royalties has shriveled and dried out. I am out of money.
I get a call to mix sound on a porn film. I take it. The location
is a mansion in Hollywood on Stanley Street. The director is a drunk who
lives with his mother. I wonder if I will make it through the day. I hang
a microphone on a C-Stand as eight or nine women lick each other for the
camera.
I wander into a spare bedroom where people aren't licking each other.
A lighting guy is smoking a cigarette alone. I sit on the foot of the bed
and put my head in my hands.
"Orson Welles died on that bed," the lighting guy says.
"What?"
"No kidding, Orson Welles died here. This was his last house."
I wander into an adjacent living room. The key grip, a heavy metal hesher/struggling
rock musician dude in need of a haircut, shave and new shirt, is playing
"Moonlight Sonata" on an elegant grand piano. He is hitting all the notes,
fluidly.
It is all too surreal.
"Did you know that Orson Welles died here?" I ask him.
He continues playing his composition, flawlessly. "Yes, I did.Ó
We begin a discourse on the composers and cinematographers under Welles'
employ.
One of the porn filmÕs moneymen crosses the threshold of the
living room and interlopes into our conversation. He does not look like a
porn producer. He has the smart and impeccable sartorial sense of a dentist
from the west side of Los Angeles.
"Do you know the problem with Orson Welles?"
"No, tell me what was wrong with Orson Welles."
"He always sold himself cheap. He never asked the producers for all
the money he needed. He always underbid what he needed and his own worth."
I almost hit the guy. But I didn't. I couldn't afford to get fired. I needed the money for Christmas presents.
STRANDED IN THE MOTHER OF ALL YUPPIE TANKS Date- 02/08/04 20:21:12 PST From-Cole Cooncecc-at-kerosenebomb.com
(excerpted from VESTIGES OF METALLIC FRAGMENTS)
"I thought you were bringing the telescope."
"I would have, but I couldn't figure out how to open the tailgate. I've
had an easier time putting together a tent in a sandstorm. I looked for a
keyhole. Nada. Then I pushed a bunch of buttons and nothing happened. If
I pushed any more buttons, I was afraid I would've launched a rocket."
"Like that's a bad thing."
"In the Ashcroft Information Age, it is important not to send up any flares."
"Right. Did you look at the owner's manual?"
"The what?"
We were driving up the Angeles Forest in a new $73,000 Range Rover that
I was to test drive for some men's magazine. Coincidentally, Mars was at
its closest proximity to Planet Earth in eons. I wanted to climb a mountain
and touch it. It seemed to make sense to take the vehicle that shared its
moniker with the craft that scientists sent to putt-putt on our celestial
neighbor.
She began punching buttons on the instrument panel. "Can you set the personal navigation system for Mars?" she asked.
"Sure, just key in the co-ordinates. Just don't use the metric system like NASA did that time."
We continued our ascent in a silver truck-cum Rolling Geosphere for
the red planet. With Glenn Gould playing Bach as a soundtrack. She wanted
to hear James Brown. We settled on the Saints, some prime, vintage punk rock.
The stereo was louder than a Shuttle Launch. And much crisper. I drove faster.
("Stranded, I'm so far from home Stranded, You gotta' leave me alone.")
We were stuck behind some peaceniks in an old school Volvo. They were
oblivious to the concept of a turn off. They picked the wrong time to sandbag
us, as the music was making us feel more aggressive.
"Pass these people," she said, as we entered a no passing zone.
So I punched the throttle. Cutting off some eco-warriors, while going
into a blind curve on a mountain road seemed like the perfect opportunity
to check the throttle response as well as the vehicles' built-in understeer/oversteer
over-compensator. "There is nothing more satisfying than pissing off some
proletariat eco-warriors," I laughed.
She leaned over and looked on the instrument panel. "Wow! Look at the needle on the gas gauge go!"
"You see, that's perfect for the ADD generation. Today's consumers need
to see things move, or they'll feel ripped off. Even worse, if meters and
needles aren't constantly blinking and moving, they'll lose interest in what
they are doing and crash."
"Speaking of crashing, you know you can't drive this thing like a Maserati.
That's your problem. You think anything off of an assembly line is a sports
car."
"No, I think this Range Rover is the space age spawn of a tank and a
school bus. But with all these pitch, roll and yaw correction algorithms
keyed into the operating software, there is no way this thing is going to
capsize, is it?"
"So you are relying on an onboard computer to keep us from crashing.
Have you ever seen 2001? If you drive this thing into a ravine -- and assuming
we don't die -- I'm going to lace your IV with strychnine and then smother
you with a pillow while you overdose."
"That's not you talking... that's Mars, the Angry Planet, talking."
"Spare me the New Age hokum, Deepak. My threat stands. If we die tonight, I'm going to kill you." She turned down the music.
I slowed down a little and thought. The silence fell like a ton of trunk space.
"What is the purpose of this car? So you we can pick up our kids at Day Care with a bitchin' sound track?"
"We don't have any kids."
"Yes, but for reasons I cannot fathom nor articulate, this car makes me want to fuck you. And have kids."
"Umm, we would have to grow up first. Which is something we both should have thought of ten years ago."
"I'm trying. I'm trying to get behind the hype of the sense of security
one gets from a towering vehicle with virtual brush guards and imaginary
force fields, where you never get lost and you are impervious to the armor
and shrapnel from eco-terrorists and pagan savages with semi-automatic weapons."
"Security is a misnomer. It is a word that should be banned from the
English language. This car does not make us more secure. It ratchets up our
reliance on those loveable knuckleheads in OPEC. It makes us less secure."
"Wow. That's sounds like something I would say. Now I really want to fuck you."
"No, you want to climb back into the uterus, and this monstrosity of
a vehicle is a surrogate mother for you." She reached over and turned up
the heat on the seat warmers. Figuring that out is second nature for chicks.
Hmmm. A stainless steel womb, with xenon lights.
"Everything is blue and silver," I said. "I don't remember the womb being this... aesthetically cold."
"It isn't. This is more like a space ship than a womb. It's a common
Jungian error you made. You are like all of those people on daytime talk
shows saying they were abducted by aliens and zapped into a flying machine
that will take them back to Planet Scientology."
"So. Do you want to have kids?"
"With you?"
"With me."
"No. I want to rock and roll, but only if you can figure out how to lower the tailgate."
"Turn up the Saints, then."
DREAMBOAT ANNIE (SANTA MONICA AND LA BREA) Date- 01/30/04 12:20:54 PST From-Cole Cooncecc-at-kerosenebomb.com
DREAMBOAT ANNIE (SANTA MONICA AND LA BREA)
excerpted from COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS AND MAKE MY BABY
I have just dropped a guitar amp at a repair shop in West Hollywood.
The repair shop's diminutive parking lot is full, and street parking is a
clusterfuck with cars being towed and ticketed with the splatter logic of
the city, so I have to carry the amp for blocks, grunting and sweating and
cursing the population and the half-baked civil engineering of Los Angeles.
Having deposited the amp at the shop, I have to walk back to my car, a few
blocks north of the intersection of Santa Monica and La Brea.
Under the shadow of a massive billboard plugging the unspecified services
of an apparent supermodel with a 1-800 phone number, I carry a guitar --
which was just repaired -- in a battered case. A beater Volkswagen Bug pulls
up next to me. I walk at an approximate speed of 4 miles per hour. The Bug
is traveling at the same speed. Besides the percolating putt-putt-putting
of the air cooled engine, the other sonic distraction is an old Heart record
playing off of what sounds like an 8 track tape player.
"Annie, Dreamboat Annie..." It is some song that I remembered lovesick
white girls listened to in High School. I heard it too many times then and
am in no mood to hear it now, nor ever again. I keep walking, trying to ignore
whatever it is that is happening to my left.
"Hey! Are you an artist?"
It is a young woman's voice. I try to keep my gaze focused forward.
"Hey! Are you an artist?"
This is unbelievable. Nobody in this town can leave anybody else alone.
Against my better judgment, I turn my head counterclockwise.
"No. I am not an artist."
There are two of them. Both women: a cute one in the passenger seat,
sandy blonde hair and a most reasonable upper torso. She is doing the talking.
The driver is sandier and chunkier and is sporting a smile only "Dreamboat
Annie" over a Volkswagen tape deck can inspire.
"Well... you look like an artist."
I am being worked and I know it. I just can't figure out the angle.
"No, I am not an artist. There is a guitar in this case, not a paintbrush."
"Awww, you know what we mean. You look artistic. We both really dig people who are creative."
"Well, I am not an artist."
"Do you like poetry?"
"No." What is it with these chicks? Why am I being hit on? Do they want
to take me to a motel and fuck me? Is this fodder for the letters section
of Penthouse magazine? What?
"Well, we host celebrity poetry readings every Sunday night and we thought it would be fabulous to see you at one."
"The only thing I loathe more than poetry is celebrities."
"You should lighten up. There are plenty of attractive women at these readings." They both smile.
"Okay. Where are these poetry meetings?" I'm thawing.
"Franklin and Bronson, across the street from the Mayfair market."
"Wow, I live just a few blocks from Franklin and Bronson, up on Beachwood."
"Great! Well you should come by Sunday night, listen to some poetry,
hang out with us and maybe get a free personality test at our Celebrity Center."
Free Personality Tests. Celebrity Center. It all coalesces. I have an
immediate, involuntary recollection of young Scientologists dressed in black
shorts, shirts, socks and shoes, running in formation down Bronson as some
sort of punishment for failing to recruit enough new disciples.
"You guys are Scientologists. Aren't you?"
"Why? What have you heard?"
Their collective smiles freeze. It then collapses on the chunky one. It becomes more acute on the cute one.
"Look, if you two teenyboppers want to worship a prophet who started
his so-called religion on a bet with science fiction writers and based the
theology on a comic book, that's great with me. I mean, bully for you. But
I have no desire to get sucked into that con game and enduring brain-damaged
so-called celebrities read endorsements of your religion masquerading as
poetry, all under the vague subtext that the three of us are going to a motel."
They puttered off, in search of another "artist," who had just gotten
the bus from, say, Iowa or Nebraska or somewhere, and was out here to ply
his trade in the city of dreams. "Annie, Dreamboat Annie" Doppler's into
the distant parallax of the city.