Look, honey
The cars are driving
Four to five a lane
The sunset is chemical Red
4.5 pH
And your headache,
Is it any better?
I say
The scientist, your friend,
asked so much of me.
Today, he was doing side work
To make ends meet
I touched a new part of his new life
In suburban Florida
you will care
You’ll come
when I reply,
“Not really”
Your greasy eye,
For a second,
will leave the room,
for a second
My life,
It will all be fake
I meant to bring a notebook with me to L.A. I wanted to write that three boys with cropped t-shirts, baggy pants, and cowboy boots got out of the back of a pickup truck to take photos in a craft espresso store for their pop-up clothing brand, that the mosaics in the sidewalk glimmered nicely in the sunshine, that a hip clothing store looked like a Gregg Araki set, and that I could be inspired to make a painting or sculpture if I read more books.
Driving from LAX, my girlfriend said she had a surprise for me after my six and half hour flight. She appeared from the baggage claim unannounced and full of joy like a bag herself, and we embraced. I missed her and I felt like I hadn’t seen her in a long time, although it had been less than a month since I said goodbye to her at the Amtrak station, which took her to Logan Airport.
She went West to L.A. and I went East to Bologna, a nine hour time difference. In Bologna, I was working on an art show. In L.A, she was mourning her late grandmother and enjoying time with her family.
I bought a pack of cigarettes for myself and only smoked one before giving them away. I had a craving for cannabis, so I had my new, overly generous and excited, Italian friends bring me nuggets of marijuana in crumpled balls of tinfoil. In a mixture of Italian, English, and contemplative pauses, they explained that they paid upfront for the weed and needed fifty euros from me, or that they spent fifty Euros altogether and this was part of a larger drug deal that fifty Euros had bought, or that I can make fifty Euros easily if I wanted to resell the weed to one of their friends, but that they did not pay that much for it. Whatever they said, it ended with an outstretched hand, a universal gesture for “please, pay me now.” I hadn’t had the time to stop at an ATM since arriving from Providence. Also, I had exclusively been using my nearly maxed out credit card and my boss’ business card to make purchases in Italy because I forgot to tell my debit card’s respective bank that I was travelling and needed their permission for numerous international transactions. I didn’t realize that I still had to do that.
I tried explaining to my Italian friends in broken translations that the gallery told me via email that they would cover any costs related to recreational drug use, although I was unsure how this transfer of funds was actually meant to go down, and that they needed to text Gaia to get her fiscal code to do a bank transfer for the weed. They looked back at me like I was trying to steal their Euros and I wondered, teetering between not knowing and being certain, if I did a poor job at explaining the bureaucratic financial situation I was in as a middle man between a gallery and resourceful Italian men on the streets. I told them I would see them later, which was true, but I also wondered if it was possible for me to behave in a way that would mystically and tragically stop us from ever seeing each other again.
I grinded up singular weed nuggets with my fingers and distributed it into rolling papers that I bought with the cigarettes that I had thrown away earlier in the day. I smoked the joint in the terrace with the two cats who were brothers and exhibitionists. When the art show was finished, I realized I still had eighty five percent of the marijuana my new Italian friends bought for me. I decided to leave it in the upstairs Bolognese apartment. Just a few months earlier on a flight back from Rome, my bag was searched and my weed gummies were confiscated. I was given a warning to never travel with weed again.
Fifteen minutes away from LAX and an hour since landing on the shiny tarmac, I smiled at the sight of palm trees and clear skies while Betsey excitedly told me that the surprise she had planned for me was a visit to Watts Towers. Her excitement excited me equally, although I didn’t know what Watts Towers was.
“Don’t look it up. You’re gonna love it.” She explained to me while driving with two hands on the wheel and putting KXLU on the radio. After going the wrong way, she turned around and we soon approached Watts Towers, a series of public sculptures built by the Italian artist Simon Rodia over the course of thirty three years (1921-1954). The centerpiece of the work was three larger towers built of cement, steel bar, and found objects, all creating concentric, and elegant shapes and gestures around a straight, long, spearlike center bar. Surrounding these larger towers were other smaller towers, which had hut-like structures at their surface with fences, engravings, and more found objects embedded in small crevices made by Rodia. Everything was made from the same materials and the same man, an incredible technical, physical, and artistic feat in the middle of an otherwise unassuming suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles.
“Wow, these are stunning.” I said to Betsey as we walked around the periphery of the sculpture that almost spanned an entire block, reading plaques that explained its complex and impressive history.
She explained how the last time she was here, she and her dad were able to walk through Watts Towers and get closer to the sculptures, which is how I imagine they were intended to be experienced.
“LACMA is doing preservation work.” She motioned to the physical evidence of the museum’s project, a temporary tent with tools and a generator. The sculpture lacked classical structural integrity that you would see in a building or a house, meaning it needed almost year-round attention to replace and repair dislodged objects, cracks, and minor damages in the work’s facade.
In 1957, a fire destroyed Simon Rodia’s home and the towers became an unpermitted structure subject to dismay and hypothetical destruction by the city of Los Angeles. Two years later, in support of keeping the tower intact, engineer Bud Goldstone designed a stress test to prove to the city that the towers were structurally sound, despite their unconventional construction. In his test, a crane pulled upwards on the main tower with 10,000 pounds of force. The tower only moved 1 ¼ inches and the city decided it was both safe and culturally worthwhile to keep the towers around.
We sat in the sun of a nearby park looking at the towers from a distance while local children kicked around a flat soccer ball and played music from their phone speakers. I had a headache that made the world around me vibrate with what felt like the pulse of my heart. Every beat was like a ripple in a pond, and faces, houses, pavement, feelings, Watts Towers, and my own body started to perceptively melt. I looked at my hands incrementally to check that I wasn’t a puddle. I asked Betsey if the world around her was melting too.
“Is everything melting to you? I have a headache.” I said.
“No, but maybe you need some food.” She responded, as if the world melting was something that happened in Los Angeles all the time. My headache worsened and soon I found myself laying facedown in Betsey’s lap, sustaining a quiet groan and trying to hide my eyes from the Californian sunlight.
She rubbed my head, “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. My head really hurts.” I replied, talking into her legs. She kept rubbing my head and I fell asleep to the steady beat of my brain melting.
Bug 1 is doing his thing
Bug 2 is doing his thing
In Bologna
In Providence
They both get a coffee at caffe rubik
They met at a concert in the west
Two years ago
Hovering in hot songs
I hate the scene
I want to play post-rock
It has been a long time since I’ve seen you
Come, take a seat,
Quick
Tell me about what you have been doing
I started a gallery with my best friend
You should come check it out
I will when I’m in town
Ah, but,
I am a bit too busy writing my book
That sounds cool
What kind of gallery is it
It is fiction but it is kind of based on real life
Independent, you say?
On what
We asked people on the internet to do shows in our house
Some said yes
Oh, Jake Shore,
I know his work
Stuck outside of a gallery
Walk into the gallery
You’re stuck in a gallery
There’s two sculptures
Left and Right
Describe them
Say Hello to the goblin in the office
You will damage the sculpture
You will find a wonderful city
Get lost in the city
Really get lost in its cracks
And visit your Grandma
In her apartment in the West
“The walk down to the beach in Umbria was longer than usual. You had to park at the top of a hill, under some trees, instead of the bottom lot. Then, they made me grab my things and hike down to sea level, about a ten minute walk.
On one side of the beach, a middle-aged Italian man sold hard-boiled eggs, prosecco, water, and french fries. He claimed to only take cash and not speak a lot of English. The locals said in dialect that his hard boiled eggs are very good when paired with the Adriatic seawater.
With not many people around, I decided to get in the water before tanning. I took my shirt off to expose a few random tattoos, and threw it in the pile of my things: an Eve Babitz book, sunscreen, headphones, a towel, and a big bottle of water. I made the short walk to the sea, the sea, the sea sea sea. I had convinced myself that salt water healed my ailments in life.
I began to understand why hard boiled eggs were being sold on the beach: the water was extremely salty. So salty that it burnt my eyes, even when they were closed. I tried to keep my head underwater for as long as I could until my eyes started burning so bad that I had no choice but to get some air. I lasted about 15 seconds, and then rubbed my eyes hard enough to make them blur and glow with fireflies. I laid flat against the surface of the water, using the saltiness to help me float and breathe in the ocean air with fireflies around my retinas. I liked when the calm waves of the early Italian morning made me bob up and down like a piece of seaweed.
Feeling cooled down and refreshed, I walked out of the water and back to my spot in the pebbles. I contemplated getting two hard boiled eggs, but decided to wait until I was more hungry in about an hour or so. I lay out my towel, half under the shade of my pitched umbrella, and half in the west coast sun, and I thought about what the rocks tasted like.
I fell asleep thinking about the acidity of pebbles. I woke up to a sunburn on my lower half, and a repetitive bass line in my ear. Thurston Moore was saying to me, “We’re gonna kill the California girls.” Now, that would be a shame to me.
I rubbed my eyes to get the salty air out of them and look around more effectively. I would say there were at least three times as many people on the beach then. Right next to me, a group of boys had set up a few chairs and umbrellas and were circled attentively around one of their friends. They listened to him very closely. He was speaking in dialect, so I struggled to pick up on exactly what he was saying. I knew a few dialect words, so I took out my headphones and tried to chime in to their conversation.
I continued to struggle to understand. They were huddled in a way that made most of their words disappear into the ocean air, while a few decided to come my way. I got up and walked by with the hope of hearing something interesting. Walking behind the boy in the middle, I began to hear him describe how he thought his car got broken into last night, but wasn’t sure because nothing was taken. Instead, he felt as if the car was running differently that day. He was asking his friends if they thought the same when they all drove to the beach together. Some of them said yes, some of them said no. I continued to walk down the beach, hearing a few different versions of these conversations as I strolled. A couple argued over whose turn it is to fill their car with gas after they leave the beach, as one of them will have had to in order to make it back home. A mother and her daughter talked passionately about when she could begin taking driving classes. The mom seemed apprehensive to let her daughter behind the wheel. Another man, who came to the beach by himself, fed his dog slices of store bought ham while he enjoyed an early afternoon sandwich.
By this point, I was at the other rock formation, the other side of the beach. This is where the man was selling his hard boiled eggs, amongst other random things. Before walking, I put my wallet in my pocket to avoid it getting stolen, and then, I thought, I might as well get some hard boiled eggs. The sign says they are one euro each. I approach the guy and tell him I want three. He put all three into the palm of my left hand, I handed him three dollars, and I made my way back to my spot, waving the eggs in the air before eating them so I could get some salt onto the outside. They were delicious.”
“And Francesco? Did he ever show up to give you the package?”
“No, no actually, he didn’t.”
4/25
I’ve been playing Pancho & Lefty on my guitar ever since you left town a few weeks ago. Everyday, I finger pick and sing my way through the Townes Van Zandt ballad, and everyday my voice cracks when I say “mother’s only son,” or “federales,” or “needs your prayers.” My girlfriend told me to try and play it a half step lower, maybe then I’ll have an easier go at it.
I agreed with her advice, and told her to sit on my bed with Cecelia while I played the first 8 measures of Better Be Quiet Now. Weird jazz chords in one part, and classic cowboy chords in the other, coming together to form another quiet and strong ballad. Maybe those are the songs that I’m drawn to.
I drove around with my windows down, with you in the passenger seat, listening to the new Lorde single that sounds like a 2016 house remix of an older, less palatable song. It is finally spring in the city, when everything comes to life.
I see rats crossing the street at night, bunnies in the morning, and old men jay-walking at 6pm. The three worry me in different ways; I hope the rats don’t make it into my house, I hope the bunnies don’t get hit by a car, and I hope the old men make it home in time for dinner. Red lights are everywhere in the springtime, too. They add an extra few on every street, because when the weather is moderate, it is harder to be frustrated, but easier to hit animals, since you are so busy admiring the sun and the flowers. The extra stoplights save the lives of the bunnies that cross the street. It is now commonplace for the spring to signify absurdly heavy traffic.
As a result, many people have taken to walking around the city. I like to sit on my private porch and watch these people, who I otherwise wouldn’t get a good look at in their cars, or when I’m driving on the same road as them. I sit, with my headphones in, listening to The White Album, and pretend to squish all the people that are walking with my index and thumb fingers. They can’t see me, so it is all fun and games. Besides, if they did, it would just look like I’m playing with the sunlight.
I was about to pretend-squish someone when I’m So Tired came on, and I had to close my eyes. It’s a ritual of mine, to close my eyes when I’m So Tired starts to play. I feel most connected to the music that way, and it's a bit of a practical joke as well. When the song finished, I realized I was bored with watching people walk on my street, so I went inside to play guitar.
My girlfriend was sitting on the couch. She told me that I forgot to show up for our date that we planned. I told her that the date already happened, and she knows that this is my outside patio time, so I would never double book myself. She was upset and did not believe me.
I poured myself a glass of orange juice to calm down. In the corner of my kitchen, a pile of sneakers with a few rat-sized bites. I had to wipe the orange juice from the corner of my lips and rub my eyes to get another look. The only explanation for this - there are rats in my house.
"Drunk Elk LP"
Repress - April 8, 2017 - Goaty Tapes / House Rules
Originally recorded in 2007 in Tasmania
Psych rock, no wave, lo-fi, synth rock
“Drunk Elk LP” is the first full length release from the Australian Trio, “Drunk Elk.” It was originally released in 2007 as a self-titled cassette on Inverted Crux, a label run by Australian artist Sean Bailey. Drunk Elk consists of four members, altogether making a band of bass, keyboards, guitar, and vocals.
I picked up this record at Analog Underground in Providence from the psych section. At the time, I was buying records based the covers, and if they looked cool or not. I also didn’t have that much money and “Drunk Elk LP” was only 12 dollars. It would be the first record I played on my record player after fixing the counter weight issues I had for a few months.
The record opens up with “Quintessence,” a song that sounds like an underground Joy Division cover. There’s a simple bass riff, and Dave Elk sings lusty lyrics for someone. He says:
Play that strange tune again,
That off key melody
The production on this opening track carries throughout the rest of the record. Every song has a constant drone of keyboard that sounds like an organ MIDI, and it all feels as if it's been run through a four track twice. Put some fuzzy vocals on top of this with the mention of a girl’s name, and I guess you could describe it as psych rock.
To me, it is more like desperate no-wave, in the best way possible. The layering of everyone’s contribution to the project is very bare bones, and makes Drunk Elk seem like a grasp for something that is missed, but wherever it lands instead is just as good, if not better.
FFO: Dead C, Warsaw, Joy Division, Soft Cell, Talk Talk
