Neptune Research

Do yourself a favor and go here:
handofdave.com
and click on
“Download WAYDOWN”

listen to it, say, twice through

wait a few days or weeks, depending on the pace of your state of being

then listen to it again

WAYDOWN consists mostly if not entirely of solo performances on various acoustic instruments run through various electronics. Guitar, banjo, jaw harp, other. It is not a long album, and most of the songs are not long songs, but the work as a whole is hypnotic. David Drew Longey is the artist. The rest of his website is also rewarding in various ways, if you have a few minutes

http://www.furious.com/perfect/marccantlin.html

The link above will take you to an interview with Marc Cantlin about his downloadable album, Spleek Speaker Speaks.”

The interviewer is me.

Big thanks to Perfect Sound Forever for putting this where people can see it!

Alright, so let’s try and tie a few threads together here…

There’s three threads that I want to work with, but at least two of them are compound threads. I will list them.

1 - Rudy Rucker’s recent book, “The Lifebox, The Seashell And The Soul”
2 - Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader (certain contents of which to be discussed…)
3 - Philip K Dick (always a compound subject)

Rucker and Dick have some things in common.

Both are or were science fiction writers and both have been influential not only on science fiction novels and movies and concepts but - perhaps in subtler ways - on the global culture as a whole.

Philip Dick was singled out by the extremely picky Polish writer Stanislaw Lem as one of the only worthwhile American science fiction writers of his time. Lem wrote about this on multiple occasions and at great length. Lem’s other writing includes the amazing “Solaris” (skip all the movie versions, read the damn book) and also volumes of criticism of non-existent fiction. Got that? Lem wrote and published critiques of books which had not actually been written. Among other things. Lem died in 2006. So it goes.

Rudy Rucker has won the Philip K Dick award for science fiction, twice. Both times it was for books in his excellent “Ware” series. The awards were for “Software” and “Wetware.” The other two are “Freeware” and “Realware,” which were my favorites of the bunch the last time I checked. I am due to re-read “Realware,” the only one of the four which I do not own. Nonetheless I suggest a) reading the four in the order in which he wrote them and b) they are probably the best possible introduction to Rudy Rucker’s science fiction writing.

Rucker writes other things than science fiction. He wrote a very dense book called “Infinity And The Mind” which is AMAZING but very hard to plow through. (Not helped by the fact that my copy was falling apart in my hands as I read. It has been reissued, but I am short on cash and long on things I want to read…) “Infinity And The Mind” deals, among other things, with set theory and with Kurt Godel. Rucker also wrote a much friendlier book called “The Fourth Dimension” which is a bit hard to come by these days, and that is tragic. “The Fourth Dimension” is probably the best place to start with Rucker’s nonfiction writing. His blog is also entertaining.

“The Fourth Dimension” is about exactly that, in terms not so much of time as a fourth dimension but of a fourth spatial dimension. He provides you with instructions and diagrams as to where this dimension might be found and how to build things in it and what might live there and what to do about that. This should be required reading for every human. If you’ve read Edwin Abbot’s “Flatland” you should be well primed for this one. If not, well, whatever.

Rucker’s fiction only deals perfunctorily with multiple dimensions and/or realities. Weird animals come out of them and drag helpless humans back away with them, but there is no heavily profound exploration of the concepts in his fiction (possibly excepting the “Ware” series). That is fine. Read his nonfiction for that. The fiction is good for other things.

Philip Dick’s fiction (including the works which inspired Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck, Minority Report, etc) not only deals with multiple realities (not so much dimensions as such), it largely takes place in them. This is not always apparent to the characters. In fact, it is clear after you study PKD a bit that it is not always clear to the writer himself where the action is taking place, in his books or even in his life.

The revelations of Philip K Dick are best explored in his own work in the novel called “VALIS.” This is not an easy read. It hurts. A lot of PKD hurts, but especially VALIS. Tread carefully. If you would rather just read about PKD’s ideas, there is plenty about that on the web. Here are some places to look:

1 - How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later
2 - One of Lem’s articles
3 - Official Website: philipkdick.com
4 - PKD interview from Rolling Stone magazine, save this for last, includes PKD’s theory that the gov’t was after him because he’d accidentally written about some secret truth or technology in one of his novels, and the accompanying illustration is awesome

and finally
R Crumb weighs in on PKD.
A pictorial history of Philip Dick’s visions and dementia. Unsettling.

In short, though, Philip Dick came to believe that the world-as-we-know-it was being influenced if not controlled by evil other-dimensional characters masquerading as a democratic government in order to keep us enslaved, blind to the truth, so that we would not overthrow them… Something like that. It is hard to explain. PKD considered this problem to have originated in the time of the Roman Empire, which he asserted had in fact never ended.

It could be said with some truth that the Matrix series, created quite some time after PKD’s death, owes him a lot.

So Rucker and Dick are both dealing with multi-planal reality, shall we say, in fiction and in non-fiction of various kinds. In Dick’s case there is also some quasi-religious content, wherein those-of-us-who-know are at times represented by Roman-era secret Christian cultists.

That’s a good jumping point to Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian with an emphasis on religious experience. “Myths, Rites, Symbols” is a sort of compendium or digest of elements of his various publications, meant to get the gist of his thoughts across in one tidy volume… Another dense read, I gotta say, but worthwhile. If you like this sort of thing. Which I guess I do.

Points from this book which seem germane at the moment:

All religions or mythos include a cosmogonic myth, which is a story about where the universe came from. Generally speaking, this takes place in a time prior to or outside of time as we know it. The doings of gods and goddesses take place above the sky, below the ground, alongside of us but not typically sharing the same plane of being or experience. Stories of travel between our world and theirs are common.

Myths of the origins of things, or of the doings of divine beings, take place in a sacred time which is outside of our own. Engaging in rites, rituals, religious activities or ceremonies, involves a return to or an access of that sacred time, thus a recharging of of our own being or spiritual energy. (“Us” being a loosely applied term in this case as most of “us” probably don’t have much in the way of this kind of experience in our lives, a major problem with modern culture in my opinion. There are things that come close… But that’s a whole other discussion.)

One thing that distinguishes Christianity in particular from virtually all other bodies of religious thought is that the sacred time which is accessed is actually a part of our historical time. It is the time of Jesus’ physical existence on earth. It is measurable, locatable, identifiable, describable, knowable in a number of basic ways. This is nearly unique among mythos.

I guess you could, if so inclined, take that as a vote for Christ. I don’t take it that way, though I have no more problem with or affinity for him than I do for Buddha or Mohammed or Shiva or Quetzlcoatl or Neptune or Sun Ra. They all get the job done, and I am thankful for it, whoever is at the wheel.

To me it’s just an interesting fact, especially when you fit it together with two elements from Rudy Rucker and PKD.

As mentioned earlier, PKD believed that the separation of properly-experienced-reality and artificially-induced-hallucination dated to sometime around the Roman empire, and included a secret Christian cult which sought to overthrow the evil powers that be. So that’s sorta fun to look at next to Christianity’s unique historicity. The sacred time which is accessed in a Christian rite is closely related to the time in our actual history at which, according to PKD, the major wool was pulled over the eyes of civilization.

And then there is Rucker’s recent book, “The Lifebox, The Seashell And The Soul.” He suggests a number of amazing things in this book, which is mainly devoted to exploring the idea that reality might or might not be usefully viewed as a quantum computation… Hard to explain. Read it yourself.

One of his ideas has to do with parallel worlds, parallel realities, an idea best understood in popular fiction and popular physics as the idea that at any point of multiple possibilities, the universe (or maybe everything) splits. All possibilities are realized. Maybe you choose which one you experience, maybe not.

Rucker’s twist on this is that, no, the universe maybe doesn’t split every time you make a decision. Maybe instead there is a whole pile of parallel timelines, each one different, maybe beginning with a simple one (the One), moving into something a bit more complex (yin and yang? the valley of the archetypes? the ten thousand things?) and eventually reaching the level of gnarl. Gnarl is exemplified by most of what we see around us: the behavior of tree branches blowing in the wind, the patterns on a seashell, wood grain, eddies in flowing water, clouds, fingerprints, really everything natural if you look close enough.

Somewhere in that pile of increasingly gnarly worlds lies our own path of existence.

It occurred to me while reading Eliade that the sacred times, the dream times, the before-time times, those might lie in various of Rucker’s parallel time-schemes. Hints and flashes - such as the one that hit Philip Dick in the forehead in a beam of pink light sometime in the early 1970s - might occasionally get through to us, or from us to them, whoever they might be, and thusly might arise many aspects of mythology and/or religion.

If anything, in this case, the uniqueness of Christianity’s historicity might be a part of the problem, if you think there is one… Sort of a time-ism, accompanying the body of Christian belief, a sense that our plane of time is in some way superior to others.

While PKD may or may not have received genuine transmissions, it is clear that he had many other problems as well. The transmissions were likely garbled. But that does not mean they are without use. Terrence McKenna had a lot to say on the subject of PKD in relation to McKenna’s own transmission-receptor experiences. Among many other points of convergence, PKD and McKenna both had significant experiences involving the I Ching. In addition, many other folks have felt an affinity or resonance with PKD’s ideas, experiences and/or visions.

If you fit all this stuff together, though, the best you can really get is the sense that there might be a bigger picture. There is very little to indicate what the picture might be of.

marccantlin.blogspot.com

Blue Afternoon is one of Tim Buckley’s least highly regarded records. Trite, record-company-appeasing, lightweight kack from an otherwise genius. He had to record Blue Afternoon to fulfill a contract, so he could get on with making the album he wanted to make. That is the story.

(It is also the story of his last two records, Sefronia and Look At The Fool. People tend to accept Sefronia before Fool, but I can’t see it. Look At The Fool is brilliantly offhand where Sefronia is competently, cloyingly produced, if sometimes more digestibly concise in the song construction. “Honeyman,” “Sally Go Round The Roses” and “Stone In Love,” all from Sefronia, are probably more effective songwriting than any one tune on Look At The Fool. But Look At The Fool wins out by miles in terms of mood, feel and funk, even if it is desperate.)

I have also read interviews in which members of Tim’s band referred to Blue Afternoon as the logical follow-up to their previous record, Happy/Sad. Happy/Sad is a loose and stretched-out post-folk passive-fusion set wherein songs with simple but unusual forms are elaborated upon… Slowly.

There are six tunes on Happy/Sad. The first, “Strange Feeling,” is in Miles-ian Kind Of Blue territory, as played by 12-string acoustic guitar, upright bass, mellow electric guitar, congas and vibraphone and Tim’s awe-some voice. Then there’s a quick fake to the left, the almost-a-pop-song “Buzzin’ Fly,” beautiful like autumn sunlight on your windowsill. Then things get REALLY slow, and, with the exception of the frantic and premonitory “Gypsy Woman,” they STAY that way.

You could almost not notice that you were listening to Happy/Sad. You could think, ‘Gee, I should put some music on!’ Then you’d go to the turntable and, whoops, Happy/Sad is playing!

That is not a complaint. Happy/Sad is an amazing record. If you haven’t heard it, you should. I like the vinyl, but whatever you can get will do. I also suggest you play it in late September or early to mid October. Play it in the afternoon. When you are feeling. Very. Relaxed.

Blue Afternoon was Tim Buckley’s next, fourth, album.

Lorca came out at about the same time as Blue Afternoon. The two records can be seen as equally logical motions in diverse directions from Happy/Sad. It has been suggested that the near-simultaneous release (record company bullshit) of two such different discs by the same artist led to the commercial downfall of both.

So. Lorca. Side one consists of two jarringly odd compositions. The first is based mainly around a HUGE, dry, odd-metered organ theme. (Everything on this side of this album is very dry. I am used to such strange music being steeped in reverb to ease it down the auditory throat. No such.) The vocals croon and wail, sometimes at once.

The second tune is equally weird, but shorter.

The tones are not especially jarring in themselves, but the composition and performance are strange. Well done, but alien. Listen to it. You’ll see.

I like this music, but I don’t play it much. It isn’t even one of the sides I pull out to show what a nutball Tim Buckley was. I use Starsailor for that, or parts of Greetings From L.A. or that live one from 1970s radio called Honeyman. Buddy Helm plays drums on Honeyman, which is another good reason to listen to it.

Lorca, side two, consists of two lovely acoustic ballads and a rave-up, “Nobody Walkin,” along the lines of “Gypsy Woman”. A more fully-developed performance of “Nobody Walkin” can be heard on the amazing Live At The Troubador 1969 disc. The ballads are on that album, too. I would suggest Troubador ahead of Lorca, for most people’s sensibilities.

Lorca is remembered as the experimental prequel to Starsailor. Blue Afternoon got the dis. It was not weird enough to be legendary and not really experimental at all, except in its historic relativity to what everyone everyone everyone else was doing then or even now.

Blue Afternoon might be the only session in Buckley’s entire career where he and the band did what they did, and did it well, without exercising their need to document their process of continual forward motion. They just made a good record. The songs are tight and affecting and haunting and pleasant, the instrumentation (same as Happy/Sad but with the addition of a drum kit) is very cool and enveloping. Buckley’s voice is in great shape, always on. Those moments that pepper his every disc where he tries for something great and wild and just misses it? There aren’t any.

He was clearly moving forward, as each record evolved from the last. He didn’t need to show us the exact extent of his reach and limits of his grasp, every time out. It is good to know that an artist is working to extend his or her abilities, but it is also good to hear one working comfortably and effectively within that extended reach.

Every tune on Blue Afternoon is a lost classic. Every one. It starts with “Happy Time,” a jaunty and yet blue-toned (duh - what was the album called again?) song about writing a song. Or about the joy that a song feels when it gets written? Not sure. But it’s great.

Next up is “Chase The Blues Away,” a Lorca-styled ballad also heard on the Live At The Troubador 1969 disc. This is one of my favorite songs. Ever.

Then comes the equally beautiful and somewhat more pained and ethereal “I Must Have Been Blind.” That’s a phrase that feels great to say or to sing, like “I’d rather be blind than to see you go,” can’t remember just where that line comes from but all I mean to say is how can you go wrong with a phrase like “I Must Have Been Blind,” and he doesn’t blow it, the sound just builds and builds and peaks and washes back down into

a song that is called “The River,” a haunting and meditative and somewhat obliquely droning minor epic, like Astral Weeks-ian Van Morrison with a higher, rounder voice and a quite different sense of space, time, and blue tonality.

That is side one.

Side two begins with “So Lonely.” This sounds to me like one of Fred Neil’s totally brilliant throw-away filler tunes, like “It Happens Every Time” or (really) “Everybody’s Talkin’.” “So Lonely” is just a quick, upbeat and lovely little sad song. “So lonely… Mama, you don’t know how.”

Next is “Cafe,” and I honestly don’t offhand remember this one, though I have heard it at least four times this week. Even a quick online glance at the lyric isn’t bringing it back. Hmm… I will have to listen to it again. No problem! Any excuse!

“Blue Melody” is third, another perfect ballad from Troubador 1969.

Blue Afternoon concludes with “The Train,” a chugging (what else?) 7-minute sprawl wherein the raving-but-drowning promise of Happy/Sad’s “Gypsy Woman” and Lorca’s “Nobody Walkin” is entirely and at long last fulfilled. The glory is no longer ragged. It is just. There. Solid and indomitable. You can not argue with “The Train.”

There is not a thing wrong with Blue Afternoon. That, oddly enough, has been the key to its obscure doom. Surrounded by such strange, striking and painfully forward-looking discs as Happy/Sad, Lorca, Starsailor, the pop promise of Buckley’s early career and the bizarre twists of its end…

Blue Afternoon - a polished-but-still-rough, more-skill-than-accident, flashing river’s eddy of a record - didn’t have a chance.

I was in Hollywood’s Amoeba Records with Z last night. We were on our way back from an excellent birthday party, having declined the barwalk portion of the event, and we unexpectedly found ourselves driving past Amoeba. “Halt!” shouted I, and in we went. Who knew, record stores in Hollywood are open til 11, even on a thursday!

So I was all running around looking for SERIOUS music. Got the Akron / Family record, hope the promo doesn’t turn me off before I get to enjoy (or not) the music contained within, nevermind that the name of the label is in MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger type than the name of the band. Or the crap on the tag about it-doesn’t-matter-which-if-any-of-these-four-genres-this-music-is. Although I respect the efforts on the part of the label to shove this bunch of weirdness down the throats of at least those at the edges of mainstream culture, I don’t expect or want the music of Akron / Family to change my life in any major way. I don’t expect it to be any further out there than anything else I listen to (I’ll report back on that). I just want it to be GOOD. I am no neophyte or media-victim. When I need my perspective realigned I will take care of it without the help of advertising copy.

And, “Smart” is CERTAINLY NOT the new “Sexy.” Spbbbttttt.

Anyway…

Got a copy of John Cale & Terry Riley’s Church Of Anthrax. I felt the need to own some Terry Riley, Cale is at least familiar (and I like his approach to collaboration: wait til the other guy leaves then do exactly what you want, a born producer), it suits my current set of interests and it was on cheap vinyl. Sold.

Picked up for $5.99 a copy in decent shape of Kilimanjaro, the first record by The Teardrop Explodes. Yay!!!

All of these, I gotta add, are on records, not cds.

SERIOUS.

So Z comes up with three compact discs in large ugly plastic cases from the “Used” rack (but they aren’t actually “Used”) with white covers bearing each one a sole piece of some kind of fruit - one has a red pepper, one has a peach, one has something I can’t remember or pronounce but Z wants me to try eating one someday. “See,” she says, showing me the picture on the back of the disc. “You peel it!”

One disc says, “China.” Another says, “Japan,” the third, “West Africa.” Each also claims: “The greatest songs ever.” They are on Petrol Records. Each disc includes a recipe.

I think (SERIOUSly): Holy shit, these look ridiculous. I mean, a recipe?

But she bought ‘em, all three. Hey, they were only five or six bucks apiece.

On the way home we continued to listen to Streets Of Lhasa, a SERIOUS world-type-music compact disc recording from the Sublime Frequencies label, which is run out of Seattle, Earth, by one of the Sun City Girls. (Serious.)

The track we are listening to is of a 3-year-old boy singing, first by himself (Z wants to cop the voice) then with his dad to the music of an erhu.

SERIOUS.

We got home and chilled out with Manson The Cat for a little while. When he took off from Z’s lap, she opened up “Japan: the greatest songs ever.” The one with the peach on it. I had a moment of precognition when I saw that the discs are designed to look like little records. Then we stuck “Japan” in the ancient funky top-loading CDwalkman and hit play.

You know, it wasn’t bad.

The music is less frenetic than J-Pop, but shares some of the cooler features of early Japanese psychedelia: lush strings and horns with bits of spazzed-out fuzz guitar, choruses of harmonizing singers going “bop bop oooo,” ladies in echo chambers crooning saccharine melodies that don’t cloy in strange languages (well, Japanese). I don’t know how I could like music that sounds like this, but I do. All I can figure is it’s what happens when a society that knows how to make use of an aesthetic idea when it sees one (Japan) runs into a set of sounds that was never meant to be anything but commercial.

The vocal arrangements (tho not the tones) on track 1 remind me of an old disc of the music of Trinidad that I once heard, which included a traditional version of “Sloop John B” which was almost identical to the Beach Boys vocal arrangement, but swingier. The musical setting of track 1 is sorta big band country-funk-hop. None of these things is more or less than a subtle and seamless element of the whole production.

Twenty minutes into the disc and I haven’t freaked and shut it off yet. Not bad. So I opened up the booklet and read the following:

“The Japanese are at the forefront of technologies and breaking inventions.”

It hit me so odd… Every time you go and invent something, here come the goddam Japanese and break it!

I skimmed ahead through stuff about the quirky foresight of the Japanese (sure, I can see it); traditional music, kabuki, tea houses, Geishas (all this in half a paragraph); karaoke bars and pantie-vending machines, flashing billboards spitting electric disco-soul, a futuristic Petrol-Japan-CD-listening-party plan, and a list of some recent Japan-related pop culture items (“Lost In Translation,” manga, etc).

Weird.

Still diggin the music. The sound is really good, warm and clear.

I skimmed the song titles, but they didn’t tell me much. The first band is called “The Peanuts,” which is appealing. Otherwise not much to see. A string of unfamiliar Japanese names, two or three English titles or subtitles: “Flowers For Your Heart,” “One Rainy Night In Tokyo,” “Tokyo Kid.” One French subtitle as well. I don’t know what it means (Z does) despite several years of French in elementary and high school, because I am a stupid American. I am not proud.

I was hoping for some kinda historical or cultural background to some of the tunes - I like that shit - but, oh well, so what else is there to see? Oh yeah, the recipe! That ought to be a hoot…

The Japan disc includes actually three short recipes. They might go well together. They are: Japanese Kabuki Cocktail, Prawn Tempura, and Salmon Sushi. I like my fish cooked, so I am most likely to experiment with the tempura. The recipe even states that it can be generalized to include things other than prawns - “just use your imagination!”

Where’d the cat go? I want to dip him in tempura batter.

I’ll chill out now, but let me close by saying the African one is so good I didn’t want to go to bed so I could listen to it. (Only got to track 4 and gave it up). I’m up to track 11 now, first thing the next morning, and the only bummer for me is maybe track 10 which wasn’t so much to my taste but good for what it was. None of this is raw Africa-funk like I usually dig, not enough guitar for my taste, but there are elements of that, and there’s the complex rhythms and rising melodies you expect from African music without any of the shit pop.

I don’t know if any of these are “the greatest songs ever,” but I didn’t expect them to be. So, no let down.

I have been telling some of you to check out a web-radio program hosted by Marc Cantlin II, aka DJ SLOTH. Some of you have had your music played on the show… Evidence will be provided below.

You can hear DJ SLOTH at www.wvtc.net, by clicking on the off-campus-stream link at the left side of the screen. If you want to look at him, you can also click on the webcam link. A good time to do these things is

To further coerce those of you who have NOT checked it out yet, I am posting the playlist from this past Thursday:

DJ Sloth began with a solo acoustic guitar-and-voice performance of a song that he wrote with, uh, me, called “Too Many Looks.” This song used to be played by a band called BRUCE.

DJ Sloth then spun the following audio files:

1 - The Prince, by Larry Carlton, from the Firewire album
2 - Cooking, by Stark Reality, from Now
3 - Live Nudes II, by Live Nudes, from Live Nudes
4 - Niko Niko Niko, by OOIOO, from Kila Kila Kila
5 - Kira, by 5-Track & Glass Goblins, from Lost Soul Island / Kira EP
6 - Jo Jo Lo (delicate beauty), by Akido, from Akido
7 - Sacred Ground, by Living Colour, from Collideoscope
8 - Can You Be The One, by Meggan Cantlin, from Mid-Life Crisis
9 - Ocean Waves, by Neon Brown, from Trouble
10 - Funky Dollar Bill, by Funkadelic, from Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow
11 - Would, by the Kristin Mueller Trio, from Booty And The Beast
12 - Folsom Prison Blues, by Johnny Cash, from The Sun Years
13 - Electric Worm, by The Beastie Boys, from The Mix-Up
14 - In Time, by Sly & The Family Stone, from Fresh
15 - This Is Not An Arena, by Skidmark And The Tighty Whiteys, from Bird-Day
16 - Around The World, by Nikka Costa, from Can’tneverdidnothin
17 - Where Am I?, by Spleek-O-Matic, from Speaks!
18 - Flouride, by Critters Buggin, from Bumpa
19 - Cadillac Walker, by Variety Pack, from The Cadillac Walker EP
20 - Up From The South, by The Budos Band, from The Budos Band
21 - Shampoohorn, by Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa, from Shampoohorn
22 - A Conspiracy, by The Black Crowes, from Amorica

As far as I can tell, I co-wrote, recorded, or performed on 1/5 of the playlist…

…and here is a picture of DJ Sloth, himself!

dig it or don’t
5 out

This gentleman’s younger brother is attending a liberal arts college on the east coast where he is indulging a self-directed study of abnormal psychology - in short, he is studying to be a HEADSHRINKER. The tragic effect on his family shall be immediately clear to even the casual viewer. Although the young upstart’s advisors are perfectly capable of cleaning up the damage, given a certain amount of time and space in which to work, they will not be able to connect properly with the victim until the winter holiday. In the meantime, the subject will be equipped with a reverse-telescopic lens which will dangle from the brim of his hat so as to create an appearance of relative normalcy.

This past week I found myself in the city of Los Angeles. What to do?

I won’t dwell on my movie-going experience, but I will mention that I went with Z to see Pirates frickin 3 in an official-FILM-viewing type theater where you can’t have any popcorn, or leave til the credits are over, they appear to only show 3rd generation sequels (Oceans 13, anyone?) and I suspect they shoot you if you try to take a leak halfway through. None of this stops people from clapping and shouting and emoting at the most appalling plot twists and blah blah blah…

I will now attempt to behave myself.

But, C’MON!!!!

Alright, now…

So the next day for entertainment, we made it up into the hills around Mandeville Canyon. The hills are spacious and somewhat extensive, to my surprise. You can walk a fire road from Mandeville Canyon Road to Mulholland Drive, for example - you can’t drive it, tho you can walk your dog or ride your bicycle - and on the way I suppose you would encounter something like what we encountered on the other side of the canyon. We chose the other side because it is BIGGER, ie, more space with less pavement.

And this is what we saw there:

A dirt road which led windingly uphill into increasingly picturesque scrub-desert-type vegetation, lots of birds, a few lizards, a surreal view of the surrounding areas which included the canyon road itself and the large houses thereon, plus the other hills around the road and the people hiking on them. They were few and far between but easy to spot, being generally more brightly colored than their surroundings and also the only obviously moving things in sight.

I couldn’t help taking us, or in some cases me, off the road from time to time, which led us to discover what are probably make-out spots or go-have-some-beers spots (based on the cans we very rarely encountered) and also brought me to a great fallen log to sit on with a super view and some crazy bird twittling at us (it left when I asked Z if she could see what it was) and then down into a thicky but drily vegetated, well, canyon… I mean, it was hillside but it was three converging hillsides. The terrain was so dry that going down involved sliding on your heels while jumping over anything in your path, and coming back up meant clawing your way up through essentially sand and losing half a step for every step you gained.

On the way back down we saw a hummingbird.

A few days later I walked into Griffith Park. A lot of this park is now closed due to fire. Some asshole was smoking a cigarette up there despite many signs to the contrary, and the whole thing - close to 5000 acres - went up in flame. But some of it is still open and usable, including the area between Fern Dell and Section 9. I couldn’t find anything to tell me what Section 9 was so I just started walking, generally leaning to the less used-looking trails.

Fern Dell starts with this great, lush, green patch. A stream runs through it, and there are many wide footpaths and picnic tables and water fountains (a major clue that we have left the real world) and just generally a great place to take your kids and your dogs and your girl and whatever else needs taking out somewhere to run around. Before long you reach a parking lot, but if you bear left first, toward the edge of the park, putting up with the sound of chainsaws and with the big fence that divides the park from the houses and yards and swimming pools, the terrain quickly becomes more rugged, the paths tinier and steeper, and you are soon climbing through that same scrub-desert-type terrain only the paths are barely visible and the hills are bordering on cliffs. This is in the middle of a city park.

Two-thirds up the first big hill, I stopped. My back was totally slick with sweat - I don’t sweat, but L.A. is hot - and I was totally thirsty and while I was standing there stretching, a coyote came out of the bushes. It looked at me, I looked at it, and then I went back to stretching and it went back to doing whatever coyotes do in Griffith Park. In the course of this hike, I also saw several lizards, possibly a mockingbird and possibly a rabbit.

At the top of that hill I was almost vertiginous. I mean, it was high up… And the drop down was fairly sheer. The view of L.A. was as good as it gets, though - unless you do what I did next, which was to work my off-road way to the slightly-higher-up Griffith Observatory, crashing through thickets and alarming some joggers but getting a glimpse on the way of some of the park’s less hemmed-in spreads. Fern Dell is a narrow channel leading into the park proper, surrounded on both sides by swimming pools and etc, but it opens up into more extensive things once you devote a little time to it.

From the Observatory I had a clear view of the smog line. It starts right below the tops of the highest buildings, and from there down the air is BROWN. It doesn’t even need pointing out, it’s so THERE.

On my way down I took a similar path, in fact I took mostly the same path but then followed the possible rabbit into what looked like a dry river bed. There were other appealing trails around, but I was getting tired - we’re talking 2 hours or more in the scalding sun and heat by now, not that I’m complaining, but I wanted a drink of water and to lie down for a bit. I found the drink in a water fountain at the head of the stream, then made it back through the lush stream-side path (recording to minidisc along the way some water sounds, dogs, cars, and bits of a few conversations) to Los Feliz proper and Z’s apartment.

The other relevant activity would be our daytrip to Crestline, which is two hours east of L.A. and about 5000 feet up. A major road up there is called the Rim Of The World, which is terrific, my only fault with the view being that it is largely of city… But that is not the fault of the view, which I’m sure was there first. Crestline and the surrounding area is right pretty, and although we didn’t really get out in it (choosing instead to drive around and dig it from a hermetically sealed distance, afro-groove and Hong Kong surf on the CD player) a lot of the region is National Park. It is beautiful and also lusher than L.A. proper by a far cry, but still scrubby by northern standards.

Here’s a coupla (slightly out of) tunes for you to compare to the versions on the “Live At Chop Suey” CD-R:

errata:

The set from which these tunes are excerpted featured Knute Jordan in place of Patrick Lenon. Patrick is 17 years old - well, he might be 18 now, I’m not sure - and some clubs are still kinda snotty about that. Knute is old enough, and what’s more he’s on his shit enough to pull this off without any rehearsal of any kind. He sat in with me and Wes at a coupla Snoose Junction shows, then made the gig and pulled it off like he was born to do it… And you know what? He was.

Other than Knute, the personages herein are 5-Track (yours truly) electric guitar and sing… Wes Amundsen, electric bass guitar.

Thanks to TQ and Indonesian Junk for making this night happen, January 30 2007