Three FREE Full-Lengths.

-  Really insightful post from my guy PEESHE (over in Australia) about using the MPC for live shows.   Specifically the MPC2000XL.   Number 5 is something I always try to remind myself of.  This is where he blogs now, mostly.  What an excellent collective site.  Dang.  Beautiful design.

-  And speaking of collectives, the new Minneapolis/St. Paul collective F.I.X. (“F to the I to the X”) is giving away three free albums in one nifty package until their debut collective show Friday the 17th: No Bird Sing’s “Theft of Commons”, Kill The Vultures’ “Ecce Beast”, and Kristoff Krane’s “Hunting For Father”.  The last I’ve spoke of on here before.  Probably multiple times.  It’s an awesome album.  The other two are as well.  And hey, the shit is FREE.  Here’s the Bandcamp stream:

-  Hey, independent comics retailers/press… wanna know a good way to not sell your shit?  By ripping on any of Warren Ellis’ friends in the public net-square.  This includes blogs, Facebook, in this case Twitter.  His wrath will be swift and severe.  And I’m betting his site gets more views than yours.  Not to mention that is just being an asshole.  Saying that shit on Twitter.

-  Very interesting interview about the global impact of Underground bookstores.

The social, cultural, and political turbulence chronicled by such off-radar newspapers as Rat Subterranean News, Screw, San Francisco Oracle, East Village Other, Black Mask, and Los Angeles Free Press, to name only a few, is commonly overlooked in mainstream histories. As a result, what often remains is the same scattershot of familiar imagery from the late 1960s/early 1970s that’s lingered in the nation’s collective memory: hippies dancing with flowers in their hair at the Monterey Pop Festival during the Summer of Love; Timothy Leary at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in 1967, urging the Haight-Ashbury crowds to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”; U.S. military tanks on city streets during the race riots in Detroit and Newark; the rise of the Hell’s Angels as the new American outlaws; and the Kent State University shootings and Mary Ann Vecchio’s haunting scream.

-Sonny

Roaring N’ Red: Connectivity.

After going our separate ways at a crossroads down in Waynesboro, it took me damn near four months to get back together with my band in the Fall of twenty-two. That’s a long time. It didn’t feel that way though. Not when you’d walk everywhere. Bix used to call his time walkin’ his “extra lives”; if there is such a thing. Said it don’t matter where you’re goin’ or who you’re meetin’, every trail was a life in itself. A miniature life. And when I finally did meet up with my band that year – behind a rusted out hotel in Baton Rouge – it meant that much more. Seeing them was like seein’ the woman I never had.

Don’t work that way now. That four months for a young person now equals gaining and losing twenty-some odd friends, and that’s without walking anywhere or having any face to face contact to speak of. It don’t feel right. Not in a personal sense, and certainly not in a societal sense. It ain’t like before we had your technology – Internet, social networking, cell phones – we didn’t make connections with each other. It’s just the scale was smaller in terms of sheer amount, and greater in terms of elapsed time. The connections we made with each other, those was deeper, realer, less superficial than they come now. When you knew someone in the city, you knew someone in the city… well. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect to sleep on their floor for a night or two.

The Jazz, and eventual Blues, community breathed connections from its inception. It’s how you started bands, recorded, played shows, met the audience, drank, even wrote songs.

Naked In-Utero.

I never knew or heard of this before (maybe I’m not very trivia savvy when it comes to dead musicians): I recently discovered via an article on the William Burroughs site RealityStudio.org, that Kurt Cobain was a gigantic fan of the Iconoclast’s works.  Cobain sent Burroughs a letter, in 93 I think, asking him to be the main character for his “Heart Shaped Box” video.  Knowing he’d likely decline due to, well, being way to Burroughsian to appear in a music video, Kurt offered a deal to blur his face so that only the director, key grips, and Cobain himself (apparently Dave and Kris would never know either) would know which old man was actually behind the blur.  Burroughs declined.  Cobain’s friends, and probably Cobain himself, also wanted Burroughs in the “In Bloom” video years before, though never had the gall to ask the man.  I thought this was interesting at the very least (though the writer, a Cobain bio writer – one of hundreds -, surely is biased in this case; and I don’t like the idea of him putting thoughts in Burroughs’ head):

“In Lawrence, meanwhile, William Burroughs sat poring over the lyric sheet of In Utero. There was surely poignancy in the sight of the eighty-year-old author, himself no stranger to tragedy, scouring Cobain’s songs for clues to his suicide. In the event he found only the “general despair” he had already noted during their one meeting. “The thing I remember about him is the deathly grey complexion of his cheeks. It wasn’t an act of will for Kurt to kill himself. As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.” Burroughs is one of those who feel Cobain “let down his family” and “demoralized the fans” by committing suicide.”

- Christopher Sandford, Kurt Cobain

Burroughs and Cobain actually worked together at one time.  Though, from reading the article linked above, it’s clear they did this over many miles from their homes, and never met at this point.  Strange they’d work together first, meet one another second.  The project was a short EP called “The ‘Priest’ They Call Him” (with a quotation’ed “Priest”).  It was a reading Burroughs did at his home in Kansas.  The tapes and written content were shipped to Cobain in Washington, where he created eerie guitar accompaniment for the spoken word.  Here’s a YouTube version, I couldn’t find an MP3 to stream.

And here’s a picture of Burroughs’ meeting with Cobain.  Also: just 2 months before Kurt’s death, Burroughs sent him a letter and collage/mixed-media painting with a picture of Kurt in the middle.

-Sonny