THE DRIVE THROUGH

 

She was and still is a pretty girl and he is and always will be as long as his memory holds out a dashing, handsome figure of a man. Of course she'd be in need of companionship , strength and innate wisdom of such a superlative example of masculine privilege. 

The radio crackled with static between the immediate programming the AM dial could offer, secret messages encoded in between the recognizable tidbits of teen music and farm reports. He woke up from his dream and realized he was still in the drive through lane of the local WHAT'S YOUR BEEF!?(c)  franchise waiting for his KNUCKLE SANDWICH  with olives. 

An announcer with a voice that was twenty pounds of ground glass cut through the static and over lapping stations to make this magnificent declaration. Even through car speakers that made every sound resemble arguments from a deep fruit cellar under a country home so that it was sinking its own wait and who's entire frame sagged like gargantuan Bozo frown, the announcer's voice was clear, alert, full of phlegm which filtered his drainpipe baritone.

"What I did this morning was tape record a whole damn hour of one of those early morning fishing shows, you know, two guys inna boat in the middle of the lake not talking, just fishing for long segments of time, just sitting there with their rods and reels and not talking, just grunting, and even they do speak there's nothing but grunts and garbled attempts to find a period or a question mark. Yeah, you know the shit, I know you watched it all, waiting for something to happen. I got it a full damn hour of it on tape, folks, and I am gonna play it now, uninterrupted and unmolested and definitely unfiltered by any kind of charcoal. I am going to step out and and FREAK something goon-tankish, so now, here it is, a full hour of a tv fishing show, no image, just damn silence, 'cept, of course, the  occasional splash, fart and grunt. Enjoy"

The radio fell into silence. He was still in the drive through lane when it occured him that everyone in the WHAT'S YOUR BEEF!? franchise was dead. He was , amazingly, a decade in the future without warning. I blinked and I missed it he thought. He looked in the rear view mirror to study his face. Deep furrows, roadwork trenches, folds of flesh defeated by gravity. 

Still got it, he thought.

The Knitted Bow

This will not stand nor will it sate my pate.
Speaking of pates, your forehead is nice and shiny like some glass surface
I saw in a muck factory where I worked.
A what?
I used to run amok in a mok factory.
Have a shot.
Okay (Pause). That tastes like boiled mung!
Yeah, I know...
Why did you hand me the bottle if you knew it would taste
terrible and awful and make me shiver like fluttertongue
adagio?
Never mind. Gonna go bowling.
Good idea.
Fuck...

The tar pit gets an upgrade

The liquor store sign on the door reveals  this store delivery policy and that the fact that it's delivered straight to you , with proper ID and a means to pay, makes the sauce "saucey". It's something you download for your phone or your PC, and it is appropiate "killer app" for those times when you're killing brain cells by killing one bottle of distilled wretch after another. Next door the bar with the least curb appeal in Banker's Hill, shown with a wood siding that resembles the faux oak panels that dominated the walls of Midwestern basements that had full wet bars and random , torn travel posters thumnailed to them, a forlorn sign reading "cocktails" over the door and and a cumbersome security door painted white to make the usually black barrier seem just a shade bit more friendly, has a new sign announcing the tavern's name in a jubilant , bouncy fount. All very nice, if you're dead and without opinion about anything, but this outside of this bar looks like some thing you'd see in Steve Ditko's neighborhood. A place that never closes and no one is ever seen walking out of.

Abrasive love with the MC5

This is important shit , folks: Until now , the MC5 are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite the impressive argument that they have been one of the most influential and , ergo, most important rock and roll bands in history. In any event, here is a choice cut not discussed much even my 5 aficionados , James Brown's "It's a Man's World". Agreed, the song is more than patronizing and winds up placing women on the damnable pedestal and back in the kitchen at the same time, but you have to hand to these guys for their odd choice. They loved black music and their choice of a song only JB could pull off is a classic punk gesture: "Fuck you guys, we're gonna play this goddamned song because WE WANT TO." Vocalist Rob Tyner did not, as has been remarked around a trash can full of burning rubber, give a FLAT FUCK if he sang worse than a horse thief gagging at the end of a dirty rope of justice. Rob Tyner sang like a man who had his head wrapped in a thick sheet of bubble wrap and then had his noggin stuffed into a burlap bag that reeked of diesel stained wagon timber and mildewed hemp. He sounded like he'd swallowed his fist in a freak accident that might have occurred when he he was chewing on his knuckles in macho mechanical panic while watching an asteroid streak a fiery, smoky path to Cobo Hall. When he wrapped his crackling squawk to  It's A Man's World, satellites stopped broadcasting, and Gabriel drove over his trumpet in a huff of overriding despair. His was the voice of percolating whiteness, personified grieving love handles with a microphone. There was a time when an attitude like that would inspire otherwise stoned and clueless teens , all of them too late for the absurd counter-culture vanities of Haight Ashbery and Greenwich Village, to yell "fuck yeah" and babble their rendition of dumb cliches about offing the pigs and serving the people. So yeah, the MC5 were really punks, macho black bad boy wannabes and crazy mofos in their right who were willing to stick it in your eye." Hah. Hit me again." The rest of the guys crammed their guitars into the cones of their amps and ground their strings against the microphone stands.The drummer, Dennis Thompson, rattled on over the snare, performed an encyclopedia's worth of imagined sexual amnesia drills over the head of the snare drum and punched a hole in the base drum with nothing apart from a random disease he picked up for kicks at the last Room Temperature Ale House he was located  within. Someone in the middle of what was left of the audience that wasn't yet unconscious, bleeding or deceased hooted. "SUCK MY DICK" countered Tyner, "GAG ON MY GOODNESS, JARHEAD." After that, it started to get weird.

The recent death of Kingsmen singer Jack Ely points up how vital the amateur spirit is to delivering whatever there is of value in rock 'n' roll.  On his legendary rendtion of "Louie Louie, you can hear the gangling struggle of this young kid slurring his words through his braces into a microphone hung above his head, turning a something as catchy but innocuous ditty into something lewd, crude and weirdly irresistible. Ely's mannish boy poses, slack-jawed leers and strained phrasing are both clumsily affected and winningly sincere; when he comes in too early on the final verse over the drummer's staggering beat, you can't help but wince, smile and cheer him on. How his maladroit annunciations manages to imply dirty words and even dirtier thoughts is one of the great miracles of rock history -- the fact that the drummer seems to actually say "fuck!" when Ely blows his cue is of less importance than what lies within those mangled syllables and phlegm-drenched ejaculations. Contrast Ely and the Kingsmen's heartfelt sloppiness to the canned lust and freeze-dried libido of a band like Aerosmith. The sterile professionalism of these prematurely used-up troopers is symptomatic of what happened to the guttersnipe genius that launched a thousand tinny, trashed-out combos in a thousand combos by the mid-'60s. Steve Tyler Jaggercized lips and pumped-up strut can't mask the essential flaccidness of his band's music, leaving one longing for the zit-faced frat-house sincerity of "Louie Louie."

What We Must Know About Communism

I stepped out of McGovern for President headquarters on Garnet, walked across the street and beheld a world gone dark, moist and very strange...

I stepped into the American Opinion Bookstore on Garnet, next to the barber shop that had the toy hair clippers still in the package yellowing in its front window, and looked at the 80 year old matron, a riot of wrinkles and mystery creases, who wore a Goldwater sun visor. I asked if they had any books by Gary Allen. She said yes. "God damnit all the fucking hell" I said, "is this the American I know, when I man can walked into a store and get served bullshit brisket at the nod of a head? You make me sick, Madam" I informed her, and then walked into the night air, which was dark and wet and filled with gas fumes and traces alcoholic drink .

Walking briskly towards the Licorice Pizza, I brushed past John G. Schmitz, who was engaged in executing a meaningless hand gesture in tandem with Phyllis Schlafly. He gave me a crazy cockeyed grin as he crinkled up his thin black moustache, mumbling, "We must stop Socialism one twitch at a time..."

I was having none of this flatulent version of righteous backbone and poked this guy in the shoulder, smack dab in the middle of the recycled Zoot jacket he took off a stoned JiveFiver in 53. " See that billboard across the street" I asked. His gaze drifted from my punishing glare and tried to focus on the billboard through the streaking blue and gold trail left by Detroit's wretched progress. He nodded. "See the building under the billobard" I asked. "Fuck you" he said, "all I need to do is get five more signatures and the RotoRooter guy next door to me is a cinch for the school board". He tapped his pencil his legal pad , his face resembling something more in the line of a sunday crossword puzzle done in a blunt magic marker. I decked him,."I AINT GOT NO USE FOR YOUR RED APPLE JUICE." The slobering cretin collapsed like ten stories of glass tile. I looked up from the mess thsi messenger had become and spotted the masses, the Doodletown Pipers, marching up the center of the otherwise dark Garnet avenue."Do you know the way to Maynard"s?" Maynard's was, of course, reserved only for Gus Hall Marxist Scrimshaw gnawing internationalist scrone bags, so I stopped the mass of inane folk music and directed them instead to Cap'n Bs Old Place, where they could find the Cap'n himself gurning for drinks from a from plaster Clydesdale.  

Down at Tug's, the Sam Yorty Caucus was planning a putsch of the local Democratic Party that would begin when everyone put down their fork at the upcoming Cobb Salad Social. Hesitant to alter the course of history, I went over to the Big Bear and stocked up on Ruskets Cereal, Squirt and Jonny Cat, preparing for Richard Nixon's second term. On my way out I ran into the old lady I'd encountered at the American Opinion Book Store. Her eyes glinted hard and sharp like tiny flecks of mica; tiny fountains of spittle foamed at the corners of her mouth. "I was just kidding earlier," I said. "Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice..." I then pulled down my pants and blacked out for something like 42 years.

• Ted Burke Ted Hughes hits up Basil Bunting's grand son for a Five Spot and hand dried cat.

  
  

  

  Barry Alfonso Since you last noticed what time it was your brother has been taking care of your white bulldog for two weeks and the waitress has converted entirely to the metric system and five ancestors have had flat tires on the bridge to the 21st Century and you, you just inhaled that piece of rhubarb pie for Chrissakes…

  Ted Burke This it! Thing! The Only Way!

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso A thing in and of itself, TRULY doing nothing...

  
  
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  Ted Burke This is what I call an Empty Signifier

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso Erving Goffman's abandoned retail outlet.

  
  
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  Ted Burke Excited Mandrill fans were desperate for momentos after the concert

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso That's why they tore down Exuma's franchise HQ.

  
  
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  Ted Burke This is where you can buy the Malo backlist

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso The backlist is muy malo. The front list also.

  
  
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  Ted Burke The front list features the obscure album "My Fist in a Glove Box" by Skeeter Davis and the bass player from the Banana Slugs

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso The Front List was a club on La Jolla Blvd. next to the White Whale; the Blitz Brothers played their first gig there, opening for Jamul before they started on their tour with Trampoline. You needed hydrogen peroxide by the gallon to get the grease out of your ears.

  
  
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  Ted Burke Raf Algren put pepper into his bottomless cup of coffee as he sat at the counter of the Colony Kitchen at the bottom of La Jolla Shores Drive, plotting a move that would make those girls drawing chalk circles in front of his house sit up and take notice.

  
  
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  Barry Alfonso Just then, my mind went blank at John's Waffle Shop wondering how many votes Barry Commoner would take from Jimmy Carter when I noted the faux-maple syrup collecting around my feet and the next Century burning on the griddle..