My crazy and mad, globe-trotting friend, Thollem McDonas is in Italy right now playing with his group Tsigoti in celebration of the new release on ESP-Disk. Read all about it below and look for them to be hitting the streets of Saint Louis with a show at the Schlafly Tap Room in May sometime.
TSIGOTI - Private Poverty Speaks to the People of the Party ESP 4053
ESP-Disk' is proud to announce its newest artist, TSIGOTI (previously known as Waristerror Terroriswar), a collaborative and improvisational quazi-punk band dedicated to expressing their opposition of war, authoritarian regimes, and violent religious extremes. Combining revolutionary politics and intelligent avant-punk fervor, Private Poverty Speaks To The People Of The Party was recorded with a group of players that have run the gauntlet of life experience and musical exploration.
Private Poverty Speaks To The People Of The Party was created with patience and dedication, yet still holds the same raw improvisational qualities of their debut recording, The Brutal Reality of Modern Brutality. Straying from the typical notion of political commentary, TSIGOTI focus their approach from an insider's perspective, exploring people who suffer being attacked, imprisoned, terrorized, tortured, brainwashed, and tricked. By expanding their sonic territory and political repertoire, TSIGOTI deliver a clever, experimental, yet accessible work of art that is true to the ESP mission - forward thinking and forever changing.
Personnel
Thollem McDonas - Beat-up Piano, Vocals Andrea Caprara - Drums, Backing Vocals Matteo Bennici - Electric Bass, Backing Vocals Jacopo Andreini - Electric Guitar, Backing Vocals
Plus Guests Edoardo Ricci, Samuele Venturin, Francesco di Mauro, and a choir of a dozen friends.
Press Quotes
"The customary digital riddles characterizing the genius of this master pianist are all but forgotten here, for this sounds more as a semi-acoustic punk album. Beaten-up instruments, muttered vocals, rhythms and keys often disrespected; the exclusive wish is crying out loud that 'we can’t do this to ourselves anymore', as per one of the tracks titles. When we compare the fusion of these sensations to a sort of feverish pagan ritual and listen to this set with the same attitude of, say, looking at a shaman dressed like a young Joe Strummer, the honesty of intentions begins to clash (pun definitely intended) with our previous ideas pretty hard. Bizarrely frank stuff. - Massimo Ricci, TouchingExtremes, Italy
"Thollem Sickofwar revs up his beatup piano and throws down on war. The results are edgy, uneven and sometimes disquieting. All in all, a rollicking success." - J. Worley, Aiding & Abetting
I'm not sure where I heard this one; probably on the radio as a cleaned-up version as I drifted in-and-out of sleep:
A man and his two sons walk into a diner and have a seat at an empty counter that is being cleared and wiped down by a matronly waitress of large bosom and apple-red cheeks. The boys sit on either side of the father. Soon enough the waitress looks down at the 12-year old and asks what he'd like to have. The boy sits back a little and smirks while he looks past the waitress to a display case. "I guess I'll have a piece of that damn pie." Immediately, the father bats the son in the back of the head with his left hand and the son goes chest down on the counter. The waitress is taken aback and gasps a bit, but recovers soon. This time she turns to the five-year old boy, leans down on her elbows and says, "How 'bout you, Little Man? What are you gonna have today?" The little boy just shrugs and says, "I don't know, but I sure as fuck ain't gonna order any of that damn pie."
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Get your car fixed
and then
crash it into your own butt.
If you don't understand,
take off your high-class dress
and masturbate while watching
or reading CRASH....or have
another lemondade and shirk responsibility.
Kill the poor.
Make wine with slave labor.
Lace dresses with little malnourished hands.
Fart in the faces of the midgets.
I'm going to watch THE DEER HUNTER
while I wait for my third pizza of the day.
Rick Ankiel sucks real good now that
"I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room."
Blaise Pascal
There is a lot of deep-breathing involved in a life that includes chronic pain, lost friendship, addiction, hangover, disappointment and the search to get yourself cured by exercise, wrestling with self-doubt and taking advice from those that can see from outside of your wretched subjectivity. You find yourself in another universe at times. You find yourself anxious and longing for the comfort of your former rut. You find yourself yearning for another one and are afraid that you'll seek out the same old path, but with different faces, voices and stranger bartenders. You're tempted to rip away from the whole game. Drop all your crutches and crawl away from home to see what the universe will throw at you without all your shields and masks. Skip town, quit the job, shave the head, sell the car and walk to somewhere else.
"Basically, I have one feeling...the desire to get out of here. And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyze, you know, why I want to go away...See, I always feel uncomfortable and I just want to...walk out of the room. It's not going to any other place or any other sensation, or anything like that, it's just to get out of "here."
Richard Hell (from a PUNK Magazine interview with Legs McNeil that was quoted from in the oral history by McNeil and Gillian McCain PLEASE KILL ME)
If you're lucky you know that all of it will pass and your vision will clear. If you're tortured, you don't know. You are certain that there are no options. The flood of emotions is like an acid trip. If you haven't had the experience before, you panic. You start thinking "crazy thoughts" and if you don't have anyone to talk to that can tell you that the moment is indeed not all, you jump to extreme conclusions. There is no light at the end of the tunnel; or if there is, it is the afterlife calling you to the other side. I don't have any answers for those that have mental illness or behavior issues. Get help and be good to yourself. There is something: BE GOOD TO YOURSELF. You can be an asshole to others and treat them unfairly and you can also do the same to yourself. I think there should be a new and all-encompassing commandment to take the place of those ten that we've seen handed about and "down" to us: DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE! I was in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan once. There was a mass going on one morning, but there were people milling around taking pictures and sight-seeing. Anyway, I was turning around from wherever I was pointed when a baglady grabs my sleeve. I look down at her and she asks me if I read the Bible and I told her that I had, indeed, read the Bible. She says, "That's good. Then you should know the only commandment!" "Yeah? The golden rule, you mean?" "No, Dummy! The only commandment is DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE!" and she kind of harumphed and walked away.
"In all probability committing suicide would be the proper course, yet I find myself reluctant to take the final step. Periodically all through my life I've contemplated doing away with myself---either by jumping from a tall building or preferably shooting myself through the temple. At moments such as the present I find my existence overwhelmingly futile and know it is pointless to continue on when there can be no change. It is simply that I haven't the nerve. I lack the drive required to push myself over the brink. It is like all I do---at the crucial moment I fail. I am as negative as one can imagine and have always found it more difficult to finish even the simplest task if the opposition becomes even slightly evident. Certainly there can be no wrong in eliminating a nonentity. What is particularly strange to me is that---although I feel little other than loathing of myself and fully recognize my insignificance---and am weary---miserable---discouraged---and wish for death---way down inside something remains stubbornly alive."
Suicide by Herbert Huncke from his journal and The Herbert Huncke Reader
So, people are in pain and misery and they freak out and think that they can't live inside their own bodies and decide to end their lives. It is heartbreaking stuff leaving friends behind to deal with the mess, even if it is only emotional. I may end up having more to add to this, but I write it only as an introduction to this fascinating documentary. Enjoy and notice the mention of St. Louis and an unnamed bridge in one of the stories. Oh and Jay Farrar pops up on the soundtrack singing Son Volt's World Waits for You from their 2005 album Okemah and the Melody of Riot.
...and read this if you haven't. The posts are interesting and shed much light on the extreme emotions surrounding the act of suicide. It can even piss of the advertisers!
...and finally, here is a song that our friend Hunter S. Brumfield penned, recorded and that later became a fan favorite of the band Bad Folk (reprinted here from Tim Rakel's blog, Trashcanvas):
The Laughing Song (lyrics by Hunter Brumfield III)
He's sorry that things turned out as they did, it's a god-forsaken shame small was the box in which that he hid to temper his poisonous brain he reached for the stars, came back with stumps (maybe stubs?) in a downpour, yearning for rain (though i was told "urine" was the lyric, i thought "yearning" more poetic and gave Hunter credit for the ambiguity) happiness got him once he hit bottom gonna laugh his way through all the pain
Believe him it's easy to drink and be sleazy as your conscience just limps along mistaking freedom for license, he screamed in the silence and his echo said boy you're all wrong well, life is absurd, haven't you heard? keep laughing boy, that's your best bet
Sometimes, you get the idea that you are living a special life. You think you are on to something. You are convinced that your existence on the rock is somehow a little bit better than the lives of the rest of the monkeys. You witness the beauty of a sunset or a car crash or perform, perfectly, a straight-set badminton victory. Perhaps you feel a little bit better about your status on the planet because you sat in on a jury that put away a guy who molested his step-daughter through her entire childhood or you performed a double mastectomy on a jive-ass transvestite. Sometimes, all it takes to feel like you are doing things right is to enjoy a sandwich. You bite into a concoction that makes your saliva perform like godcum on the first Sunday and you feel lucky. You can sit back sipping your Sanka and remember how you slammed it home after the give-and-go and Karen slipped your socks off.
Sometimes, you are an idiot. Sometimes, you get the wind knocked out of you by a 25-mile-per-hour, 295-pound psychopath because you forgot to raise your hand for the fair catch as you set to recieve the punt...and you realize you forgot to wear your cup. Most of the time, it is the little disappointments that will drive you nearer to the idea of practicing a series of little suicides or one big one. Read the man: Bukowski. -------------------------
The Shoelace
a woman, a tire that’s flat, a disease, a desire: fears in front of you, fears that hold so still you can study them like pieces on a chessboard… it’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse. death he’s ready for, or murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood… no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse… not the death of his love but a shoelace that snaps with no time left … The dread of life is that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer and which are always there - license plates or taxes or expired driver’s license, or hiring or firing, doing it or having it done to you, or roaches or flies or a broken hook on a screen, or out of gas or too much gas, the sink’s stopped-up, the landlord’s drunk, the president doesn’t care and the governor’s crazy. light switch broken, mattress like a porcupine; $105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at sears roebuck; and the phone bill’s up and the market’s down and the toilet chain is broken, and the light has burned out - the hall light, the front light, the back light, the inner light; it’s darker than hell and twice as expensive. then there’s always crabs and ingrown toenails and people who insist they’re your friends; there’s always that and worse; leaky faucet, christ and christmas; blue salami, 9 day rains, 50 cent avocados and purple liverwurst.
or making it as a waitress at norm’s on the split shift, or as an emptier of bedpans, or as a carwash or a busboy or a stealer of old lady’s purses leaving them screaming on the sidewalks with broken arms at the age of 80.
suddenly 2 red lights in your rear view mirror and blood in your underwear; toothache, and $979 for a bridge $300 for a gold tooth, and china and russia and america, and long hair and short hair and no hair, and beards and no faces, and plenty of zigzag but no pot, except maybe one to piss in and the other one around your gut.
with each broken shoelace out of one hundred broken shoelaces, one man, one woman, one thing enters a madhouse.
so be careful when you bend over.
---------------------------
You find yourself crying at work one day and realize you are nothing like you thought you were and it all seems hopeless. Every second is another dagger set between your ribs. You want to go back to your youthful days of self-destruction and have visions of your grave or you dying, alone.
...and then, you don't know exactly what it is...somebody pisses you off or the world tilts slightly under a full moon...the waitress spills hot coffee on her tits and smiles instead of screaming.
Something cracks and you are able to see a way to go on.
...and this has nothing to do with anything, except it made me laugh.
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994): A friend of mine recently found himself in the bustling metropolis of San Pedro, California, the whimsically dumpy harbor area of Los Angeles, famous for not really a whole lot else as far as I know other than being where the Great American 20th Century Poet Charles Bukowski is buried, underneath a modest in-ground marker that reads “Don’t Try.” This was, of course, the advice Bukowski gave, while he was still alive, to poets, writers, and everyone else looking to become the type of person that makes a city famous for being buried in it. But in death, I think it was his advice to humanity in general, his final pearl of wisdom imparted to mankind. Don’t try, at anything. Just be. There’s a certain amount of disingenuousness inherent in this statement; after all, when Bukowski was still just a alcoholic mailman, sending hand-copied manuscripts to magazines and publishers, he was definitely trying. And you don’t write as many poems, novels, and screenplays as Bukowski did during his life without putting out some effort. But just like the more spiritual epitaphs usually found on the gravestones of the honest Christian men, Don’t Try is more of the goal, the life’s lesson learned. It’s the advice Bukowski would have given to himself, a fittingly narcissistic thought for a man who made a career out of relating his sexual exploits, drunken loutishness and otherwise self-serving behavior. He was like Thoreau with a taste for booze, choosing the slums of LA, instead of Walden Pond, as his personal purgatory, with women and barflys serving as his woodchucks, ants, and squirrels. And like Thoreau, he didn’t remain there forever; after the slums had served their purpose he moved on, eventually living, and eventually dying, in the comparatively upscale San Pedro, a white wine-sipping old timer. My friend went to the graveyard to pay his respects. The people there had no idea what he was talking about. They finally looked it up, gave him directions and sent him out there; no historical monument, no literature about the life and work of the late great Charles Bukowski. Just a plot number. He found the grave, there with all the other graves. There was nothing spectacular about it. It could have been the grave of anyone, and I guess it is, as far as most people are concerned. Except it says, right on there. Don’t Try.
So you want to be a writer by Charles Bukowski
if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don't do it. if you're doing it for money or fame, don't do it. if you're doing it because you want women in your bed, don't do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don't do it. if it's hard work just thinking about doing it, don't do it. if you're trying to write like somebody else, forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers, don't be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don't be dull and boring and pretentious, don't be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don't add to that. don't do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it.
when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you.
So, I have to think that Buk would appreciate this bit of drunken idiocy
So I know you can't see it through the glare of the flash, but it says something amidst the mispelled scribbles. Who is going to make this bumper sticker?
DON'T TRY BUKOWSKI TRY BUKKAKE
Of course, it is disgusting, but can we not reward a play on words and the recognition of our most worthy poet? Oh, you don't think he's culturally worthy?
I dare you to read this book and neglect his prowess!
"He's got a lot of irons in the fire", she whispered, several feet away from the bar not knowing that he hears everything.
Everything!
It is quite maddening sometimes. Or atleast it used to be. Now he can weave mariachi with chainsaws; bowed cymbals with bees buzzing; bird calls with babbling seamen and jingling trinkets.
He doesn't mind at all, you see.
It just the music of his city.
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