Schedules

 

 

In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone." 

 

Kurt Vonnegut Timequake

 

 

To The Home Which Everybody Owns

Between 1697 and 1807, 2,108 known ships left Bristol to make the trip to Africa and onwards across the Atlantic with slaves. An average of twenty slaving voyages set sail a year. Approximately 500,000 slaves were brought into slavery by these ships, representing one-fifth of the British slave trade during this time. Profits from the slave trade ranged from 50% to 100% during the early 18th century. Bristol was already a comparatively wealthy city prior to this trade; as one of the three points of the slave triangle (the others being Africa and the West Indies), the city prospered. This triangle was called the Triangular Trade. The Triangular Trade involved delivering, as well receiving, goods from each stop the ship took.

Darkness  

The Bristol underground scene was characterised by a sparseness and darkness. Bands like Portishead and Massive Attack are known for using sparse instrumentation - a prominent bass line, vocals with what are usually melancholic lyrics and sometimes other effects commonly associated with hip-hop, such as samples and scratching. (...) Separately to this, some writers have talked of an undercurrent of darkness within the city due to its history.

Racial tensions within the City 

An article in 2008 in The Telegraph stated that: "Racial matters have always carried a historical resonance in Bristol, a city made affluent on the profits of tobacco and slave-trading. Street names such as Blackboy Hill and Whiteladies Road remain as reminders." However, the popular belief that both Whiteladies Road and the Blackboy Hill had connections with the slave trade is untrue: both names appear to be derived from pubs.

(...) 

There has often been a slight undercurrent of tension both in the politics and creatively with artists and musicians in the merger of black and white culture. During the 1950s the Bristol Evening Post carried what many today would consider openly racist articles, warning of the dangers of black bus drivers.

Ends Of History

"It is true that Columbus harbored strong prejudices about the peaceful islanders whom he misnamed "Indians" - he was prejudiced in their favor. For Columbus, they were "the handsomest men and the most beautiful women" he had ever encountered. He praised the generosity and lack of guile among the Tainos, contrasting their virtues with Spanish vices. He insisted that although they were without religion, they were not idolaters; he was confident that their conversion would come through gentle persuasion and not through force. The reason, he noted, is that Indians possess a high natural intelligence. There is no evidence that Columbus thought that Indians were congenitally or racially inferior to Europeans. Other explorers such as Pedro Alvares Cabral, Amerigo Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan, and Walter Raleigh registered similar positive impressions about the new world they found."

(...)

"A sincere effort to study other cultures “from within” requires a rejection of the Western lens of cultural relativism. Multiculturalists who wish to take non-Western cultures seriously must take seriously their repudiation of relativism. Otherwise a humble openness to other cultures becomes an arrogant dismissal of their highest claims to truth."

Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism, 1995

 

"Columbus inaugurated perhaps the greatest experiment in political, economic, and cultural cannibalism in the history of the Western World."   

 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 1992

"Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor Western civilization. Some cultures are better than others: a free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western civilization stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible: reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement."

Michael Berliner, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, 1992

"Could it be that the human calamity caused by the arrival of Columbus, was a sort of dress rehearsal of what is to come as the ozone becomes more depleted, the earth warms, and the rain forests are destroyed?" 

 Ishmael Reed, Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, 1992

"What did Christopher Columbus do, discover America? If he hadn't, somebody else would have and we'd still be here. Big deal."

John Waters, film-maker,1992

"The cruelties multiplied. Las Casas saw soldiers stabbing Indians for sport, dashing babies’ heads on rocks. And when the Indians resisted, the Spaniards hunted them down, equipped for killing with horses, armor plate, lances, pikes, rifles, crossbows, and vicious dogs. Indians who took things belonging to the Spaniards - they were not accustomed to the concept of private ownership and gave freely of their own possessions - were beheaded, or burned at the stake.

Las Casas’ testimony was corroborated by other eyewitnesses. A group of Dominican friars, addressing the Spanish monarchy in 1519, hoping for the Spanish government to intercede, told about unspeakable atrocities, children thrown to dogs to be devoured, new-born babies born to women prisoners flung into the jungle to die."

(...)

"Let me make myself clear. I am not interested in either denouncing or exalting Columbus. It is too late for that. We are not writing a letter of recommendation for him to decide his qualifications for undertaking another voyage to another part of the universe. To me, the Columbus story is important for what it tells us about ourselves, about our time, about the decisions we have to make for our century, for the next century.

Why this great controversy today about Columbus and the celebration of the quincentennial? Why the indignation of native Americans and others about the glorification of that conqueror? Why the heated defense of Columbus by others? The intensity of the debate can only be because it is not about 1492, it’s about 1992."

 Howard Zinn, Christopher Columbus, 1992

Desecration Acts, Coda

Part Three: Slouching Toward Ypsilanti

Getting the "band" together. Some twenty years after the fact. Hey, why not?

Nevermind that, back in 1974, it had largely started out as an art-school hijinx, the product of youthful boredom and malaise and surplus energy, designed to befuddle a handful of locals through an infrequent series of "guerilla" (i.e., uninvited) performances around town. Freeform guitar caterwauling, tape loops, a version of "Iron Man" performed with a rhythm section consisting of a coffee can and vacuum cleaner...that sort of thing. As one of the founders, Mike Kelley &mdash, would recall looking back over two decades:

"All of the members of Destroy All Monsters had grown up during the alternative cultural renaissance of the late sixties. We had all been raised on the psychedelic excesses of the MC5 and the Stooges, and the general feeling of that time: that every form could be combined and all excesses were possible. Now we were in the dark ages. Detroit's economy had collapsed and taken with it its radical culture. Detroit was a dead city. And Ann Arbor, once the 'drug capital of the midwest,'...and a thriving radical intellectual scene, was now slipping back into being a sleepy and conservative fraternity-row college town. All of the musicians of the previous generation were trying to adapt to the cleaner hard rock sound of the day. ...This was the milieu that birthed Destroy All Monsters. We were designed to be a 'fuck you' to the prevailing popular culture."

To say nothing of the "shits and giggles" component. At any rate, within a couple of years, two of the main instigators -- Kelley and guitarist Jim Shaw — departed to the west coast to enter grad school, leaving the other two members of Destroy All Monsters to carry on with the enterprise however they saw fit. What soon followed for the outfit is history, or at least a footnote in the annals of the Midwest's contributions to the American "proto-punk" canon. With the Stooges' Ron Asheton and the MC5's Michael Davis in the lineup, it became — according to member Cary Loren — a period of "formalism" mixed with "out-of-control energies and egos." By the 1980s, the group had ceased to be, while Kelley and Shaw were off embarking on what would become highly successful art careers.

Come 1994, the members of DAM found reason to look back to DAM's beginnings as they assembled a collection of the group's early, unreleased recordings. After some discussion, they decided — why the hell not give it another go? The timing was a little ironic, seeing how the early '90s already an orgy of "reunion" tours by acts from the 1960s and '70s getting back together for the sake reliving a few glory days of yore. From the Swingin' Medallions to Three Dog Night, eventually followed by — not too many years later – the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. In doing so, the idea was effectively reset all the gauges to zero — using their original 1974 "art-noise" intentions as their starting point. Sporadic performances, tours and CDs would result in the years that followed. Of these, the album Swamp Gas — recorded in the final years of the decade/century and seeing release in 2001 – perhaps best embodies DAM's initial intent.




As far as historical revisionism is concerned, Swamp Gas retells the latter half of the "American Century" through a haze of lysergic mind-rot, "alternative"/New Age spirituality, UFO cults, "trash" culture, and conspiracy theories; all of it threaded by a free-form racket or free-form jamming, yakkety guitar, droning noise, primitive electronics, vari-speed tape collages, and the occasional cartoon sound effect. An open mystical invocation — reminiscent of bits from Timothy Leary's Turn On, Tune In... LP and attributed to Madame Blavatsky — tells of the "Seven Worlds of Eternity" and urges the listener to "kill all desire." The voice of Sun Ra recurrently drifts through the miasma of noise. At one point, Mike Kelley steps to the mic delivering a 17-minute long ode to the famed UFO sightings over Dexter, MI in March of 1966 as they were recorded by witnesses and law enforcement officials, invoking Sananda and Mark David Chapman and Project Blue Book, while intermittently offering interpretations of the top ten hits of the spring of '66 ("Nowhere Man," "California Dreaming," "Homeward Bound"). All of it coming wrapped in a copy of the Swamp Gas Gazette, a mock newspaper bearing extended Heaven's Gate-styled texts on UFOs and Sananda and whatnot, as well as a couple of articles purporting to reveal "The Truth" about Iron Butterfly and Question Mark & the Mysterians.

It's an extended exercise in mind-fuckery that's sometimes bewildering, and sometimes merely numbing...not unlike hearing Amon Düül's Psychedelic Underground hammered out in an amphetamine blur. It is, admittedly, not an incredible album. Ultimately, it's an artifact — an effort at channeling the aesthetic spirits of a particular bygone time, resuscitating the stillborn potential of a creative em-oh and an era-specific sense of restlessness and disenchantment. Something about the cathartic noisiness of it all probably still felt somehow vital, just as necessary as the whole shits-and-giggles aspect. Which I suppose is what one could expect from a long-delayed transmission from the beginning of the Age of Diminishing Expectations.

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