IOWA HIGHWAY PATROL

(excerpted from COME DOWN FROM THE HILL S & MAKE MY BABY)

After spending a couple of nights crisscrossing the Midwest, we conclude a gig in the roarin’ podunk of Iowa City. We leave the gig and hit the road. Our destination: Chicago.

Due to every other member of the Soundmachine mistaking our tour across America as a 3-month holiday (thus their constant imbibing of any libation and/or pharmaceutical they could inhale down their gullets), yours truly was voted the only member cogent — and sober — enough to guide our tour vehicle into Chi-town.

Reality tells me later that his descent into chemical depravity had been a reaction to my liaison with the Lebanese Lounge Singer. Her function was merely perfunctory and utilitarian, and her self-absorption was beyond insufferable. My sleeping with the enemy was a betrayal that he took personally. Looking back, he was right.

Cut back to I-80, Eastbound, I haven’t slept in damn near two days and all I want to do is get to the Windy City, get a hotel, draw the curtains and hibernate. Before we can make time on the interstate, however, we must appease the appetite of the Lindy, which contrary to the wisdom of Glen (the owner of the RV Emporium where we got the vehicle), consumed far greater than a mere 10 mpg.

In Tipton, Iowa, I find an exit with a convenience mart/petrol parlor; everybody in the Soundmachine entourage is either playing possum or is truly zonked, so I grab my traveling coffee mug and exit through the side door of the motor home, give the lady behind the counter a couple of twenties and commence dispensing with the fossil fuels.

After topping off the tank, I drag ass back and get my change from the portly clerk, refill my coffee and retrace my steps back into the Lindy. I turn over the motor, put ‘er in drive and SHIT!

In my haze, I neglected to disengage the fucking hose from the vehicle. The kiosk itself is completely thrashed… FUCK… As band members begin to wake up, I truck back into the convenience mart, humbled and completely apologetic. The counter wench is completely FREAKED and hysterical — “You’re the second asshole this week to ruin one of our pumps, yadda, yadda, yadda.” I’m calm in comparison, I offer my license, the insurance papers, and a copy of the rental agreement but she’s having none of this. “I don’t care about the paperwork, you’re gonna’ have to wait until the boss lady gets here.”

(It turns out that the boss lady lives over ninety minutes away. It’s now 1 AM — I need sleep! I tell the gal, “Look, call the Highway Patrol, I’ll fill out an accident report, here’s the paperwork…” “I don’t care about no paperwork, you’re gonna wait until the boss lady gets here.” “Look, I don’t how you handle traffic accidents in Iowa, but in California we show our insurance papers and the officers fill out accident reports.” More hysterics on behalf of the counter wench, she refuses to call the HP, so I leave.)

So there we go, EVERYBODY in the Soundmachine is wide awake as we motor for about one hour towards the Mississippi River, out of Iowa and into Illinois and Freedom! We get to Davenport, I can see the fuckin’ muddy-ass river and BHHWOOOPPP — it’s the law dogs.

I am asked to step out of the vehicle as Fingers and Reality are stuffing more pills that have long passed their expiration date into the crevasses of various analog, monophonic electronic keyboards.

“I understand you had a little trouble back there in Cedar County. The clerk at the Jiffy Stop said you fled the scene of an accident.”

“No, not really,” I say, “I offered her my license and proof-of-insurance, but she was having none of that.”

“That lady is my neighbor, she lives right down the road from me; Are you calling her a liar?”

“Umm, no not exactly, but she did refuse to listen to reason,” I backpedal.

They haul my ass back to Tipton, Iowa in the squad car, with Reality and Fingers in tow. We get to the Big House and the bailiff decides not to throw me in with the drunks, but with the felons who are waiting there until the State Penitentiary can create some more room for real criminals. Great. It’s about 5 AM at this point and I still haven’t slept. I decide to sleep on my back because if I’m going to be violated, at least this way I’ll see it coming.

I’m awakened at 6 AM — “Getup!” — for a meal of flapjacks and coffee. I refuse the coffee, because I am going right back to bed (or so I think) after some carbo-loading and a phone call to my lawyer. I am told I’m in for “criminal mischief.” Worst case, according to Lolita’s Mom’s Attorney in Los Angeles: “Ten years.” But that’s worst case, he assures me. Until the phone call, I have refused to make eye contact with my fellow cons because I was sure I would be released at any moment. Wrong. After a morning of cleaning the jail bars with a tooth brush (I actually didn’t want to interfere with the other fellows routine, it kinda’ looked like I would just get in the way — ironically, these guys really knew how to work a toothbrush, although you would never know it from their smiles) and putting Field & Stream magazines in a stack (“They’re already in a stack,” I tell the trustee, “Put ‘em in another stack,” he counters), I am finally shuffled off to the Courthouse to see the Magistrate around noon.

Handcuffed, I pass Fingers and Reality in the corridor as they take snapshots of me with their Instamatics. Their goddamn cameras have flashbulbs popping and I feel like Frances Farmer on her way to the Funny Farm. Two hours later — after sixty minutes of shuteye in the last two days, I am led into a small office with the “magistrate.”

The judge is in a wheelchair and his hands are all sclerotic and discombobulated. He immediately tells me that he was interrupted from a luncheon and a golf game (!) to come review this matter. He then feebly attempts to turn the page in the police report concerning my arrest. Great, I think to myself, I’m going to jail for the next ten years because I put a crimp in social calendar of the Stephen Hawking of Jurisprudence — who apparently golfs.

At this point the Magistrate’s phone rings. And rings. I’m new at this: I don’t know whether to help him left the receiver off its cradle or whether that will piss him off more. I decide to let him struggle with the telephone. He finally gets it positioned in the groove of his shoulder blade and tells the party on the other end: “Yes, I’m reviewing it right now; I’m really disturbed by this.” Ten Years.

He wrestles the phone back into its holster. “It says right here you accidentally destroyed a fuel pump at the Jiffy Mart out on I-80.”

“Uhh, yeah, I accidentally destroyed the fuel pump.”

“If it’s an accident, then how could it be mischief?”

“Uhh, yeah,” I say.

“I suggest you get Iowa in your rear view mirror as soon as possible — like now.” Not a problem…

+++++++++++++++++++++

Come Down from the Hills & Make My Baby: Second Edition

Due to popular demand — and the fact that used copies of the book were fetching nearly 50 clams on Amazon.com — KBP announces the release of a second edition of Cole Coonce’s Come Down from the Hills & Make My Baby.

More details are here: Second Edition Available Now!

Next up (and coming soon): A Kindle edition of the book!

McCarthy And Son And The Usual Suspects

by John Tottenham

Paul and Damon McCarthy’s Caribbean  Pirates received its Los Angeles premiere at REDCAT recently: a visual and aural multi-screen feast/assault that covered all four walls of the theater. The audience, many of whom sat on the floor, were surrounded like the victims of the raid taking place onscreen(s). The only way out was through the exit door, which guilty-looking art lovers frequently resorted to, smiling awkwardly as they fled.

Paul McCarthy, famed for his shit sculptures, chocolate butt plugs and other artistic inquiries that are lauded as forceful critiques of consumerism, has now plundered the pirate tradition in a style that is surely closer to the seafaring realities of yore than the Disneyland ride and movie franchise it cruelly parodies.

As soon as the industrial-sized cans of Hershey’s chocolate syrup came crashing through the hatchway, the audience knew it was in for a McCarthy-style barrage of blood and shit on the high seas. Swollen-bellied, bulbous-nosed, giant-eared old salts squirted chocolate syrup from prosthetic phalluses, simulated masturbation with broom handles, sawed through noses and generally had a roaring good time. Blood was flying everywhere, pouring down the lens to a deafening soundtrack of drilling, screaming and obscene Yaaars and Aye-Ayes.

Upon any one of nine screens at any given moment one was greeted with such sights as a naked woman crawling around on a carpet in front of a ship-shaped bar, caressing herself with pained, imploring looks; a man with a freshly hacked-off leg being ridden by a droopy-nosed harpy in a blood-soaked scullery maid’s outfit; and the figure of the pegboy, famed in maritime lore, evoked by a sporty nautical gent in blazer and seaman’s cap who danced around a bottle of Morgan’s rum before frigging himself on a giant peg (the pegboy was a selected crew member who was obliged to keep his anus dilated in this fashion for the pleasure of his shipmates while on long voyages). Somewhere in there a parody of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was apparently being played out, but it was impossible to keep up with all the references. The playfully tasteless mayhem continued for the standard theatrical 90 minutes, descending eventually into such popular piratical pursuits as cannibalism and torture (despite their cartoonishness, the bone-splintering amputation scenes were not for the squeamish).

It was fun to watch and it was obviously fun to make. To those of us unfortunates unable to draw upon an arsenal of critical theory in order to make the work appropriately rigorous, it was an old-fashioned bloodbath, an unabashed extension of the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis. This was cinema divested of such tiresome niceties as plot, character and dialogue, focusing exclusively on filth and gore, which, after all, is what most people go to the movies for. Visually stimulating, it therefore possessed value as entertainment. Only the crowd, strangely, did not seem entertained.

One would think that such a scathingly visceral overload might provoke some sort of reaction. But looking around the audience — whose expressions it was easy to gauge as everybody was obliged to continually twist and crane around in order to view the different screens — there was no laughter, no smiling. It looked like an uncomfortable experience for many, especially those who were on dates. Most people wore looks of tolerant amusement or puzzled seriousness. Resistant to the notion of mere entertainment, they seemed unsure of how they were supposed to react. They knew they were supposed to like it because it was supposed to be art, but appeared uncertain about whether many of the depicted acts could be morally sanctioned.

It seems a shame that a work of such crazed vitality should be the exclusive province of an audience that insists upon extracting or impressing meaning upon it, when the multiplex crowd would surely get a lot more pleasure out of it. The average moviegoer, quite forgivably, might fail to interpret the sordid merrymaking on view as a critique of the Hollywood dream factory and a metaphor for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In years to come, Caribbean Pirates will probably serve as a worthy corollary to these times, but the only people who are likely to make that connection now are the chosen art house set, who made up their minds about Abu Ghraib long before McCarthy went to such excessive lengths to tell them what they already knew.

This is a work that lends itself generously to the possibilities of audience participation. It isn’t being marketed properly. Why not release it to a less discerning audience: one that would actually enjoy it?

(originally published in Artillery Magazine)

“…Cole Coonce’s pornographic love letter to Los Angeles…”

Evan George on “Come Down from the Hills & Make My Baby”

BOOKS: LA ALTERNATIVE PRESS

COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS AND MAKE MY BABY
By Cole Coonce
KBP

Los Angeles, they say, is a siren. Calling all of us not born in this in this city, like the Whore of Babylon to an end-of-the-world orgy. It’s easy for those of us recent additions to this freakshow-sex party to ignore that this city is followed by an immense history that still lingers along the streets (and the gutters) we walk everyday.

New Angelenos truly enthralled with their home have years of reading ahead of them, starting with the apocalyptic Day of the Locust. For the slackers just mildly interested in getting some head from Los Angeles, there is only one book: Come Down From the Hills and Make My Baby.

Reading Cole Coonce’s pornographic love letter to Los Angeles is like skipping ahead in the history textbook straight to the Rodney King beating. After all, those of us here and now really cannot do without a little knowledge of the decade from which our city has not recovered.

Loosely factual, this novel follows the indifferent musical career of the experimental-punk-noise outfit Braindead Soundmachine, the drunken exploits of the band members in East Hollywood when it was actually seedy, and the narrator’s post-modern love for Los Angeles as he watches it burn on TV during the L.A. riots from a sports bar in Oregon. This book is worth picking up for its sexy, nihilistic description of transvestite strippers alone. But as a historical document, it’s priceless. (Evan George)

7-8-05

YAHWEH

by Lockdown

On the outskirts of Palm Springs a few years ago I saw unfinished tracts and tumbleweeds blowing through the living rooms.  All my old man’s poker buddies using their homes as ATMs… I remember asking Rickie what to make of it.  Rickie said shit would hit the fan and spelled out why in detail.  Nice call.  Paul Krugman of the NY Times was also on this — why there would be ripple effects, strange attractors and Lorenz butterflies causing long distance tornadoes.  One thing all the experts agreed on though: 1929 could not happen again because you can’t have national bank runs.  As of today they’ve reversed themselves — a guy clicking his mouse can cause a lot of trouble.   The point is that 1929 is now a possibility — it’s on the table as a scenario, however unlikely.

The RNC convention was an electronic Nuremburg rally — but I did not know Sarah Palin quoted Westwood Pegler in her convention speech… world class anti-semite and McCarthy commie-basher.  Wall St. Journal broke this and NY Times came in with “Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine.  But the people around her do.”

Strange times that warrant cigars in the desert as the stars wheel overhead…

It will be interesting to see where this shakes out.  I remember in the middle of the junk bond scam I thought: This is Old Testament, baby.  Yaweh must punish.  It didn’t really happen — though I did see Mike Milken one night at the Hollywood halfway house at the head of Vine St. cutting the yellowed grass with a push-mower. I recognized him without his hairpiece.

GET BLANKO!

by Damo Kandinsky

(excerpted from: PULL THE PIN: The KeroseneBomb Reader)

BEEP…channels opening…StrangeCorp data retrieval operational…

“LA call for ya, Mr S…”

The humanoid-voiceprint avatar clean forgotten since last night’s debauches sidled up to Strangelove, all mincing electro-hum, high pitched whiney love-me-cos-I’m-deferential self abasement, but the recumbent demi/household god was/is in no mood for trifling. He flicks/flicked a switch and the robot’s sarcasm/camp-banter circuit went dead on him.

BS, Buffy, Buffy to his friends, Mr Strangelove to those who go in fear of the wrath of God in (at least) 3 persons…today is BLANKO. These nuisance-value websites haven’t yet been closed down…the BS channels of influence not yet fully tumescent. Not yet characteristically tumescent with throbbing BS activity, agents up and down the line, digital agitators, flesh ‘n’ blood agents, cack-handed office functionaries, power bimbos with stick-on political convictions, court officers, corrupt Media barons, Mr. Bigs, none of them yet awake to the potentiality of Blanko Is Evil propaganda. Websites bearing the (semi)divine image, telling it like it is, as they say. They say he’s evil. But they know NOTHING. His good is their death. But…nothing. They’re like flies and he’s like a wanton boy. Kandinsky likes a good semi-classical allusion early doors. He’s the fucking boss though innit? We humour or defer. Humour or defer. He’s a moron but when roused…

“OK, ready…” hums Mr S as he eases into semi-consciousness. Today he sports a bald look, one bulging/one squinting eye and massive soup strainer moustache. He warms up with a few preliminary “Doh”s and squints at the vid-phone screen, puffing and blowing in exasperation. He’s worked it (somehow – nobody knows how, which is a function of the genius of StrangeCorp generally) that every time anyone anywhere in the world says “Doh” credit deposits are made into StrangeCorp accounts straight from FOX, and of course Groening is at his wits end, but that’s another made up story…

“Agent BDSM guv…” says the image on the screen.

A pregnant pause looms, but somehow also kick starts and simultaneously anticipates the strange banter to come in a manner not readily susceptible of description.

“Well”? enquires Strangelove.

“Well…well, we’re waiting…I can’t hold these goddam hyeanas off any longer Mr S. We…” he corrects himself “…they are still waiting. We…I mean they, want product. New product. StrangeCorp stocks are plummeting BS…”

Strangelove/Blanko merely looks nonplussed, blows through his moustache a few more times and fixes Agent BDSM with a bulge-eyed stare.

“Er, what I mean is, your, er, grace…”

BS dismisses the blandishments with a wave of the hand

“…uh, what I mean, BS, is that sanguine though you may be about the state of StrangeCorp stocks, there are rumblings in the financial jungle!”

“Rumblings?”

Emboldened, Agent BDSM warms to his theme.

“Yes, rumblings! It may seem ludicrous to you, but we need product. Again. But…and I’ll tell you this for nothing mate…it’s got to be below 35,000 feet of film this time. That’s TOTAL length. Unedited. Get me? Somehow, your message must be condensed, de-tumesced…if you will…”

His tone softens appreciably as he leans into the camera, bumping his forehead as he does so.

“Listen Buffy, you know I’d only say this for your own good. I’m not trying to force you into anything. But you know, and I know, we all know, that not doing anything is like, well, you know the result in advance. Do something and the effects are, well, imponderable to say the least!”

And with that he sits back with the air of a man whose point has been well made.

And indeed it had been. Strangelove knew the wisdom of Agent BDSM. He knew that, even though StrangeCorp shares could never collapse entirely while he was still capable of MIndFUck Operations reality morphing (via subsidiary offshore holding Co RealityCorp Ents) the quality of the stock must never be allowed to depreciate appreciably. New product, he understood, was necessary for the continued maintenance of channels A B C and beyond…

New Product. Yes, why not? New Product out of his very own genes. New lines of discontinuance. New obfuscations. New HUMANS. New carefully covered tracks. Evil bastards in their prime halted in their tracks. New traditions of subservience, bullshit, obeisance and obfuscation to be nurtured.

Plus of course inaction almost always equaled De-Tumescence of the most distressing kind. Product is and was of course the be-all and end-all of existence. No point denying it. People need things to have, to touch, to dream…

Giving one last puff through his moustache, then, and fixing Agent BDSM with one last gimlet stare, he acquiesced…

“Agent BDSM, you’re a diamond…You done good my son…Hear me and hear me well. Your efforts will never go unrewarded while I breathe this fetid air. Are there any more like you at home Agent BDSM? Or did they break the mold when they made you? Your ingenuity in these matters will not go un-noticed while I still…[CLICK]…”

Agent BDSM was already gone. He had of course heard it all, and much verbiage of a similar nature, before.

Blanko sighed. The start of a good day’s work…and to reward himself he rolled over again, already Get Catered Michael Caine, nekkid with a shotgun(!) to all intents and purposes, and gave the boarding-house landlady, who for her part was wondering how on earth she’d ended up in this strange place, one of the best, most roistering seeings-to she’d experienced in many a long frustrated year…

Coming up for air, literal realities intervened…humming, straight from the enlarged, engorged brainpan of Strangelove. Fully channeled. All agents on standby…receiving. Direct download of spurious material…

DELEGATE!

“Bullet point this fucker would ya sweetie?”

Strangelove habitually disrespects employees but since they’ve all grown up in and beyond a universe in which this sort of disrespect is no longer regarded as a bad thing (ie: they don’t give a fuck themselves) they give as good as they get and given that Mr. S is a simpleton whose actual understanding of the channels of power he controls is attenuated to say the least, it doesn’t seem to matter to them. The power is always obtuse, impossible to actually discover. And that is his secret or one of them anyway…

DELEGATE!

We need…

· An impenetrable section. Full of abstruse imagery and lame-arsed pseudo- intellectual rambling. Something that will set indelible benchmarks of otiosity for the clinically tendentious and loathsome. This demographic should never be underestimated. It grows like a cancer. And we need to be ready to supply like with like, meeting this cancer in the body politic with a cancer of our own. A kick-ass cancer that brooks no backchat. This will take the form of impenetrable rambling of an intensely fatuous nature.

· A romantic interlude. Needless to say, for our purposes, “romantic” must perforce be an analogue of “pornographic”. I know for certain, Daisy, that in some influential circles, the only real romance left in the world is that of the pornographic. While I have personal issues with this outlook, I know it carries weight in certain bone-headed enclaves.

· An abstruse intellectual fugue. This must needs be composed of rhetorical elements purporting to explain ontological phenomena with reference to pop-cultural elements. I know it’s distasteful Daisy, but any book or film seriously intending to throw its intellectual weight around must of course touch these bases as delicately or as roughly as you like, according to taste. My personal preference (for what it’s worth – not much, as of course I exist merely to channel, to facilitate, to dream, to create, to babble, to expectorate, to haver, to prevaricate, to decipher, to alienate) is to take the rough with the smooth. With the emphasis firmly on the rough.

· A sex scene. This must, for obvious reasons, involve a multiplicity of rabbits. What’s that you say? It’s not obvious to you? My dear child, surely you know that rabbits are the most myth-laden creatures in the entire mytho-cultural realm. There barely exists a civilization in this or any dimension that I’m aware of that hasn’t seriously relied on rabbit iconography to bolster it’s sense of permanence or weightiness. Mythologically speaking, in other words, rabbits is where it’s at. But also clearly sex sells and by extension Key Moments in the narrative/continuum must be weighted with sex, freighted with rabbit imagery and sealed with a kiss.

Now, Daisy, I’m all shagged out. Come and give me one while I visualize. The visions must be unlocked. Agents must be placed on standby. Remind me, after you’ve sucked me dry, to memo Agent BDSM. Channels must be opened. And now, let us be GARLANDED with daisies. We enter the new world vision zone of Key Moments frozen in time/space. The ghosts are emerging…bottle the pure bliss…globules of love explode in image frenzy…3 Stooges…Marx Bros…Laurel ‘n’ Hardy…(later later)…Brando…Montgomery Shirtlifter…(earlier earlier)…Cagney white heat…no, too cack handed…Mae West…Adam West…(how’s that for a juxtaposition?)…Michael Angelo Caine…CAINE??? -30-

DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION/WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION/GHOSTS

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION (1933)

As the film continues rolling, children play with sheets and scare each other, apparently an eureka moment for the formation of the Klan. This historical distortion disturbs Rommel.

“This film is less than useless,” he barks. “This is not the history I expected at all. Is this not the story of the origins of the Ku Klux Klan? Where is the ‘Wizard of the Saddle?’”

From the stuttering turntable Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries pitch-shifts in full song. Onscreen, Ku Klux Klan vigilantes battle a hapless militia of black men.

After grunts of disapproval, Rommel rises suddenly and walks towards the film projector. A hyper-real superimposition of Klan footage on the Lieutenant, with two hooded horsemen galloping and holding a cross, make the staff officers scrinch their eyes.

“Turn it off!” Rommel fumes and whacks a rostrum with a pointer. The adjutants jump, reach for a light switch and fumble with the film projector.

“Enough of this buffoonery and propaganda. I am unconcerned with cartoonish portrayals of final solutions.”

WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION (2001)

The more I study the collectibles store, the more I realize the place is a shrine to Nathan Bedford Forrest. Despite interrupting their lunch hour, the husband-and-wife antebellum memorabilia merchants spend the better part of the afternoon discussing the myths and folklore of the object of their passion, Forrest.

The stories are legend. One tale after another of Forrest risking his own neck in some daring ill-advised personal assault on enemy positions while his inferior forces triumphed exquisitely over a legion of bamboozled Yankees, each battlefield assault punctuated with pithy, percipient yet cornpone punchlines such as “Get there firstest with the mostest” and “Never stand and take a charge… charge them too,” also “Get ‘em skeered and keep the skeer on ‘em.”

“This Forrest fellow was epic,” I tell my Cousin.

“Yes, he was,” he agrees, “but these fine folks didn’t tell you about all of his exploits.”

“Really? What did I miss?”

“What they didn’t mention was that Forrest was also the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.”

GHOSTS (1933)

“To know Forrest, I must go to the source,” Rommel cries. “To Brice’s Crossroads, the site of Forrest’s greatest triumph and the battlefield where he exercised his infamous pincer movement, movements to the detriment and annihilation of superior Northern forces. Find me a guide – a survivor… somebody who was there.”

“Herr Rommel,” Burgdorf reasons, “that was seventy years ago. Is there anybody there who is even still alive?”

“If not, we shall be guided by ghosts.” -30-

CLOSED FOR LUNCH (2001)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 5: CLOSED FOR LUNCH (2001)

The hand painted sign hanging on the door of Coontail Collectibles reads: “Closed for Lunch.” The store looks deserted. I knock anyway. Inside, a back room door opens, a matronly proprietress emerges, motions with a forefinger for us to wait, makes her way through the aisles and aisles of antebellum-era thockes and then lets us in. We are joined subsequently by her husband.

“Is there anything in specific y’all was interested in?” she coos.

“Naw, just kind of tire kicking,” I answer. “And trying to get a bead on the store’s etymology.”

“Well,” she replies,” we specialize in Suth’n memorabilia, if that’s what you mean.”

“And some Confederate artifacts as well,” her husband chimes in.

“Indeed,” I say. Pointing at a painting of a Rebel officer in a nest of dozens of Yankees who had taken aim with their rifles at point blank rage, I ask: “What’s this then?”

“That is a battlefield portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest taken at Fallen Timbers,” the husband explains.

“He looks like he’s in a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, he made out all right,” the husband says. “Notice how he has hoisted a Yankee soldier as a shield.”

“The damn Blue Bellies shot their own man and Bedford Forrest made it out unscathed,” his wife adds.

“The Yankee died, but Ol’ Forrest lived to fight again… and again,” the husband finishes.

The Fallen Timbers yarn has the elements of proper Civil War folklore: Southern chivalry, Northern ineptitude, replete with tragi-comic results.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in dogshit,” I say. -30-

THE ONE BEER TO HAVE

by Wrenchski

(excerpted from: PULL THE PIN: The KeroseneBomb Reader ; an extract of THE ALCHEMISTS NEGRO: My 30+ Years As A Motorsports Bottomfeeder)

A one-two finish is what I’m after now…

Running a two and a half car stock car team when you are the only one able to find which end of the screwdriver goes in the screw is not fun…or funny. I’m running around trying to get all the tires back in the racks while the team owner (2nd car drivers mom) is bitching about how if her (nearly retarded) son drove THE CAR WITH THE GOOD PARTS IN IT HE COULD WIN SOME RACES, and I’m thinking everybody thinks their kids a winner… then why does SHE think JR’s penchant for 12 year old girlfriends is perfectly normal when he’s a couplea years short of thirty… tires in the racks, where’s my jacks and stands and gas cans… O’sweaty is having his picture taken AGAIN with the goddamn checkered flag, and JR is in the spectator parking lot with his hand up Lolita’s skirt AGAIN… they were out there between the heats and the main event… I need a helper old enough to open my beers and pour them down my throat… mind made up next week O’sweaty gets the number 2 car into the top three AGAIN and JR wrecks the number 1 car for the third time as anything with the least bit of stagger and left side weight causes him to careen from the outside across the railroad ties marking the inside of the turns ruining the wheels and most of the suspension…he says it’s because the steering wheel is too big… (Mom bought him a tiny Grant chrome “racing” wheel for his B-day)

Fat balding man waddles up and offers me an open beer…

It’s that goddamn cheap ass stuff my parents drink…only reason that brewery is still operational is they’ve discovered firemen cops and other civil servants are EXTREMELY loyal IF you give them free kegs for their social gatherings… to NORMAL people it tastes like it was strained thru an old gym sock.

I slap it out of his hand and tell him to GET ME A REAL BEER, DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING OFF-DUTY COP, OR WHAT? BRING BACK A BUDWEISER, FER CRISSAKES… He stammers and walks away. Toward Mom…much gesticulating and talking…he walks off…

Moms asks me what I did to the guy in the Hawaiian shirt… Morry… Morty… huh?

I ask why she cares…

It would seem unbeknownst to me She had invited the DISTRIBUTOR of the previously mentioned swill to a lil’ after-race party for the brilliant idea of attempting to uh…date rape him and put the arm…lips…whatever on him for the expressed idea of buying say, a couplea MODIFIEDS and moving the whole deal into the big time… uniforms… trailers… trucks…tires… AND NOW I’VE RUINED EVERYTHING AND I’M FIRED…

I have to reply that firing a volunteer is difficult at best… especially when he DOES ALL THE WORK, AND OWNS ALL THE GODDAMN SUPPORT EQUIPMENT AND ONE OF THE CARS.

THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 4: THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

In a strobing smoke-filled classroom at the Potsdam War Academy, a silhouetted quartet of uniformed men puff cigarettes and fidget and watch a screening of D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation. The air stings of crackling celluloid, and of the soot of history slowly melting from the heat of a movie projector’s lamp. As the film strip burnishes from age and friction, emulsions decay and nitrates metastasize, mixing with hot balls of dust that float through the tobacco haze like dirty satellites in space. It burns the nostrils and the singes the eyelashes.

In lieu of an orchestra or a proper pipe organ, the soundtrack to the silent film is a perpetual whir of the projector’s motor, a clattering grind of mechanical teeth champing on 16mm sprockets interrupted by a smattering of coughs from the assembled military staff.

A plump adjutant fiddle-fucks around with a flakey phonograph machine. A pair of staff officers, Burgdorf and Maisel, befuddled by the movie they have been forced to watch – an American film which purports to explain the necessity of the Ku Klux Klan in the Age of Reconstruction – squirm from boredom. A fourth viewer, Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, equally impatient with the movie’s plodding plot and maudlin histrionics, taps his creased thighs with his leather field gloves. “If Goebbels made such shit he would be shot,” the Lieutenant quips, and the rest of men chortle. The screening is Rommel’s idea; he commissioned a print because of his interest in Nathan Bedford Forrest, the savage and savvy Confederate General who, after the Civil War, became the Klan’s inaugural Imperial Wizard.

“Schneider! The needle!” Rommel urges, his frustration with the film compounded by the gnawing silences of the malfunctioning phonograph. The portly adjutant prods the phonograph, and strains of Wagner’s Die Walküre jump starts to life.

On the screen, former friends — and now adversarial soldiers — shoot at each other with primitive rifles and then a Title Card reads: “On the battlefield. War claims its bitter, useless sacrifice. True to their promise, the chums meet again.”

The scene cuts, and Griffith’s portrayal of hand-to-hand combat in the American Civil War resumes. A Confederate soldier is shot and drops to terra firma. His “chum” from the North attacks with a fixed bayonet, and just before the inevitable skewering, recognizes his fallen Southern pal, smiles and puts his weapon down.

“Why doesn’t he kill him with the blade?” Maisel asks, his lanky frame bent in a ball of confusion.

“His enemy must be his brother or his cousin, I think,” Burgdorf responds.

Their discourse is interrupted by Rommel. “In war, there is no room for sentimentality,” he argues. “Americans lack the cruel instinct necessary for pure, complete domination.”

Birth Of A Nation continues in background; as strings swell, the compassionate boy is shot and falls over his dead friend. Dying, he caresses his chum’s lifeless body. “The American’s last great conquest was maybe manifest destiny,” Burgdorf says. “Then they got soft.”

“Yes,” Maisel nods. “Maybe nothing was left so they turned on each other.” -30-