SECRET IDENTITIES, ETC.

Jimmy Salinas:

So I been writing these stories for money and since they’re all real dirty and real violent I decided to use a pen name. That way nobody’d know it was me.

What I came up with was “Jimmy Basura.” It had a certain ring to it.

But then Jimmy Basura started coming up with these other characters who wanted to write and draw and record things, make movies and so on. So this alter-ego of mine developed eight alter-egos of his own.

Trouble was, each alter-ego then created a sub-alter-ego (or two, or three) so that they could also do secret things. And then everything really got out of control when each of those subs’ imaginary friends and evil twins started showing up.

Now there’re more of these quixotic locos running around than I can count. It makes my head spin. Everybody’s running around in some disguise or another, people steal each other’s identities, get mixed up for one another.

Makes me feel like I just want to burn it all down.

The Imaginary Friend of My Alter-Ego's Alter-Ego

Ofélia Hass:

When I got here the doctor, Harvey Carcass, MD, said I had to do this as a condition of my release, like to make public how I came to be another “girl interrupted.”

I’m epileptic. I’ve always had visions as a result, starting from when I was a teenager. That’s where my art comes from. But my family is a very traditional Catholic alemán-mexicano family (grandma never learned English even though her parents moved here in 1934, when she was 10 years old, and my mom always had to interpret everything on T.V. for her) and my affliction was always hidden. It would have been a disgrace to reveal the condition to anyone outside the family.

I tried to study up on epilepsy and its stigma, how to manage it. I found conflicting viewpoints, especially when it came to sex. I adopted the ancient Roman perspective that engaging in sexual activity could relieve the seizures. But social anxiety made my interactions with boys and girls I was interested in difficult. So I turned to a solitary kink.

I don’t know what initially “triggered” it, but I began to dress as a boy. I assumed a second identity —called Billy Hapsburg— and started shoplifting compulsively. I developed a shoplifting fetish. It was all that could get me off at that point.

Before I knew what was happening, I had these two dolt detectives after me, the so-called Reverse Sherlocks: Trigger Lee and Junior Batson. They eventually tracked me down and turned me in to the police, which is how I came to be committed at St. Quiteria’s.

But then here at St. Quiteria’s I learned that there are no Trigger or Junior, that in fact Junior is really just another alter-ego of Billy Hapsburg, my alter-ego. And Trigger, his partner and lead detective, was actually just Junior’s imaginary friend.

I can’t say in this essay that I think Doctor Carcass is gas-lighting me. That won’t help me get out of here any faster. So I’m going along with this whole trip. I’ve even agreed to draw some comic strips about the whole thing.

Film Stills

Here we have some stills from the recently discovered music video for Dim Jim’s “I Ruin Everything,” off his final album,4821’s It’s Him!

La Espada no. 400 - Mink'a Press

La Espada no. 400 is a 48 page, 1/2 tabloid size, full-color publication that features collage art and a comic from Ofelia Hass, a Sol y Sol interview by Constance Condon (of Connie and the Condoms), plus manifestos by Nadya Kivi, Simon Chevrolet, and other members of the WNC.

I’m real proud of this one. But (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) it’s too fuckin big to reproduce it in a way that makes sense. There are a few options I could explore. Like I could put it all in black and white. That would bring the cost down some. Or I could split the thing up into several issues at half the size (zine standard 1/2 letter size) and combine the writings with other ones and some other collages.

Any thoughts? What else could I do with 48 pages of fiction, manifestos, and collages? I need to come up with some alternative or this labor of love may just be another thing that gets consigned to the flames.

Harmony for Guitarists (zine)

The next zine up for sale in the Wolf Note Shop is Harmony for Guitarists by Luna Flores. This 40 page guitar publication details the ins and outs of how chords work, with design and graphics by Ofelia Hass.

wolfnotecollective.com/s/HfG_luna-flores_january-2021.pdf

EXTRA

But say we want to shake off some of those connotations, so as to be free of them, at least in part. First of all let’s modify our terminology, but just a little, because with some slight modification we can free some words from their connotational baggage. Picture a word as a traveler, a criminal on the lam, a political exile, a refugee, set to make a new life in a new land, and in order to travel expeditiously, to avoid detection and detention, they drop their bags on the platform and leave them there right as they hop on the train. Now this word-person still looks the same, has the same accent; much about them remains the same. They are, however, assuming a new identity although not trying to change their whole personality. It’s a partial disguise.

Let’s go back to the word “supernatural.” It’s not a complicated word. It just has two parts. Let’s take the root to be “nature,” meaning “the creative and regulative physical power which is conceived of as operating in the material world and as the immediate cause of all its phenomena,” from Latin natura: birth, constitution, character, course of things, etc, nat- participle stem of nasci, to be born. The native English word is kind.* “Natural” would of course be the adjectival derivative of the substantive “nature.”

The prefix “super” also is from Latin, an adverb and preposition meaning “above, on the top (of), beyond, besides, in addition, used in compostion with various meanings.”

Suppose the combined meaning of “super-natural” has centuries of connotational baggage it’d like to let go of. Of course the word has meaning and that meaning is useful to communicate certain sets of ideas. So what to do if we want to communicate some but not all of those ideas and also have it sound fresh, free of connotations of superstition, hokem, and charlatanry? Related “super” words like “superhuman” also have value connotations, in this case indicating superiority, i.e. a higher rank, status, or quality, a spatial indication of hierarchical structure. My proposal is simple: replace the prefix “super” with “extra.” “Extranatural” rings well, is immediately understandable, stands apart from YA images of wizards throwing fireballs out of their hands or religious conceptions of afterlife, and yet is able to contain those same images and more.

The prefix “extra” has similar meanings to “super,” albeit without the specific directional and evaluative connotations. It means “situated outside something, lying outside the province or scope of.” “Extranatural” would mean “outside the scope of the material world and all its phenomena.” More or less. It wouldn’t have to imply ghosts or goblins or unexplained powers beyond the scope of human ability, but it could. It can also mean something perhaps less astonishing—that is, avoiding the current one-ups-manship of ever more complex CG-rendered magical and superpowered cinematic set pieces—but no less strange. It’s not a new word, but a word that has had a makeover. A word making a fresh start.

“Extra” could be useful in this way in other contexts. Take a minute and consider what we call “reality.” For now we won’t explore questions of what is real, and whether with our neurological and linguistic limitations we are even capable of conceiving what reality is, but will instead stick with basic definitions of reality in a tangible, i.e. material sense. “Real” is an adjective that means “having an objective existence, actually existing as a thing... in philosophy applied to whatever is regarded as having an existence in fact and not merely in appearance, thought, or language, or as having an absolute and necessary, in contrast to a merely contingent existence.” Let us unsophisticatedly take this to exclude immaterial things as not existing within the bounds of the “real.” By immaterial we could mean incorporeal entities (ghosts, demons, angels, etc.) or places (the Celtic Otherworld, heavens and hells, for example) or concepts, feelings, thoughts, or ideas.

Say as an artist you wish to move beyond the limitations connotated by a term like “avant garde” or “vanguard,” but you still wish to explore. These are words with generations of artistic theoretical baggage and also a martial meaning, as the vanguard means the frontline in a battle. There you are on the frontlines in an 18th century battle, fresh off the farm in Virginia. You were milking cows or bailing hay three weeks ago. Now you face almost certain death. You have no horse, no sword. You are armed with a musket. You will march directly toward your enemy to a jaunty snare drum beat, and many of your comrades will fall. You are cannon fodder. Let’s toss that out. “Avant garde” we will still use in reference to some works of the previous century, but for the sake of our work, we’ll set that aside and let it represent a certain time and place.

Like “extranatural,” the word “extrareal” may have some usefulness, especially as an extension or sequel to the word “surreal,” which features the prefix sur- “beyond.” The surrealists, beginning with Breton, explored dream imagery and the unconscious mind as the ideational fountain for the movement.

I say let’s move past surrealism—let’s go through all the doors opened by surrealism at the same time. “Extra” implies boundaries and limitations, and a willingness to go beyond those. We can take cues not only from surrealism and its psychoanalytic approach to technique e.g. automatism, but also transgressive art and literature and cinema, work which seeks to surpass boundaries of all kinds. Transgressive work often seeks to trespass into forbidden moral territory, in terms of subject matter. The prefix trans- “extending across, through or over.” Transnational, translation, transsexual, transgender. We question and surpass borders.

As extrarealists, we embody a worldview that there is a fundamental commonality in all things in the cosmos owing to the primal unity at the instant before the beginning of timespace, a harmonic state of togetherness that shapes our existence by its absence. All things in the cosmos are animated by desire, which is a longing to return to our primal unified state.

Every extrarealist is a poet, whether s/he versifies or not, because poetry is a recognition of samenesses, especially far-flung and unexpected ones. As poets we recognize the tenuousness of boundaries, the fluid nature of matter and energy, physicality and personality, sex and gender. We see the overlaps in things, and how they are similar, whereas non-poets, non-extrarealists see discrete objects, ideas and concepts.

We move beyond surrealism and transgression, incorporating fundamental tendencies of both, and also add a mixed-means approach, exploring any and all media available to us, no matter our skill or training in said media. We explore the boundaries between forms, we occupy space between and beyond man and woman, we trespass and illegally dig for treasure in the territorial overlap between forms, for instance between film and painting or between music and fiction.

As Extrarealists, we seek limits in order to go beyond them. Sometimes these are the outer limits of a form—“is this even a sculpture?”—sometimes we are looking for the overlap between two or more things—“which is it—a sculpture or a film?”—sometimes we exceed the boundaries of personal identity and work alter-egotistically. We seek things that are beyond or outside the realms or nature (extranatural) and real (extrareal), fueled by the unquenchable burning desire for unity.

 * all quoted definitions are from the Oxford English Dictionary

In my theory of alter-egotism

(I can send you notes, but will just reference some key points here to make my arguments) the genre encapsulates artistic alter-ego creation such as my own attempts at it as well as the related arts of stage and screen acting, performance art, and includes morally questionable, even illegal practices such as impersonation and certain other types of fraud, as in criminals on the lam using assumed names.

On the one hand, one of the gifts to humanity that fiction provides is in its empathy, as writers of fiction generally attempt to write about characters other than themselves. This empathy is transferable to the reader, who also identifies with the protagonist typically. Traces of the author's personality as well as incidents and anecdotes, stories, scraps of dialog, and insight into the character or personality of another living being: these are commonly accepted as building blocks of fiction writing. In the course of creating characters, an author may essay to live inside the character they are writing, to overlap the fictional personality onto their own, to harmonize the two, not for the sake of changing themselves but to make the character come alive on the page. There are of course innumerable examples of authors' successful attempts to create characters different from themselves as well as characters based upon themselves throughout literary history. Now extend this idea of empathy to the creation of an alter-ego. The argument from this direction might conclude that if we begin from an empathetic starting point anyone should be able to portray anyone else, and harmful stereotypes based on race, sexual orientation, placement on a political spectrum, or any other of a number of qualifying criteria would be self-censoriously ruled out. That's the York Notes summary of one possible point of view.

But let's expand our point of view to include context, so we can see the issue from other angles. Reference was made to Cindy Sherman's use of blackface in her Bus Riders series of 1976. Sherman's oeuvre  is problematic to feminists as well as people of color for its overreliance on stereotypes, effectively propping up an oppressive status quo rather than helping to dismantle it. Critiques of the referenced work are fair and honest, noting that Sherman at the time was capable of creating a range of white characters before the camera, as seen in the photographs, but her black characters have a feeling of interchangeableness  due to the use of the same traditional blackface makeup for every persona as well as other details of styling. 

It seems clear that the images can't be defended on artistic grounds, as the blatant exploitation of unfair racial stereotypes is not only offensive to the people who are lampooned as well as lazy, which deflates whatever seriousness the work might have had in the artist's mind at the time of its conception and production. Now of course some might try to defend Sherman by calling attention to her youth at the time of the work but such an argument can be, and often is used in defense of all sorts of antisocial actions by young people. Youth is no more an excuse than ignorance. 

My own habit is to ask "what fresh insight does this work provide?" This isn't a moral question. In spite of my personal tendency to denounce Cindy Sherman's racist explications in Bus Riders I also hold the conviction that art has no mandate to moralize, that didactic art and literature constitute some of the most vacuous and insipid works of the imagination humanity has produced, and furthermore whether or not a work is offensive isn't sufficient grounds to deem it entirely without value. And yet when I ask myself "what insight does the work provide" in this case it doesn't strike me as particularly revealing of anything other than the author's own prejudicial assumptions about blackness, and about poor, marginalized people as simply "others" who are held at a distance, if not in contempt. 

If I were to add something to this critique, I might point out that use of alter-egos may be morally questionable in itself, as an act of deception, but that in the case of some types of performance, such as acting, it’s an agreed-upon deception, a handshake lie, for the audience understands that the actor and character are not synonymous, but when the actor is any good the audience forgets it’s seeing an actor and is swept along in the story. It’s an agreed-upon deception and a fundamental prerequisite of theatrical arts.

It’s also worth mentioning that an element of play is involved in all artistic creation, play being here defined as a certain childlike freedom and enjoyment in the pure act of doing, or making. Sometimes play will get us into trouble.

Spartanburg
March, 2023

I BEAMED INTO THE PERFECT

But perfection is a process. It’s the journey, not the destination, making perfection itself imperfect. Once again: Both/And, not Either/Or on full display. So it’s an imprecise process. You can’t engineer a body but instead you choose one based on your requirements and mine were: 1) the ability to assume aliases and alter-egos, to disguise myself, 2) to infiltrate the halls of power and plant the seeds of its undoing, seeds which now grow into vines which penetrate the mortar of power’s foundations and will cause its edifices to crumble.

Los Angeles
April 26, 2023

CUT OR BURN

It seems to me that something has been lost: a distinction. Nuance. Things get lumped together, sometimes fairly, sometimes otherwise. Much is lost when we generalize. Let’s talk about art and writing for a minute.

All art crosses boundaries. It transgresses. Poetry—I like to use the words “art” and “poetry” somewhat interchangeably, a main idea that I’m sure I’ve extemporized on elsewhere—finds overlaps between things. Likenesses, samenesses. That’s where we get all our tropes* from. Sometimes this normal, everyday process of poetic trespass is shocking or offensive to delicate sensibilities.

The distinction I want to make here is between what I’ll call “edgy” and “incendiary” work. Both types can be shocking or offensive. But there’s a difference in content and intent. Keep in mind that these are just my opinions and I don’t purport to speak for anyone other than myself.

The word “edgy” has a variety of connotations now in the early ‘20s. But let’s think of it as a concept and not just a word and expand on it for a minute. One way of looking at it might be “cutting edge,” i.e. “avant garde.” It’s work that’s out at the forefront. The vanguard in a battle is the row of men with spears who are the first to break through enemy lines, the first to be sacrificed and lose their lives, who fearlessly rush toward death for whatever cause they believe it is they’re fighting for. If you look at it that way, avant garde or edgy work is admirable. Courageous. That’s generally what critics meant a hundred years ago when they talked about the avant garde.

Fast forward to the early 21st and we get edgelords. Here we can make a distinction between the courage of an artist who pushes boundaries and the bravado of the keyboard warrior, safe in his room somewhere, a cutter who doesn’t care if he cuts himself or someone else.

Let’s contrast that with Lorca, who lost his life to the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Federico Garcia Lorca was a surrealist and a poet and queer. He’s regarded as one of Spain’s greatest poets. He was a bright, burning light in a dark time. His life was cut short when he was executed by Franco’s men. His life and work were incendiary.

What does that have to do with edgelords? Very little. By my definition, the edgelord is a poseur. His** utterances exist for mere attention seeking and lack real substance. His positions are taken up for their shock affect and little if anything more. He’s desperate for any attention he can get at all, even if he’s attacked, or maybe especially if he’s attacked. His arguments are shallow and weak.

So why make a distinction at all? This matters to me because the energy, the fire, the burning is something that matters, something I value. It’s necessary. If artists are afraid to offend then they resort to safer tactics and risk nothing. Of course I don’t think anyone’s going to look back at the life and work of an artist of Lorca’s stature and call him an edgelord, unless they’re trying to be edgy. But the contrast between work that has substance and courage and breaks real boundaries and takes real risks and work that’s just made to provoke and offend is clear and ought to be delineated so that the embers don’t burn out but instead are stoked and bring us the cleansing catharsis and healing and animus inherent in their heat.

Los Angeles
April 29, 2023

*tropes, meaning similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech, not the repeated, formulaic clichés that stink up “cultural” products meant for mass production.

**I refer to edgelords in the masculine because they tend to be dudes.

Affinities

L.A. meant the Beach Boys and Annette Funicello and the Beverly Hillbillies and bleached blondes and burnouts, beaded curtains and cults and other crazies. But there was always the taco connection, the Cheech and Chong of it all, the lowriders and the surf guitars, the Kenneth Angers and the rumors of the secret rituals that kept it all afloat. There was another side. Mystery, in other words.

Turns out there are many sides to Los Angeles. It’s a vast urban sprawl, a collection of cities that overlap and contrast with one another. There’s extreme wealth—around 50 billionaires live here, including some suit named “Jose Feliciano,” (and no, he’s not the good Jose Feliciano, the guy who gave us “Feliz Navidad,” he’s a private equity billionaire) and excepting fake smart guy edgelord idol Elon Musk, who left town and lives in Texas now—and there’s also extreme poverty and homelessness. There’s Chinatown and Little Tokyo and Koreatown and Highland Park and Boyle Heights and Hollywood and Venice Beach and the little old ladies from Pasadena and lots of others I haven’t had the time to see on this trip.

But the only thing that has truly shocked me this week is how friendly the people of Los Angeles have been toward me. Being from the south, I never bought into the idea of southern hospitality. But this isn’t supposed to be another tirade against the town where I live and have never felt at home. It’s supposed to be in praise of the town I’m visiting. So I’ll quit by saying that I love it here in California, and that I feel at home and at ease here in ways I’ve never felt back in South Carolina and Texas.

Los Angeles
April 30, 2023

Analog Life

It seems inescapable. What’s the alternative? You could try to turn Luddite. Give it all up. But that’s probably not such a good idea. Have you ever tried to give up all the trash you eat—potato chips, fast food, frozen stuff—at once? It never works, and you always come back to it with a vengeance. Same thing with New Years resolutions. It has to do with your pleasure and reward centers and dopamine. What’s more effective is instead you can whittle away at all the bad food habits, one at a time. You stop consuming soft drinks. When that’s achieved, maybe you cut out sugar altogether. Replace the bad stuff with good. Give up the junk with the added sugar and eat lots and lots of fruit instead, for instance.

We can do the same thing with our digital lives. Chip away at the harmful shit and start replacing the bad habits with good ones. I’ll leave it to you to work out the details. At this point I’m working out the details of what to quit when and what to replace it with for myself and no one else. And I don’t believe in on-size-fits-all solutions. A program of changing habits needs to be individualized to be effective, in my opinion.

Now humor me for a minute as I’m going to skip ahead in the process a bit and I’m not going to talk about those above-mentioned details concerning my own habits. That’s not even interesting to me so I know it aint interesting to you. Instead I’d like to talk a little about the philosophical underpinnings of the whole enterprise.

What I’m advocating for here is an “analog life,” as opposed to a digital one. What does that even mean? Maybe we should start by defining the terms “analog” and “digital,” just so we’re clear about what we mean. Everybody’s familiar with these terms, but let’s slow down a minute and consider them a little more.

an·a·log
adjective
relating to or using signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position, voltage, etc.

dig·i·tal
adjective
(of signals or data) expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1, typically represented by values of a physical quantity such as voltage or magnetic polarization.

For the purpose of this argument, let’s just use “digital” to mean anything we do on a laptop or a smartphone or whatever and “analog” to represent the rest of life, e.g. going out for a walk, having an in-person conversation, eating a meal that we don’t post. Literally everything else we do. The phrases emphasized in the definitions indicate this difference between things in the real world and things done on a computer.

Let’s make one differentiation. What I’m advocating for is “analog life,” not “an analog life.” The difference is that if one attempts to live “an analog life,” they’re trying to accomplish the herculean task of complete renunciation of all digital living, so no internet, no streaming TV or music, no texting or posting, no nothing. A pre-computer way of life. Not that that’s a bad thing. I imagine that would be great, much better in fact.

But what I’m talking about is a philosophy or approach to living that I call “analog life,” without the indefinite article. It could be an approach to living where a normal person such as you or I try to get more analog or real-world experiences into our daily lives.

Here’s a personal example. I eat lunch at my desk most days, and when I do, I stream a video while I eat. It’s a digital/analog hybrid experience. As an all-analog alternative, why not pop open a book instead of looking at the computer screen for an extra half hour or hour? Or better yet, take my lunch outside. Read or don’t read—we can look at mindfulness sometime maybe but it gets no more than a mention here—but either way it’s an all analog experience. It’s that simple. We just look for little ways every day to live offscreen.

Los Angeles
April 27, 2023

Noise Without Borders Volume 3

https://noisewithoutborders.bandcamp.com/track/99-sensory-complex-james-heighway-slowly-drowning

Release On Demand (ROD) Program

I’ve recorded a few albums over the years, but haven’t often put them out on CD or tape. And I can’t really see the sense in having boxes full of them.

Sooooo…. what if someone wants to help me out and buy one? To that end I now offer a “Release on Demand” service. Kind of like print on demand.

It’s like this:

1. Go to the Microwave Eyes Bandcamp page. Or just click on one of the album covers above because each one is a link to its respective album.

2. Listen to some stuff.

3. Find something for which you’d like a CD or cassette.

4. Purchase a digital download. Digital albums are usually $7, but you can pay more if you want. Pay me $14 instead of 7, and I’ll make you a CD. Make sure to send me a note to let me know you want one!

Next Month's Album: Teenage Hells

November’s album will be Teenage Hells, a “solo” album. That means it will be under my own name rather than a band name or an alter-ego/alias.

There are 17 original tracks, plus a bonus cover song on here. Most of them were recorded in my high school years (1991-1995) on either a boombox or home stereo system, upgraded to 4-track cassette sometime in ‘94 or ‘95. A few tracks are newer ones, sneakily added to the compilation when they don’t belong there. I’ll leave it up to listeners to decide which ones are which.

Teenage Hells is intended to become a series, much like Phantom Limbs. If you don’t know about Phantom Limbs, it’s an ongoing series of recordings with songs recorded immediately after they are written, in the most bare-bones, lo-fi format, usually just an acoustic guitar and voice on a cassette. I’ve got tons and tons of cassettes that I am going through, a painful process. If I find anything else good (a subjective term, for these recordings and compositions hardly meet any accepted criteria for musical “goodness”) then there might be a Teenage Hells Vol 2 as well.

A post about how I'm doing

People always ask you how you’re doing. I always lie and say something positive.

I’m alright/Doing well/Fine, thanks/etc. Isn’t this what everyone does? I mean, who’s fine, ever?

If I were to answer truthfully, I'd probably say something like “disordered,” or “dysregulated,” or “unsupported,” or a combination of those things, because that’s how I actually feel. Every day.

Now, there are days when I do feel “fine” or “well” or whatever. Sometimes that feeling will stretch to a week. Sometimes two weeks. But it takes a tremendous effort of nervous system regulation, a monk-like level of self-control via diet, exercise, rest, meditation, therapy, scheduling and routines, and much more (without the aid or accountability of a monastery, other monks, or even reliable, present friends) to achieve that, and it inevitably crashes down like a house of cards, leaving me a mess for extended periods of time: weeks, months. But nobody ever sees it because the people in my life other than my immediate family only see me maybe once a season, if that, and when we do see each other, well I grew up by learning how to mask my thoughts, feelings, desires, mannerisms, facial expressions, etc. with some degree of effectiveness. And if we see each other that seldom, are we really even “in each other’s lives?”

Yes, I’ve been diagnosed and the verdict is that I have a pretty disordered mind. That means they told me I have four disorders: Autism, ADHD, SAD, and Adjustment Disorder with Anxiety. I had to look that one up, and I have to say that it’s a relief to receive diagnoses as it gives me a more clear path on how to heal and hopefully get better somehow.

So I’ve been in therapy. It’s helped me a lot already. Unfortunately though I’ve come to self-diagnose with yet another thing: Complex PTSD. I think some people think of this as “childhood PTSD,” and it has to do with having an “injured nervous system from coming out of a rough family.” Anyway, I’m pretty sure CPTSD well-describes a lot of my feelings and behavioral patterns, so I’m adding it to the list. Isolation, feelings of being utterly alone, even feelings of not being human, are regular states of mind for me and feature into the criteria for CPTSD.

When I was a kid, my parents would fight. And by fight I mean they would have screaming matches and things often got broken and there were multiple threats of divorce. Once when they were having one of these fights I got in the bathtub to feel safe and stop shaking. The hot water and the bubbles were soothing. But when the dust settled, they barged in on me and asked me which parent I would rather go with if they divorced. I’ll never forget it. I was eight years old.

Me in 1985 as an alter boy at St. Mary’s in Greenville, SC. I was in third grade there.

My older brother would beat the shit out of me every time I was alone with him, humiliate me in front of his friends, call me a “faggot” and otherwise degrade me, ever since I could remember. By the time I turned 13, in July of 1990, he’d cut all that shit out—he had been a wild teenager, even getting into fist-fights with our Dad—loud crashes as they wrestled each other against walls and into furniture—Mom and Dad and Danny all screaming at each other, cussing—chaos, entropy—I remember one incident where the big mirror that hung on the wall in the living room fell and broke—I would hide under my bed, shaking like a leaf, not out of fear for myself but fear for them, that they would be seriously hurt or even killed—I imagined I could just jump out a window and run away and that’s how I made myself believe I wasn’t scared for my own physical safety—I guess he had matured a little after having been kicked out and having to get a job and an apartment and all that. That summer he’d returned from working in Tennessee and started taking me out in his old Corvair convertible and getting me burgers and fries and milkshakes and talking to me like an actual human being, as opposed to a piece of shit that he wanted to scrape off his shoe. It finally started to feel like I had a real brother, not just some kid who was six years older and hated me. But then he got in a car wreck that same month that left him in a 5-month coma and permanently and totally disabled.

There’s a lot more than that, and I could go on and on about all these things, but those two patterns of abuse—let’s just call it what it is—are enough to fuck a little kid up pretty good for life.

I’ve never wanted to talk about all this shit for a lot of reasons, but mostly I feel ashamed of all of this, even though not a single thing they did to me was my fault. I don’t know why I’m even writing this now, except that the shit I went through in my volatile home life as a small child has led me to the state of extreme isolation in which I now live.

There are (thankfully) at least a few people to talk to on the phone about some things, but I don’t have a real social support network or a real circle of friends, i.e. people I can rely on to be present for me physically (as in in the same place at the same time) or offer me affection, people I can see more than once or twice a year. I can’t even get anyone to come over for a fucking cookout. It’s not their fault. It’s no one’s fault really, except maybe my family, who raised me this way.

Anyway, I’m fine! How are you?

MI PRIMERA PALABRA

Let me just say that I believe no words are bad in themselves. They’re just things, objects. They can be used for good or for ill. But the word itself is just a tool of expression. Sure it can be used as a weapon, but that’s not what it was made for.

When I was growing up my parents and my brother and I would go to Texas every summer and sometimes over Christmas. In later years, after Danny’s accident, we started flying rather than driving there. We would gather at an aunt and uncle’s house somewhere in the Houston sprawl or we would camp out at Grandma and Grandpa Martinez’ house in Corpus Christi. Things were very different there than they were back in South Carolina. The food was great and so was the music and the weather and some of the architecture but I think what made the deepest impression on me was probably the language.

Mom and her brother and sisters and Grandma and Grandpa would all carry on endlessly in Spanglish, seamlessly moving back and forth between Spanish and English midsentence. There were a lot of colorful expressions used. The one I remember most clearly and affectionately is “chingado.”

Coming soon to a theatre near you! Off-off-off-off Broadway.

It’s a very Mexican thing to say, from the verb “chingar,” which means “to fuck.” Like its English equivalent, “chingar” is one of the most flexible of utterances, being readily adaptable to any and all parts of speech. I learned how to say “chingado” if I accidentally broke one of my toys or stubbed my toe, “chingalo, pendejo” to asshole kids on the playground—they didn’t know what it meant and couldn’t remember it well enough to repeat to report me to the authorities—“¿qué chingados?” when confused. La Chingada is also a town in Veracruz, the Mexican state where my Grandma Martinez was born.

Of course I couldn’t say any of that shit around the adults. But all of my cousins and I cussed as much as we wanted when the grownups weren’t around, which was probably twice as much as they did. That includes my white cousins back in SC, but we just cussed in English.

The word “chingado,” in spite of and because of its vulgarity, is a source of great pride for me and many others. It’s a part of my essence that runs through my veins and can never be taken away from me. Octavio Paz wrote about the word in El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) and my interpretation of it is that Mexico is a bastardized nation. The biggest ethnic group there is Mestizo, a mix of the indigenous people and the Spanish invaders. During the Conquest, Cortés relied on an interpreter to communicate with the Mexica and other native leaders, a woman called Marina or Malintzin, often referred to as “La Malinche,” and sometimes derisively as “La Chingada.”

I’ve lived in South Carolina pretty much my whole life. But Texas and Mexico go with me everywhere I go because I carry them around inside of me. ¡Ay la chingada do I love being alive!

Los Angeles
April 28, 2023

Notes from the underworld

Sooooo you may know that I’m working on getting some shows again. Part of that is searching the internet for bands I played with before and venues and such, and I’ve come across some amusing tidbits.

For instance, this cover of my song “Bad Luck” by Greenville punk band Scuds, from their 2016 release Bombs Away:

What is a Mixed Means artist?

It’s not exactly mixed media, but it’s kind of like that. I first came across the term in a book called The Theatre of Mixed Means: An introduction to happenings, kinetic environments, and other mixed-means performances by Richard Kostelanetz. It was a seminal work in my development, featuring interviews with La Monte Young, John Cage, Ann Halprin, and others concerning work that blended techniques and ideas from various artforms, dissolving many boundaries between them in the process. Robert Rauschenberg’s theatre pieces I found particularly amusing.

In my work, all of that adds up to a cosmically-scaled fiction project that uses prose and verse writing, songs, photography and video, graphic design, zines, comics, and any means or materials I have at my disposal to tell the complete story. “Mixed Means” is the essential composite form of the Wolf Note Collective and all its many stories and songs and images and films.

I don’t like the sound of the phrase cosmically-scaled. That sounds too hippy or too bloated or both.

It may be both or neither of those things. I don’t really care either way. I follow my muse, not critics. That’s why I don’t read many music or film reviews, I have never used Twitter, and I don’t subscribe to periodicals that feature this type of writing. It’s not that I never read them, but I wait until after I’ve had time to think about the work I’ve just read or seen or heard and form my own view on it. When I do read them, I often disagree. Usually with old, classic work I don’t find the consensus to be far off the mark, but with newer things I don’t find much value in critical readings because too often they either spoon-feed the reader some key concepts they want them to understand or they misinterpret things, or they use a political checklist to assess a work’s worthiness or unworthiness.

I call my work cosmically-scaled because primarily it’s fiction, specifically fantasy fiction, like The Lord of the Rings or Dune—I group Dune and LOTR in the same category, excuse me, due mainly to the world-building elements—with an infrastructure of an invented world, complete with its own history and prehistory, economy, geology, political and authority structures, physics and astronomy, mythologies, competing religions, and so on. That might not be apparent in a story where the groop almost burn down the house they’re living in thanks to an ice-skating mishap, but it’s there, most obviously in stories with ancient or medieval or far-future settings or stories with magic and monsters.

It seems to me you’re dealing with themes of—

Let me stop you right there. I am happy to talk about how I do the work, processes, and so on but don’t ask me about the themes. Let’s just say that the result and the process are the same thing, and what it boils down to is a type of unification. That’s all you need to know about the themes. If you like the work and you want to spend some time thinking about it, then think about it. But don’t look to me to validate or denounce your theories.

Do you have a speaking position?

In my view, sex, sexuality, gender, and identity are all fluid things, within certain physical limits. For instance, I can’t change the fact that I’m a white latino. Mom’s side of the family was from Mexico and Dad’s was from the isles, I think Ireland and Scotland. I can ignore the history and culture of one or both of those but it won’t change my genetic makeup. But to answer your question I am an Autistic single father with ADHD and anxiety, White/Hispanic (or Latino, or Latinx, if you prefer, doesn’t bother me either way), gender fluid or gender non-conforming or just plain non-binary (he/him/they/them, both “masculine” and “feminine” attributes which are expressed in cyclical alteration or overlapping, but I typically mask as a simple male most of the time,) and omnisexual, that is, attracted to all genders to varying degrees. I could go deeper on all this stuff but I don’t know you that well and it’s personal.

The 1960s seem to have a particular resonance with you. And the ‘90s.

I don’t really know why that is. With the ‘60s I mean. With the ‘90s its obvious and I don’t try to resist it or make too much of it but that’s when I was an impressionable teenager. I don’t adhere to that attitude that the music of my formative years was the best but it imprinted on me in ways that are predictable and perhaps inescapable. But I can remember certain times when cultural artifacts from the ‘60s jumped out at me. As a preteen I liked war movies, in particular Vietnam war movies. It was the first time I started to really notice songs. British Invasion, Motown. Later on, in history classes, the idea that it was a particularly tumultuous time period struck home with me. As I entered college and began to learn a little political science and more history and start to develop an anti-capitalist stance, the social upheaval of the era resonated, as a belief was seeded in my late teens or early twenties that things were just as bad now as they were then, but maybe we were just less organized. There was just as much shittiness in the capitalist system to resist, if not more, than in the 1960s. The Mixed Means book, now that came out in ‘68 and the interviews were with artists who were well known in that decade.

It’s not so much a self-consciously retro thing. I don’t often consciously imitate the tropes of that era or any other, and I don’t subscribe to the internet culture which venerates some particular past time or place to the point of having ‘60s or ‘90s mood-boards and band t-shirts and the right shoes or hairstyle for the time or any of that, and I definitely don’t feel like I should have been born in some other decade, like some of those tie-dye wearers that I got stoned with as a college student. It’s more that from my point of view the parallels in Timespace are obvious. We live in at a point of vast social upheaval in some ways similar to past times. I grew up paying attention to that stuff and I draw on it continually, but use it unconsciously.

In particular?

Specifically I paid attention to in my formative years what I considered to be fringe guitar bands that incorporated extended techniques and dissonance and the generation of Downtown music that preceded that, guitarists like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, and before them, La Monte Young, and before that any eastern music I could find, especially anything that utilized drones. I believe that a performer and the song itself, even in an entirely conventional setting, they have these hypnotic qualities, and these qualities may be exploited to harmonize a room or whatever performance space. The original gang of CBGB bands but especially Blondie. Madonna, Andy Warhol’s Factory as depicted in Factory Made, Gillian McCane and Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me, Paul Jordan Smith, the unholy trinity of Reed/Pop/Bowie, a psychedelic complex of cannabis, LSD, Hesse, Castaneda, Luis Buñuel’s films, Breton’s manifesto, all the early 20th century art movement manifestos for that matter. Burroughs, Borges, The Kids in the Hall, Syd Barrett, Andy Kaufman, Cindy Sherman… I can’t pull them all together off the top of my head but I was exposed to their works at times when my mind was particularly opened, and they made lasting impressions on me and, at least from my point of view, the lines from their work to mine are pretty straight.

You seem reclusive by nature. But not shy. What is the connection between these aspects of your personality and your status as an unknown underground artist?

It’s a causal relationship. I am shy. But I mask to a high degree in order to socialize. It is an enormously draining use of neuronal configuration. I have a string of disastrous interpersonal anecdotes and ruined relationships that might have been avoided or at least blunted had I been diagnosed with Autism earlier. But the cookie didn’t crumble that way.

The other variable in this equation is desire. In my view, desire is the fundamental element in all life, the spark that animates everything. My desires, my fantasies about “the art life” have everything to do with the work itself and very little to do with the publicization of it, or seeking interviews or gallery representation or any of the professional moves that would help me gain the resources to fulfill the vision. It’s a real stumbling block. Add that to a pretty deep anti-capitalist, anti-commercial stance and voila. I’d like to overcome this, at least a little, because if I could get some attention and some cash flow I could possibly do more elaborate, higher quality work and develop an audience with which to communicate via the work. I just never feel like I have an adequate skill set or even the motivation most of the time to get my work “out there.”

What is the Wolf Note Collective’s elevator pitch?

What? I don’t understand the question.

If you were to summarize the Wolf Note Collective so that someone unfamiliar with this work could understand it, how would you do that?

“The Wolf Note Collective was a failed parallel-universe multimedia franchise, a long-running, unsuccessful collaborative effort between a loose-knit group of losers in Texas and South Carolina who all pretty much hated each other and then died together in a warehouse fire.”

I believe I read that already, here on your website. Or maybe it was on your Bandcamp.

So?

Well, I was hoping you’d give us something fresh.

Oh Jesus you asked me for a short description and seeing as I’ve already got one I used that. This isn’t even a real interview.

Look, I’m trying to help you here. I don’t have to be here at all. I can tell my editor not to run this interview.

Sizzlin synapses—who gives a shit? Nobody reads your rag anyway. Let’s just get back to some real questions before I call this off.

Fine. That sounds good, actually. How would you characterize the intersectionality of your work, specifically the way your personal character is reflected in the stories, songs, and visual presentation?

I said I don’t talk about the themes.

You seem very angry. Like you’re easily triggered.

Fuck this we’re done. And fuck you too. Goodbye.

What draws you to hoaxes?

Finally.

Finally what.

Finally a question.

Wow. Flattering.

Hey I can’t help it if you’re sensitive.

Do you treat everyone this way?

Probably. God I hope not, which reminds me, this has gone too far and I must apologize. I went on the offensive and for that I’m sorry. But you know that aggression masks insecurity. I expose myself by going on the attack. But maybe recognizing fundamental insecurities can help me to overcome them. If I even overcome one of them, like this one, the tendency retaliate in a nasty way when I wrongly perceive a slight, well that’ll be an improvement. It is a social block.

It still doesn’t excuse how you talked to me.

I’m sorry. I will try not to let it happen again and treat you with kindness free of judgement. I’m sorry I judged you.

We’ll give it some time. If you show me you can be good, we may see ourselves talking again sometime in the future.

To your question, hoaxes. How much time do you have?

End

THE FREE TRAVELERS (zine)

The Free Travelers is a 36 page, 1/2 letter sized black and white zine with a color cover now available from Mink’a Press. Filled with photographs, speculation, gossip, and biographical information about the principle members of the WNC, this “encyclopedia of the Wolf Note Collective” is limited to 100 copies, printed (using mixam.com) on 80lb satin finish paper with a 100lb satin color cover.

The zine is shipping now, so head over to our shop and get your copy.

it’s him! on microwave eyes cassette