Román Leão

Tag: writing

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1 [ficção]

    I was right out of college and living with a couple of roommates in a flat over the Communist Bookstore in the Mission. A friend of mind had wrangled me a job working for Zev Avidan—we all called him “Z”—over at Celestial Records. This was back when their offices were still on Irving, out in the Avenues.

    Celestial had somehow gotten the North American distribution rights for Lucious Cole’s new solo album, A-OK; sort of a Syd Barrett meets Van Morrison at a Captain Beefheart clusterfuck in Golden Gate Park sort of thing. To tell the truth, I thought it was a hot mess, but you have to understand the times. The labels were a lot more willing to take a chance on some crazy act because you just didn’t know what was going to catch on.

    Cole still had some star power left over from his years with the National Loaf, and whatever self-destructive thing he did to land himself in the papers on any given day only helped our situation. It’s a sad fact that dying is one of the best career moves you can make when you consider the back catalog.

    I got involved because was Cole was coming to town for a string of shows at Winterland. I think Albert King was opening for him and all three nights were completely sold out. This was the summer of ’71, right after Morrison woke up dead over in Paris, and the company was understandably a little concerned about their investment.
    Z asked me to keep an eye on their boy; you know, keep him out of major trouble, and make sure he found his way to the venue at a decent hour and in reasonable shape. I have to admit, I was a little star struck. I was young and still susceptible to British charm back then. Cole would soon cure me of that. Permanently.

    Despite all the drugs and booze, or probably because of them, our man had the sexy lure of the disaffected poet about him. I have to admit when I saw him strolling up the jet way at SFO’s International Terminal, a pretty blonde stewardess on each arm, that I was a little smitten and maybe just a little jealous.

    Safely delivered by Pan Am’s fit yet curvaceous handlers, Cole made a rather elliptical beeline toward me. As he got closer, I could tell he was sloshed, but he still tried to double down on his remaining charisma.

    “Hello, darling,” he purred, or slurred, I couldn’t yet tell which. Perhaps both.

    I said something to the effect of “Mr. Cole, I presume, how did you know I was waiting for you?”

    “Because, darling,” he buzzed (yea, it was both), “who else would such a beautiful woman wait for?” And with that, we were set to launch.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1 [ficção]

    What fiery creation / Streaking across the skies… I love that fucking song! Oh yea, sorry, man. Are we rolling then? I was just about to say how much we all dug that “lost” Lucious Cole album when it came out. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard that Cole had died. The first time. Hang on, I’m getting ahead of myself.

    I was driving back up from surfing the Point break all morning with Chae. You’ve already talked to Chae, right? Man, I had just bought the Olds back then, a beautiful 1970 442 in Nocturne Mist. The top was down, of course, and the wind was blowing her long black hair around like we were in a shampoo commercial.

    I had the radio tuned into a pirate station from out in Boonville and they were playing a block of tunes from Cole’s old band, the National Loaf—not really my favorite as I’ve always been more of an R&B guy: Otis, Sam and Dave, that’s my bag. James Brown! Say it Loud!

    At the end of Cut the Loaf, their last hit before Cole was shitcanned due to his uncool behavior, and alarming—even for that time—drug use, the DJ broke in and laid the trip on us that he was gone. It was still all rumors as to what had actually happened to him. I remember one story had it that he had choked on his own vomit while crashing his motorcycle into an airplane. Hey, man, you have to consider the times, we had just lost Jimi, Janis, and fucking Morrison in quick succession, so we were getting used to shitty news and were becoming… uh, a little cynical.

    Chae was a big fan, especially of the more personal solo stuff he had put out after the breakup. Personally, I can’t stand that singer-songwriter shit. For my money, if you can’t say it with a five-piece horn section, then maybe you should just keep it to yourself; that’s just me. Chae was pretty upset and moped around the rest of the day playing Loaf records until I secretly started being glad that he was dead.

    Cole had checked out at the going age of 27 and everyone made a big deal of him being another member of the “27 club,” yet another case of wasted youth and potential. I’m here to tell you that 27 didn’t seem all that young back then. A lot of us had grown up hard and fast when the ’60s went up like a house fire next door to a bomb factory. All the “flower power” bullshit that you hear about those days had been pretty well defoliated in Vietnam before getting stabbed to death by the Angels out in Altamont.

    I did one tour flying Hueys overseas—lift and assault—and got out just before the shit really hit the fan. It was no picnic, but nothing like those poor fuckers had to deal with after Tet. At least I ended up with a marketable skill after all that grind.

    Back home, I found enough action on both sides of the law to keep me flying with enough under-the-table cash and free weed that I was able to by my own chopper before too long and stay high enough to often forget where I had seen it last.

    My main gig before the farm was flying rescue for the county and fire spotting for the Department of Forestry. I was still keeping the hair high and tight at that time, and as a decorated vet, I didn’t attract too much heat. Of course, I ran night missions in the Triangle come harvest time. Back then, I was the only motherfucker crazy enough to make those runs, although our drunk Uncle Sam was churning out flyers younger and crazier than me by the DC-8 load.

    You could say that I was mixed up with the family out at Girassol from day one. My man Zongo Khumalo was the one that first got permission to be there from the old lady that owned it, back before things got really weird. I used to party with Zongo when I first got back from Vietnam, back when he was still going by what he started referring to as his “slave name.”

    Zongo is tan as a motherfucker, but he’s not Africa tan, if you know what I mean, and the only two things he’s ever been a slave to are weed and pussy. As you can imagine, we hit it off pretty well.
    I do feel partly responsible for what happened, but when I really think about it, the whole downfall of Girassol was Lucious Cole’s fault from the jump.

    You know, if Chae hadn’t been feeling so bummed out that day, I wouldn’t have taken her out there with me and she wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in all that foolishness. I guess some things are just written in the fucking stars.

    I read somewhere lately that the word disaster actually means “bad star.” That’s really when the trouble started, when that bad star showed up.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift

  • Superworse—Ben Greenman

    If there is one thing you could say about this slowly aging, psychedelically dented, slightly cynical romantic, it’s that I likes me some metafiction. When Dave Eggers and his crew started up McSweeney’s back in ’98, I thought I had died and gone to a well-lighted, non-denominational heaven (which for some reason, looked a lot like Portland).

    Author Ben Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker and apparently indulges his non-monocled side writing for indie cred publications like McSweeney’s and Nerve. His 2004 novel, Superworse, is supposedly a paperback “remix” of his 2001 hardback effort, Superbad. It’s hard to know to what extent this is true as the novel itself is a Gordian knot of self-reference and too-clever-by-half literary winks and nods. Just the way I like ’em.

    Without giving too much away, the conceit of Superworse is that an old instructor of Greenman’s, one Laurence Onge, is asked to edit the original novel for the soft cover release by Soft Skull Press. Onge is a bit of a megalomaniac and sees references to his history with the author under every well-turned phrase. Onge had gone as far to impose a series of Greenman’s musical numbers onto the earlier version of the book, which have been removed here “at the request of the author.”

    When Greenman quits shuffling the cards and playing with the intricate structure of the 19 chapters of the book, he writes a good short story. Pieces like the twice-removed western, The Theft of a Knife, or the 13th century Florintine political drama, No Friend of Mine, show Greenman’s gift for set and setting, as well as psychological abstraction. Even the more traditionally structured stories in Superworse all leave the reader with a faint sense of unease. Nothing in Greenman’s stories is ever really resolved; we are only seeing as much of the drama as the author thinks we need to see.

    The feeling of vertigo is muted in shorter, McSweenyesque, sketches like, Notes on Revising Last Night’s Dream, and the superlative, What 100 People, Real, and Fake, Believe about Dolores, which masterfully maps the rise and fall of a relationship through short observations from friends, historical and literary figures, and… Superman, who simply believes “that the underwear she wore was the same as the underwear that Lois Lane wore.”

    To illustrate the extent that Greenman, or Onge, or Greenman/Onge has gone to tie all this together, the first nine chapters and the last nine are separated by a pivotal 10th chapter entitled Notes to a Paper You Wouldn’t Understand in which a series of footnotes thematically echo their corresponding chapters while they ostensibly relate minutiae about an absent piece about… well, who really cares, you get the idea. If this all sounds like your cup of mud, well, I’ll see you at the bar.

    Also by this author:
    What He’s Poised to Do: Stories

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1 [ficção]

    I came out to San Francisco in ’68… no, ’69; it was right after the whole Manson Family thing. I had been trying to make something happen out there for a couple of years, but the scene had been getting pretty heavy. It seemed like all of a sudden, there was a lot of speed on the street, really nasty shit. Of course, I was no Boy Scout in those days. After staying up for seven days straight—actually pretty badly bent—I had what you could call a mystic vision. Sure, you could call it a psychic break, but I prefer mystic vision.

    I was walking down Broadway headed downhill from Columbus past the Condor and the Hungry I looking to pop up Romolo to the bar under the Basque Hotel for a shot and a beer to help focus my spinning eyeballs. I had no sooner passed under the giant Carol Doda sign—the one with the blinking red nipples—that I heard a voice calling me.

    Now, I had been inside the Condor a time or twenty and had run into, or had nearly been run down by, Carol enough times to recognize her voice. This sounded like her, but… not. It’s hard to explain.

    “Fred,” she said. I was still answering to my slave name at that time. “You are now known as Zongo Khumalo.” Heavy, right? Well, Carol Doda calling me out to change my name would have been weird enough, but here’s the drop; she was nowhere to be seen.

    “Fred Williams no longer exists,” the voice explained. “Zongo Khumalo, it is time to fulfill your destiny.” The voice was really starting to fuck with my head. I kind of stumbled off the curb and that’s when I saw it. It was the sign.

    I don’t mean it was a sign, I mean it was the sign. I know it sounds crazy, but the giant Condor sign was talking to me. I must have stood there an hour in the piss-smelling gutter rapping with the Giant Neon Doda before one of the club’s goons gave me the bum’s rush.
    I had a plan by then anyway.

    I knew this old lady that lived over on Fillmore that had inherited some property up in Mendo. I had been doing some work for her at her place—really nice old pad, lots of old hard wood detailing that you just never find anymore. I must have mentioned to her at some point that I used to live up that way so when she got a letter from an attorney telling her that she now owned this place, she started talking about having me check it out for her.

    I didn’t have any plans to go back up the coast at the time. You know, I thought the City was where it was happening and, more importantly, I had done the Emerald Triangle trip. People think it’s easy—living the life of luxury—but it’s not all bare tits and bong hits. You really have to have your act together out there.

    I shined her on for a few months, not having any intention of taking her up on it. I had seen a lot of those old places that hadn’t been kept up properly. The woods are no joke. You have to keep an eye on the environment or it reclaims what you’ve so carefully carved out as soon as you turn your head.

    All of this was in the back of my mind when the Giant Neon Doda started telling me to go out and prepare a place to ride out whatever was coming down the pike. It really did feel like it was all… what’s the word? Predestined, or something.

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1

  • Gun, with Occasional Music—Jonathan Lethem

    One of my favorite things about Jonathan Lethem’s work is the sense of fun he imparts when playing with the expectations of genre. His first novel, Gun with Occasional Music, takes the noir of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and fuses it with the dystopian science fiction of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, with a little William S. Burroughs thrown in for leavening.

    The life of Gun’s protagonist, futuristic flat foot Conrad Metcalf, gets complicated when his client on a simple peep job ends up murdered. The problem compounds exponentially when the number one suspect, after Metcalf himself, shows up to hire the detective to find the real killer.

    This brings unwanted heat from the Inquisitor’s Office, an all-seeing, not-so-secret police force that has the power to remove “karma points” from citizens as they see fit. To let one’s karma fall to zero is to become a non-person and awards the unlucky a trip to the (literal) freezer. Further complicating matters, is the fact that everyone is hooked on the government-supplied drugs “Forgettol” and “Acceptol” which makes getting a straight answer from anyone an interesting challenge.

    Not satisfied with a run-of-the-mill paranoid run through one of our possible paths, Lethem ups the ante with super-evolved talking animals, including a gun-toting kangaroo (inspired by a Chandler quote reproduced at the top of the story), a concubine sheep, and disturbing “babyheads,” human toddlers who have had the same mutagenic fast-forward applied to them, making them little alcoholic fatalist assholes. Which tracks.

    In 2020, literally moments before COVID fucked everything sideways, the movie trades were abuzz with news that the book was under development for a television series. Johan Renck, best known for his harrowing Chernobyl, was named as director, with Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films producing. It has been crickets since then, however.

    Talking kangaroos and the like are tricky to pull off without looking ridiculous, and like the creatures in David Cronenberg’s 1991 take on Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, perhaps left to the individual widescreens in our heads.

    Also by this author:
    Chronic City: A Novel
    The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

  • Submission (A Correspondence in Three Parts)

    (1)
    Greetings XXXX XXXXXXXX editors,

    I wanted to thank you all for sending my return envelope back; I’m just not sure what kind of message you were trying to send. Was the empty envelope a metaphor for the howling void that we all must someday face? Or perhaps my submission just left you speechless and unable to respond? I’m sure that with time, and the proper medicine, I’ll suss it out and all will finally be revealed… or, I could just ask. So, ’erm… what’s the deal?

    Yours envelopically,
    Ray Larsen

    (2)
    Hi Mr. Larsen,

    I hope you haven’t been deteriorating into madness while awaiting our reply.

    I apologize for the empty envelope and the subsequent foray into the land of unanswered questions. While I would like to claim artistic genius and expressive intent, it was sadly just a mistake. As the assistant editor (i.e. graduate student) I possess a very fine skill set for stuffing, licking and sending envelopes. Your envelope, unfortunately, missed the crucial first step. And now I must re-evaluate my postal prowess, sigh.

    Well, at the very least I can relieve your sufferings—the envelope was meant to hold a lovely blue little slip, bearing our logo and this message: “Thank you for your recent submission to XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX. Though we are unable to include your work in this issue, we are glad that you gave us the opportunity to consider it. We wish you success in placing your work elsewhere. Thanks again, The Editors.”

    It tries very hard to be friendly while inevitably informing you that we are crushing dreams. We don’t like that part of the job much and we know that you like it even less, so really, I’m quite sorry that you were subjected to the empty envelope.

    Really it’s quite a profound little piece of paper. The color is really quite nice. And the size is wonderful. I’ve spent tens of minutes in the copy room, brushing off my math skills to figure out exactly what size will fit into a variety of envelopes.

    If you would like the little blue slip that the envelope was meant to contain, I’ll happily send it along. It’s a very nice slip.

    Yours apologetically,
    XXXXXXX XXXXXX
    Assistant Editor
    XXX

    PS Hopefully this little blunder doesn’t mean you will be too incapacitated by the proper envelop-related medications to submit to us in the future!

    (3)
    Greetings Ms. XXXXXX,

    Thank you for your enlightening, entertaining, and timely response to the vacant envelope imbroglio. At no time did I mean to impugn your prowess as it applies to stuffing, licking, etc. I am sure that the sheer volume of correspondence lends itself to the occasional unintended mystery.

    Please don’t let this aspect of your responsibilities weigh any heavier on your conscience than does the slip itself. I, for one, have started an art project with the myriad beautifully colored papers that have been sent my way. I am sure that the one you have been charged with discharging is lovely.

    I imagine it to be a medium Persian blue, as was the binding of Bailey’s A Treatise on the Seven Rays, reflecting a possible theosophical bent on the part of XXX. Or perhaps it is a less esoteric, but no less historically relevant, Prussian blue—one of the first synthetic pigments ever developed, and interestingly, an antidote for heavy metal poisoning.

    I don’t want to make more work for you, however, and I will simply wait until my next submission works its way through the editorial process. I will force myself to be content with the seasonally apropos light spring green version I still hold and cherish.

    Yours in the wild blue yonder,
    Ray Larsen

  • What’s in a Name? [Pt. 2]

    I was born Raymond Andrew Larsen in late-July of 1966, closing in on six decades ago as of this writing. Raymond is a family name, after a great-uncle on my father’s side, one of five born to an immigrant couple from the Azores. I think he helped keep my father on the straight and narrow after his father was out of the picture, a task with which even God themselves had limited obvious success.

    I have long suspected that my middle name came from Andy Nickolatos who happened to own the Black & White liquor store on the corner of Main St., a block and half from the house. I can neither confirm or deny—given that all parties, apart from myself, have passed on*—that the bestowal of Andrew either settled a bet or a sizable tab. I wonder what a middle name was worth in mid-60s commodities, and what that might translate into 21st-century dollars. It was probably a dodgy investment at best.

    By all accounts, my grandfather, a Dane named Larsen was a real piece of work. He and my grandmother, Elvira, were divorced—a rarity for Catholics in the 1950s—and he died when my dad was still pretty young. To this day, I have never seen an acknowledged photograph of the guy, although after dad passed I found a souvenir Los Angeles restaurant pic of him as a young kid sitting with two uptight-looking people. Not his usual crowd, to be sure.

    I know that Larsen in Danish means “son of Lars.” Having lived in California my whole life, the only Lars I know of is the drummer for Metallica, but we are roughly the same age. It would have been nice to fall into some of that Master of Puppets money, though.

    As dad got older, he dropped more stories of his strained relationship with his pater familias, none of them all too flattering. Of course, it was Louie’s name to claim or disavow, so we’re stuck with it, a tie to a lineage I really know little about. I’ve read that, like the Portuguese, the Danes have historically been really into boats, fish, and faded empire, so they should be my kind of people. Maybe we just got a bad one.

    After living under the Scandinavian surname for a half-century, I figured my pen name should pay homage to the side of Dad’s family I actually related to. Leão is Portuguese for lion, and given that, if pressed, I identify as a double Sun sign Leo, I can get behind that.

    Part of writing under another name, is the freedom a different headspace can afford you. At this point, Ray Larsen has done all kinds of different things, but they have followed a certain, if avowedly circuitous, path. This Leão motherfucker, though, who knows what shenanigans he might get up to?

    Quite coincidentally, the statement, “I read,” is translated in Portuguese as, “eu leio.” As far as Roman goes—or incongruously, “Román,” which denotes a Hungarian provenance (I don’t remember what I was smoke… erm, thinking)—it has historically simply meant, “a citizen of Rome.” If you’ve read your Phillip K. Dick, you’d know that we are all citizens of the Roman Empire, which never really ended but manipulates our materialistic and spiritually bankrupt world to this day.

    Wow, that got dark.

    As far as I know, Román Leão has no middle name, although he may be taking bids.

    *OK, Mom is still around, but either a) those characters cooked up a story that she believed. It was pretty early in the relationship, or b) she knew the gross percentage of GDP that the tab entailed and signed off on it. Either way, she ain’t sayin’.

  • What He’s Poised to Do: Stories—Ben Greenman

    Ben Greenman’s wistful collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do, begins at a remove. For a book that both posits and ponders the importance of interpersonal communication, Greenman chooses to keep readers at arm’s length—at least until he’s gotten to know you better. His use of characters identified only by third-person pronouns in the title piece underlines the faceless isolation that an unhappy businessman out on the road feels as he engages in a cool affair with a woman who works at his hotel.

    There is an echo of the relationship between Lydia and Ricardo Reis in Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in that even within an ongoing carnal relationship, Greenman’s guest remains alienated from everyone to a debilitating extent. The businessman’s one remaining open conduit of exchange is the series of postcards he writes the woman, his wife, and his son. Even this method of expressing his feelings stumps him at the end of the story, revealing that Greenman’s title is, if not ironic, then overly optimistic.

    “He sits down at the desk, finds a pen, and holds it over a postcard, uncertain exactly what he’s poised to do.”

    Greenman underscores this theme throughout the collection by postmarking the first page of each story, indicating the date and place from which it was sent. Even a cursory glance at the contents page gives the reader a pretty good idea of the breadth of Greenman’s stages for his universal passion play; settings range from North Africa, in 1851, to Atlanta, in 2015, and everywhere (and when) in between—including the imagined Lunar City, in 1989, and the confounding Australindia, in 1921.

    One standout piece, To Kill the Pink, is written from Harlem in 1964 at a time when both racial and personal boundaries were burning. Greenman writes as an African-American man who, after a tragic incident, decides to travel to Malawi to better understand his heritage and the extraordinary woman he loves. When he asks her how a “twenty-four-year-old black girl who’s never been out of New York City” knows so much about the world, she replies, “I always paid attention… while you were busy studying the human comedy, I was trying to figure out the human drama.”

    “You’re the sad mask; I’m the happy mask,” he answers. “Takes both of us to put on a play.”

    While Greenman’s gift for whimsy does surface from time-to-time, owing perhaps to the impossibility to cage such a formidable beast, he is wearing his sad mask for much of What He’s Poised to Do.

    “I write often about sadness and loneliness … the only cure, I think, is intimacy,” Greenman writes in About the Author, “which is what the people in my stories are struggling to achieve.”

    It is telling that Greenman’s stories revolve around written correspondence, a form of communication quite possibly in danger of becoming archaic. How will future generations understand us, or how will we ultimately understand ourselves, if our written interactions diminish to texts scattered on the digital wind?

    If there is a lesson to be had from this book, it’s this: Go write a letter to someone you love.

    Also by this author:
    Superworse

  • Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch & the Beat Generation—Aram Saroyan

    At the behest of poet Ted Berrigan, a young Aram Saroyan interviewed a becalmed and nearly forgotten Jack Kerouac in 1967 for the Paris Review. Saroyan describes this meeting much later in an article for The Poetry Foundation. It is a watershed moment, one generation testing the next, and Saroyan walks away with Jack’s benediction, “You’ll do, Saroyan.”

    I doubt that Kerouac had in mind for the young writer to go forth and pen the History of the Beats, but 12 years later, Saroyan attempted just that. Perhaps the tired Kerouac recognized a comrade-in-arms, as Saroyan’s sensibilities would have fit right in with the tea-loving, electrified wordslingers of the past. His official biography for his collected papers at the University of Connecticut Libraries reads, “In the late 1960s Saroyan experimented with marijuana and began to develop a career as a poet.” Sounds about right; let’s go!

    Genesis Angels is no straight-ahead biography, but a long prose poem in its own right. Saroyan attempts to capture the feeling of the era, the mad rush toward an uncertain future and away from a stifling mid-century American mindset that had all but disappeared by the time he started his journey.

    Saroyan identifies the Eisenhower years with the monster movies that were throwing their own existential warnings up on the screens of the ’50s and early ’60s. “We were being condemned to endure a complete rescheduling of human experience: our routines no longer in any relation to the planet or the landscape or our neighbors. We had willingly locked ourselves up with comfort and convenience and suffered an immediate transformation. It was we ourselves who had become The Thing, The Blob, inside our private Houses of Wax.”

    The degree that Saroyan is successful in capturing the Beat gestalt, from the far remove of 1979, depends on how susceptible you are to that particular brand of amphetamine-driven patter. Me? I can’t get enough.

    On Jack Kerouac meeting Neal Cassidy: “Now this is where it did combust because what happened was Jack saw Neal and listened to his wild, never-get-a-word-in-edgewise, spontaneous patte… this man was a rapid, word chasing man chasing word chasing man chasing time chasing space—lookout! just like his driving—saved by exposure and the rare posture of ecstatic brotherhood.”

    On Allen Ginsburg: “Allen had the conceptual center of the universe in his belly and breath… so that then he could inhale and exhale planets, and snow storms, windows, and paper towels, Mickey Mouse and Hollywood, tits, and cocks, ambushes, and semesters, toothbrushes, and Coca-Cola—the whole litterbug earth with Indians and business man and women giving birth, inside his nature, and available.”

    Strangely absent from this cluttered stage is Welch himself. Whether outshined by the titanic personalities around him, or just a quiet guy whose poems did the speaking for him, I didn’t come away with any better sense of the man than when I started. This isn’t a deficit in research; the University of Connecticut’s Saroyan collection contains a recorded interview with Welch and David Meltzer from 1969, and Saroyan himself interviewed poet Joanne Kryger about Welch in 1977, presumably while doing research for the book.

    Perhaps the problem is that—like a total eclipse, or some other natural rarity—Welch began disappearing as soon as he appeared. You have to catch these things when they happen or you’re out of luck. Until next time.

    Saroyan best captures Welch’s spirit in a few throw away lines describing the importance of becoming a poet:

    Be a poet and save the world forever.
    And don’t forget to take a sweater.
    Put this flower in the peanut bottle with some cold water.
    It’ll be here when you get home.
    That’s the way the universe works.

  • Put on This Record: Funland—Unknown Instructors [2009]

    Shakespeare had it right. You really can’t trust anyone that doesn’t appreciate music. All of our greatest thinkers eventually seem to come to the conclusion that we are only vibrations in the great void. Call it the Big Bang Theory, call it what you will, but how could one go through life closed to the most primal and necessary form of human expression?

    Into the late spring of our discontent, like a silver dollar dropped down an outhouse shitter, the third, and most cohesive, album from Unknown Instructors—an unlikely supergroup of sorts—could just be the vital blast of L.A. punk you didn’t know the situation was calling for.

    On Funland, the planet’s premier punk rock rhythm section of Mike Watt and George Hurley consistently push each other in more and more complex jams supported by Saccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza playing at his most insectoid. Whereas Hurley played pretty straight-ahead on the previous album, producers Baiza, Joe Carducci, and Dan McGuire saved the most Rashied Ali-inspired grooves for its follow up.

    Recorded at the same time as 2006’s The Master’s Voice, Funland is no mere collection of second-rate tracks, but a cohesive work of art that follows a thematic surge. Of course, that theme is loose enough to include Pere Ubu’s père David Thomas (R.I.P.) wailing as if existentially wounded on Afternoon Spent at the Bar, Sunny; while elsewhere, poet Dan McGuire reprises his role as a modern-day Jim Morrison with a real penchant for language rather than just a vehicle for getting more whisky and leather pants.

    McGuire has an eye for the details of the less-than bucolic childhood that many of us aging suburban California kids can relate to. He remembers the forgotten places, the weed-strewn empty lots, and trampled-down hurricane fences, but he’s not the only poet on deck.

    Whereas Voice was a hard-charger right out of the gate with the swirling Swarm, the opening salvo on Funland is Maji Yabai—Japanese slang originally meaning something like, “Oh, shit,” and morphing in recent years into something like “sick” or “bad,” but in a good way—an introspective Watt-spiel.

    This paints the scene in a peculiar midway twilight. The unmerciful heat of the summer sun has finally abated and that belly full of PBR and corndogs isn’t going to hold you. It’s time to make some decisions. As the buzz threatens to loosen its grip, you can opt to reinforce with another semi-cold one, or pop out to the car for something stronger.

    Funland’s hard stuff includes a cover of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Frownland, welding its odd gravitas to the album’s own weird sense of bacchanalian carny freedom. In addition to Thomas’s unique contributions, artist Raymond Pettibon’s unexpected jazz-influenced rap on Lead! proves that his take on Voice’s Twing-Twang wasn’t just an anomalous laugh.

    Pettibon has a surprisingly direct and, dare I say it, swinging delivery that may just cause me to rethink my idea of him as a quiet, misanthropic artist; or someone you might meet working the ring toss. It’s good to remember not to confuse the artist with his art.

    Funland is all about pushing the boundaries of what you think you know about these musicians, and like the famous Tilt-A-Whirl, if you don’t hurl, you just might have the time of your life.