Tag: The Farm

San Diego 2000 The Loft intermission : “Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?”

berniebleak2 Comments

The plot thickens.

When I first starting asking around in the Crash Worship group I heard an unfamiliar name in some of the comments – Zendik Farm. In the context it seemed like maybe this was another name for the apartments in an old church by Pokez where JXL and some other folks in the band’s orbit had lived. For the initiated you most likely already know what’s coming.

O oracle and miracle of modern technology I combined the relevant phrases in the search bar of the world’s foremost search engine and out comes a colorful video:

Side B is available from the same uploader

Cool, I thought, an all day festival and live album with some familiar and unfamiliar names. Crash Worship check. Night Soil Man check (a new favorite of mine that sounds a little like Comus). I was nerding out and clicking around on discogs, as one does, when I came to the name Arol Wulf. Expecting a band I next ended up on the entry for Wulf Zendik and from there an unexpected hop to a Wikipedia page.

Holy shit! Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?

If you’re in a live band you’ve probably played at least one or two shows for either dodgy promoters or as benefits for questionable businesses. PlywoodStock seemed to be an all day festival organized in the name of old fashioned Manson family brainwashing and coercive sex trafficking. I’ve heard a handful of things about Murshid and Circle of Friends over the last few days ranging from “flirty fishing” to “high end yoga escort service” but I was not prepared for what I was about to read on Zendik Farms.

For a sleepy and moderately sized military town San Diego has more than it’s fair share of cult and commune activity, I listed a modest handful in the last installment but you can add to that tendrils of Miracle of Love, The Church of Scientology, International Society of Krishna Consciousness and even a sizable contingent from the commune I was born on: a place In Tennessee called simply The Farm. To be entirely honest some of the things I read about Zendik Farms seemed unpleasantly familiar.

Life on The Farm wasn’t always idyllic as evidenced by the major exodus in the early Eighties that included my family. I found a FAQ from a former Zendik resident that echoed many of the grievances I heard from my parents and their friend circle: poor standard of living, malnutrition, lack of education and a clear hierarchy in what was supposed to be an egalitarian community.

https://emeraldimajia.livejournal.com/149140.html

On the other hand the title of this woman’s memoir is Mating in Captivity. While there was definitely social pressure at The Farm for men and women to pair up they weren’t told who they had to sleep with or expected to endure scrutiny into their sex lives the way this woman describes at Zendik. My mother certainly didn’t have to ask permission and get examined with a speculum every time she was intimate with my father.

Both communities could be stiflingly heteronormative.

I heard of gays at The Farm either living closeted or trying to force themselves into the more expected lifestyle only to realize their true tendencies would not disappear after years of marriage and children. I don’t know if Zendik created similar experiences but Wulf’s writings seem to have been overtly homophobic in a way I never saw in Stephen Gaskin’s (founder of The Farm)

I actually wonder about the possibility of some cross pollination between the two. I had a pair of childhood playmates, sisters named Jasmine and Jade, whose mother moved them out to Jacumba around the time Zendik Farms was in the area. I’d heard something about them having troubled adult lives and wonder if they might have been drawn in by Arol Wulf’s charismatic nature.

The larger coincidence is that Zendik Farms and Circle of Friends both had property in the same small town of Boulevard. I wonder if Murshid and Wulf or Arol ever met or how such a meeting would have gone. The timelines don’t perfectly line up though – while the Zendik’s were decamping to Austin by 1991 Circle of Friends seemed to arrive from Colorado around the same time.

It seems possible that Zendik Farms could have even sold their compound to Murshid and Circle of Friends or the specific owner of the land could have shifted loyalties between the two. For now it remains an amusing hypothetical as I need to return my focus back to the Underground Music.

Chris Squire of Crash Worship, Tit Wrench, Battalion of Saints, Heroin and a million other legendary bands kindly provided the above photo and some corroborating details:

Squire’s band Lectric Rek was omitted from the live album

I might have been overstating things when I described PlywoodStock as using the participants music for sinister purposes. While visitors no doubt got the standard invitation to join this 1988 festival sounds like a mostly innocent opportunity to cut loose, drop acid and rock out far from the eyes of SDPD and Vice squads. Squire definitely cited “frying at four AM and being a WRECK” as an explanation of why his band didn’t make it to the compilation cassette.

Also performing but failing to make an impression on the keen commercial instincts of the Zendik compilationist was a band called Monsters of Rhythm.

The thing that stuck out to me immediately was the clearly diverse lineup of Daddy Long Leggs while San Diego rock was predomimantly white. I found a Reader profile where the band talked about choosing to create a mix of funk, rock, punk and metal instead of emulating the far more popular ska trend at the time. This, and the slightly earlier lifecycle, would explain why I never saw them share the stage when two-tone legends like The Specials came to play at the second SOMA near Old Town.

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/bands/daddy-long-leggs/

Members of this group combined with Pull Toys from the same festival to form Casbah legends Creedle and keyboardist Robert Walter now tours with Roger Waters lineup of Pink Floyd.

Moving along – when John Goff first sent me the links to the articles on The Loft’s impending eviction it caught my eye that the post was dated 5/5/2000. I was a bit of a sticker head in High School, cataloguing each new variant and color way of Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant stickers in a special notebook, and I remembered seeing cryptic stickers with the message “ACHTUNG 5/5/2000”.

This turned out to be an early ambient/noise/industrial project of Travis Ryan who is now best known as the vocalist of Cattle Decapitation. The name is based on a prophecy from the Mayan Calendar that the world would end on this date – possibly related to a rare alignment of the outer planets. That was especially interesting to me as I went to Palenque on 12/21/2012 for festivities around the end of the twelfth baktun of the same Calendar that was also widely prophesised to mark the end of the world.

While neither date brought about any particular apocalypse the first of them did mark the beginning of the end for The Loft. It is also interesting how numerologically significant and symmetrical both dates appear in the Gregorian Calendar as they were derived from an entirely different system.

I also thought I had seen the name on some kind of compilation CD which turned out to be In Formation: A Tribute To Throbbing Gristle which Ryan coordinated and released on his Attention Deficit Recordings label. I did have a copy of this CD and used to listen to it fairly frequently but can’t remember if it was given to me by John Goff in San Diego or by Deerhoof when we played together in Chicago.

https://www.discogs.com/master/53481-Various-In-Formation-A-Tribute-To-Throbbing-Gristle

A couple of interesting details on the artists: I was listening to a lot of Integrity that year after finding a pile of the …And For Those Who Still Fear Tomorrow records at a Maxwell Street creative reuse in Chicago. I literally couldn’t give them away to my hardcore friends at the time but I’d imagine they’d be worth a decent stack of cash if I still had them (there were like 30 on black vinyl). Anyway the point is I was listening to the TG tribute at the same time but had no idea Lockweld and Psywarfare were Integrity adjacent projects.

I also had a few Spacewürm records I’d picked up in discount bins but had no idea of the connection with Kid606 which I listened to a ton of soon after. There was no discogs in those days – I got this kind of information in bits and pieces from conversations with other encyclopedic music nerds. Thanks to the site I now know that Travis was also behind one of my favorite local bands Graveyard Whispers.

Goth was huge in San Diego at the time. I tried to go to Club Soil at the World Beat with an older friend but was denied entry because I wasn’t even 18. My mother had somehow convinced me that goths, or mods as she used the terms interchangeably, painted their faces white with a certain brand of Bag Balm she had in a crinkly old aluminum tube. There must be a kernel of truth in there somewhere but it looked and smelled ridiculous.

That was my only teenage foray into goth fashion paired with an oversized white button up and black leggings. I stood around the alley and listened to Vampire The Masquerade LARPers talk about drinking each other’s blood and witnessed the arrival of a high status scenester named Vlad dressed in Renaissance looking red velvet. I ended up drinking coffee at Denny’s then sleeping in the upstairs portion of Gelato Vero until the trolleys and buses started back up.

Anyway back to Graveyard Whispers – they were a goth parody band. I saw them at either Empire Club or Xanth depending on who owned it that year with my friend’s band Hide and go Freak. The members rode up on chopper bicycles with revving motorcycle sounds through the PA and all immediately lit clove cigarettes. As the set progressed the singer, Rozz’d “Stewart” Williams, was strapped up and hung upside down on some kind of BDSM apparatus.

I need to amend a couple of details now that clearer recollections have found their way to me from a certain horse’s mouth. The show I saw most likely predated Ryan’s involvement and the “BDSM apparatus” was simple exercise equipment. The bit was a buildup to a visual punchline of suddenly revealing ostentatiously sparkly pants under the vocalist’s somber black attire but this was either adopted later or didn’t have quite the “punch” they’d envisioned in a room full of smoke machine fog.

I’ve also learned that their were plans to do a “colonial goth” set involving George Washington (but goth – perhaps George Xymoxington?) outfits and an entrance on a rowboat. This was scrapped with the dissolution of the parent band – Upsilon Acrux. The plan seems almost prophetic with the present popularity of various goth “microgenres” such as the impressive niche Leafar Seyer and Prayers have carved out with cholo-goth.

It was a real hoot and a memory I’ve cherished often through the years. Apparently they released a tape but resellers are asking exorbitant amounts online due to Cattle Decapitation’s well deserved fame. It would be nice if somebody had one and felt like throwing the tracks up somewhere.

Back to John Goff – I thought it was strange that I never spent any time in The Way Out Sound record store if it was next door to Plasticratic. Thankfully Chris Woo came through to solve the mystery for me. According to this clipping it didn’t open until October of 1998 and I had gotten my diploma and run to Chicago then Oakland by that time.

If the quality translates you can even zoom and read this

As is common for intermissions this one will be something of a variety show. Turning back to the “No Roof Action” piece when I first learned that The Loft was at Sixth and Broadway I thought that it might be the same building as the Street Art Gallery show from that piece. It turns out I was extremely close. Here is the excerpt:

There are multiple inaccuracies here

While I pride myself on the detailed nature of my memory the reality is that like anyone else’s it is entirely fallible. I am about to reveal the identity of “Featured Artist” in detail but first I need to correct myself on two points. First he picked up the hammer in self defense rather than over a name dispute. That argument was actually over the tag name of one of his friends and verbal intimidation was more than sufficient.

Second he may or may not have hit anybody with it but he was provoked, threatened and largely outnumbered. Some goons from a rival tag crew had shown up and were trashing the gallery and attacking him. Shepard Fairey would likely remember more specifics.

RIP RAMBO

I am talking about Lance De Los Reyes who created his largest body of work as RAMBO but was writing CHIE at the time of this incident. I was recently reminded of Lance when I saw his cameo in a Safdie Brothers film coincidentally called Daddy Longlegs only to learn that he had tragically passed away.

At this early stage he made images of insect cocoons on scraps of rusted metal and other found object refuse that were displayed on the walls of Pokez before making the jump into Galleries. He had named this show Modest Behavior because Shepard had just introduced him to Modest Mouse and it was directly behind The Loft at 1027 Sixth Avenue.

2000 was the year for this

This opening was about a month after the article about The Loft’s eviction and most likely after the legendary party era there had been over for at least a year. The other artist I really remember from the opening was Grimey aka Bhagavan or “Bugs”. He was good friends with Harmony Korine and the two of them got matching hand tattoos of his trident or pitchfork tag. I thought he might have gotten his name from Circle of Friends but it turned out to be a Hare Krishna thing.

He was very inspired by Norwegian Black Metal and made an entire installation in a recessed part of the space – a darkened area with candles and an atmospheric evil sounding soundtrack. I always think about how ahead of his time he was when I see environmental works from artists like Neckface and hope he is doing well. I was tagging WORM then as a kind of metal logo with a pentagram in the O and a lower case R as a candle so I felt a bit of artistic kinship.

More on Bhagavan via Chris Woo

Me and Francois had a bit of “fame” in the moment due to our highly visible pieces on the California Theater. When Lance learned our “street” identities he was impressed enough to invite us onto the roof and generously offered a pair of desirable paint spots. The show was in the building with the big glass “SPORTS CARDS” sign but we jumped over to the next roof to get at two pieces of wall.

The bit of red wall is The Loft building

Francois’ skills were well beyond mine so he got the cream colored spot visible from Broadway for a JUMP piece while I whiffed whatever I did on the grey wall invisible from this angle. In the course of the night we quickly went from elation at the connections we were making to dismay at the possible consequences of accidentally covering somebody or any other transgression. We quickly gave up painting.

When I started working at my alma mater San Diego High in 2003 or so I picked it back up as a way to connect with my students. I swapped out paint cans for streakers and shoe polish but my bigger focus at the time was on battle rapping and it’s covered in other chapters. I must have painted once or twice with Nick Feather – another friend that we lost far too young to an epidemic that’s only getting worse.

I could have never tracked down these exact details without the hard work of Eric Elms. Eric worked on Shepard’s street team at the same time as Lance and also used to do poster art under the name ADORN. I would always laugh to see the ones with giant pictures of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock on electric boxes as the prevailing trend in youth fashion and music of the moment was called “Spock Rock” after the boxy black haircuts.

He now does a mix of fine art, design work and the considerable overlap between the two and occasionally uses the name ELMS. You can find his work at:

https://partnersandothers.com/

I will close this intermission with some thoughts from the as-yet-unidentified admin of The Loft at Sixth & Broadway Facebook group. While it doesn’t identify 9/11 as the official end of the era it does reflect many of my own thoughts of San Diego at the time, and it’s Downtown 81 vibe, as well as the “American Underground” as a whole. This is understandable as the developers were very much present and palpable and even if you’re living under it you simply can’t see the shadow of something that’s in the future.

If you could we’d have a word like “foreshadowing” or something…

[link to next part]

San Diego 1994 The Loft Part Two : “The Gospel According to Steve Pagan”

Riverside 2004 : “We’re going to be good right?”

berniebleakLeave a comment

Like the title of Henry Rollins’ 1994 memoir, my first and strongest inspiration was not to pick up any instrument but simply to Get in the Van. Before playing my first live show as Spidermammal I was already going to shows early for bands like Monotract – as much to hang out as it was to ask for help sneaking into the over 21 venues I wasn’t otherwise old enough to get into. Even for the Spidermammal show while I had been composing music and yearned to present it to a live audience the more urgent reasoning was as a pretense to hang out with my favorite band at the time Deerhoof.

In some part this must stem from the role of The Farm in my family mythology. My parents had met each other because of their individual decisions to simply show up at this commune so it only made sense that I would similarly show up once I thought I’d found the cultural and artistic pulse of my own generation. Another factor, somewhat paradoxically, was social awkwardness: after moving to the Bay Area with a couple friends to attend SFSU we failed so completely in making friends with our immediate peer group that we instead began seeking out our idols in underground comix and experimental music.

Symbolically speaking Fort Thunder was the ultimate van: a nexus of the most vital things happening in both the aforementioned music and comix but also the concept of the alternate living space, or punk house, as a form of expression in itself. Things might have wound up very differently if Fort Thunder hadn’t listed their phone number on their earliest web page or Jim Drain hadn’t picked that phone up when I decided to call it or if he hadn’t said “yes” when I asked point blank if I could show up and temporarily live there.

As serendipity would have it all these things did happen and my time at Fort Thunder brought me into contact with Friends Forever.

Even as I was going through a specific obsession with drum and bass duos like Lightning Bolt, godheadSilo and eventually Japan’s Ruins it was easy to overlook the fact that Friends Forever had the same lineup. Part of this was that their music, while incorporating the sludgy metal some of these other groups were known for, also subverted expectations by steering the riffage into exuberant, triumphant marches.

More importantly the overwhelming aspects of the entire live experience served to overshadow the underlying instrumental minimalism. First and foremost the show took place spilling out the side doors of a Volkswagen Type 2 “hippy bus”. This was unprecedented enough at the turn of the millennium but on top of that the music was supplemented by a light show, lasers, smoke machines, bubbles and eventually fireworks and custom inflatables.

I kept in contact with the band, primarily the drummer Nate Hayden who I bonded with over a shared interest in the OTC psychedelic Coricidin, but I wouldn’t cross paths with them again and literally “get in the van” until after returning to California in the wake of 9/11. Friends Forever essentially toured constantly from their beginnings around 1998 until their breakup in early 2005 but I think it was some time in 2002 that I was finally able to meet back up.

I did pass through Denver at least once before that but I didn’t know any way to get in touch with them or that their house was called Monkey Mania. I spent at least one long layover wandering around downtown and asking the teenage runaways and assorted scumbags that assembled on a grassy hill next to a bank if they’d heard of them.

Nobody had.

They had been the subject of a 2001 documentary film of the same name directed by Ben Wolfisohn. The indie documentary space was nowhere near as crowded in that year as it is now and this movie seemed to both reach a larger audience than and bolster the popularity of the band itself. Some of these memories are difficult for me to pin in place but I’m almost certain that a few of them happened before they were joined by a third member: keyboardist Jason or Rudy Bloody.

After briefly glancing at the discogs page it looks like he already was recording with them by that year. I’m ready to be incorrect about a lot of these details but the way that I remember it this first batch of memories happened when it was still just Nate and Josh. At the beginning I wasn’t literally riding in the van but rather following along the tour like it was The Grateful Dead.

My good friend Josh Harper had just gotten a very old car from his grandmother that he called Grandma and I was staying with him at his parents’ Culver City house with our friends Dain and Vanessa. Inspired by a San Diego tradition called Chicken Burrito Madness we were doing a lot of shoplifting, mostly liquor, and nonstop drinking. After catching Friends Forever somewhere in Los Angeles I drunkenly decided to steal a bunch of metallic fabric markers from a Party City on our drive to the Bay Area.

To my future embarrassment I used these to leave some sloppy tags around the inside of Josh’s car that lasted until Grandma eventually died many years later. One of the first places we visited was Berkeley’s People’s Park where an excess of quality shirts in the free clothing bin inspired us to use the markers to make some unofficial Friends Forever merchandise. The one that I remember featured Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: I added marijuana leaves, pills and syringes between his outstretched, gloves hands along with the band name.

Friends Forever were playing that night outside of a San Francisco bar, possibly Kimo’s, so we met back up and presented them with the garments intending for them to be extra merchandise. These shirts became the inspiration for a track called Ossian’s Shirts on one of their final unreleased recordings – once again throwing my entire timeline into question. Regardless, I remember this as the point where I began to ride along with the band.

Nate usually controlled the different aspects of the light show at the same time that he was playing drums but for a couple of shows I was offered a “stage tech” position. I took it seriously – I made sure to only add one new element per song so each one would feel like a revelation. First it was only flashing lights and fog machine, then lasers appeared on the second song and bubbles debuted on the third so the set could end with a mix of all these things.

I don’t know if this was more entertaining for the crowd but I always get bored watching bands like Caroliner if they reveal all of their visual and staging tricks right at the beginning of the set.

The first show I rode along to was at a warehouse space somewhere in San Francisco’s SOMA district. I’d been fascinated with the neighborhood since my year of college in 1998 when me and Francois would walk it’s streets to find pieces by big graffiti artists like Twist and copies of Iggy Scam’s Turd Filled Donut. I remember being taken with the space they performed outside of but unfortunately my only clear memory is a girl at the show leveraging my apparent closeness to Nate to ask if he was romantically available.

I don’t think I knew how to answer.

The next day the show was at a warehouse space near the intersection of Grand and Broadway in Oakland called Grandma’s House. This must have been around the time I met Rob Enbom – Friends Forever was probably playing a few shows or even touring with a band he was in called Vholtz. At that point gentrification had barely touched this part of Oakland and the neighborhood felt chaotic and dangerous in a way that was diminished in later years. Things felt especially tense as we drove in through a sliding gate in the alley through a cloud of hostile and openly aggressive stares from the locals.

I’m not sure exactly how this happened but somehow I had gotten my hand on some syringes and powdered cocaine. The most likely explanation is that I briefly separated from the band in San Francisco and met up with friends who were also IV drug users. Either in person or by mail Nate had given me a copy of a tape he made called Airick Heater : Poison Addict from a period in his life when he had similar interests.

[Author’s Note: I’ve been mistaken all these years in assuming Airick Heater was a pseudonym of Nate’s. Airick Heater is the name of another Denver artist who later moved to Portland and had a club night called Blowpony. While extant copies of this particular tape will still show overt references to IV cocaine use in the liner notes any other inferences are far from definitive.]

I was pretty tactless about that sort of thing in my early twenties and I thought he might still be into it. He definitely wasn’t. Whenever they were on tour the members of Friends Forever were perpetually sober which makes a lot of sense when you consider that nearly all of their sets ended with the police arriving and they needed to be ready to drive away at a moment’s notice.

He wasn’t judgmental about the fact that I was doing it but he was nervous about how the rest of the band or our hosts would react to the same information so I decided to take it to the inside bathroom instead of trying to hit in the van. I stepped out rushing to the sound of wild free jazz saxophones – most likely a set by the band Hospitals.

Friends Forever toured extremely slowly, mostly because the Volkswagen could never go above 60 mph, so they never spent the night where they played if there was a big drive ahead of them. I stuck around Grandma’s House while they drove on into the night. The main thing I remembered about the place was a huge orange and white parachute on the wall and a neighboring unit that had been turned into an impromptu swimming pool.

The next morning I walked up Grand Avenue with Rob so that he could catch a bus to his job at Rasputin Records and I could take a Greyhound back toward San Diego. I discreetly slipped the capped syringe from my pocket to a covered trash can as we walked.

In an odd coincidence my future friends and sometimes collaborators Complicated Horse Emergency Research moved into Grandma’s House when everybody was moving out and renamed the space Count Dracula Africa. They recorded videos in the space of microwaves full of animal skulls and light bulbs. Running the microwave causes the lightbulbs to briefly illuminate in what looks like a random order.

When I met back up with Friends Forever the following year they had just released the album Killball on the Providence experimental label Load Records. Dedicated to the Denver Broncos this album imagines a futuristic form of ultraviolet football and was probably their most successful and widely distributed release. Jason was definitely part of the touring lineup at this point.

Some thematic additions to the live show included using a fan to blow up some tarps that were sewn together and spray painted with their logo and throwing nerf footballs into the crowd with ropes tied around them. The ropes meant that the footballs could be pulled back and thrown over and over. The first show was a small festival in Hollywood in front of that domed movie theater by Amoeba Records.

I wish I could remember the name of the festival. Some other groups playing included the psychedelic folk act The Winter Flowers and Sam McPheeters hardcore supergroup Wrangler Brutes. Whoever organized the show helped Friends Forever drive their van into a part of the courtyard that wouldn’t ordinarily be accessible to vehicles. The night was intended to culminate in a screening of a rare original print of the Penelope Spheeris film The Decline of Western Civilization Part Three.

There were supposed to be a few moderately famous people there for the screening. I remember hearing that one of the footballs from the Friends Forever performance hit Kevin Nealon, the guy that used to do the fake news on Saturday Night Live, and he was pretty pissed about it. The real kicker to the night was that somebody stole the movie from the theater lobby and they had to cancel the screening at the last second.

When feature films still came in two octagonal metal cases for the 35 mm reels it wasn’t that uncommon to leave them sitting in the lobby underneath the projection booth. The things were heavy and you had to carry them up some narrow stairs to get to the projector. Plus the person whose job it was to carry them into the lobby and the person whose job it was to carry them up to the projector were usually two different people.

Anyway this was probably one of the first times that a thief had decided to target this specific vulnerability and make it a problem. Oddly enough I can’t seem to find any media coverage of this night although I’m moderately sure my specific details are correct. This was also one of the early times that I crossed paths with my future friend Ryan Riehle but failed to remember him.

While we were in Los Angeles we stopped by a house that might have been where Ben Wolfisohn lived and definitely some other guys who worked in the special effects industry. I know Nate had moved out to LA to try to do the same thing previously so maybe it was friends from that time and totally unconnected to the guy that made the documentary. Someone I talked to said he was working on a movie called Dead Birds – he described it as “kids go into a haunted house and get turned into weird monsters by ghosts”.

Or something like that.

I suggested that for the kid who gets turned into a monster they could make a body suit so an actor get’s on all fours but it looks like he’s bending over backwards like with his face upside down and his arms and legs twisted around the wrong way. I figured you could have a sequence where somebody’s body is getting bent like that and then when they run around at normal “all fours” speed but it looks like they’re bent the wrong way it’ll look creepy.

I know a movie called Dead Birds did come out but I’ve never looked to see if they used the idea or not. Maybe it had even already been done – I don’t keep up with all the creature effects in all the horror movies. I was just kind of the type of person who always thought I had really good ideas for fields I didn’t even work in.

The energy had been a little weird between me and Jason because I had known Nate and Josh for a couple years but didn’t really know him – or maybe it’s all in my head. The thing that happened was that we had gone by a health food store with bulk bins and me and Nate had bought some granola and I didn’t know at the time but Jason bought some granola too.

So we were chilling at these movie people’s house and what turned out to be Jason’s granola was on the arm rest of a futon and he was eating some. I thought it was the other granola so I was reaching in and eating some too. Every time I did that Jason would twist the bag closed but I just kept obliviously untwisting it and reaching back in for more granola.

This happened a lot of times, at least three, until Jason finally said:

“Hey, I’m not trying to be a dick or anything but I bought this for me!”

That’s when I realized the mixup and apologized. After Los Angeles we drove to some small town on the way to wherever was next – it might have been Riverside. It was Jason’s birthday and the movie Freddie vs Jason had just come out so we went to a movie theater to watch it. After that we all went on this hike up a mountain but it was really dark and we didn’t have flashlights. At least we had a couple of dogs with us so as long as we stayed close to them we could be reasonably sure we wouldn’t stumble off the edge of a cliff because dogs can see better in the dark.

Instead of everybody riding in the van Nate drove separately in a pickup truck with both of the dogs. The way that Friends Forever tour they basically never crash where the shows happen they just keep driving and sleep in the vehicles. I rode with Nate and we’d share the bed in the back of the truck which was comfortable enough except that I’m not really used to sleeping with dogs too. Josh and Jason made jokes about us being gay.

The next year when I met back up with Friends Forever it was the only time I set up a show for them at Scolari’s Office in San Diego. They were touring with Hale Zukas that was a band with Rob Enbom and some other Grandma’s House guys and also the first time I met John Benson. I had booked this local band I thought would be a good match called Electrocrypt that played what I called “psychedelic biker fuzz”.

The band was centered on this older couple of a German prog-rock style drummer with big white poofy hair and this goth granny lady that played a tiny keyboard on a little table with a Rolodex that had all the song chords and some kind of Halloween decoration like a fake spider. The other two members were a bit younger – a guitar player that always wore a leather vest that said Dead Boys, The Damned and his own band name in white out and the singer was like a hair metal guy.

I really dug Electrocrypt’s sound but they didn’t seem to be too popular with the rest of the San Diego scene around my age. They still played a lot. I did all the correspondence with Klaudia, the keyboard player, and she would fill the bottom of every e-mail with internet 2.0 style animated gifs of pumpkins, ghosts and black cats.

I randomly decided to look them back up last December and saw that she’d passed away.

Hale Zukas was named after a paraplegic man that John Benson worked with in his job called Easy Does It centered on power wheelchairs and disability transport. He was just getting into converting diesel vehicles to run on veggie oil and they toured in an ambulance that had been decommissioned after helping in the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks. It would always flip people out at shows because they’d assume that somebody had been injured and the show was probably cancelled.

Anyway there is a clear line from touring with Friends Forever and the work John Benson would go on to do with The Bus from the Living Hell tour and Larry Bus. Their unconventional style of playing out of their own van instead of inside the concert venues obviously inspired the idea of creating a vehicle as concert venue. Beyond that the overall touring energy – last minute shows, being unconcerned with making money and camping out in nature between performances carried over.

Ironically I think this night have been the only time I ever saw Friends Forever play inside instead of doing the van thing. There was already some static with Scolari’s over Hale Zukas wanting to bring in their own PA so maybe they decided it would just be better to streamline things. Friends Forever did play on the curb outside this same bar in either late 2002 or early 2003 though because I just saw it in the Friends Forever Documentary 2 that came out on VHS on Animal Disguise Records.

It also clearly didn’t bother the venue because you can see the popular bartender who used to breathe fire to amuse patrons happily dancing with their inflatable. I forget his name but he died of heart disease not long after. I’m in the same video wearing a skirt I made out of colorful tapestries.

Everybody stayed over at my parent’s house which eventually led to John Benson bringing my mother a power wheelchair when she started to have mobility issues from multiple sclerosis. I think Friends Forever stayed over too. The picture up there is the Hale Zukas ambulance and me walking on some stilts that had been in my yard for as long as I can remember.

The next show was at the Pixel Palace in Riverside and I rode along with my girlfriend at the time. It was Erin Allen’s spot but I’ll do the search engines a favor and not write out his band name from that era. The main thing I remember from this show was a ridiculous drunk couple.

Both of them kept talking to me all night about how much they liked doing cocaine so after several hours of this I was like “fine, let’s do some” and we all went into the bathroom and just stood around for a minute. When I finally asked “where’s the cocaine?” they said “I thought you had it!” That wasn’t the ridiculous part though.

A few hours later I was peeing in the bathroom when the girl ran in and closed the door behind her. She gave me an intense look and said:

“You have a girlfriend right? I have a boyfriend! We’re gonna be good… right?”

I told her I didn’t care what she did but I was going to finish pissing and get out of the bathroom. Despite all this we gave them tickets to go see The Cure or maybe it was Morrissey. My girlfriend had won them on the radio but for some reason we couldn’t go. I forget the specifics but we worked at a lot of events like Warped Tour and OzzFest.

Friends Forever and Hale Zukas drove toward their next spot after the show but we stayed over to catch a bus back to San Diego. Erin Allen’s girlfriend walked us to the bus station the next day. She pointed out this building that was supposed to have animatronics of Catholic Friars chasing Native Americans. After a bit of research I’m pretty sure this must have been a clock at The Mission Inn.

This detail might be out of order but my last memory of Friends Forever is a show they played outside a big theater with Sonic Youth and Erase Errata. One of Brian Miller’s projects was also on the bill but I forget which one. The thing that stuck with me was that while Sonic Youth had specifically asked them to play the venue couldn’t get the proper permits so they played outside anyway and were quickly chased away by police.

The bands that played inside were not only paid well but also given hotel rooms. I remember hanging out in somebody’s room that night and feeling like the whole thing was a bit of an injustice and that Thurston should have used his leverage to get them a better deal. Of course I don’t see it that way now.

The reality was that Friends Forever wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The thing about touring is that there’s always bad nights and disappointments. Shows that get cancelled or nobody shows up or everyone stands outside while you play or you don’t make enough money or your equipment breaks or somebody gets arrested. For Friends Forever at least half these things were certainties and even if some of the other things happened it never seemed to get them down.

It was like by self sabotaging and painting themselves into a corner they had made themselves immune to disappointment. The bar was already set so low that no amount of bad luck could possibly compete. You can see it clearly reflected in the name of the label that they used to self release almost all of their recordings:

Nothing Gets Worse Than This

Chicago 2001 : “Number One you punk! Number Two you Jew! Number Three you gay!”

berniebleak2 Comments

Wow, I really haven’t written anything in a while. I’ve been struggling with this three part piece that isn’t really coming out the way I imagined it and isn’t done yet. It goes into the sort of thing I’ve mostly been avoiding writing about, like sex and relationship stuff, but that isn’t what it’s really about. I think I’m still struggling to understand what it actually is fundamentally about.

I’m sure I’ll finish it and put it up eventually but it’ll probably be a while.

Anyway I decided to just write some more stories about when I worked at this Italian coffee bar called Trattoria Monterotondo. I just read back over some older pieces to see how much I had written about this place already and it turned out to be hardly anything. Sometimes I worry that I’m losing the thread and my earlier pieces had a quality that my new ones lack but then I go back and read some and they’re all full of typos and really short.

It’s fine, everything’s good for something even if that thing is only being thrown in a corner because it isn’t good for anything; if that makes sense. There was a show last night that I helped set up but I got there so late that I only saw the touring band and then had to leave immediately to run errands. I would have felt really bad if it was only sparsely attended but there was a decent crowd and they probably made good gas money so I feel a medium amount of bad.

I hope Ivory Daze made it up to Eugene okay, their van was apparently starting to overheat when it goes up hills and it’s uphill the whole way there and today was really hot. I was reading today about the “Faustian Bargain” where the aerosols from human economic activity actually have a globally cooling effect because they reflect some of the sun’s rays and as soon as we stop creating air pollution it will suddenly get a lot hotter really, really fast.

That sounds perfectly awful but it must be good for something too. Maybe the extreme heat will make it easier to breed lots and lots of insects like crickets in shoeboxes with bits of egg carton in them like you’re supposed to do when you keep small reptiles or amphibians as pets. It’s not like there will be anything else to eat.

Ok, the Trattoria Monterotondo place. I mentioned in the earlier piece that the owner and my boss, Papa Giovanni Moratti, was a giant asshole but I only really talked about him being the fun kind of asshole like refusing to let uppity customers buy his approval with money. To make things really clear he was a racist homophobic antisemitic womanizer shady businessman kind of asshole too.

That part wasn’t always as fun. If you’ve ever seen The Simpsons episode where an old Italian character says he can’t speak Italian but only broken English that was basically the deal with Papa. I’ve taken Linguistics classes now so I have a better grasp of how language fossilization works – basically when a person acquires a new language as an adult they will hit a point where they stop improving and just mispronounce things and forget words that they need to use all the time forever.

Somewhere along the line he must have forgotten how to speak Italian too because sometimes other Italians would come in and try to speak it with him and he obviously couldn’t. Every week I would help him write down a shopping list and he’d always say to write down “silver things” and I’d tell him it’s aluminum foil and the next week he’d say “silver things” again. He told me to go outside and feed the birds in the same way every day:

“Go feed your bird your pidge.”

Anyway that’s probably enough of his charming and harmless catch phrases. Here’s another thing he was fond of repeating:

“We have three rule here: No Jew. No Black. No Gay.”

Sometimes he would throw something in about how he knew I was Jewish but it was all right because he was teaching me how to be better or some crap like that. I know that sort of thing would probably piss a lot of people off but it’s always been like water off a duck’s back for me. It’s entirely possible that the only reason he hired me in the first place was to get one over on the Jewish owner of the furniture store I’d been working at around the corner.

It is what it is.

Everything about his hole in the wall coffee bar was some kind of flex. He had made a ton of money in the ‘70s and ‘80s with a store down the street that sold cheap Turkish knockoffs of Italian designer goods and now he just wanted to show off, have fun and waste it. When I first started working there the main flex was to make the little patch of sidewalk in front of his shop look as elaborate as possible.

Every day we would drag out a table, some chairs, a few planters, an assortment of statuary and a fully functional stone fountain that we put live goldfish in. They only lived inside a bowl on one of the shelves at night and died a lot because of how much they were constantly moved and handled but he kept buying more. If all of this doesn’t sound preposterous enough the main purpose of this tiny pocket of paradise was to tell 90% of his potential customers that everything was takeout only and they couldn’t sit there and it was “members only”.

I guess it was kind of like the concept of a “spite shop” on Curb Your Enthusiasm except that this spite was directed at the world in general instead of a neighboring business. Not that he didn’t have plenty of spite for a neighboring business. I’ll get to that.

This whole tableaux took us at least an hour to set up every day and another hour to pack back up again and it was heavy and most days nobody was ever allowed to sit there. So one day we are in the midst of either dragging out or packing up the heaviest part, the fountain, and a very Black and very gay man dressed in a speedo and sunglasses comes rollerblading down the sidewalk and does a flawless little twirl in Papa’s face before disappearing around the corner.

Papa wiped the sweat from his forehead with the folded little towel that was always stylishly draped over his shoulder and turns to me and says in a tone of total resignation:

“What can you do?”

I don’t think I actually said it but my immediate thought was “I guess you can tell me what you want to do and I can tell you if you can do it or not.” Anyway I think I have a pretty good idea of the sort of thing he wanted to do and thankfully, he couldn’t do it. Now that I think about it that dismissive twirl must have done a pretty good job deflating him – it wasn’t that long afterwards that the fountain disappeared and his new flex turned into flying in gelato from Italy even though it would have been cheaper and smarter to just make it.

One of the statues that we set up everyday was a cement donkey pointed at a nearby business on the corner of Clark Street to “frighten the Marrochini.” It was a fairly successful French Restaurant owned by a pair of brothers from Morocco and I guess donkeys are some kind of negative stereotype for that country in Italy. He would refer to them as “used donkey salesmen” and spread baseless rumors about the cleanliness of their kitchen to his fan club.

At some point he made up a story that they were coming and peeking through his window at night to try to learn how to emulate Italian cuisine. This was especially laughable because nothing in our shop was even made there with the exception of a couple weeks that he did paninis – everything else was brought in from off site. The Moroccan guys always dressed well and made a point of going out of their way to greet Papa with some well curated polite contempt.

I used to chat with one of the waitresses that worked over there because we both wore white belts. It was pretty trendy in the circa 2000 hardcore landscape but I never saw her at Fireside shows or anything. Papa was obsessed with trying to get us to hook up but it wasn’t really like that. Her name was Sonia.

Playing matchmaker was a thing he was actually pretty obsessed with with his fan club of neighborhood yuppie transplants but I can’t think of any instances where it was actually successful. He had me write up a poster for his imaginary dating service at some point with a lot of coded wording about the “right kind of people” – basically trying to say no Jews and everybody had to be white.

Out of the group of much younger women that he was always trying to set up with his male regulars he arbitrarily decided one was “his” and tried to make a move on her. When she was less than receptive to his advances he quickly turned a cold shoulder and stopped talking to her entirely. That night he loudly complained about the situation:

“All God damn bitches! Papa wants to fuck too!”

The whole referring to himself in the third person thing was especially creepy but he didn’t do it too often. He just wasn’t particularly interested in names. The entire time I worked there he never bothered to learn mine – he either called me “boy” or “Tom Croo” because he thought my unibrow made me look the famous actor whose name he would have been pronouncing if he ever bothered with the final “s”.

She did not take getting kicked out of his imaginary club very well. She showed up the next day crying and begged me to tell her how to get back in his good graces – if she could maybe give him some kind of food or flowers. What could I tell her? You could throw away your dignity and pity fuck an old bald man you aren’t attracted to but I wouldn’t. When somebody tells you who they are what can you do but listen?

My own relationship status and his suspicions surrounding my supposed homosexuality became a bit more of a project for him. For the period of time that I worked there I was in an off and on situation with Robyn but she never came by the shop and he didn’t believe she existed. After his attempts to hook me up with Sonia from the restaurant down the block didn’t pan out he started hiring girls in their late teens or early twenties for the express purpose of trying to get them to sleep with me.

It only happened a couple of times but it was incredibly awkward. He was shamelessly transparent about the whole thing so I’d try to warn my new coworkers about the nature of the situation they had just found themselves in. I just remember the second girl seeming incredibly suspicious and thinking that I was making the whole thing up as a ploy to actually get into her pants. When nothing happened after a couple of days he fired her and said she smelled like marijuana.

Now that I’m typing this part up I’m getting flashbacks of Karen Centerfold in Los Angeles who also had a cartoonishly obvious habit of trying to get random girls to fuck me. I’ll have to write more about Karen somewhere else later but I most remember her yelling:

“You know what the problem with all you stuck up bitches is? You all want to fuck surfers with big dicks but you won’t do it because you’re too scared!”

Once again I wish I could somehow convey the actual voice. I don’t know what it is about me that all these characters seem to make it a personal crusade to get me laid but even my mother had a similar outlook. When I was about ten years old a family with a daughter close to my age from the commune was staying with us and all the grownups somehow thought it was a good idea to have her sleep in my bed with me.

I wasn’t old enough to get an erection or even know what one was but one of my aunts had just remarried and evidently not been very discreet because the next time I saw my cousin she showed me how to play a game called “honeymoon”. Me and the commune girl went through some of the same motions once all the grownups had gone to sleep.

After that my mom would periodically give me random updates about this girl’s life. Last I heard she became a ballet dancer. Hippy families are weird.

Back to Papa’s spot – it was during the time I worked there that I started injecting heroin and eventually cocaine but Papa took all the evidence of a drug problem and explained it away to himself as a “gay problem”. I would roll in looking haggard after a sleepless night, even taking a final shot in a Port-a-Potty a few blocks down the road, and this would be his response the moment he laid eyes on me:

“What’s wrong boy? Partying all night with the happy boys on Broadway?”

His accusation referred to the popular street in Chicago’s Boy’s Town district – coincidentally I had just moved into an apartment there. I wanted to keep my job and figured he wouldn’t take kindly to the actual causes of my current condition so I parroted sarcastic assent:

“You got me Papa, I just can’t resist those gay discos…”

It was around this time that his “private club” started to include a crew of wise guy Italian cops from the neighborhood. They’d hang around the one outside table most nights and he’d give them some food and booze they were perfectly happy to drink on duty. There was a big story in Chicago around that time about a bunch of cocaine mysteriously disappearing from a police evidence locker and for some reason it came up in conversation.

“Yeah! Wanna buy some? Ha ha ha ha!”

Typical Chicago cop humor…

I didn’t live too far away, this was in the Red House near DePaul University era, and I figured it was only a matter of time until one of them recognized me going into Cabrini Greene or something. It either didn’t happen or if they did see me they kept it to themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of them were into the same shit. One night Papa obliviously made the comment:

“Isn’t it great boy? All the cops in the neighborhood know your face now!”

Yeah, just wonderful…

I said before that we didn’t make any food there but around that time we were putting together cannolis. This fat cop that the other one’s called Shrek, the first movie had just come out, was always asking me for them:

“You want a cannoli huh? How about I bring you the one with a big fat red strawberry on the end? You want me to dip it in chocolate for you?”

We did in fact have cannolis with strawberries on the end that were dipped in chocolate but I was taking advantage of an opportunity to make stupid jokes about sodomizing him and getting him to perform fellatio on me. In my defense it was a reversal of the usual power dynamic where I was constantly getting harassed by different Chicago cops in my other life as an injection drug user. The other cops were happy for any opportunity to make Shrek the butt of a joke and he licked his lips and clowned it up the way submissive abused Chicago cops always seem to.

Papa was very particular about the coffee we’d be willing to make for anybody. We did straight espressos and cappuccinos or macchiatos but if anyone dared to ask for an americano he’d yell at them to “go to Sewerbucks!”. One afternoon somebody must have asked him for some kind of vanilla something because the moment I walked in he was excited for me to make a coffee menu for the window that listed “Café Milanesi Finnochio”

It basically translates to “faggot coffee of Milan”. His big plan was that if anybody else ever asked for some kind of flavored coffee beverage we were supposed to point to this item on the menu and make them order it by name. He even bought some kind of CostCo vanilla cappuccino mix to complete his little joke. It never actually happened.

I’ve covered him being all the different kind of assholes I listed earlier except for the shady businessman one. He had a refrigerator full of cans of Sprite and one day somebody looked at the bottom of a can and noticed it was expired. You’d think he would have just thrown the rest of them away because we had plenty of orange and lemon San Pellegrino but that’s not what he did.

He had me fill a sink with hot water and soak all the cans of soda in it so I could scrub away the expiration dates with steel wool. Soaking the Sprites in scalding water probably did more to mess up the flavor then the expiration part but it mostly seemed pointless because hardly anyone ever asked for it to begin with. He pointed to the printed expiration dates:

“Just for decoration anyway…”

It was his little phrase he’d use any time he thought he was being sneaky. He said the exact same thing when he had me write out a paper that said “I am responsible for paying my own tax” because the job was under the table. Maybe he’d gotten caught up in some kind of situation with tax evasion in the past but it was never an issue when I worked there – the cops were in our pocket.

The bigger thing was that he constantly and carelessly lied about the nature of the food he sold and where it had come from:

“Everything made fresh today!”

“Everything 100% fat free sugar free!”

Neither of these things were true for anything except for maybe a shot of espresso. He would get cookies delivered from some bakery that would sit in the pastry case for weeks until he’d sold them all. Frozen pasta entrees sat in freezers for months. The pizzas and focaccias were delivered on a daily basis so at least the fresh part was true for those.

We’d get diabetics who were excited about the sugar thing and I’d have to wait until he was out of earshot to tell them that of course it wasn’t true and honestly you couldn’t trust a word out of his mouth. With all of these lies it would have made perfect sense for him to be lying about the gelato being flown in from Italy but that part was actually true. I saw the weird frozen customs cases it came in.

Like I said everything with him was a flex. He liked lying about where various things around the shop had come from too.

“This was Al Capone’s Espresso Machine!”

“This was Mussolini’s bicycle!”

Really pointless little lies. He’d tell his fan club we had a hot tub on the roof and some of them seemed to believe it.

Besides the Marrochini thing I didn’t see too much of him being racist right to people’s faces but this was probably because the Black folks in the neighborhood had already had bad interactions with him and kept their distance. There is a story on Yelp! about a family realizing that the reason he wouldn’t sell them gelato was because they weren’t white. He didn’t outright turn away nonwhite customers for to go orders when I worked there – he’d just say “your department” and have me wait on them.

Honestly things weren’t too different at the furniture store. Besides Yvonne, who was Black herself, most of my coworkers there would blatantly ignore Black customers and pretend they didn’t exist. In a city like Chicago you would almost say Papa’s candid honesty was refreshing but then there was the thing he yelled at the television during a Michael Jordan interview:

“God damn black gorilla! I hate!”

I was getting sloppier from the drugs so eventually he fired me. I forget what specific thing set him off but he shook his finger at me and bellowed in rage:

“Number one you punk! Number two you Jew! Number three you gay!”

At least he got two out of three. It was fun while it lasted. I assume he’s probably dead by now.