Living back in San Diego I ended up in a long term relationship with a New England type pedigree girl. She was from Cape Cod and into stuff like Diesel Jeans and making Cosmopolitans, probably the closest I’ve ever been to dating a “normie”. She lived in the same Mission Valley apartments as the woman that Andy Panda was seeing – still is actually but she might have moved by now. She was really good at getting jobs as a “brand ambassador” so I got to experience that world in all it’s weirdness. Operate an Oxygen Bar to promote Trojan Condoms at OzzFest, that sort of thing.
We made a trip to the East Coast together so I got to see Cape Cod through the eyes of a local: hear people talk about how some tunnel wasn’t finished yet, go to a bar somebody in The Pixies owned, hear the way people said words like Hyannis. We stayed at her Grandpa’s house and one morning a newborn bat had fallen from wherever they were nesting to just in front of the front door and died. It looked like an emaciated human infant swaddled in a blanket of it’s own skin.
Her Grandpa asked me if I was much of a fisherman.
Her dad was renting a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard so we went out there too. If you’ve never been it’s almost difficult to believe how patrician things like pictures of lighthouses and dried out starfish and sea shells can be. In San Diego these are the trappings of Ocean Beach which was still pretty run down and hippyish when I was growing up but for New England white people they might as well be gold chains. Everybody wore The Black Dog T-Shirts and the ladies were buzzing about this kind of straw hat that Hillary Clinton had just made popular.
The rental was on a part of the island called Gay Head near Michael J. Fox’s house. We spent a day messing around on a secluded beach because there wasn’t much privacy in the rental. This big orange dog-tick came marching across the sand to make things unpleasant for us. They don’t squish easy so I threw it as far as I could but our body heat just brought it back. I found a rock to smash it on and a smaller rock to smash it with – it’s body split perfectly into top and bottom pieces like the two sides of a hollow plastic action figure. I would have almost thought it was two ticks stuck together if the two halves didn’t stiffen up and die the moment they were separated.
Everybody was talking about Lyme Disease.
The trip hadn’t been planned around it or anything but we were fortunate enough to be in New York for a Dearraindrop opening at Deitch Projects called Riddle of the Sphinx. I had seen some Dearraindrop stuff in Paper Rodeo and there was one batch of zines that them and Paper Rad had put out together. The two collectives were almost uncanny analogues of each other: a charismatic careerist with a quiet overshadowed girlfriend and her sort of wunderkind younger brother that seemed to make slightly better stuff than the main guy.
I never knew too much about it but I heard vague whispers of a “beef” between the two groups. It was almost a theme within the Fort Thunder adjacent art landscape for a little while. Everybody was inspiring each other and working in various groups and collectives – when an idea gained traction it could be a little Rocky defining exactly whose idea it was. I actually asked Jacob Ciocci about the “beef” a few years later:
“We squashed it.”
This was the beginning of my storied history with admiring Jeffrey Deitch’s taste while carrying a mild aversion for his overall persona. He has definitely amplified and fostered a lot of artists that seem to benefit from the platform over the years. I wouldn’t say anything as dramatic as “necessary evil” but “necessary ickiness” about sums it up. A party at his Los Feliz mansion had me retreating into a closet to escape the atmosphere then immediately emerging to find out who was responsible for the Boschian embossed works I found hanging there.
It was Raqib Shaw.
At the Dearraindrop show I made an especially cringey faux pas. Billy Grant had left his prescription of Adderall on a table next to some pita chips and orange juice and because much of the group’s work is drug related I assumed they were supposed to be “refreshments”. In an overcompensatory attempt to seem “cool” I swallowed three of them. Of course that hadn’t been the intention behind leaving them on the table at all and he actually needed them and it was a problem for him that I’d taken them. They were 50 milligram extended release capsules.
I don’t actually even like stimulants that much.
I’m a bit of a talker under normal brain chemistry conditions so in this state I was an absolute menace. I was overly enthusiastic and oblivious to basic social cues and Joe Grillo had to ask me repeatedly to back up and give him some personal space while I was talking at him about god knows what. The commune I was born on had a specific idiom for this kind of behavior:
“Into the juice.”
The group Slow Jams who seem to have disappeared from the internet were performing at an after party somewhere with a piece that utilized a trampoline and I was jumping on their trampoline and generally practicing bad audience etiquette. Even without an absurd dose of Adderall I was a bit much for a big chunk of my twenties. I was always trying to get on the mic and freestyle rap and while this behavior is appropriate in some settings like freestyle rap battles and acceptable in other settings like shows and parties where people want me to rap it is almost nearly as often a total pain in the ass.
It was that moment with the harmonica at that first Make-Up show in 1998, I was shamelessly addicted to the thrill of the borrowed spotlight.
About a year later I would end up in a rap group of my own joining a motley San Diego outfit called Sex Affection and helping reimagine it as Hood Rich. Spending time on the other side of things where you bring the gear and write the songs gave me some much needed perspective but I would credit one particular rapper with showing me a hard boundary. I can’t remember where and when I first saw MC Subzero Permafrost but I remember exactly what she said when I tried to get on her microphone:
“When I was coming up I was taught to get my own mic and never let anybody else use it.”
Sometimes hearing “no” can be as transformative as hearing “yes”. I appreciate everyone who was accommodating in my early years but Wendy’s honest refusal was what I needed to grow and mature as an artist. I got my own microphone, a cheesy but iconic Shure 55 because I liked how it looked in a DJ Scooter video. I haven’t considered myself a rapper for several years although some might disagree with how they would classify the Bleak End stuff.
I’m pretty sure I’ll get back into it.
This feels short so I’ll throw in some extra details from the 2004 trip. We went to Providence and it was going through one of those extremely populist public sculpture series of the early 2000’s that arose after the success of Chicago’s Cows on Parade. In this case they were Mr. Potato Heads. There was one that looked like Edgar Allen Poe and an especially inspiring one in front of the mall that looked like an ATM with money coming out of it’s mouth. There’s actually a story about that mall from the 2000 Fort Thunder trip that didn’t make it into those chapters. I was holding the door open for a group of whatever New England calls “Valley Girls”. One turned to me as they entered and announced in a cheery tone:
“Thanks! We were just about to say something really rude about you!”
I’d rank it pretty high among all the variations I’ve gotten on “hey weird guy you look weird” over the years. Back in 2004 we went to see Devendra Banhart at AS220 and I wasn’t thrilled with it. I’ve written about this elsewhere and this installment has enough snark, directed both inwardly and outwardly, as it is. More memorable was the hotel we ended up staying at when I didn’t run in to anyone we could try to stay with. The Sportsman’s Lodge was the perfect setting for what we were getting into: sex and heroin.
Boston and Allston were the final ports of call. We ate at a popular vegan pizza place that I never miss a chance to mention was later rebranded as TJ Scallywaggles. The jaunty backstory printed on the wall reminded me a bit of the Ben & Jerry’s mythos as written by Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil. We had other business in the neighborhood. New England was getting dope from her sketchy Russian friends. One seemed to be a prostitute and the other suggested rich boy whose mother handmade him shirts with cute pictures of apples on them – quite trend forward with the oilily’s and such to come.
While we were waiting a large wind picked up. A very young mouse was attempting to cross the street but being harried by the winds. An errant gust would send him rolling backward with his comically oversized feet flipping over his head. Still he recollected himself, soldiered on and reached his side in style.
If this little mouse serves as any allegory, avatar or simulacrum of anything else in this chapter please let me know. I’d certainly like to believe it could but more specific details elude me. It was in fact very cute.
We went to a Neil Young tribute in a Brooklyn Park. Cat Power did Needle and the Damage Done. We were happy to be there, happy to come home and I was unhappy to extend the relationship.
I needed out.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 