i sit on my hands

"Pablo had nothing to say on the matter. Nothing of eloquence." - ib

▼ FAUST: ICH SITZE IMMER NOCH from "jUSt" CD Bureau B (bb182) (DE) 2014

je suis charlie | infidel

"She stood behind them at the kerb. Hectoring. Bullish, in her taupe anorak." - ib

There was a crater where the news stand once dispensed, a doctor at large, Charlie. Analgesics. Twists of caffeine percolating through the tables, chairs, pavements loitering inches above the cobbles.
     Every time a vest went off it took the wind out one's sails. Just a little bit.
     The baby carriage detonated at the intersection between two avenues. Its canopy shredded like a purple flower where the blast ventured up.
     A wall pocked with holes.
     Pablo had nothing to say on the matter. Nothing of eloquence.
     The lunatics jeered through bullhorns. Mobile devices. Closer than one cared to think.
     It was a little piece of Vietnam, at least, carved and served with all the trimmings. Chickens smuggled home in knapsacks. Ugly orange feet bound and drumming.
     The Americans fought among themselves to ship back home their tired, huddled masses. The Turks grumbled. The British agonised and procrastinated in their peculiar Shakespearean way, like Hamlet sucking on a good cigar.
     The world is fucked, a monk complained, scarcely a heretic, and few consented to riot.
     Pablo walked Seul and Stein for the last time. Black muscle straining at the collar, hocks at heel.
     Together they paced the perimeter of the quarry, sniffing the air for intruders. Rumbling in their throats on the scent of fleece and hoof. Steaming vents. Football scarves of a less than rosy colour.
     Pagans, the three of them. Crusaders in the strictly catholic sense.
     Waging war not on dissenting hoards, but wards of the mentally diseased.
     A caliphate of midget tyrants.
     Seul uncovered something half buried in the dirt. What first appeared to be the handle on a broken vase or jug turns out to be something stripped of meat. Her tail wagged wickedly as her jaws worked at it. Yellow teeth scrabbling.
     "Nya!" Pablo admonished, but he did not have it in him to scold her.
     Stein regarded her enviously out the corner of one old eye, but knew better than to get too close. The shard of limb was not for sharing.
     December is a harsh month for unbelievers. Wise men mingle with fools. The firstborn is cruelly exposed, hair-lip turned against the fold.
     Pablo flirted in mirrors as he walked on down the hall. Stopped at the door to take a piss. In spite of the constant scribbling he had grown fat. Palsied. The century had grown old prematurely. Its children leery. Devoid of charm. There was no caution in his eyes.
     I am Charlie. Infidel. Paunch without a stick.

asshole

"It clung to the silks. A smell of mothballs from the coffin, a crack pipe in an unventilated lift." - ib

Pablo Dillinger was not one to open his mouth much in public. Even when soused.
     It was not so much that hawks and doves continually vied for dominion, that was given - one swooping after the other to nail it at the expense of meaning, fluency - it was more the fear of dentures slipping which prohibited him from flirting with the staff.
     The perforated ulcer in the join between lip and jaw which made him wince.
     The discomfit of always physically gravitating in disparate directions which made him feel he were coming apart at the seams.
     "Thank you," he said. Carefully.
     Watching bubbles rise and burst in token effervescence.
     "You're welcome."
     He swallowed it on down in less time than it took to smoke a cigarette. Sniffed at the two or three busy vaping along the length of the bar. He had tried it. Like a graft on a ravaged limb, it refused to take.
     "Peekaboo." He went.
     Feeling the teeth shift incrementally. Chewing over the burlesque bump and grind of the waitress's hips as she wove between the optics. Antonin Artaud's dead sibling in the mirror above the gantry.
     He remembered leaning out the window smoking on an autumn day. The rain coming down in fits and starts. Deep puddles in the potholes between parked cars. The brothers shaking hands with those departing mass. Sheltering under umbrellas while their priest tilted his head and took it on the chin.
     A man stepped between two vehicles pushing a child in a buggy. He looked to be in his early thirties. He lowered his head not so much to escape the drizzle as his wife. She stood behind them at the kerb. Hectoring. Bullish, in her taupe anorak.
     Pablo smiled and pulled on his cigarette. Turned the dial on the transistor radio resting on the ledge. Diluting the sound of her under a sheet of all hallows staves.
     "Peekaboo."
     The man turned to say something and his teeth slipped, the full set, emerging from his mouth before he could raise one hand to stop them. Falling in the road. Lurching sideways like a crab with amputated limbs on impact.
      The infant wailed. Pablo laughed.
      The man stooped down to collect up his dentures and jammed them straight back in his face.

mindfulness

Their guru passed among them a shallow plate
on it arranged some raisins.
He invited the shyest to partake of them.

She dropped hers on the floor
rose clumsily to her feet and collected them up.

The guru, a psychiatrist seemingly,
rang a handsome Tibetan temple bell three times
so they wiped the sleep from their eyes
rolled up their mats and stretched their limbs, smiling.

She stumbled and caught the bell with her toe
kicking it under the chair in the corner to lie there
/ broken.

party pooper

"Water flowed into it. Out of it. It was a place where The Young Team sent off their dead." - ib

 

Just when the old honest fruit remembered its roots, he was reminded he no longer had any confidence in it. 
     He despised the floral scent which could not quite be expurgated. It clung to the furniture, the silks. A smell of mothballs from the coffin, or a crack pipe in an unventilated lift.
     He could see the divorce coming.
     Sometimes, when he had fallen asleep on a train, for instance, the oncoming weight of it would jolt him awake. His eyes would snap open. His tongue fall out of his mouth.
     His hands automatically climbing to the inside pocket where he kept his cigarettes.
     Even though it had been years since one might smoke in the open without inviting penalty.
     In  hindsight, he supposed he was always aware of its inevitability.
     It was something which lurked somewhere in the near future like an accident which could not be undone. It was the unavoidable consequence of an irascible union, the firstborn coiled in utero, a tiny thumb wedged belligerently in the corner of its cheek.
     Where envelopes were stamped and invitations mailed, it might have been more prudent to remind their small circle of friends of incumbent alliance.
     The trenches were already dug. Snipers deployed.
     To that end, he felt outnumbered from the first.
     All through summer he could not bear to be close to the wetlands. Its fecundity.
     He traveled by day through the stifling heat of public transport just to escape into the concrete cool of the terminus at dusk. Meandering corridors where gusts pulled and nudged and theremins vacillated at three in the morning.
     He drank ginger spiked with ice flakes from a thermos at noon. Traded it for coffee when it grew dark. Brown tea laced with whiskey.
     Only when he was properly laid to rest, goaded in a welter of feral cats loitering between sleepers, did he feel capable of risking resurrection.
    That was the nub of it. Never in the most lucid delirium or temper did he presume to be reborn a Nationalist. Not so thick in middle age.   

smyrna 2:8–11.2

"...to the end that vacuous Halloween lantern grin of the junkie. Chiseled in sinew and bone." - ib

Jody the Hat and Pablo Dillinger were just miles into the stretch formerly known as The West Highland Way when they made contact with The Young Team.
     Pablo Dillinger squatted in the road. His guts an oily river.
     Under the brim of a Fedora, the Hat's ears howled.
     The Honda buzzed. Fizzed. A lion of Judah painted on one side of the petrol tank. A blue and white saltire on the other.
     On it perched a boy, a skelf, in oversized headphones. A tumble of filaments. Puffer fish. The ancestral shock of auburn hair partially tamed by the connecting rod of plastic carved into his skull.
     At a distance he resembled a tiny gladiator preparing to cut a rug with Auntie, bring the roof down on the spoiled, but the sounds bleeding over the whine of the engine were pure CT.
     Government approved silt.
     The bike was almost certainly borrowed from the Brotherhood. The dusted.
     Behind them the ground fell away abruptly. Plunging by twisting degree into a hollowed out channel littered with empty bottles. Buckfast. Mad Dog 20-20.
     The Devil's Pulpit.
     Water flowed into it. Out of it. It was a place where The Young Team sent off their dead.
     The boy opened the throttle some more. Balancing the weight of the frame on the heel of one boot.
     Aside from the headphones, the boots, he wore nothing but shorts.
     In another locality, a different time zone, Jody the Hat and Pablo Dillinger might have reached out to him with sticks of gum.
     His mouth a sea anemone blistering in sun bitten pool.
     "Trubba," said Dillinger.
     "Fuck," spat the Hat. Dropping one hand to the Tascam dangling on its strap.
     Like a child soldier caught square in the eye of the lens, the boy exuded a toxic photogenic charm. Pablo Dillinger raised his camera and composed himself for the shot. Clenching both buttocks while continuing to squirt.
     Where correspondents chase awards across a double page spread, Pablo Dillinger was nothing if not diligent.
     Overtaken by a weakness to bludgeon the house senseless with a royal flush of dubs, the bleachers echo with the whisper of melodica.
     The Hat let him have it with a full stream of FLAC. Asbo. Straight between the eyes.
     The boy pitched over. A sheep with the staggers on a barbed wire fence. Sprawled in a tangle of spoke. Engine noise. Rust. The headphones unstuck. The china pelvis dislocated.
     A stream of urine sizzling on the cylinder block.
     Pablo Dillinger leaped to his feet and fastened his pants.
     "You got him," he said.
     The Hat's tiny mouth said nothing. Shut the fuck up, the tilt of felt brim advised.
     He and Pablo covered the ground by inches to where the body sat half upright. Tugged at by ghosts. Those invalid brothers and sisters buoyed by elegy.
     The sky to the south rolled with smoke.
     The Hat seized the boy by the hair and dragged him back on the seat to expose the tattoos on his chest. Young Team Pygmy Death Squad. We have Come For Your Children.
     He looked to be about twelve-years-old. In truth, he was closer to forty.
     Under the blue tattoos, the skin clung like varicose porcelain to rib and joint. Tented over the distended belly where the navel bulged. An eye engraved in cataract.
     A rash of old and fresh tracks wove a dark bloom on both arms. The thread of brown matter issuing from the ear indicated long term abuse.
     Cock in Pocket. A pitchforked nut. A big fat man pushing a little pram.
     The Hat and Pablo Dillinger rolled a joint and shared it.
     Plucking a filtered cigarette plugged like a bullet into the leather belt slung around its waist. First generation Ministry. Shredding it. Pilfering a pinch of tobacco.
     Disposing of the body in those tall weeds at the side of the road with no concession to ritual magic.
     They lit up the Tascam, too, and listened to some Tubby. Worked out those kinks that result from being on the farm too long. They were being watched. Ears older than their's were tuned to the dub.
     Jody the Hat checked his batteries. Exhaled into the encroaching darkness.
     By 1AM the sirens falter. The hammers to the south bed down to a pulse. Pablo never sleeps. Not soundly. The quiet he inhabits is the space between sinew and socket. The dials twitch. The tape rolls. Spooling behind eyelids, the fluttering of moths. East of the Nile. A mile upstream. The engineering nowhere so critical as the end result: chin to midriff, thickening to a river. What started out as an anonymous pouring, a splash from a carafe, a water bearer.

$9.99 per month, or the william tell routine

"Inhale, and it is immediately apparent that they are bent on fostering addiction." - ib

Those people closest to Ernestó Agnursson did not need to subscribe to the cloud. When he made his music the whole favela stopped to listen.
     Infants stopped pawing at their mother's breast. Bakers stopped baking their bread.
     He stuttered. He whistled. He rumbled and growled.
     There was more weight in his small intestine than in a pedal drum. His teeth chattered. His anus rattled, occasionally rang like a cowbell on a Yamaha Boom.
     Ernestó Agnursson was a one man orchestra.
     Where the Ministry conspired with the Big Fruit to trick the pygmies into paying a monthly stipend for their fix, Ernestó Agnursson was an affront. A slap in the face. A threat to the bottom line.
     King Asbo first met Ernestó Agnursson in a barbershop in Easterhouse.
     When Ernestó dropped by to trade recital for shave and trim.
     Where the old colonialists reign in small print, and the royal pen skips with the minute hand over death row, the introduction came quite by accident.
     The king sat in the big chair. Working at a cigar while the barber's scissors danced. By the time he promised to make Ernestó a prince he was bald as a poor man's bicycle tyre.
      The king knew everything there was to know about the science of sound.
      He could strip it back to its essence just by listening to it.
      In his youth he ran electrical repairs from his mother's house. Shotguns barked. Ice cream vans exploded. Asbo did not hear them. He was up to his elbows in the physics of transfiguration.
      He built a radio transmitter from the ground up. The Ministry tore it down. He built another. He disseminated Hometown Hi-Fi and flew the black flag.
      The king listened to Ernestó Agnursson and knew all that was needed was a little echo. Reverb. A half twist on the high-pass filter.
      Like an old school instrument of wrath, Ernestó worked straight out the box.

pablo dillinger | war correspondent

"Overtaken by a weakness to bludgeon the house senseless with a royal flush of dubs, the bleachers echo with the whisper of melodica... Where the casual user exposes himself to infection, we seek to tattoo over underlying distortion." - ib

I had not seen daylight in three days.
     I crawled around on the rug like a broken cockroach. Filling the ashtray with cigarette butts.
     I slept under the window where the curtain met the floor.
     I could not type.
     My fingers sported blisters from partial thickness burns. Large blisters filled with pus. Serum. The carpet, too, scorched like grass from where I'd hurled the Zippo. After it lit me up. A reluctantly protesting monk.
     I could not sit comfortably.
     I could scarcely waddle. Let alone walk.
     The boil lurking between scrotum and anus smarted worse than my hands. Swollen to the approximate size of a ping-pong ball. Tender as a porkloin fillet.
     Thanks to the fucking boil I reclined for the most part motionless. One leg elevated. Pointing at the ceiling.
     It felt like the end of the road.
     I needed penicillin. A doctor. But that required my leaving the hotel room. Above all else, it involved picking up the phone and addressing reception. I practiced in the mirror. I was incapable of articulating anything beyond a short burst of ticks and clicks.
     The medicine cabinet clung to one screw in the wall. Empty but for a sliver of soap. A single, unopened rubber. I rifled through drawers. I turned socks inside out for the hell of it.
     I tore off my clothes and lay in my undershorts sobbing.
     I skulked in the cornicing looking down on myself.
     Mostly, I confined myself to the rug. Smoking incessantly.
     Several times the cigarette tumbled from between my fingers. Rolling under the sofa. A chair. A table. Forcing me to my knees before I burned the entire building down. Everyone in it.
     At times like these, one questions one's motives.
     At times like these, one eliminates the need to shave. Bathe. Even the act of defecating requires an impossible degree of concentration.
     I squatted next to the open turnstile that is a keyboard. Squatted scores of empty guest houses while landlords chased for rent.
    There was no word from the Hat.
    The trackpad was sticky. It would not permit me to navigate an escape route. Failing that, a safe return. My hand ached. The blister on my index finger burst. It leaked between the keys until all my options scabbed. I nudged the cursor around on the screen and opened several unwanted tabs.
    The minibar was closed.
    I could not write. I did not want to write. The thing which haunted me did not move me to eloquence. It sat in my bowels as ballast. Stones and gravel.
    Constipated on every level from the basement up, I crouched in the cellar of ego and refused to consider changing the bulb. The corners never heal. Not from the shame of self-inflicted wounds.
     Better to be dragged from the debris the accidental arsonist than surrender the smoking pistol.
     Better to kick against the pricks.
     Come Sunday I would be back in the interior. The newspaper owed me that much. The board of directors was screwing its readers. The editor was fucking my wife.
     The Hat and Pablo Dillinger were the only constant on the page in a war of shifting alliances. A war without obvious casualties. The Hat and Pablo Dillinger were evangelists, partisans, observers in a collision of heavy manners.
     The biggest pricks of them all, maybe, malcontents on a raft of hostilities.

el topo | dub discriminator

"Seven years imprisonment for playing a radio in an open window. Should that window occupy a space on a monitor." - ib

No lion of Judah stalks the interior dispensing justice. Holding court in dwarf shrub. Rampant. Bristling with mange.
     Jody the Hat moves like a hyena on singed paw, clinging to peaks, dropping in on favela to dispense dub. The aboriginals receive him oftenetimes without a murmur. At others, retreating into corridor with IV lines trailing. Inviting the Hat to plug them succinctly in the back.
     A Tascam loaded on his hip. The bullhorn as forgiving as a flyswatter.

4 feet 11 inches tall 2.1 | fucking felled by torpor

"I could not move for damn pygmies. Down there deepthroating dick in the tall grass." - ib

Jody the Hat did not care for pygmies, aboriginals, straights or queers. 
     Jody the Hat was a suit for hire.
     He dressed conservatively. Did not say much. Held no opinions on politics or the weather.
     The only thing which moved him was dub. It flowed through him as the CT sickness stalks the interior. Dividing cabals. Twins. Seeding in the blood like the cargo of a fruit fly.
     The sky was a peculiar shade on the bruised side. Puce as a failing liver.
     The back of the Hat's neck was spotted before the deluge. It rode above the collar of his shirt like a mildewed fire hydrant. The reels kept jamming on the spool. The gears kept laddering his hose.
     There is no better operator east of Port Moresby, and if there is he's long since drowned.
     In the rain, the rain, the rain.
     To be specific, the indigenous peoples eschew dub, but he goes at it regardless. The continual threat of blow dart is an occupational hazard. One builds a resistance to Curare. Over time, the resultant weakness of the skeletal muscles promotes a vaguely pleasant torpor. The thing to do is just keep moving. Ignore the almost overwhelming urge to buckle at the knees.
     Or unbuckle one's breeches and squat down to shit.
     The mission to bring dub to the aboriginals, to bludgeon fibre cabling into submission, is not to be sneezed at. Most of them are hooked on the Central Transmitter. It is a joyless, unenviable, thankless task.
     Many are so addled they are past assisting.
     Only yesterday morning the Hat came across an entire herd of them. Lamont T. Shady's orphan children.
     Plumbed straight into the mainframe, configured head to toe.
     Sprawled out like epileptics kicking.
     The Hat stomps on limbs. Tiny wrists. He obliterates maybe fifteen players, on and off the wire, but of course it's too late. One of them has overdosed on a Pono. God knows where she got it from. The device is jammed on its highest setting, the purest reading he has stumbled on yet.
     93.6% grade A Radiohead. Enough to fell a young elephant.
     The Celtic pygmies, like their Pictish forebears, are a simple people. While it is true they abandoned the practice of painting their faces blue centuries ago, really there was never any need for it. 
     The weather is so cruel here that their genetically pallid hides are given to that colour regardless. 
     Dusted with freckles, crowned with plumes of blazing orange and red, they naturally gravitate to building huge bonfires. Around which they collectively dance. 
     The Ministry soon adopts the practice of employing airdrops over the region. The rapid deployment of industry approved drones.
     Jody the Hat does not dance. Not with Ivor. Not with Auntie.
     Of course, executives from the Central Transmitter Tweet that they are merely supplying demand. Such activities are perfectly legal. Inhale, and it is immediately apparent that they are bent on fostering addiction. Here, in the most remote parts of the highlands, as elsewhere.
     So starved are they for diversity of diet, they will gladly consume the most unpalatable swill.
     At first it was Zunes. Preloaded with The Nashville Eleven. Beyoncé.
     Jody the Hat merely shakes out his pants. Adjusts the crease accordingly.
     A few of the natives are thereafter spotted several miles outwith their natural territories. It's understood they have woven cowboy hats out of the forest vines which proliferate.
     Where some are given over to the primitive theatre of line dancing, others, still, appear to be gyrating most salaciously.
      If one has ever heard a jig and reel one will understand their susceptibility to the crudest intrigues of chicanery. Much like the native American Indian, they are predisposed to all forms of mental illness. Predominately depression. Small wonder, in fact, they invented the very firewater which did for a tribal nation what General Custer could not.
     A short while later, they graduate to 2nd Generation Nanos laced with CT approved Bitrate effluent. Beethoven. Coldplay. Diluted Techno and Acid House at 192 KBPS. The effects on the ground are devastating.
    The cure is basic but may require several "shots" to achieve the intended result. Utilizing those extreme frequencies found in dub, we at the same time tap into HBL activity as dispensing with the need to court the earbud.
    As the needle courts the vein.
    We go in direct and like a cauterizing iron eradicate, or overwrite, the cellular damage caused by low-end interference. Where the casual user exposes himself to infection, we seek to tattoo over underlying distortion.
    DYB, DYB, DYB. DOB, DOB, DOB.
    Dub, motherfucker. Dub. Kit Carson is a long time dead.
    Decant a ribbon of glass beads and out of holes they come scrabbling.
    Jody the Hat does not care for pygmies, aboriginals, straights or queers. Jody the Hat does not care for family. In his younger years, it's true, he favoured the blackjack in tight spaces. He even auditioned for the goon squad. Jail time cured him of that vanity. Jody the Hat does not care for warrants. Supreme court subpoenas. Jody the Hat does not care for anything save deep, righteous dub.

the mouse that yawned

"When the mouse laughs at the cat, there's a hole nearby." - Nigerian Proverb

The mutes patrol the back pages like web spiders in the rough. They read. They register vibration. They eavesdrop from the tangle of a tormented rag.
     Anonymity is the preferred condition.
     Lockjaw. Trismus. The terminal backfiring of a yawn.
     One attempts to be nice. From a distance.
     Self-contained as boy scouts scavenging for kindling, they pepper the screen with cigarette burns. Peer in at the civilians setting the table for guests.
     Quiet as mice, they fall back to their position in the woods. Dig in to observe. They have nothing to say.
     Quiet as a mouse, they shoulder it like a sniper's rifle. Picking off sentences at will. Nailing the good shit with precision. A bayonet up close.
     They are the assassins one wonders about when one is laid out on the sofa. The ninjas lurking in the outhouse. The old lady knitting a sweater for the accused in the dock.

the gospel according to ayatollah shady | a fragment

"The greatest threat to civilization right now is not financial ruin. Not even terrorist attack. The greatest threat to our nation comes disguised as liberal intervention." - Lamont T. Shady

I went to the bookcase and withdrew a volume so slim it resembled a minimum wage pay packet. Cracked the spine and hoovered up some Chinaski. The good stuff. Just a little. A line or two, a paragraph at most.
     Enough to prevent the arteries from furring up altogether.
     Not so much so as to get me to idle at the trough.
     That thing with Lamont T. Shady. His fucking Mickey Mouse charter.
     Such a ridiculous name for an author. Such a preposterously mean legislative draft. He could only be a Texan. The kind of name one expects to find on the jacket of some cheap Western novella. Or stitched to the overalls of a pig farmer up to his knees in shit.
     Oil. Gas. A fucking cowboy's lament.
     Small wonder he was so warmly embraced by the pimps on the bleachers. One hand on the abacus. The other on a leash. Reining in their tired young bitches. The wrinkles. Creases. Pimples on the ass.
     Seven years imprisonment for playing a radio in an open window. Should that window occupy a space on a monitor.
     A custodial sentence on a par with manslaughter in less enlightened countries. Rape. More than made men get for inciting genocide.
     I turned up the dub. Practiced pacing around my apartment in my undershorts.
     Shady, while doctoring his texts, might as well prescribe the cutting off of hands and tongues. Routine stonings.
     The Ministry demands hanging for casual eavesdroppers.
     A cruel and unusual punishment for the rest.
     Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Lamont T. Shady plots to padlock the doors on our public libraries. Stops just short of raising them to the ground.
     He postures and drawls like an Ayatollah in Gene Autry hat and spotted neckerchief. A peeping Tom in jackboots. One can't sleep soundly for the lasso sneaking out from under the bed.
     The Ministry is delighted.
     It would call in the firemen right away. If circumstance allowed it.
     If not to cook the books, then put them out of circulation. Nothing excites them more than the prospect of abolishing a free lunch. It's where Jesus went to hell in a handcart. His neglecting to charge those fuckers by the head.
     I turn up the dub some more. Just enough to make a pantomime of it.
     Every time Shady pauses to wipe the spittle of his microphone, the Ministry jumps to its feet and applauds. They can't believe they're getting away with it at last. Murder. After the lean years. The aboriginals have had things their way for far too long. It's about time someone restored a semblance of order. It's about time someone put them in their place
     Getúlio Vargas III immediately produces a calculator and calls his hedge fund manager. The Mouse oils his Uzis and checks both magazines for duds. It's a win win situation. The only element not profiteering can't afford the ticket.

mouse bill 3261

"A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb." - Lamar S. Smith

A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/13782-Lamar_S_Smith

A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/13782-Lamar_S_Smith

A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/author/13782-Lamar_S_Smith

getúlio vargas iii | bean counter

"He looked to be about twelve-years-old. In truth, he was closer to forty." - ib

Getúlio Vargas III occupied such a high position within the Ministry that they had to construct an extra floor. Just to keep up with him.

     He drew an eight figure salary, had three wives, six homes, countless children. In addition to owning one hundred and forty-two pairs of custom made loafers - in which slept the imprint of those women who dressed and stitched them - he drove a Maserati Ghibli five days a week; a Ferarri 458 on Sundays. That is, when he was not piloting his very own private Embraer Legacy. An achievement he was especially fond of, even though it was widely conceded he did not not deserve his wings. Getúlio Vargas III was incapable of flying straight. Even down a lighted runway.
     At the end of the day he was still a fucking bean counter.
     At least so far as his enemies were concerned, and he collected quite a few.

know your rights

     "And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth

     And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices." - Revelation 10

 ▼ KING TUBBY + PRINCE JAMMY: DUB OF RIGHTS from "Dub Gone 2 Crazy • 1975-1979" 2 x LP Blood & Fire (BAF 013) (JA/UK) 1996

a guiding dub

"The drones seldom hover this close to the edge of the page. We bookmark it regardless." - ib

▼ GRANT PHABAO: ANDUB HEAD YUDU from "Hi-Fidelity Dub Sessions • Chapter One" CD Guidance Recordings (GDRC571) (FR) 1999

young team | pygmy death squad

"We came upon a Wurlitzer standing in the pulpit of a church. A jukebox, not an organ." - ib

 Originally appearing on the Wurlitzer Jukebox 7", WJ 22.

▼ MOGWAI: (NEW PATHS TO) HELICON 2 from "Ten Rapid • Collected Recordings 1996-1997" CD Rock Action (05 CD) (UK) 1997

devolution dub

"North of the border, the drones circle like crows high on the scent of carrion." - ib

Engineered by Bullwackie, Prince Douglas.

▼ PRINCE DOUGLAS: NORTH OF THE BORDER from "Dub Roots" LP Wackie's (WAC 295) (JA/US) 1980

dub will eat itself 2.1

"Out of that awareness comes dissent. Out of dissent comes the instrument for change" - ib

Midway between sermon and reason, houses of prayer spring up in the most unlikely of terrains. Where the grandest of cathedrals fester desecrated, those rawer divergencies circulate as freely as lice. A shrine. An offering. A dais and several deckchairs.
     Tabernacles infesting road and favela like so many abandoned shoeshine boxes. Havens for the unclean.
     The gatherings are seemingly impromptu and generally involve some token sacrifice.
     The aboriginals are drawn to echoes of the Eucharist. Even as they inject unadulterated quantities of RIAA approved filth directly into their brains and set about consuming themselves. Siphoning all that which can be salvaged between one airdrop and the next.
     The especially wasted, the ones most eaten by desire, simply fall prone to the turf and writhe there still connected to their media players. In the rain. The sleet... Blindly willing the effluent to pour down on them from out of the rectums of government drones.
     Many times I have planted a steel toe-capped boot in a creeping stain only to step on a bracelet of teeth. A gris-gris gumbo of battery acid and undigested parts.

We came upon a Wurlitzer standing in the pulpit of a church. A jukebox, not an organ. The gospel frozen on the spindle behind stained glass. Seven archangels pinned like butterflies.

     It must have involved a tremendous degree of determination. Just to drag it in there.
     The generator lay half buried under a litter of printed hymn sheets. Psalms.
     We did not much feel like tarrying there. Once it was established the juice was spoiled. There was something about those blank rows of pews - the dust, the absence carved in wood - that made one immensely wary. Afraid for those pockets of resistance within oneself. Sometimes it is better to turn one's back.
     Sometimes it is better to move with the dub.
     Where the copper wire which strung me together sang feet above those twisted shrunken remains I could no longer assume I was safely earthed. The vibrations travelled through less vital organs than heart or spleen and concentrated somewhere in my belly. Nesting there. Stitched full of appetites.
     We were on the seaboard. Closer to the coast than we had been in weeks.
     I seem to recall there were boats once. Yachts. Idling at the jetty.
     The memory of it is sentimental. Where the Brotherhood is not.
     I remember.
     Sun ripened runners in pea coat, its longer Afghan cousin, toggled against the stiff salt breeze. Before the voodoo stench. A tangle of cockles. Whelks. Nets laid out on the pier for mending. Dogs snuffling between children's feet. When children were still children.

Not those diminutive high priests courted by the Ministry.

     Dogs, one must take pains to avoid.
     Like addled pygmies they travel in packs, but they are grown feral and have no fear of man. The aboriginals, of course, exhibit no alarm either. Even as they are overrun. I have seen them half-dismembered, disemboweled, ribs snapped open like an ivory toast rack, bratwurst ticker tape spooling.
     And to the end that vacuous Halloween lantern grin of the junkie. Chiseled in sinew and bone.
     Young Team Pygmy Death Squad.
     An arm floating up like a doll's.
     The dub, it must be understood, is neither directed as a means to pacify nor agitate. Where the Ministry for the Central Transmitter seeks merely to control, The Brotherhood of Dub moves at great lengths to nurture awareness. Out of that awareness comes dissent. Out of dissent comes the instrument for change.
     We zipped up only that which was essential and left the Host intact in its spangled box. A vestige of more simple times. Only the reel is key now. The dub. The drones seldom hover this close to the edge of the page. We bookmark it regardless. The CT can go fuck itself. There is no truce, no pretense, no token religious observance. There is nothing save conflict. Division. Bad blood.

b.o.d.

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.” - William Burroughs

North of the border, the drones circle like crows high on the scent of carrion.
     The aboriginals are broadly divided into two camps. Those dependent on airdrops to maintain their habit, and those drawn to the cyclic boom of dub permeating deep into the interior.
     Deserted A roads thread the landscape like collapsed veins. Caravans of the afflicted press forward on their bellies where both worlds intersect. A predatory centipde, or parasitic flatworm, bent on devouring itself.
     Wretched. Retching. Melting under the weight of junk sickness, RIAA sowed genome.
     I could not move for damn pygmies. I could not move, period.
     Where the copper wire which strung me together sang feet above those twisted shrunken remains I could no longer assume I was safely earthed. The vibrations travelled through less vital organs than heart or spleen and concentrated somewhere in my belly. Nesting there. Stitched full of appetites.
     The continual threat of blow dart is an occupational hazard. One builds a resistance to Curare. Over time, the resultant weakness of the skeletal muscles promotes a vaguely pleasant torpor.
     The thing to do is just keep moving. Until one simply can not.
     I played out the dials and let the dub rest as bait. My hands shook as I rolled one cigarette after another and watched each stutter and fizz between restless fingers. While parachutes floated down and deposited more filth on playing field. Car park. The cinders of a hospital.
     The old stadiums are a favoured target, naturally. The aboriginals continue to congregate there decades after the colossal PA systems have fallen into disrepair. Squatting on the bleachers. The executive stands. Waiting for some cue or prompt to galvanize disturbance.
     The especially wasted, the ones most eaten by desire, simply fall prone to the turf and writhe there still connected to their media players. In the rain. The sleet. The slavering ferment that is one month only in July. Blindly willing the effluent to pour down on them from out of the rectums of government drones.
     The cure is basic but may require several "shots" to achieve the intended result. Utilizing those extreme frequencies found in dub, we at the same time tap into HBL activity as dispensing with the need to court the earbud.
    Even a cure has its limitations.
    We go in direct and like a cauterizing iron eradicate, or overwrite, the cellular damage caused by low-end interference. Where the casual user exposes himself to infection, we seek to tattoo over underlying distortion.
     The dub, it must be understood, is neither directed as a means to pacify nor agitate. Where the Ministry for the Central Transmitter seeks merely to control, The Brotherhood of Dub moves at great lengths to nurture awareness. Out of that awareness comes dissent. Out of dissent comes the instrument for change.

'kaktəs | CT 49

     "Much like the native American Indian, they are predisposed to all forms of mental illness...

     Small wonder, in fact, they invented the very firewater which did for a tribal nation that which General Custer could not." - ib

▼ RUPIE EDWARDS: BUCKSHOT DUB from "Buckshot b/w Bucksot Dub" 7" 45 Cactus (CT 49) (JA/UK) 1974

assume power focus

"Over time, the resultant weakness of the skeletal muscles promotes a vaguely pleasant torpor" - ib

▼ PSYCHIC TV: PART IV. NEW GUINEA HEADHUNTERS PIPE, LARGE AND SMALL DRUM from "Themes" FREEBIE LP with "Force The Hand Of Change" LP Some Bizarre (PSY1) (UK) 1982

matthew 4:1-11

stones become bread

“Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.”
- William S. Burroughs, "Naked Lunch"

 Recorded at Tom's Place, San Francisco.

▼ THIN WHITE ROPE: RED SUN (ORIGINAL) from "Red Sun" 12" 45 Demon (VEX 8) (US/UK) 1988

the world wobbles

drop down natt'rly loaded

▼ KING TUBBY: DROP DUB from "The Fatman Tapes Vol. 1" LP Culture Press (CP 4002) (JA/FR) 1999

ah seh won

stations of the flex

From the album recorded variously at 

King Tubby's Studio, Channel One Recording Studio, Southern Studios.

Mixed by Adrian Sherwood, King Tubby, Prince Jammy.

 ▼ BIM SHERMAN: STATION DUB from "Ghetto Dub" LP RDL (RDL 900) (JA/UK) 1988

screwdriver

mind control

On the third knock, I answered the door to my neighbour's eighteen year old grandson and knew before he opened his mouth that I would not say no. The word had gone on vacation. He wanted to borrow a screwdriver, the delinquent son of a bitch, and I had one close to hand. A flat head. Everybody owns at least one. It is not the kind of thing one thinks to borrow.
     Ordinarily.
     Unless one is a spinster. Or widow. Frittering away afternoons grieving after a firm hold on geometry. The architecture behind a wall socket.
     He had not long since caved in his best friend's skull. With a brick. On the street below my kitchen window. Not that it bothered me. This was not the reason I could not refuse. But it did give me pause to wonder just why he might require a screwdriver.
     From the moment he was born, he suffered acutely from problems with his hearing. The small bones in his middle ear.
     Not my neighbour's grandson.
     I have no reason to suspect that he was ever plagued with aches. Infections.
     But this kid, he suffered miserably for the first several years of his life. His mother bound his head in a scarf. Tied it in bows like some drowsy rabbit in an attempt to pacify his mewling. From the age of twelve he began self medicating with whiskey. Rum. Anything he could lay his hands on. Just to dull the serrated edge of it.
     It was not until his forty-second year, half scuttled by psychosis, that he stumbled on epiphany. He was a telepath. That was the root of it. The reason his ears had for so long bothered him. He could not keep out the din of voices. The ringing of cutlery from several hundred yards away.
     At forty-four he decided to be done with it and stepped off a roof.
     His ears troubled him no more.
     I fetched the screwdriver from its box in the cupboard and handed it to my neighbour's boy. I knew I would never see it again. Or that if I did it would be missing its bit. For a second there, I thought of plunging it between his ribs.
     "Stick it through the letterbox when you're done," I gestured.
     "Sure thing," he said.
     The eyes prematurely blunted. His face a freshly harvested cabbage nodding off the stalk.
     His girlfriend had a little dog. I wondered how long it would take before he strangled it to to death on its leash. Or took to beating her with it.
     "Do you like reggae ?" he asked.
     I studied the faint blossom of acne creeping along the hairline where his forehead joined at the scalp.
     "Only, I heard it coming from your door. My nan says it's a lot of shite."
     The next day he still had not returned my screwdriver. I had that fucking thing without losing or misplacing it for close to twenty years. Bills in brown envelopes clung to the bristles of my letterbox, but that was all she wrote. Two days passed and still no sign of it. Children played on bicycles outside beneath the balcony. Fathers attacked glued parts with spoke key and pedal spanner.
     I thought of a hundred small tasks postponed I might perform. Had only I the right tool for the job.
     Quite by accident, I came upon the kid's uncle in the stairwell. I told him very precisely that I wanted my fucking screwdriver back.
     I had an engraved brass plate that needed fixing to my door. The batteries in my son's nightlight needed replacing.
     "Relax," he shrugged. "I'll have a word with him."
     "Do that," I said.
     A couple of days later, the cocksucker was back at my door. Even through the fug of deep bass I could identify the rattle. This time, I answered on the second knock.
     He looked down at his shoes and juggled my screwdriver as though it were a miniature baton. Hunched over the welcome mat like a sack of shit zipped up in a tracksuit. At first I did not recognise it as my own. The cap which ought to have been screwed down into the handle was missing. A crack ran through the red plastic barrel.
     "What the fuck ?" I said.
     "Here," he went. Slapping it into the palm of my hand.
     My former acquaintance, the telepath, would have had none of it of course. The hapless fucker knew too much.
     The river of genes which carried his gift may have been muddied from the first, but still.
     He never married. Never divorced. Never went sleepwalking through those vast wildnernesses of misplaced trust like the rest of us. Some people do not care for dub, the seismic shift, the tectonic rumblings. It fucks with their heads.
     "Have you a cigarette ?" so help me god, the motherfucker sang.

the postman delivers

the hipster kool-aid acid test

With guitar by Doug Cooeyate.

▼ WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS + GUS VAN SANT: THE HIPSTER BE-BOP JUNKIE from "The Elvis Of Letters" 12" 45 Tim/Kerr (PK-714) (US) 1985

dub poem(s) for self medicating corporate motherfuckers

 die slowly riddim (twice)
 

▼ STEVEN JESSE BERNSTEIN: THE SPORT (PART 1) from "Prison" LP Sub Pop (SP 101)
▼ STEVEN JESSE BERNSTEIN: MORNING IN THE SUB BASEMENT OF HELL from "Prison" LP Sub Pop (SP 101) (US) 1992

dub is the star

cut > cut > cut an' gain

▼ CORNELL CAMPBELL: BEAT THEM IN DUB from "Sound System Dub Plate Specials" LP (Jamaican Recordings (JRLP055) (JA/UK) 2014
▼ DELROY WILSON: A HEAVY DUB from "Sound System Dub Plate Specials" CD (Jamaican Recordings (JRCD055) (JA/UK) 2014

brentford roadworks in dub

dub is my preoccupation

The Dub Specialist is not any one artist or engineer but a series of limited edition dub LP releases from Studio One issued throughout the 1970s, and subsequently repackaged by Heartbeat in the US, Soul Jazz in the UK.

 "The [original] albums were mixed down by a number of engineers over the decade, including Sylvan Morris, Syd Bucknor & Overton "Scientist" Brown, all under the auspices of legendary producer, sound system pioneer and music entrepeneur, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd."

▼ DUB SPECIALIST: BEAM SOUND from "17 Dub Shots From Channel One" LP • CD Heartbeat (HB 142) (JA/US) 1995
▼ DUB SPECIALIST: QUEEN OF THE DUB from "17 Dub Shots From Channel One" LP • CD Heartbeat (HB 142) (JA/US) 1995

strickly old school

dub will eat itself

Produced by Linval Thompson. 

▼ SCIENTIST: PRINCE'S WRATH from "Scientist Encounters Pac-Man At Channel One" LP Greensleeves (GREL 46) (JA/UK) 1982
▼ SCIENTIST: THE DARK SECRET OF THE BOX from "Scientist Encounters Pac-Man At Channel One" LP Greensleeves (GREL 46) (JA/UK) 1982

austerity in dub

start choppin'

The sequel to the earlier Prince Jammy Dub LP "Uhuru in Dub" (CSLP 2).

Mixed at Channel One Studios, Kingston, Jamaica.

▼ PRINCE JAMMY: CHOPPING DUB from "Osbourne In Dub" LP CSA (CSLP 10) (JA/UK) 1983

tortoise |ˈtɔːtəs, -tɔɪz|

crooked dub

tortoise (n.)

1350-1400; variant of earlier (15th-century) tortuse, tortose, tortuce, Middle English tortuca < Medieval Latin tortūca, for Late Latin tartarūcha (feminine adj.) of Tartarus (< Greek tartaroûcha), the tortoise being regarded as an infernal animal; Medieval Latin form influenced by Latin tortus crooked, twisted (see tort)

 Recorded and mixed at Idful Music Corporation, Chicago 

Illinois, November 29 through December 5, 1993.

▼ TORTOISE: TIN CANS & TWINE from "Tortoise" CD Thrill Jockey (THRILL-013) (US)
▼ TORTOISE: CORNPONE BRUNCH from "Tortoise" CD Thrill Jockey (THRILL-013) (US) 1994

fields and waves

hoo

"From Middle English hoo, shoo "she" from Old English hēo "she". The Hoo Peninsula is a peninsula in England separating the estuaries of the rivers Thames and Medway. It is dominated by a line of sand and clay hills, surrounded by an extensive area of marshland composed of alluvial silt. The name Hoo is the Old English word for spur of land."

With Guitar by Graham Sutton.

▼ .O.RANG: HOO from "Fields And Waves" CD  Echo (ECHCD 10) (UK) 1996

42 strings to one calabash

dali's acoustic toothbrush

Ali Ibrahim Touré

1939- 2006

From the album recorded at Livingston Studios, London 

24th, 25th, 26th June 2005. 

▼ ALI FARKA TOURÉ & TOUMANI DIABATÉ: FANTASY from "Ali & Toumani" 2 x LP • CD  World Circuit (WCD-083) (Mali/EU) 2010

docteur gainsbarre

serge en dub

"Aux Armes Et Caetera" b/w "Lola Rastaquoère"

Philips (6837 549) (PROMO) (FR) 1979

Backing Vocals: The I Threes; Bass: Robert "Robbie" Shakespeare
Drums: Lowell "Sly" Dunbar: Guitar, Piano: Michael "Mao" Chung
Organ: Ansel Collins; Percussion: Uzziah "Sticky" Thompson
Piano: Robbie "Tights" Lyn; Rhythm Guitar: Radcliffe "Dougie" Bryan 

Recorded in Kingston, Jamaica. 

For Emmett @ Art Decade

▼ SERGE GAINSBOURG: DUB ET CAETERA from "Aux Armes Et Caetera" 2 x CD  Mercury (077 261-2) (JA/FR) 1979 • 2003

▼ SERGE GAINSBOURG: DUB RASTAQUOÈRE from "Aux Armes Et Caetera" 2 x CD  Mercury (077 261-2) (JA/FR) 1979 • 2003
▼ SERGE GAINSBOURG: DAYSI DUB from "Aux Armes Et Caetera" 2 x CD  Mercury (077 261-2) (JA/FR) 1979 • 2003