$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.