they're trying to wash us away...

home, seep home...

76 hours of stress and strain, thunder, tumble and stain...

the drain beneath the groaning heavens poured out a clotted clutch of dark, matted hair and teeth...

the combination of days and nights of rain and the intense levels of water in the streets due to backed-up sewers began to cripple the foundations...

the back wall fell in and took mother's favorite wallpaper, well, the only wallpaper we had, on one wall. now there's just a gaping maw...

when the sun came out yesterday afternoon i realized how thirsty i was, surrounded by water, thirsty...

a plane went over earlier, but it was far too high to be of any use, such a distant sound. my whole world seems distant right now and yet threateningly close, breathingly intimate...

starved water moccasins and slewing, desperate rattlers invaded the front room earlier. i moved upstairs...

suddenly, the smell has become overpowering, rich, pungent and sweetly cloying, a wine hint smeared with worm...

my little brother didn't wake up this morning. still, that leaves more of the remaining food for me. cold comfort. frozen, in the heat. why this...

the stairway gave out underneath me and i fell bluntly through into a stanchion, shearing my fibula and driving it out my calf and into the sunlight...

something hit the roof today, i think...

the temperature has been steadily climbing and my internal thermometer is soaring too. water supply in the tub's almost drained, never mind that my leg has made it almost impossible to get there...

someone's on the roof. i can't shake the dreams. i think i'm an alien here now, somehow, foreign even to myself now. someone's on the roof. i think it's me. i'm leaving...

the only thing left alive on earth and above...

the water's falling. i'm rising...

Then, buried somewhere in the lower regions of this sonic barrage, comes the sound of that ancient, storied elevator scraping and laboring once more up to the eighth floor, and the gate clatter-slams open. I catch Huncke's footsteps as they shuffle down the dim and echoing corridor to his tiny room by the stairwell, his frail yet elegant voice keeping itself company. The is where he will close the final chapter, the fascinating, draining yet lush threads of his journey at last tying their last, worn knots. Now the old thief too joins the rush of noises and film clips that swirl around me as I drink in my memories of a life lived up there in the old hotel.

Here are the lyrics for the PRUDE song "Darkroom" that's available on the 'Gears Gone Wild' compilation on Glitch Mode that was available on the 16 Volt tour. You might still be able to get a hard copy from the cats of Cyanotic.
You can avail yourself of our world, though there's not much happening there yet for you to see, but you should go and listen to us slip a slice of sleaze here: http://www.myspace.com/prudemusic
It, and the rest of the record, will be making more noise and raising dust all over the place sooner than some would like, and not fucking soon enough for me.

-DARKROOM-

Get you off in the darkroom.
Get it out in the dark.

Spanish Johnny got his fingers in everything,
He’s got his tongue in there too.
Louie likes it dark, likes it light,
likes it loose, likes it’s tight,
likes it coming, going, in and out and
old and young too.
Oh, Kiko’s king of the aisle and he’s
the star of the show and
he can really rock you in the back row.

Get you off in the darkroom.
Get it out in the dark.

Ricky Rocket slides a hole in his pocket,
slips a finger in the socket now.
Gets his kicks and licks from
turning tricks for balcony spics,
pretty boys getting slick
look like sugar-sweet chicks.
Laying back in his seat
with his pants at his feet
and when he blows a spark, oh man, what a show!

Get you off in the darkroom.
Get it out in the dark.

Gimme leather.
Gimme pleasure.
Gimme candy lips together.

Gimme disco.
Rock and roll.
Gimme zipless glory hole.

So get unhooked in the darkroom.
Just come on out in the dark.

Come on out, come on in.
Get it off, get it in in the dark.

Just drove back from seeing two friend’s bands play in Brighton down by the piers. The night was strange and like an off-kilter merry-go-round and the show was perfectly demented, delivered in a basement that was straight out of Berlin 84. It reminded me of the Lower East Side back when it was the Wild West and hadn’t been colonized (high-colonic’d) by the Beige Brigade. Queen of the Trucks, dear friend Stuart who splays in The Dirty Cakes, uncorked a solo set of damaged Berlin cabaret via Klaus Nomi-does-Metal that was smoky and cocky and licky and delicately feather boa’d. Wonderful in hi-heel deceleration. Another friend, Andy Huxley, ex of 80’s Matchbox B-Line Disaster fame etc, kick out glass shards with his latest greatest, a thing called Vile Imbeciles. It was angular and splintered through a James Chance-fists-Elliott Sharp spyglass. Spectacular scree of car-crash proportion.

The whole night was capped by the drive back, through the pitch black. I listened to my favorite radio position which is Long Wave band 152. It essentially falls in the perfect intersection of a catalog of actual stations and produces a miasma of sounds that I just can’t get enough of. The main aspects of the non-broadcast tonight were two different forms of static, one of them a very lo-mid range repeating 2-second pulse, and the other a stuttering wash of noise waves that periodically broke into shards and tatters of hi-end tearing crash that scrolled up and down in volume. Layered throughout this melange was an almost constant, low-volume perhaps Czech soap opera broadcast. Then, depending on where I was on the journey through the ink of night, there threaded in undulating portions of “Harlem Nocturne”, some Flamenco guitar solos, a jazzy quartet and some opera singer of stature, Carreras or the like, singing (really) “Yesterday” in terrible earnest. Every now and again some feedback bleeps and tones came cascading through like shrieks from the throats of dying animals. It was so spectacular and other-worldly that I found myself rocketing aimlessly onward for the sake of it, past my turn, just to hear what would be mix into the crucible next. My 15-minute drive took me almost an hour. It was fascinating and riveting and soothing and rending all at once and there are countless post-Cage artists that would have loved to be able to claim that as their finest recorded moment on vinyl or optical beam. One of the best non-broadcasts I’ve caught yet.

http://www.myspace.com/dearbritch
http://www.myspace.com/vileimbeciles

Just had a fascinating meeting with Daniel Baker (no relation to Dave) in Brixton. We met to discuss a collaborative project that we'll be working on over the next couple of months and executing over one of the last weekends in September.

Daniel's a visual artist with a strong scientific cant that informs much of his work. He has recently built The Little Theatre of Disease and Desire and displayed it at The Old Operating Theatre Museum along with a slide show of images that either stand as frozen tableau (often disturbing cut-out images) inside the confines of the theater itself, or as actual slideshows and films. The theater is a collision of 18th Century toy theaters and autopsy theaters and explores the delusions, dreams and fevered imaginings that vent from that intersection. Stimulating realm of ideas and one that meshes with my own interests as well.

He's been commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to develop a more interactive version of the theater that'll become the framed setting for a series of student interpretations of illness and desire via charcoal, pencil, watercolor, smudge/smear and other materials possibly. These tableaux will be shot in sequence and dropped straight into Final Cut Pro to be shown there at the museum during the run of each workshop.

I'm really excited about this project. Besides collaborating with him on execution and logistics, I'll be spontaneously storytelling throughout each session, and the shards that I improvise as stimulated by the materials and the student's ideas will be used as intellectual engines to help facilitate the flow of creative juices, acuitive descriptions and interpretations of the material and what the students want to do with it. It's one of the more challenging and complex projects I've been involved in a while and looks to be a blast. it also feels like it's a sign post for future projects.

This is the link for Daniel's Paper Theatre:
http://www.papertheatres.blogspot.com

Here's the site for the Wellcome Trust's collection. Go exploring, it's rich and profound. I've had a chance to work with some of their extensive medical collection before and it's staggeringly broad and stupendously gruesome and only a minute portion of it is on public show.
http://www.wellcomecollection.org