aNTiFAmE

"It’s not about striking it rich anymore, but doing whatever you’re doing as well as you can. Live it yourself in the new world. That's anti-fame. Accepting personal responsibility for your expressions as a creative being, declaring yourself unstandardized by choice, is a brave reclamation of property rights, the exact opposite of giving up." -Zack Kopp, author of Undamned!,Gut co-editor,managing editor, www.MightyMercury.com

the vectors and intersections of print and electronic reading matter shift these days. content, even 20 years ago, of underground comix, or fanzines, say, always manifested a strange variety. now zines, books or chapbooks become sites or blogs maybe selling or promoting blogs or chapbooks. the internet has always been a natural place for DIY endeavors. now in the 3rd age, where it's all monetized and dominated by hyper flashbannered ads selling car insurance, cellphones and penis enlargement pills, nuggets of the real dope still can be dug up.

The Gut Zine was a zine that turned into a blog but is still a zine. It describes itself best.
THE GUT is an ANTI-FAME publication. "Anti-Fame" is an equivalent alternative to stardom or fandom, more diverse, with room for everyone. We are capable of everything to the degree we are capable of anything. There is no bottomline. This is our house.


THE GUT
can keep you
up to date on
who's in charge of
what's unknown!

THE GUT ZINE





The blog, The New Vulgate, proclaims itself "a new low in topical enlightenment". Essays on anything from, say, the filmography of Warren Oates, Western Democracy as a bait and switch con game, an insider's account of the early SF hardcore punk days, ethnic unrest and racism in China, may seem disjointed. But there's a common denominator where geopolitics and popculture history overlap.
THE NEW VULGATE


The Alternating Current Homepage portals into a couple of blogs and, twitter, Googlegroups, FB and Myspace pages. But most importantly, it goes to a catalog of Propaganda Press, which has like a hundred chapbooks. It represents a coop which is "here to challenge you to create new and bold art; then to give you an outlet to mainstream that art to a larger audience. we distribute, produce, market, sell, and love innovative, fresh, controversial, and important creative works and social/political commentaries of all kinds."
Alternating Current


Brian Polk uses Myspace to promote his novel, Turning Failure into Ideology, and the best of anthology of his zine, the Yellow Rake. In the novel Eli Indignation refuses to let society assess his creative endeavors—regardless of the income they generate, which is nil. The Best of the Yellow Rake distills the zine. After five years and 17 issues, the photocopied, hand-stapled zine known to Denver cultural warriors as The Yellow Rake continues to embody all the grit, humor, and audacity of a punk culture notorious for instigating self-reliance and creative self-determination.
Turning Failure Into Ideology Myspace


enlightened pyramid publishes unpretentious and sometimes funny fiction and non-fiction. They also epublish. Their soon to be released book, Vato Maldito; My Life of Crime, by John "Bubbles" Gallegos, tells it like it was from the other side of the barbed wire fence. "A notorious Denver professional criminal tell his story in his own words. Armed robbery, addiction and hard time are just the tip of the ice berg in this career thief's autobiography."


enlightened-pyramid


The Mighty Mercury site is a continually updated selection of short fiction, verse, art, photography, and commentary (mainly interviews, reports, and reviews), and longer works of fiction and nonfiction are published serially by invitation. MM currently post chapters of Vato Maldito, out soon from enlightened pyramid.
Mighty Mercury

what we do

Here are just a few examples of DIY media. All show a high level of accomplishment in their different forms of work, or works of form. That is, the wholes equal more than the sums of their parts. And also, all of the creators, or teams of creators, did these without being, owned, sponsored, or coopted by media conglomerates.


Compass helped spawn Chicago's premiere improv venue, The Second City, preceding it by half a decade, as well as Saturday Night Live, which first aired 20 years after the Hyde Park group's first performance. Studio 207 has been making a documentary for 5 years about the birth of improv. watch the trailer.
Compass Cabertet 55

So, I ask underground movie director John Michael McCarthy, what is Cigarette Girl? “It's post-vintage futurism, with a side order of dystopianism,” he says. The project, which stars Cori Dials as a scantily clad, nicotine deprived antiheroine, may be McCarthy's most mainstream effort to date, CIGARETTE GIRL is having it’s world premiere at REVELATION, in Perth Australia on 7/10. trailer forCigarette Girl

Social networking or social disease? the live show In Your Facebook takes a voyeuristic look at the walls of four Chicago solo performers as they obsessively define their existence by the likes of Facebook. atProp Theater in chicago.

Flower Diamond has created the memoirs of BikiniKat, a 7 foot tall pink cat with a Smart Sassy Stylish philosophy that protects her from Negative Vibes, Mean People, Funny Smells and Karate Chops. check outBikiniKat or
BikiniKat Myspace

this site shows what the internet can be. poingnant random pieces of human reality found in the street. it seems low key at first. i passed it up, too stupid to figure it it out. click 1,2,3,or 4 on the left, or 'directions for use'. it's like a mystery grab bag of toys at the thrift store, or a trunk in an old basement. open it up. strange treasures wait inside.
Ausgang
this publishing house releases unpretensious intrigueing novels and nonfiction. and they're books are often quite funny. currently they're working on the 3rd edition of

'Chindogu; 101 unuseless inventions'.
check out the review of their 1st novel.

Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat other books and ebooks will soon be available.
go toenlightened-pyramid.com

It takes an obsessive compulsiveness to do this DIY media stuff, and blood and guts and spit and polish.

HOTWIRED!!!!!!!!!!

GHETTORIGGING EPUBLISHING

So, you want to publish your work. You can always epublish. You don't like the constraints of Amazon, Lulu, Bookglutton? You're willing to take a shot at just starting to get your work out on your own terms without printing costs or being pimped by POD publishers. This is a cheap easy way to hotwire epublishing.
1. Buy a domain name that offers free hosting with it (they get a banner of course) or on geocities if you have an account (no new accounts, yahoo's axing it.) 2. Upload a homepage that links to an uploaded pdf of your book. 3.Email your contacts, facebook and myspace friends and guerilla market. Viola, another 21st century dostoyevsky.



THE FUTURE IS YESTERDAY

Now that technology totally rewires disinfortainment unceasingly, how does that change the rules of the writing and publishing game? Does this present writers with a chance to snatch the power of distribution, an increasingly wiggily commodity, from the claws of an oligarghical pompus hierarchy of publishers and agents?What will be the predominate e-reading device? i don't know anybody who owns a kindle. i've heard that it's a craze to read short fiction on a cell phone in Japan. Will people do that here?


iphones? ipods? laptops? PCs? Forget it. Maybe the novel is going the way of the Wooly Mammoth. What is the future of literature?



Not the blog. Maybe 15 years from now people will have the attention spans of guinea pigs and everyone will stop reading anything longer than a tweet.



will the hardware/software zeitgeist continue to transmuteforgate faster and faster until the worldwide virtual media comsumer tweaks past the point of not being able to process any real sensory input data at all? The 5 senses will become obsolete and reality will become irrelevant.

MALL WORLD by Dave Carr

I often read at the mall just to get out of my apartment, be around people, and forget about my not so dire version of living in poverty for a few hours. I notice more than half the people will have a laptop before they have a book. Very few have books. At the Kahala Barnes & Noble, it is usually people reading fashion mags or business/financial mags. These people have to hustle to keep up appearances and keep their incomes on track or start one up. I understand their focus. Over at Sure Shot by the Punch Bowl area, you get kind of a more bohemian feel, but it only goes so far. That's true of cafes in San Francisco as well! These are businesses, and business has never been hip or cool, nor revolutionary or on our side (the workers there may be a different story---sometimes). Without the money ticket in, membership in such "communities" ends.




Undamned! by Zack Kopp, an enovel, on Milehive. Open the 'Articles' tab to read it chapter by chapter. It's a funny, evocotive almost dreamlike tale of a telephone research interviewer stuck between channels in an alternative reality chasing his own tail in AmeriCo.



Zero's Mask, by Raoul Vehill A gender-bending masked ninja superhero and a mutant talking monkey keep the city safe for children. No way? Way!!! read it for FREE @ Enlightened-Pyramid

petroleum jelly

these things that you think you need make you a sissy-max out your credit card and trash it-throw your laptop under the bus-steal the tip jar at starbux-quit your job-give your car to charity-shop lift-quit your job-drop your insignificant other-eat an icecream cone-let go-post post modern culture aint right-you aint right-the dinosaurs thought they'd be around forever too-now we use plastic to pump them in our gas tanks

SEND A POST TO rvehill@yahoo.com and ATTACH A jpg or gif IF you want pertaining to the theme and i'll post it as long as i can. maybe even if i can't. i am an actual convicted criminal.



and now a word from our sponsor;read a review of Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat HERE, an Espionage Thriller Comedy by Titus North from Enlightened-Pyramid,

a Surreal dialectical gameshow -by Kit Grant
flags. bugs. existentialism. slime molds. sprats (prepubescent bivalves). speeches. swastikas. skywriting. light bulbs. skeletal remains. flowers. weeds. salt. viruses. amoeba. cycad. elephants. platypus. old newspapers. libraries. incunabulum. medieval instruments of torture. rubber hose. mountains. cuneiform. pictographs. big piles of cash. coffee.haircuts. gates. old shoes. art. catacombs and lava tubes. diatoms and trilobites. snakes biting their own tail.
tyrannosaurii. sinking ships. dead enemies. drunken shrimp. dimes. gangrenous limbs. snow. roasted turkeys.heaps of cow dung. layers of dust. speckled walls. successful brain surgery. lumps of dough. left over meatloaf.red-haired kids. pitcher plants. cataclysmic events. ends of pages. bananas. amphibious creatures. metamorphic rock. glow-in-the-dark- paint. glastnost.

photo by Joe Butoh>

deep holes in concrete filled with water. angler fish. knocked-out teeth. warehouses. trumpets. baritones. things in perpetual motion. the devil.

from Pontiac Blues by Joe Carducci
Read the whole postHERE,

The Pontiacs always had little GM mysteries built in about them. Turn the key and just to remind you how blessed you are to own a combustion engine vehicle it would occasionally do nothing. No problem, it would start in an hour or so and be fine for months. Until you took it for granted again. Deer-willing the Aztek will last til 2012 which if i recall is the end of the world by the Mayan calendar anyway. Can't wait. Btw, there's a beautiful color pic of a GTO on the NYTimes front page today - above the fold one last time. The Aztek was discontinued last year, now the Pontiac line itself is history.



Allergy -Virgina Mongomery
"As if a blazing fire took its fiery fingers and threw me into a frigid river, this day started hot and ended cold.... still, I know how to make light of the heaviest things.", she said... "How so?", he asked. "Easy!", she replied... "Turn your mind to lost causes and know who you are among them." " Doesn't that depress you?" "Oh PLEaSe!", she exclaimed. "I was far sadder when I thought I was special."

"Alas, I do not know ...not a thing, not a nothing.... not even my self..... I wish I knew something more of you too...there is so much unspoken..." She sighs and looks to his eyes for recognition; that he might know this too; the anguish; the nothing, but his eyes are soft and adrift. " I think I left my allergy medicine at the bar", he says.

A gender-bending masked ninja superhero and a mutant talking monkey keep the city safe for children. No way? Way!!! Check it out. What do you have to lose?
read it FREE!!! Enlightened-Pyramid
From Ratboy, by Slag Shamshaft
Dirk had come in to set the table. "They blot out traditional music and get kids hooked on a stream of pop dribble with ever-changing titles and never-changing content," Dirk chipped in.
"Good point," Kim-Marie concurred. "The best example is genetically modified crops. By inserting some gene that doesn't belong, the agricapitalists can get a patent and 'intellectual property rights' over any plant that has that gene in it. Farmers can then no longer use seeds from one year's harvest to plant the next unless they pay royalties. Now the agricapitalists are buying up all the seed companies so that they can take non-genetically modified seeds off the market. It's
all about monopoly power."
Roger summed it up. "Money, sperm, addiction, power."
"That's right. From the beginning, capitalism has relied on addition. What was the first capitalist cash crop? Tobacco. The capitalists killed of the Indians to clear the land, shipped in African slaves to work it, then got Europe hooked on the stuff.

Next it was rum in the Caribbean. What about the Opium Wars in China? Opium is not grown in China, you know. The war was to force the Chinese to let British merchants sell to the Chinese. It goes on today with cocaine and heroin. And its not just drugs. They get us addicted on automobiles, on computer games, on television, on pornography, and of course on their sorry excuse for food."
WESLEY WILLIS TOWER>>>
"Well," said Dirk, bringing out the meal, "I can't guarantee that there are no modified genes or
hormones or preservatives in my ingredients, but I do my best."
"It smells delicious!" exclaimed Kim-Marie.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

PONTIAC BLUES by Joe Carducci

My dad isn't driving alot now that he's in his eighties, so its likely I've inherited-or-requisitioned my last Pontiac from him, a 2003 Aztek, so I better baby it as best as possible living some steep rocky blocks off the paved highway. Even then there's deer, tho I've only hit them east of the Mississippi. Dad was a doctor and had some quid-pro-quo with a patient/GM dealer. He always bought American (except for one used Fiat) and there'd be a station wagon (I'm one of nine), but the other was often a cool car like the 68 Malibu, or the 70 Challenger. I was moving to Hollywood in 1976 and when they saw I might walk there, my parents gave me the Challenger; it had an 8track in the dash. Dad bought that because the Johnny Cash in the demo sounded so good; my favorite 8track to play was Amon Duul's Phallus Dei. I left Naperville at 5am and got a ticket listening to Sabotage before the sun even came up - there's still a speedtrap near Dixon, Illinois. I sold the car in Portland and didn't get another car from dad until my 63 Ford Country Sedan, which i moved back to Chicago in, rusted out. He gave me his 83 Pontiac Parisienne Brougham - a top-of-the-line doctor's car. (I'd missed out on dad's mid-seventies Trans-Am.)


I was rooting around in Wax Trax one day researching for the book I was writing, R&TPN, when I heard Jello Biafra's voice. He was in town to do the Oprah show. I gave him a ride there and I could tell he was concerned about my car. Soon after I got to SST in late 1981 Jello stayed with us and said the DKs were looking for a carducci to run their label, Alternative Tentacles. (I had re-issued their first 45 and put out their second single while at Systematic in 1980-1, but Jello couldn't then get his band behind the label concept). SST was an important model for the world of independent record distribution but we didn't always behave with proper indie manners. So Jello I think suspected I might have bought this bourgie-mobile with my SST cashout fortune. He was relieved when I told him different. It was nice to have stereo FM radio after that back-to-mono 1963 Ford (You can see that model in reruns of The Fugitive). You could really hear Bonham's kickdrum in that car; the rearview mirror shuddered to it.

I moved to Wisconsin, then Wyoming and sold that Pontiac and wound up with my sister-in-law's dad's 1989 Grand Prix. Her dad was born in China and escaped to the Phillipines after the Great Leap Forward, got married had two kids and moved the family to Chicago in 1979. He bought American too. Really nice size car with a cassette deck. Hit a deer near Valparaiso, Indiana. Requisitioned mom's 1998 Bonneville; it came with a cd player. Wider than the Grand Prix but not bad. Hit a deer in Pennsylvania, not terminal but gave it to my cousin's kid whose dad works for GM and had already worked on it for me. Now the Aztek.

I've been listening to some Paul Revere & the Raiders compilations that Andy Schwartz sent me when he was doing for Epic. Some of their off-gems are the car songs they did for hire for GM: SS-396, The Judge, Corvair Baby! Those were the days for Detroit. They'd give you a free 45 if you dragged your parents to the dealership. Then Ralph Nadir killed the Corvair; Detroit suddenly had to worry about the liability of their smaller, less safe cars and so they went big just when the Japanese figured out car manufacturing and just when American daughters began to need small simple cars to go to college and work on their way to building today's gynocracy. See Eastwood's Gran Torino. Its pretty good. The Pontiacs always had little GM mysteries built in about them. Turn the key and just to remind you how blessed you are to own a combustion engine vehicle it would occasionally do nothing. No problem, it would start in an hour or so and be fine for months. Until you took it for granted again. Deer-willing the Aztek will last til 2012 which if i recall is the end of the world by the Mayan calendar anyway. Can't wait. Btw, there's a beautiful color pic of a GTO on the NYTimes front page today - above the fold one last time. The Aztek was discontinued last year, now the Pontiac line itself is history.

Photo Joe Butoh>
Driver Malia Ma
Passenger Jameel

in other family news, my uncle joe died two weeks ago. he was my dad's youngest brother. dad was born in italy; the rest of the kids in america. dad worked for his father in his groundskeeping business in bradford, pa. he'd have to get out on winter mornings before dawn to shovel the rich folks' walks and he said he envied little brother joe still sleeping like a baby. joe painted. he was in nyc in the late fifties/early sixties but moved to columbus ohio and worked commercial art while painting his own stuff on the side. i have some good ones on my walls and he did the new cover of Rock and the Pop Narcotic for me, a version of Spot's photograph of Black Flag practicing without singer Dez that was on the cover of the 2.13.61 edition. joe did a good job; he has the band graphically pulling power from the earth and then accelerating it as they throw it off into the air in music. i had arranged to use joe's favorite of his own work for my essay collection next year. so i look forward to getting that together soon.

Pontiac Youtube Ad 1
Pontiac Youtube Ad 2
Pontiac Youtube Ad 3

our irreality

Let's keep this simple, OK? Right now multiple flows of fake experience and misinformation compete for our attention, mostly to sell us stuff we don't need and is bad for us and the world.




Eye and ear candy 24-7-365 and more hands in my pocket than money. Even money's fake now.

This glob axes the question; how do i live a real life in a world of layers of FAKENESS?!?!?



SEND A POST TO rvehill@yahoo.com and ATTACH A jpg or gif IF you want pertaining to the theme and i'll post it as long as i can. maybe even if i can't. i am an actual convicted criminal.

Or if you want to comment, i may post all or part of it on the next blog.



and now a word from our sponsor;read a review of Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat HERE, an Espionage Thriller Comedy by Titus North from Enlightened-Pyramid,

Stolen from someone else's blog;

Born to paranoid hippies in a mob hospital on the southwest outskirts of Chicago..I lived thru the 70's without too much damage...entered the 80's with a chip on my shoulder...wandered most of the 90's in some weird daze which included time in Calcutta,India finding myself and my faith...now the 2000's..hmm..gee..they're almost over huh?I spent alot of my first 23-24 years of life..locked in a box of my own making...Now..I live on a Mountain...a captive of Mountain Time...I still get confused when watching cable and they say " Standard or Eastern"...I wonder
where i fit in cause they never mention ' Mountain Time..'...so I always end up looking for something scheduled..at the wrong time..Carrie Ann Warner


photo by Joe Butoh




From Tropikal Epilepsy, by Knut Krondstadt:

Monday, October 22, 1984
I woke up to the stound of voices. Nik was talking to his girlfriend and her roommate. I had had a dream about playing "Sound of Silence" really fast on the guitar. Yesterday I had a dream that I got in an argument with Mom and Kathy, and they turned into seagulls and attacked me. But they weren't very scary. The four of us ate breakfast and walked downtown to a bank where Nik and I changed money. One by one the two girls went to work (they were nurses) and Nik and I went shopping. Later we went back and ate and I slept for a few hours. After I got up I was fortunate enough to see the Finnish coverage of the Reagan-Mondale debate. I got on the train at 9:50 and

talked politics for some time with a German guy who I share a compartment with. Now I'm watching two Finnish girls knit. 50FM



Tuesday, October 23, 1984
When I awoke, the compartment I was in was getting crowded. At Helsinki station, I took my time gathering my stuff, and while making my last check I found that someone had left their hat and gloves. I waited around for a while to see if the owner would show up, but he didn't. I debated taking them to the lost and found, but Ive lost a number of things, so I decided to keep them. They're very nice and I like them very much. [I still often wear the hat 25 years later.] I walked around Helsinki for a while doing the usual (food shopping, looking for peanut butter),
and after a while, not knowing what else to do, I took the train to Turku. It was a nice trip, although a drunk guy on the train kept offering me things. It was raining in Turku; nonetheless, I decided to walk across town rather than wait a long time for the six minute train ride to the docks. When I finally got there, I had another hour plus wait to get on the boat. It was great. It had a big duty-free store, two discos, and a casino. The older folk were taking advantage of their disco, which had a live band complete with uniforms, but the young folks showed up in small numbers, and seemed interested only in nursing their drinks while putting on a bored "cool"
facade. I asked one girl to dance, a small, young looking blonde, but she declined without a word. In fact, the whole time I was there she never moved except to flick her ever-present cigarette. I moved, a lot in fact. I decided I would not let these people spoil MY fun, so I danced by myself. Of course, I danced better than those tar-lunged, disinfectant-brained Europeans ever could! 50FM







From Vato Maldito; My Life of Crime, by John Gallegos

At the age of 12, I delivered papers on my bicycle. But I began car prowling, selling the loot to various people.
When I was about 13 years old, my sister had aboyfriend. Dube was his name. I thought at the time that he was the baddest dude I had ever known.
He was a safe-cracker. So I started my career as a burglar.
At the beginning of our association, I would seek and find businesses that had safes. I would be his lookout man. We did a half dozen or so jobs,during which I was able to observe how he would crack open the safes. One night, he shot a rival gang member in a dispute, and wound up in jail. He needed money to pay an attorney. So in order to help him,I went out on my own. I was able to help him with his lawyer's fee. Subsequently, he was aquitted by a jury and freed. From that point on,we didn't work together anymore.

photo by Joe Butoh

I had a small group of buddies with whom I worked cracking safes. Soon though,the police learned of my activities and came after me. At the age of 15 I was busted and sent to reform school.I served a one year sentence and was released. I was 16 years old then.
I was on the street for about 2 months and was busted again for safecracking. I was sentenced to an indefinite to 10 year sentence.


photo by Laura Chenault

More Blog Theft:


It was me...i passed out..the smell of leather and sweat.was not something i was used to yet....i got mid way thru the room..spun..and went down..the big guy that was kinda protecting me at the stage.had followed me..scooped me up..and off the floor..i made it up to the first landing and puked...Mark (?) grabbed me.and got me to the weird little ... Read Morecreature that used to lordess over the bathroom...she gave me like 3 sheets of toilet paper ..to 'clean myself up with'...threw some water in my face..called me a bitch(cause i didn't tip her..how the heck was i supposed to know? )-Carrie Ann Warner

...i went back downstairs and proceeded to wreck my hearing for awhile more..without passing out..it's funny..recently watched a documentary about the Ramones on Sundance (?)...and told Shaffer that story...about seeing Johnny get off a Clark bus...then for the rest of the show..me trying to get his shoes untied...and getting my fingers stomped on..over...and over...I got to see the farewell tour out here..their last show ever..at the Ogden theatre in Denver...in 95?...I remember thinking of you that day...and telling Nancy the shoe story...


i'll end with this; i told a friend of mine who's editing a movie that it'll take twice as long to edit a movie than he thinks it will. It always takes longer. He thanked me for the encouragement. i looked up the word 'art' in the dictionary; 'skill aquired by experience,study
or observation.' no, that's not it; 'the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects'. closer. how about this, Webster?; 'using a medium to communicate something extraordinary.' but why do it if it's inherently fake? I found a fork in the road, smashed by a semi, and each prong twisted and curled in a strange way, more beautifully than any sculpture ever could. i heard a bunch of dogs howl with a fire engine at a chilly windy
neighborhood sunset, more thrilling than any choir. Wild beauty happens everyday more often on accident than on purpose. it's a nasty megalomania that makes me try anyway.


Remember, instructions for posting are near the top of the glob.......

mORe UnSAniTY

This blog gives a unactual place to post what happens in our heads and selves now that the gadgets and teknology of misinformation have proliferated and diversified to the extent that nothing is real. in our smellphone drivethru starbux cineplex download clusterfuck finacial meltdown invade the mideast gps chip implant satellite superspy world noone smells the coffee or looks in your eyes when you buy a micowave burrito at 7-11.

SEND A POST TO rvehill@yahoo.com and ATTACH A jpg or gif IF you want pertaining to the theme and i'll post it as long as i can. maybe even if i can't. i am an actual convicted criminal.



WHERE HAVE ALL THE PUNK ROCK STARS GONE?!?! Ronald McDonald



Book review:

Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat

made me laugh out loud despite he gravity of the subject; cold war and post cold war US military/intelligence hegemony and violation of our personal freedom. Yeah it's a espionage thriller comedy, hilarious but deadly serious.

Here's a synopsis;A drunken late-night promenade through a former CIA Director's living room makes young Joe Retard a suspect in an international intrigue involving a high-tech spy toilet seat. The U.S. military chases Joe to the ends of the earth in an effort to keep a lid on their toilet seat.

Without giving it away Joe is entangled in comedy and intrigue which kind seems a weird amalgamation of the Wrong Man and Dr. Strangelove, on the East Coast and all over Asia with nods to the Opera Salome. Sound confusing? It wasn't. North crafted the plot very skillfully and it reads smooth. I finished it in 48 hours leaving work undone to get to the next good part and the next and the next. The ending had an unexpected emotional punch too. i got it at enlightened-pyramid.com


Frederik Husar at work>

Drag City recording artist AZITA has a new release, How Will You? She SINGS with a voice filled with raw firelight over a spare arrangement of piano bass and drums.Azita @ Drag City! performing Thursday, March 12;
Bloomington, IN Buskirk-Chumley Theatre (with Bonny Billy)



from Ignacio Balangatang's novella Ratboy:

Finally, as both Jive and Dirk
crescendo-ed into a frenzy, Margie faced Jive, removed her top, and tossed it over the drum kit onto Jive's head, where it remained draped. Bare back to the audience, Margie broke back into New Year's Eve's distinctive bassline. Dirk jumped back up on stage and approached the mike, although for dramatic effect he refrained from picking up the lyrics for several measures, during which time Margie remained with her back towards the audience, much to Jive's obvious delight. As Dirk did his best rendition of U-2 singer Bono's screem leading back into the lyrics, Margie turned around and the place erupted. It was a powerful part of a legitamately moving song anyway, but the particular events that transpired during the song created a rock star kind of excitement that the band had never yet experienced.

Nor would they ever again. For this particular evening, two bigwigs from Disney's Musical Operations Division were in the house to check up on how Loni was managing the night club, and were obviously displeased at "activities detrimental to Disney's family- oriented reputation." Battery Club's 15 minutes of fame were to last only 20 seconds. Suddenly, the power to the amps, the P.A. system, even the stage lights were cut. Jive, thinking it was simply a technical problem, kept up the beat with his drums until the D.J. finally cut in with the dance version of "Who Let the Dogs Out".


Dirk, however, immediately knew that there had been no mistake. He looked up and saw Loni heading towards him with Chris Mokihana, the club's burly, surly bouncer. While Dirk was a tae kwando blackbelt and more than able to defend himself with bare hands and bare feet, he did not want to tangle with Chris Mokihana in close quarters in the nude with both the management and the law on Chris' side. Dirk put down his guitar and looked around for his clothes. Jeepers! With the stage lights off, there was no way he could find them before Chris Mokihana closed in on him. He jumped off the stage and instinctively ran to the table at which just 45 minutes ago he had been conversing with Kim-Marie and the others. Ethyl, and especially Blanche, glared at Dirk as he approached, while Kim-Marie sat with her face buried in her hands and her hands buried in Roger's shoulder. However, Roger's eyes were a more than adequate surrogate window to Kim-Marie's soul, and Dirk realized that his lover felt more than just shocked and disappointed, but even betrayed.

Dirk could only pause for an instant, for Chris Mokihana was within ten feet of him. Dirk knew that there was no hope of making it through the front door, so bolted off towards the kitchen, in the hope that the back door was unlocked. As luck had it, the cook had left he door wide open in an effort to keep the kitchen from overheating. Dirk bounded out the door with the bouncer in hot pursuit. The fleet-footed guitarist ran in a counter-clockwise semi-circle around the building, widening the gap with his bulky pursuer. As soon as he reached the front of the building a group of teen age girls screemed with ammused surprise and pointed at him. Fading into the crowd was not an option, not without any clothes, at least, and Dirk turned heel and raced down Kuhio Avenue. However, the streaking caucacian attracted far too much attention on the well-lit main drag, and Dirk decided to cast his luck with

a dash down a side street towards the beach. If nothing else, the surf might hide his nakedness until things calmed down.

However, wouldn't you know it, there were two uniformed police officers sitting in a patrol car eating microwave burritos that they had just acquired from the local seven-eleven, and when they spotted Dirk they threw their car into gear and raced after him.

From Arnie Saiki of Honolulu and Smellay CA. re; R Vehill's novel Hawaii Punk avaialable at Amazon and http://www.enlightened-pyramid.com


"Raoul is a hero! He gets to speak out and tell his version of the Hawaii-everyman-archetype. His indelible vision for posterity is much better than the gum stains on the sidewalk in front of Queen Theater which was proof enough of my own existence. Now, here we have the chronicle that at long last reveals everything that the everyman has been running away from: attempted suicide, visions of family members chasing us with murderous intent, unrequited love with prostitutes and heavenly delirium in stink urinals."