ON BICYCLE GANGS

ON BICYCLE GANGS
by Sam Haddix

"Basically it’s just fuckin' -- who was the dominant -- like who controls the social space in Ann Arbor? It’s like the entire premise of Critical Mass is based on 'taking back the street' which is fucking bullshit because -- I don’t want to necessarily boil down Critical Mass but, especially in Ann Arbor, the majority of bike culture enthusiatsts are generally those people that have a huge voice in the social sphere, right?

"So really what Critical Mass ends up being is just like a reassertion of, uh, that power -- of that stance. Of like, a bunch of white males breaking street laws & screaming at people, wearing denim vests and really just being as visible as they possibly can be & having a huge adrenaline rush. I mean, you could get sexual with it but, uh, that’s totally what it is. Is that not true? It’s just some white kids looking for reaffirmation for white kids that they’re the shit.

"Those who would participate in an event like Critical Mass are already, um, sort of like their identity represents something that's like antithetical to what it’s supposed to be like. It’s like the entire art world. Like everyone should be seeing the art... people are creating art that... museums are no place for art to be. Because it’s already a safe place. It’s already condoned. People go to museums or more importantly the art show -- which are hip as fuck these days -- who are the people that are likely to be walking by & want to get drunk for free. Like that entire crowd self-replicates itself. Like the art that’s supposed to be challenging peple -- it’s already in an environment that’s supposed to be safe. You’re going to that environment expecting to be challenged but you feel safe."

"Well maybe it requires a new envisioning of the art world. I’m sure what I’m talking about has already been done and acted upon & what not but at that point the audience becomes like the enemy. Because you’re not, because these people -- because the audience becomes the very people your art hates. The justice you’re trying to enact is to those who arent able to come to the show. If you’re reasonably intelligent, your art in whatever reduced political sense should be repsonding to all of the products of pseudo-liberal capitalist society. Like consumers -- pure consumers -- that don’t create. That are interested in life but look for it in these weird reproductions of like...

"It’s not whiteness, it’s power. It's those that occupy pirvilege -- and what is privelage? It's like a social power, right? There's a whole field of study that's emerging right now that supposedly tackles ideas like why are black people supposedly louder than white people? Because they feel they have to occupy a larger space because white people control it. And because white people don’t have to forge a space for themselves, what you end up happening are these narcisssitc negative rituals that are really the reverse of the things they attempt to act out. Where you have these white kids 'taking back the streets' when in fact they’re reasserting their own power space.

"I noticed that there are a bunch of black longboarders in town. I mean, what's that all about? I think the most important thing is that you’re pursuing, like, you're just like being honest with yourself."

EXCERPT FROM THE FORTHCOMING RELEASE, THE CATALOG: LANE

". . . it’s pure insanity to tear the zombies away.” A little booze changes their eyes into human “boob reflectors” -- which just goes to say that Lane’s boobs are pretty remarkable projections in their own right.
The semi-tropical atmosphere of the Wabangi Lounge -- home for such famous dances as the Watusi, and the old Wall Street slogan: “You bangi me, I’ll bangi you” -- adds background to Lane’s dancing style. After a couple of hours of pounding flesh, Lane begins to sound like a kettle drum. In fact, they fired the drummer because the beat she makes as her teats pound on her stomach, creates a more dramatic effect anyway. And once those old jungle sounds rise from the chasm of her chest, “honey” drips from the zombies’ erected cones.

WEST VIRGINIA PT. 1

WEST VIRGINIA PT. 1
by Ted Kennedy

His jaw was sore; sore like he’d been making out with a pillow for hours.

His neck throbbed; throbbed like he’d puked all morning.

His beard wasn’t growing as he’d hoped, and the motorcycle still sat in the front yard.  It needed a coil pack, but they don’t make those anymore.  Or so they said.
The guys on the softball team called him whipped, you know… by old mama ball and chain.  But he thought different.  If they saw how she treated him when they were alone, then they’d know.

Last night he showered in front of her for the first time.  He was embarrassed for them both.

SHAKES

SHAKES
by Travis Alexander Galloway

Tara was impressed by the abundance of driveways in Allen Park, all of these choices. (Pulling out of randoms)

Without her bootleg ADHD tabs, possibilities screech.

Hurricane/Tampa Bay Lighting jersey/Heavy handed radio shuffle push

Inside her home (1990’s collage art), Tara spreads moon blood across her walls, arms spread like a champion running into the arena. The family room has RED levels.

Passion pile up on the X-Files mouse pad. The walls cheer and roar. Tara is a flame.

BABY NAMES

BABY NAMES
by B. Thomas Hunter

"Have you ever sleepwalked across state lines?" Moshe Rabbenu asked me in a hushed tone near the microfiche in the basement of our poorest High School. His cock pressed tight into denim: a rival, not a friend.

"If Eden was a time, and not a place, it would be those first days of Spring. That terrible season...." He trailed off, distracted by the glow of some neon light, a creature of El, yet un-melt-able.

Gershom and Eliezer had wandered in the desert. That damned wilderness. Why were they forsaken? He said He'd catch up to them but He was nowhere to be seen, and they had done all He had asked. Their foreskins, shriveled away, blackened by time. Brit milah, a covenant between Him and the tribe they had lost. They sweated and sang, and above all rested for everyday was their Sabbath. Their beards had grown long and complacent. Their brows furrowed. Their fields fallowed.

"He's never going to show," Gershom whispered.

"Did you know I once had a cock-ring made of solid gold? It turns out my Grandpa made it out of stolen Jews gold and the Shoah Foundation came and took it." You were wearing a striped shirt that made you look like a comical burglar. "America is the Black man's battleground!" you screamed at the top of your lungs. We were on a roof. A track team stopped and stared.

They couldn't afford a skywriter, so the note read: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH!

THE SHOW OF VIOLENCE

THE SHOW OF VIOLENCE
by Frederic Wertham

The counsel showed me the record of a conversation he had with Irwin. It contained passages like this:

Q: Are you insane?
A: I'm not as crazy as the rest of the world.

Q: Was it against the law of God and man?
A: Those are exact opposites.

Q: Was it against the rules of society?
A: It was against the standards of this predatory group.

Q: You mean you set yourself up as the judge?
A: That night I was was the judge.

UNTITLED

UNTITLED
by B. Thomas Hunter

Ronnie had just dropped acid for the last time. Tomorrow he would take a job at the bank and his life would officially be over. Sitting in the back seat of his car in the Major Magic's parking lot, he
contemplated his existence and what he had accomplished in his 28 years on the planet. This thought was brief as soon as his blue jeans, once tight and form fitting, turned into a soaring eagle and left his body.

His jeans grew and grew until they covered him in a shadow filled with the screech of goblins and beasts man had yet to discover. Soon they melted away into a sea of rainbows.

Ronnie began to fly. Once heavy with his strapping 145 pound body, his legs were now free. Free to fly into the heavens, where he would play chess with Zeus. His arms soon turned into flippers, as was to be expected, and the air turned into water.

Ronnie awoke from his trip, dripping in sweat, covered in his own urine, ready to take a nap. Tomorrow he would take a job at the bank.

EDWARD & ALEX

EDWARD & ALEX

by B. Thomas Hunter

Van Halen came through this Dust Bowl town like the cyclone that destroyed half of Houston. I never saw such a sight. Spandex and young girls for as far as the eye could see. The reverberation from their amplifiers destroyed the top soil and damaged most of the downtown. Of course we'll rebuild, but the question is: After all we've seen, why would we want to?

KISS

KISS
by B. Thomas Hunter

Peter Criss has traveled through time seeking the cure for the disease that has ravished his band mates. The pox on the band KISS was due to a run in with a voodoo priest on their tour of South America, and the cure was hidden far away at the dawn of time. As the cat-man traveled through time he pondered his own existence, and what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, his life after KISS.

“I could become a scientist,” he said aloud in the vortex that surrounded him, his face distorted by the wave of time that overcame his body. “Gene is always telling me that I’m really creative and I loved science as a kid... I bet I’d be a good scientist.” As Peter rambled on, he did not noticed that he had left the vortex. His feet were now firmly planted some where in the ancient past. But where?

 “Computer -- run an analysis on this time period,” Peter said firmly into his wrist computer that also served as a virtual tour guide to the slipstream of time. This wasn’t a KISS invention; it actually had belonged to Blue Oyster Cult.

“Sir, the time period is…”
“Repeat that computer”
“Sir, the time is…”
“Computer, what time am I in?”
“Sir, the time analysis is incomplete. I don’t show you being in any recognizable time period.”
“Dammit,” Peter snapped back.

If he could not trace his whereabouts, then he didn’t know where to go to find the cure. He looked at the ground, there had to be a clue somewhere. In the distance he saw what he thought resembled a city.

IRAG WAR MAKES WORLD MORE DANGEROUS

IRAG WAR MAKES WORLD MORE DANGEROUS
by B. Thomas Hunter

never make me go to rehab.
that would sux.

SCUD MOUNTAIN BOYS

SCUD MOUNTAIN BOYS

by D.C. Berman

This time of year the light comes through the pines in flat beams and spark points, glancing off the frost that decorates the grounds of the light-studded medical cities. For a six-sided record I feel like I'm back in the haunted Piedmonts, a decorated major in the Japanese Inner Space Program, renewing my vow to bear down on the truth even if there is none for a hundredth time.

After the exodus of the Calm Reflectors I had started seeing the Scud Mountain Boys around town with their Baltimore haircuts, the guitarist's guitarist carrying his 1873 "trapdoor" Springfield rifle, the progeny of the muzzle-loading French Charleville muskets that had whacked so many Redcoats around these hills. I had heard it was the band's tradition to lay dinner on the table uncooked and then set the table on fire.

I was out for a walk with Mr. Fiddler the other night, when he turned to me and said, "this is the time of year when the region is at peace with itself." I turned to laugh in his face when the impulse subsided. He had been right of course. I'd already seen it happen in the slide projector's cone of lit dust: the November sky hovering over lives of dark employment like a televised clay bank, breech-loaders replacing muzzle-loaders, crows wired to the sky like marred pixels, portraits cubed into accordioned life while every single object of perception waited for us in the air conditioning. Yes, tennis crested in the seventies, killing Eddie Money and the last of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, but how many times did we have to witness the L.A. fireplaces reflected in L.A. wineglasses before it ended?

You meet these suburban kids with Biblical names, but there are walls behind their eyes, strange mathematical mountains at whose base we sit playing our native keyboards and rinsing our teeth with digital snow. I'm starting to believe that the inscription above the portal describes this side, not the next.

Few people know that George Washington's favorite song was "The Darby Ram," or stop to think that before he was a statue he scratched his weld, got the hiccups, and danced alone in his room. All the "human things." He must have been scared when he fought in the woods, hiding in the dormant Christmas trees, his hand gripping the black walnut musket stock.

In those times and these we turn to the pacifics of a Gamelan orchestra for transport and release. We stand by the hind legs of a K car, listening to the new city cassettes, searching for some sign of human residence here beneath the justifiably uncelebrated Massachusetts sky.

This treasured early work brought calm forecasts and sad peace to our house. I hope you take it with you when you go.

COME OUT TONIGHT

COME OUT TONIGHT
by Steven Jesse Bernstein

Forecast in chrome and plastic, tyrants breathing out oil, slavery, planet hunger versions of Jackie-O. Sherry, Sherry baby, won't you come out tonight.

And the stars whisper like old blood at the edges of the body of night. She stood with one hand on the phone for four hours, poised as only a few seconds had passed. I watched her through the crack between the shade and the sill. She waited for a forecast in human trembling, together with other important women.

Come, come, come out tonight.

The world suffers for her. The clock hurries like a terrified animal and stops, dribbling saliva. She is eating chicken pie and bubble gum. For a month the Luftewaffe lived on raisins, same with the French after the war. Jackie-O received fresh oranges from John Kennedy. Silly girl!

She cannot put down the telephone reciever. She is waiting to receive my body of work. She wants to take it into her ear. A modeled flush builds under her cheeks. She eats Christmas candy while she waits. The telephone rings and rings. I am not at home. I am with Jackie-O. We are eating oranges from the President.

We are alone on the roof of a Park Avenue penthouse. Picture of Marilyn Monroe in my back pocket, molded by heat and sweat to the shape of my buttocks. You are gripping the phone, smiling, eating candy, crying, "I am with the important women now." I am secretly an
important man.

Hang up the phone, I can't dance with you anymore. Go to your freezer and get a popsicle. Go to your TV. Turn on your TV. You will see me and Jackie-O. She will be taking it in the ear, my body of work.

In the planetarium, you will receive a forecast: "I will always be more important than you. You will never be important enough. You will never be on the repent end of slavery, never be the one to wield hunger against humanity. Heaven will never be an extension of your body. Your body will always belong to someone else."

The picture of Marilyn Monroe flutters across the roof, steaming, shaped like me, shaped like my ass. The sky is filled with oranges during the war. We eat them. The President is alone in a room. He is unimportant. As we eat his oranges the sky grows blacker. The moon ripens and turns red. It rots and is swallowed by the darkness. You are still by the phone. It is ringing and ringing, dead.

Sherry, Sherry baby, won't you come out tonight.

It is completely dark. The earth freezes. You put down the receiver and go to the window.

Come, come, come out tonight.

UNEXPECTED FREUDIAN ISSUES

UNEXPECTED FREUDIAN ISSUES
by B. Thomas Hunter

She said she saw god at the 7-11.
They got shacked up and moved to Manhattan.
They walked the aisle and said they do.
And now he works miracles in the bedroom.