SACRE COEUR

Unlike my own teenage years in every possible way, they tossed Heineken bottles down the hill in front of la basilique, lit joint after sidewinding joint, played the same four chords all night all night, and gave no shits. Before this, there was a wildness in pissing off a cliff hundreds of feet above the Mediterranean.

SHE WAS A PARTY DOG

Licking her lips at every Burberry-wearing European honeyboy that passed her outside the bar, she thanked heaven she skirted a drunk driving charge and came to Holland. It meant knocking over an athletic shoe emporium and losing her sister's baby for a couple hours, but she thought she might crack the fashion world by knitting hats out of shoelaces. So far, the best thing to happen since her arrival was being told by a cop that she "has a nice scent." She remembered a high school graduation openhouse in which a friend drunk on whiskey & V8 bent her arm the wrong way over his knee. Pausing mid-bend he said, "It smells like hot dogs -- big time!" It was no surprise to hear that he became a cop after high school. Or was it that he got arrested? Either way, now she had a mighty hankering for some hot lil' smokies.

THE MEDIUM SLEEP

Anxious for a walk, the dog woke him at 2AM. The ghost of her laptop was present, looming heavy in the room. Having swallowed the last of the evening's gin, he rose and pulled a pair of trousers from the mass next to the bed. Four hits of acid wrapped in a Hot Dog Beetle receipt fell to the floor. After purchasing the acid from his brother four months ago, they were saved for a special occasion and eventually forgotten. He tried to remember the first time he dropped acid but was unable. This lack of recollection negated a shared experience with many of his peers; how many parties would he attend, sitting through anecdote after anecdote, before he created one of his own?

Then he wondered how many of his peers were lying about their first time. And if they'd even had a first time. How would he know? If worse came to worse, he could talk about tonight. The trip:

the dog threw up on the sidewalk
it was a Pagan Holiday
it was a thriving moustache river

FOUND FOOTAGE

He was a Ghetto Mister with a fancy pimpstick. One couldn't help but notice how his shoes shined. He could have a doctorate in one phone call. And widows loved him. "A widow will make you breakfast in her husband's robe," he told a group of kids.

THE CIRCULAR RUINS

What a sight it must have been for my neighbors back on Garland Street: eyes rolled back in my skull, heaving hot dogs and Doritos at the base of my mailbox while my ex yells at me to come inside and brush my teeth because it's 3AM and we both have to work the next day. "Just bring me a pillow!" I holler and someone does. The story doesn't quite end there but I couldn't say what happened since the next thing I remember was waking up around noon. It was a gorgeous Spring day outside, I was in my boxers, and the bedsheets never felt cleaner. How I undressed myself and got in bed I don't know, but I felt surprisingly great.

So goes my first blackout! Later that day, my stomach boiled from the heat but the morning after still has a place as one of the most beautiful waking experiences of my life. It wasn't deserved after a night of such abuse: I later learned that I laid out a friend by socking him in the jaw on the way home from the bar. I also pissed on people's lawns, climbed buildings I didn't own, woke random friends up to party (all declined), and danced while my pals placed orange road construction barrels at the front doors of an entire neighborhood of houses. This only comes to mind because I've been completely sober for 11 or so days and every morning has been rrrrrough stuff.

THERE ARE POWERS, THERE ARE HAUNTINGS

Update! HC still reigns but not without its foibles: thanks to the internet (and Punk Not Profit in particular), Void's unreleased Touch & Go album, Potion For Bad Dreams, was pretty easy to track down. Unfortunately, after a couple listens, Potion has been relegated back to obscurity; Potion For A Not-So-Great Album is more like it (nyuk nyuk). However, a proper rip of the Condensed Flesh boot more than made up for it. Corey D. hooked me up with the Wrangler Brutes cassette which I was pleased to find ISN'T the lo-fi live tape I believed their debut to be. It should prove a nice addition to the double-cassette HC mix I'm preparing for the trip abroad (180 minutes of the fuckin' truth!).

Although not far from the hardcore/punk family tree, Black Eyes and Mi Ami have been pulling me out of the 1980s and back to earth. So few bands/musicians grab me out of the gate with their lyrics and Black Eyes was able to do so despite singing in a near-unintelligible bark & yelp (look no further than "A Pack Of Wolves" for a totally ON condemnation of boy stupidity). At the moment tho', I'm preparing for a recording session tomorrow by avoiding music almost completely today as an experiment to keep any influence that might creep into the songs as lean as possible.

By the way, is it possible to call for an embargo on the use of "bro" and "bros"? I'm all for the de- and re-contextualization of words, but can't we find something better? Something, I dunno, not so easy!? C'mon, let's expand the cultural lexicon.

Damn, I gotta' give it up to super-positive Polish jazz violinists that studied with Don Cherry. Here's hoping all that smiling and great energy rubbed off.

TACO BELL FOR THE EARS

Dag! Someone remind me not to partake of the free nacho platter at the next film festival after party. From a dream -- actually, a nightmare -- in which Interpol were playing a live cover of The Smith's "This Charming Man," I awoke with what was quite possibly my worst case of indigestion yet. Were I not buckled over in pain, consciousness would've been a blessing. Of course, I fell back asleep and the dream started all over. When I woke once more, again buckled over in pain, I thought, "This is my world?" And not a Tums in the house.

CROSSOVER

Sometime during my freshman year of high school, Matt, the first friend I made that year and future bandmate, pulled out a copy of Suicidal Records legendary comp, Welcome To Venice. Save for the "Institutionalized" video on MTV, Welcome was truly unlike anything I'd been exposed to. The cover looked dangerous as fuck: technically, it's a brilliant painting but slightly twisted, the title a gross joke on Venice, California's reputation for gang violence.

The music was dangerous too. It was hardcore and thrash but the solos had a very distinct flavor that wasn't quite either. Later, my sister's roommate, Spring, offered to sell me a cassette of "silly ol' skate rock" which I misheard as "Sicilian skate rock". The guitar solo in the intro sounded incredibly familiar: "There must be a Sicily, California right next to Venice," I thought.

So, my penchant for hardcore persists. Infatuation? Perhaps, but I'm really enjoying myself. I've taken to burning copies of the first Skate Laws recordings onto 3" CDs before leaving the house and plan to take some along for the trip to France -> Ireland -> Germany -> Malta. Is there a Maltese hardcore scene? A quick search yields great results: Extreme Maltese Metal Festival!

HEY MUSIC

What goes on? Three weeks ago, everything was fair game! All genres had equal footing and, god damn, almost everything sounded great. Then I made a joke about how Vampire Weekend showed up, the world went crazy, and I lost my appetite for music altogether.

It turns out it wasn't a joke -- it happened! About two weeks after the VW album dropped, my musical world dwindled from a diverse playground to a meager (but choice!) stack of hardcore cassettes. My average listening experience has been widdled down to 16 minutes -- the same length as Agnostic Front's 1984 magnum opus, Victim In Pain! It's a peculiar world...



wait! this shit's even better...

THE CLOSED WORLD

I was left standing there, dick in hand. You said: "I'm sorry, but are your buns winking at me?" There was that sweet shit and then there was my blueballs. In those little shorts, I lost it by the waterside.