Good morning. Hello. How are you? #677
A kinda weak Throbbing Gristle-America analogy. A map of Big Boys. Villianous Paul Riser. Gardening. Sick Jane. Background thinking tasks. Peter Gatien was railroaded. Bad Seeds in Montraux. Etc.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well? I’m okay, thanks. I read somewhere that most Amerians think they’re life is going well while the country is going to hell in a handbasket. Checks out. Sign me up for that inconsistent worldview, I’m all in. Did not in any way celebrate this country’s birth, for fear of, you know, catching the plague and getting shot or something, or actually because July 4th is a joke of a day to celebrate, independence was years later, the Articles of Federation were a catastrophe. Not sure what the actual, generous, good birthday of this country would be, if you were trying to be kind about it. Maybe the ratification of the 14th amendment, not that we’ve especially lived up to that. Oh huh looks like that was July 9th. Well, cool. Maybe I’ll eat some flame broiled dead cow this next coming weekend.
Okay that seemed… mean? I don’t mean to be belittling just sad and ashamed. America these days is like that Throbbing Gristle show at Coachella in 2009. Like yeah, at some point, ages ago, they had some good ideas, had a big influence on things in a mostly postive way, but they seem like mostly a spent force now, and the dude leading the affair turned out to be abusive. But if you stand there looking at it in the cold desert daylight, with an untainted person who was not there the first time round and doesn’t have an irrational, historical attatchment to the institution, it’s really just a creepy old man singing about date rape. Plus the Cure are playing the next tent over, you could just walk away and go see the Cure instead. I’m not sure where this metaphor is going. Is the Cure Europe? China? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It seems obvious that there would be a mass shooting (or two, haven’t the heart this morning to see what happened in Philadelphia) would happen on the Fourth, just a matter of time. It’s like porn parodies. It’s only a matter of time. Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. Rule 35: If there’s an event in the US, there will be a mass shooting at it. Rule 36: If it exists, there is a tactical, gun-fetishistic version of it. Etc.
Anyway. Here is an image of all the Big Boys left in the US:
One each in North Dakota, Ohio, and Nevada, three or four in California, and like fifty in Michigan. I saw one in a TV show last night and it made me miss them from my childhood Big Boy was great. I want to go to one again. I wonder if a) it’s anything like Big Boy of the 80’s, and b) if I would remember anything, if it would touch some sort of memory deep inside me, linking me to my childhood. Seems dubious. But seems worth a drive to Michigan for I suppose.
Here is an image of Paul Riser playing a villian, or at least a “bad guy” because Emma said she could not imagine Paul Riser playing a villian.
I had a decent weekend. I did some gardening. The three grapes decimated by Japanese beetles and deer are on the mend. What is up with the animal name “Japanese beetle” am I really supposed to capitalize the J and not the L? That seems dumb. I deeply, profoundly believe that all animal names are proper names and should be capitalized but apparently I am wrong about this. I will go to my grave believing this.
I harvested, no exaggerating, about thirty pounds of monster cucumbers, just giant, behemoth cucumbers, That are, mostly speaking, not too sour. Good, huge, American cucumbers. Absolutely bonkers. There is no way to convey hoe copious and large these cucumbers were except for watching this video. Also, note Jane’s Ukraine-themed outfit. She picked it out herself. In solidarity, I am sure. She is a little revolutionary.
A little revolutionary who puked on Sunday for the first time in her life, or at least one of the first, since, you know, when she was a puking baby. She’s not been feeling super well, we don’t know why, and boy is she taking it out on us. We went to the neighbors for a little pool party on Saturday, and she had a great time, ate some different food, some BBQ and such, maybe that did it, maybe some sort of heat stroke kind of thing because my god it was hot this weekend. I don’t know. I hope she feels better soon, so we can go make her feel awful again by giving her a vaccine, which we’ve still not gotten around to because our doctors are kind of useless getting their act together, and we’d prefer to go there than a pharmacy, though I’m starting to think we’re gonna have to suck it up.
I’ve been doing two background thinking tasks this weekend. On Friday I was presented with two things I needed to think about for a while before making a decision or recommendation on. I cannot recommend this tactic enough. When confronted with a difficult or impossible decision, the first and most important thing to do is to stall. Buy as much time as possible. Usually, with more time, the decision knot in your head will unravel naturally and you will know what to do. That happened with one of my background tasks, but not the other. Luckily, the one that unravelled was the one I needed to make a quicker decision on, so, you know, live to fight another day. I think a lot about that genre of spy thriller, like Enemy of the State or something, they do it in The Boys too, it is a definite trope, where the evil head of the CIA or whatever is always in their garden pruning orchids or something, and the hero has to go out to their country house and talk to them about assissinating the president of Barundi or something. This is my aspiration. To be some mastermind living in their country house, gardening, while secretly running the world.
I watched a documentary about Peter Gatien and his club empire, consisting of Limelight, the Palladium, the Tunnel and “Club USA,” which I had never heard of. Found out what happened to the whole thing. Should have guessed. Giuliani and America’s puritanical drug war. They threw the weight of the law on him trying to cconvict him for the drug sales that happened in his clubs. It went to trial. At the outset, the feds conceded that Gatien never profited off of the drug use, they could not link him to the purchase of drugs or trafficking. Their witnesses were all criminals. The original three witnesses all turned against the feds, including Michael Alig, the notorious party monster. The DEA agents were under such a cloud of suspicion of witness tampering, drug use and more that the prosecution didn’t even call them as witnesses, which is unheard of. Gatien’s lawyer took one look at the jury after the prosecution rested and decided to not bother calling a single one of the 24 witnesses they had lined up, and just rested. Gatien was acquitted.
A year later, they got him on a minor tax avoidance charge — Capone style — only on the small component of his 1000+ person payroll that was all cash. He settled with the state, paid the back taxes, paid a fine, served 60 days in jail and received a “statement of satisfaction” from the State.
Two years later, after 9/11 happened, the DHS decided that this “felony” was enough to deport him. He was forced to leave his wife and three kids and head back to Toronto, even though he had been in the US legally for thirty years. He had to sell the Limelight and the Palladium (to his credit, he owned the buildings). He attempted to start a new club in Toronto, it folded after a year. He is mostly retired now, trying to start a boutique hotel, but mostly not doing much. The US wouldn’t let him back into the country for more than a decade but they have since chilled out about that and he routinely visits. He published an autobiography early in the pandemic, it is $3 on Kindle. I bought it last night. There was a profile of him in the Times around then.
Peter Gatien was railroaded by a drug paranoid federal and state government, mostly over MDMA, which was legal in NYC until 1996, and most of that trafficking was done by Lord Michael, the man who brought rave to America, who never served a day in jail for any of it. The whole thing was complete bullshit. Limelight was monstrously profitable from its opening in the early 80’s through the 2000’s when he was forced to sell it because of deportation. The Tunnel hosted the most important night in NYC for Hip Hop until the police essentially shut it down by making it impossible to attend, blocking off the entire street, searching people four times, down to their shoes… because we can’t have black people having a good time in lily white Chelsea.
By all accounts, Gatien ran his clubs professionally, no one was ripped off, more than eight million people passed through the doors of his clubs, and when his empire was closed by the government for no reason, more than a thousand people lost their jobs and New York nightlife dissolved into small bar parties and shitty finance bro bottle service clubs.
Nick Cave played the Montreaux Jazz Festival this weekend and I only watched the three-song preview on his Youtube page but you could buy a stream of the whole thing and I have to say, while I am a bit tired of Nick’s current direction in recorded music, wow what a setlist. Started with “Get Ready for Love,” into “There She Goes My Beautiful World” which is one of his mid-late period materpieces (man how many phases do the bad seeds have I wonder). But most shockingly: 1) There is a woman in the Bad Seeds now, the first time, I think, since Anita Lane was briefly a Bad Seed in the mid 1980’s. I don’t know who she is. If you know, please advise. And 2) The Bad Seeds played “City of Refuge” which is fucking amazing and I bet it was amazing live and I’ve never seen them play it and my god I want to see “City of Refuge” live so badly.
Went to Walmart on Friday. They have removed the label for the “Hispanic Foods” aisle. The aisle was always more than Hispanic foods, it’s also where the Asian foods are, the Middle Eastern foods, all the “ethnic” or “foreign” foods. But what’s funny is they removed the label to the aisle, oh, I don’t know, two or three months ago. But they have not renamed it. It’s just blank. It’s like Walmart knew they couldn’t call it the Hispanic aisle anymore but have no idea what to call it. Seems very American.
And, finally, Rockets Burst from the Streetlamps’ Spotify followers were up 67% to fifteen whole monthly followers so thank you guys (well, all 10 of you) for doing me that solid after I asked you to go listen to our old band. At this rate, we may eventually earn a penny!
Todays’ mix is a mix of some of the first songs I can remember as a child. Emma and I were talking about it this weekend. It took a little bit of digging around in Billboard top-hits-of-the-year lists to remember some of these. If you’d asked me, I’d say the first songs I remembered were from ‘83, ‘82, but with a bit of mnemonic assistance, I could go back to ‘78 pretty easily and even a couple from ‘77 when I was five. Still seems like I oughtta remember songs earlier than that, but this is the best I can do so far. I will keep working on it. Emma got a kick out of “Pac-Man Fever.” Is it just me or was that, like, the biggest song ever when it came out? Probably just me, I was uniquely primed for a novelty hit about video games.
All right let’s get into this week and do some worky-work. More chats tomorrow. Miss you.
The new touring-only Bad Seed is Carly Paradis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Paradis. She appears to be from Stony Creek, ON, about 20 minutes down the QEW from my high school stomping grounds of St Catharines.