“LANDLINE” — AN EMAIL BULLETIN BY JAY BABCOCK
No. 0023
TUESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2022
Hello there,
1. THE ART OF NOT GETTING SQUASHED OUT
A friend from a beautiful, small, rural town I’m familiar with recently moved to another beautiful, small, rural town in a different state. As always, she’s sharing her stunning photographs of her local outdoors on social media, but this time, in this place, she is not saying where she lives. She saw what happened to the last place. This time, she’s keeping the treasure a secret.
I get what she’s doing. Some of us, when we encounter a great thing, immediately want to turn other people onto that great thing; think Joe Pera at church, after hearing Baba O’Reily. But care needs to be taken here. Sometimes (often?) that great thing cannot survive the attention—could be the scale of the attention, could be the quality. If you don’t have formal institutions or practices in place, that great thing can get squashed out. The local field of blooming poppies gets trampled by a stampede of inconsiderate instagrammers; the passionate musician loses their way, disheartened by the obliviousness or buffoonery of a suddenly expanded audience; the beautiful, small, rural town becomes an Airbnb partyville for oblivious urban wealth.
With that in mind, I’d like to pass along a few smaller-scale things that might be of interest or use to others. I like the way I found out about all of this (s)low-profile stuff: through friends and future friends, through a kind of sensitive, responsible, word-of-mouth network. A good way to share treasures. A private-ish map of public waterholes.
2. UNCOMMON SCENTS
Birdman Recording Group impresario and aesthete David Katznelson recommends procuring high-quality Japanese incense in person from Asakichi, a “hole-in-the-wall tucked away in San Francisco’s Japantown. Staples from the shop include Hinoki Cypress Incense (Kunjuto brand) and Fu-In Aloeswood Incense (Minorien brand).” Smells good to me. David’s always talking up great stuff on his substack, The Signal.
3. WHERE ARE THE FROGS?
When I moved to Tucson earlier this year a generous friend who knows me well gave me a Sonoran ecology-focused moon calendar book made by a local genius named Ray. The calendar book is hand stitched, 4.5"x16," runs from Spring Equinox 2021 to Spring Equinox 2022, and costs $30. Here’s how Ray describes it:
The calendar is arranged by moon cycles rather than Gregorian months, with Gregorian dates written for reference. It is a tool to think about time in an Earth-informed way, and gain clarity of personal and societal biorhythms. With space for writing on each day, the book is designed to be used for tracking and planning life aspects such as health, body fluctuations, gardening, fermenting, dreams, ecological observations, and travel. The first page of the book provides suggestions of what to record into the book. When do you see the first Desert Willow flor? When does snow melt begin to fill the canyons? [Where are the frogs? Are branches brittle? Are the mushrooms out?] How does the wind's course change through the year? Each cycle depicts the more-than-human creatures of unceded O'odham and Yoeme land/the Sonoran desert, placed according to their seasons as another method of observing time. Astrological progressions of the sun and the moon are also written. Margin space and black&white illustration are left for adding your own illustrations and coloring!
Ray also offers a moon calendar for the wall for $16. It looks like this:
I think you can arrange to buy these calendars direct from Ray via Ray’s “timeisdirt” instagram, but I’m not sure. I hope Ray makes new calendars for 2022-3.
4. MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MESMERIC BLISS
Since 1990, the Dick Slessig Combo have assembled occasionally for live performance or private recording. Extra-long instrumental covers/interpolations of pop songs is their metier. Doesn’t sound especially promising until you note that DSC is comprised of three exquisite musicians: Mark Lightcap from Acetone, Carl Bronson from Matmos and Steve Goodfriend from Radar Bros. We are talking a massive amount of extended bliss here. There are various points of online contact with the DSC, but acquiring what DSC physical recordings have ever existed is not easy or straightforward. From time to time, though, recordings pop up on one of the internet streaming services, and word gets around. A gorgeous 42-minute slo-mo cover of “Wichita Lineman” is out there; so is a 28-minute meditation on Bobby Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe.” Below is DSC covering George McRae’s celestial disco hit Rock Your Baby for 27-and-a-half mesmeric minutes (I know it says this is “B” by “Grant Oesterling”—disregard that.) Listen now and let the loving start. You can read the rest of this email some other time.
5. 501 N. MEDNICK
Los Angeles-based Sam Sweet makes books of text and photographs and designs, publishes and sells them, as far as I know, only direct from his website. I don’t know the whys or wherefores of this practice of his, but I do know his books. They are spectacular achievements in clear and poetic history writing, based on a possibly insane amount of research, footwork and interviewage. Like many others, I bowed in Sam’s general direction after reading his 2017 Acetone biography, Hadley Lee Lightcap, which was the kind of thoughtful, compassionate book this band (and place, and era) deserved but never could have expected. And I continue to bow in Sam’s direction today as I make my way through volumes 1-3 of his five-part All Night Menu series. (The fourth volume is imminent.)
Here’s how Sam describes the project:
All Night Menu is a history of Los Angeles told in five installments. Each booklet contains eight addresses; each address reveals a different strand of L.A. culture. By the end of the series, there will be five volumes and forty stories, drawn from all time periods, subcultures, and sections of the city.
Buildings are demolished, populations pass on, and neighborhoods mutate. The city changes. Addresses do not. Everything that happens, happens somewhere. Each resident shares his address with the invisible and the long departed. Even addresses with no history are full of it. Streets you have never seen still have names and numbers—in case, someday, you need them.
The city is vast and amorphous. This booklet is small and precise. It is not a walking tour, a visitor's guidebook, or a street atlas. It is a periodic index of lost heroes and miniature histories. Its only objective is to make the invisible equal to the visible.
Visit Mr. Sweet at https://www.allnight-menu.com/
6. IT MAKES SENSE WHEN YOU GET INTO IT, GENE
I cannot recommend Carlos Gonzalez’s tightly plotted 21st century post-PKD hieroglyphics enough to people who like weird stuff.
Ryan Carey, who I do not know, wrote about the dude recently:
There’s no reason that pioneering underground cartoonist, musician, and SOV filmmaker Carlos Gonzales isn’t on the so-called “A list” of contemporary artistic talents. I mean, whatever you’re looking for — fiercely-realized visions, a legitimately singular drawing style, a core set of existential concerns, an absolutely original “voice” — he’s got it. And yet, aside from a small but committed cadre of exceptionally loyal fans who will gladly follow wherever he leads, he remains something of an unknown quantity …
I think that’s largely due to the fact that he’s committed to his own artistic independence to a degree that’s certainly admirable, but not likely to garner him a ton of attention. He’s always been a prolific self-publisher, but only occasionally pops his head above water, so to speak, to make his presence known to the wider world. He distributes the music of his largely one-man project, Russian Tsarlag, via mail-order cassettes, and his “films” are, to my knowledge, only available on homemade VHS tapes. His longest comic to date, the 500-page Slime Freak, is strictly a “good luck if you can find it” item, and the same is true of his newest ongoing series, Everglide. In other words, he’s underground by both default (there’s nothing remotely “commercial’ about any of this stuff, trust me) and, crucially, by choice.
I was, therefore, somewhat surprised to see that Gonzales agreed to let someone else — namely Floating World — publish his 320-page 2019 opus Gates Of Plasma, a sprawling-yet-conceptually-tight tale of truck drivers, alternate dimensions, asshole tech moguls, mayors-turned-DIY-porn-entrepreneurs, amateur-plastic surgeon UFO cultists, and mystically-powered ear wax — but was pleased to see that they still hewed very much to their auteur’s decidedly lo-fi aesthetic sensibilities with their formatting and presentation…
Gates of Plasma is available from our friends at Floating World Comics in Portland, Oregon. Carlos Gonzalez sells xerox copies of his latest series Everglide (they’re all sold out at the moment, but I hope he makes more — I need #1!) and other sideways stuff via https://waspvideoroadhouse.bigcartel.com/
7. HOW TO HELP SUSTAIN THIS THING FOR CHEAP
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Thank you kindly.
Now: outward!
Jay Babcock
Tucson, Arizona
New softbound compilation of Carlos Gonzalez rare comics out now via Floating World.
"Follow the crooked journey of several ‘lost’ souls as they navigate the borders of rationality within a curdled American gumbo. If you can’t get enough of crudely drawn mutilation fables, open this door. Then you can get back to your jazz albums and drinking." https://floatingworldcomics.com/shop/comic-books/wasp-video-roadhouse-by-carlos-gonzalez
Carlos Gonzalez has some new stuff available at his hard-to-find webstore, including the new issue of EVERGLIDE. "Bill awakens in some kind of elaborate sewer system with a disturbing guide that leads him through layer upon layer of his own brittle psyche. Will he be able to find help again from Alicia Blue? Or will this mental donut provide no hole for escape, just endless jelly?" https://waspvideoroadhouse.bigcartel.com/product/everglide-4