[Landline] Two incredible fingers

Comradeship and goodwill in foul times

1. #SOLIDARITY

Two Friday nights ago, a bartender, unbidden, put a small bottle of his homebrewed serrano pepper-infused absinthe before my wife and I, then winked and poured us a couple incredible fingers.

We had nothing to give him in return besides our obvious joy and gratitude, and, I guess, a sense of unspoken comradeship and goodwill in foul times. If only I’d followed Arthur magazine ‘Weedeater’ columnist Nance Klehm’s advice! In a 2013 column, Nance wrote:

Reginah Waterspirit, aka Brown Dove of Albuquerque, told me this story.

Her husband Bearheart had been reading from his book at a major bookstore in town. Afterwards he was approached by a woman who he’d noticed had arrived at the reading late. She didn’t ask any questions, just looked into his eyes and gave him a paper, folded up. He put it into his pocket without looking. Later in the evening, Regina asked him what the woman had given him. He had forgotten about it entirely. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper holding a yet-to-be-used teabag. So they put the kettle on.

Nance advised always having something handy to share, something socially-cosmically-ecologically appropriate. In her Arthur column, Nance passed along an idea-recipe for “an urban-foraged weedy smoking mixture that you can easily find, gather, dry and mix yourself to later put in your pocket and pull out for payment or sharing when needed… Let’s alchemize our struggles and smoke the pipe together.”

Read the whole of Nance’s 2013 column here.

2013 illustration by Kira Mardikes that accompanied Nance Klehm’s column in Arthur.

2. L.A. ALERT

Above: Porkchop does his part for the KBLT cause, circa 1997. Porkchop was owned by Christopher Wonder, the outrageously creative/annoying stage magician who lived in the carriage house behind Sue’s Silver Lake apartment, where KBLT’s secret studio was located.

40 Watts From Nowhere, the new documentary feature film about mid/late-'90s Silver Lake pirate radio station KBLT, will be screening Saturday, Feb. 22 and Monday, Feb. 24 as part of this year’s Slamdance film festival in Los Angeles. Here’s the synopsis:

Based around vintage footage of pirate radio station KBLT shot in 1998, 40 Watts from Nowhere is the story of a young woman who loved music but hated commercial radio and decided to do something about it. After buying a pirate radio kit from a Berkeley activist, she set up shop in her apartment in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, growing the station into a 24/7 operation.

I deejayed at KBLT, and during that time, became involved with the station owner-operator Sue Carpenter, who's made this doc. I was interviewed for the film and appear in it. I haven't seen a cut yet, but I hear it's good!

Tickets for individual shows are $21. Info here, including a trailer: https://slamdance2025.eventive.org/films/6761ae61df3a3b5ff54845df

3. A BIG BOOK FOR BAD TIMES

I just finished reading Big Trouble by legendary double Pulitzer-winning journalist/author J. Anthony Lukas, an absolute stonking masterpiece of nonfiction originally published in 1997. It's a full-on, propulsive, God’s-eye immersion into early 20th America, with the 1905 assassination of a former Idaho governor as its throughline: 750 tightly written, insanely vivid pages (with another 100 or so of footnotes) that, for me, provided pure escape from the dismal present even as its resonances with aspects of Our Current Situation were inescapable.

I was describing Big Trouble to a friend as a cross between Deadwood, Tolstoy, and Pynchon’s Against the Day, but that’s a bit facile¹. Better to simply quote Lukas in his introduction, talking about how the book developed its super-panoramic scope:

4. ESCAPING SPOTIFY

Buy Music Club is a (new?) website that allows you to create streamable playlists from Bandcamp. Great! So, forget the Spotify link for this playlist in the previous Landine, here’s Landline Playlist 1 (Jan 2025), featuring Swanox, Bayaka people, Jantar, Diles que no me maten, Sgt. Papers, Manduka, Ava Mendoza, Sonny Smith, David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights, Terry Allen, Doug Paisley and Lee Baggett.

Hopefully there’s something in the 16 tracks that catches your ear, and if so, in the spirit of solidarity, goodwill and exchange, please share something with the artist in return.

More soon,

and let’s visualize a general strike,

Jay

p.s.

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1. Then again, Big Trouble does feature many sentences like this one: “Kelly had served three years in prison for biting the nose off a man in Wilkes-Barre.”