I meant to write an essay here, but, as usual, I got sidetracked and overenthusiastic for too many things, time kept passing, and, well, instead here’s another bunch of clips and quotes that are loosely related.
First off: not long after I pushed ‘send’ on the last Landline, one of the fantastic Michael Hurley videos I highlighted—Snock ‘N Roll: Adventures With Michael Hurley (25 mins, 2009), was yanked off the YouTube, leaving folks hungry for more Snockumentary matter in their time of mourning in the lurch. Such is life. Anyways, here, now, via the film’s director/narrator/co-star Marc Israel, is the film on Vimeo:
I understand that Lisa Foti-Straus’ feature-length documentary, Elwood Snock & the Land of Lo-Fi, is complete, or near-complete, or something, and that after at first not being into it (“I told them to go back to the drawing board“—from Byron Coley’s 2013 interview), Hurley had later come around to it…? Let’s hope so, and let’s hope we all get a chance to see it, as word from dependable sources on the street is it’s great.
Speaking of documentary films featured in Landline: 40 Watts From Nowhere, Sue Carpenter’s new documentary about her ‘90s Silver Lake pirate radio station KBLT, will be screening at the 24th San Francisco Documentary Festival on May 31 at 9pm at the Roxie Theater. Tickets are available now, etc. The film has also been accepted into this year’s SouthSide Film Festival in Bethlehem, PA, which runs from June 10-14; screening date/showtime has not yet been set.
Thanks also to Sue for forwarding this absolutely spectaculicious recent AP photo essay on Pakistani truck art by photojournalist Anjum Naveed. Click on the photo below to see the whole feature—truly inspirational work from a highly advanced culture:
Trucks decorated with artwork drive along a highway on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, on Sunday, April 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)
Speaking of advanced culture: We lost another another great American weirdo genius recently—David Thomas of Pere Ubu. Although I was good friends with longtime Pere Ubu collaborator John Thompson aka Johnny Dromette (RIP) for several years in L.A., I only saw David Thomas perform one time, almost 25 years ago. Utterly captivating, astonishing, etc. This is the too-brief review I wrote for the LAWeekly:
“One day I will be the best that you can do/and time will catch up to you/like it caught me too,” sighed/warned Pere Ubu bulbous guy David Thomas during a song midway through the pioneering “avant garage” Cleveland band’s recent Knitting Factory performance. Maybe time has caught up with ol’ Crocus Behemoth, as it has with the lonely-hearted oddball narrators of many of his recent songs, but from the opening pitch (the classic “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”) of Ubu’s 25th-anniversary set of artistic hits and total commercial misses, the ever-watchable Thomas was in command of the small stage like few other living rock & roll frontmen.
Maybe it’s Thomas’ fantastic, utterly unique vocals — all growls, yeowls, bleats and warm warbling — or his large mass and dainty1 hands, his fingers carefully grasping vintage mike and silver flask . . . or perhaps it was his giant red apron, tattooed with pickup mics. In any case, he resembled an imposing supervisor in a Midwestern slaughterhouse: heavy, covered in dark stains, red-faced and wildly gesticulating, only occasionally satisfied with his department’s performance. Thomas needn’t have fretted so — the band was stupendous, with returning original Ubu guitarist Tom Herman especially deserving a laminated co-founder-of-the-month certificate for the staggering amount of inventive riffs, solos and sounds he summoned from his supermodified electro-acoustic guitar. If this was the best Pere Ubu can do after two and a half decades, well, it’s still more than enough.
John Thompson went back to Cleveland days with David, and was the one guy who, from what I could tell, stayed within DT's art/life orbit all the way through. It was far from easy, but John, it seemed, was able to stay amused where others got exasperated. I miss hearing the stories.
Johnny Dromette/John Thompson, 1970s Cleveland (photo via clepunk.com)
David Thomas! Such a visionary character in so many ways. For those who have time/curiosity, I highly recommend roaming through the Ubu/etc website(s) he carefully constructed over the last two decades. Facts, humor, manifestoes, pathos, wit, directives, flags, books, a brilliant essay on Ghoulardi... Charming, exhausting. Here's an example, as published in 'The Book of Hieroglyphs' (2012), that kind of says it all about The Basic Problem—and one method to endure It:
Here’s David in full vocals/accordion flight on his song “What Happened to Me” in a makeshift brotherhood with a very game Loudon Wainwright (!), David Sanborn and others:
Finally: wandering around the internet, I came across this playful 1991 interview/performance from Deirdre O’Donoghue’s KCRW show2, which I remembered hearing when it was broadcast :
"Cleveland’s indomitable Pere Ubu come to SNAP under the guise of Petit Ubu, a miniaturized trio, on the heels of their eighth album, ‘Worlds in Collision. They play a short acoustic set that cherry-picks from throughout their extensive history, while leader David Thomas gamely endures Deirdre’s flattery.
Still with us and still being brilliant is another weirdo American genius— Lynda Barry, who gave a very good, typically funny3 interview recently to Mary Miller for the Southwest Review, some of it about her experiences teaching adults how to reconnect with their innate capacity for play and creativity. She says:
At the university there are four preschools on campus, and there’s one that’s become my favorite. I go there during the school year once a week and three times a week during the summer to work with four-year-olds. All I do is hang out with these kids and draw and write down their stories if they have something they want me to write. They get deep into drama. If they’re making pancakes, they enact every step—breaking the eggs, stirring the batter—and they don’t talk much while they’re doing it.
I love being with them, period, but I’m also interested in what makes drawing and writing split because at their age these things are still working together. They draw their name; it’s not writing yet. I’m interested in how they separate, and whether we can keep them together for a little while longer. …
My graduate students are often miserable, and I started to wonder what was going on. Like, why is this acceptable to the university? And I realized that graduate students, particularly PhD students, start to lose their peripheral vision of the rest of the world; the world becomes smaller and smaller until their two states of being are working on their dissertation and not working on their dissertation.
When I’ve been in a creative jam, the four-year-olds bring me out of it, so I told my graduate students that they were going to meet with co-researchers who would work with them on their dissertations once a week for two hours. I didn’t tell them any more than that. And it worked well because they learned this other state of being. It opened them up.
The people that I love working with the most [as a teacher], with all my heart, are those who gave up on drawing at about eight when they realized they couldn’t draw hands and noses. I seek these people out. I’m just like, Yeah, come to me. "
Landline is free to everyone, but you can help keep Landline from getting disconnected—and receive occasional bonus ‘Landline Special’ emails—by making your subscription a paying one. The button below gives you a 50% discount, meaning only $20/year (that’s $1.67/month)…
"It’s like being on a road trip. You think you’re just going to this one site, but then you turn down a detour and there’s a giant rabbit. Actually, that did happen to me once."
Filmmaker Marc Israel has posted his Snock doc on YouTube, with an explanation for its absence, thoughts on the film, and a remembrance/tribute to Hurley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTHotuc4BL8
Filmmaker Marc Israel has posted his Snock doc on YouTube, with an explanation for its absence, thoughts on the film, and a remembrance/tribute to Hurley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTHotuc4BL8