MUSIC: a year in music (5) - coachella BLAKE WALKER

 
DAY ONE

My friends Carl and Ryan had specifically requested we leave by 9:00 a.m. sharp. It was my job to provide transportation to Indio. As 8:45 a.m. rolled around I was well-ready so I gave them a call. However, Carl and Ryan had stayed up the night before snorting lines of coke and playing Halo. They requested another hour.

By the time we were finally on the road and barely outside of Los Angeles, I began to hear a familiar sound coming from the back seat: *sniff* *sniff* *sniff*. I turned around to verify that Carl was already kickstarting the party, doing lines of cocaine off the fleshy part of his hand.

Some hours later, stuck in stand-still traffic packed together for miles with several countless of Godʼs hipsters and strategically embedded highway patrolmen camped for miles on either side of the long highway, Carl was still going at it: *sniff* *sniff* *sniff*. That last sniff broke the camelʼs back and caused me to snap: “Stop doing cocaine in my car! Please, I donʼt want to get arrested for drug possession before we ever get to this concert!” Looking like a kid whoʼd been caught stealing cookies, Carl begrudgingly took one last snort and then brushed off his hand and put away his little straw.

The closer we got to the Empire Polo Field in Indio it became clear to me that we werenʼt going to make it in time to see Yeasayer at 3:00 p.m. Yeasayer was the band that started the year for me and whose music still mattered — one of the top three or five bands I had most counted on seeing this entire weekend. Sensing me seething in the front seat Carl and Ryan began maneuvering around the inevitable: “Well, at least thereʼs a lot of music this weekend,”…“Itʼs good we live in a place like Los Angeles where all these bands come eventually.” Meanwhile, all I could envision in my mind was the image of Carl and Ryan doing bumps and shooting each otherʼs avatars in first person until 4:00 a.m.

Once we parked at the polo grounds and got out of the car we each took our portion of magic mushrooms. Off in the distance I could hear the tail end of “One” by Yeasayer. “Thanks for coming to watch us play, have a great rest of the weekend,” bid Yeasayerʼs lead singer Chris Keating, before the band presumably left the stage—we still hadnʼt even waited or waded through the bottleneck of humans entering through a narrow security checkpoint to get inside.

By the time we emerged on the other side, my head had ballooned and it floated just above my body, attached to my shoulders by a string.

We made our way to the main stage where The Specials were just getting on stage. Through a cloud of delighted dizziness I watched and danced as this reunited but mighty middle-aged Ska band proved themselves relevant, creating a sound from a generation I was once removed from but had always been impressed by, nonetheless.

After The Specials we moved over to one of the smaller tents for the haunting, psychedelic folk of Grizzly Bear. Grizzly Bear was wistful and dramatic, but after the performative awesomeness of The Specials they came off a little tepid. Perhaps they’re one of those bands that just might make greater records than live shows.

Wanting to make sure we secured a reasonable spot in time for LCD Soundsystem we excused ourselves from Grizzly Bear and moved back over to the main stage. Luckily for us, we managed to get close to the midsection of the audience, just around the rim of the sound booth.

Hanging above the main stage was the most gigantic mirror ball I had ever seen. The anticipation preceding the arrival of LCD Soundsystem was beyond palpable as 2010 would mark the beginning of the end to the bandʼs brilliant career, and this would be one of the last chances to ever see them live.

When James Murphy, LCD Soundsystemʼs brain trust and lead singer made his way onto the stage with the rest of his entourage the massive throng exploded. Over the next hour and a half the band tore through several classics including “All My Friends,” “Yeah,” and “Losing My Edge,” not to mention new tunes such as “Drunk Girls” and “I Can Change.” In perfectly dramatic fashion, the band finished us off with the bittersweet homage to The Big Apple — “New York, I Love You But Youʼre Bringing Me Down.”

Once the band struck their last note and exited off the stage we all took a chance to catch our breath and prepared ourselves for the latter half of a one-two punch — Jay-Z.

A massive digital countdown clock set against the backdrop of the stage began ticking away the minutes until H.O.V.A. made his entrance.

When Jay-Z came to the stage it was with full force — lights, sound and a pummeling screen presentation. The whole effect was like a test exercise in how to increase the probability of seizures in young white middle class hipsters.

At a certain point, I think in the middle of the song “99 Problems,” I suddenly noticed a section of the crowd in front of me beginning to move backwards with considerable force. I became worried for anything terrible that could be causing all these people to suddenly shove each other out of the way and scramble for escape. The nearer the movement got to me I suddenly noticed what was making these people move back in an effort to sacrifice each other to save themselves: there, in the middle of a radius of several feet was a completely naked man, eyes glazed over, walking very calmly and casually towards the back of the audience without a care in the world. He was like a modern day Moses on LSD. I felt someone grab and shove me, to which I responded by doing the same thing to some other poor schmuck, all in an effort to not touch, or be touched by the naked man. I watched as the naked man made his way effortlessly toward the back of the audience, disappearing into the throng of clad folks all too ready to shove others in their way.



At that point - perhaps resulting from what just happened - I checked in with Carl and Ryan. We decided we were ready to move on to see what remained of the first day of the festival, taking advantage of the constant music buffet Coachella had to offer before calling it a night. We caught some of Vampire Weekend and tried a little bit of PIL and Fever Ray — both of the latter very dark and apocalyptic as musical treats go — and arriving finally at Deadmau5; a hard-charging electronic DJ sporting a large mouse head with demented facial expressions light-projected against the face of it.

Once the first day had finally come to an end, we began making the exhausted but satisfied trek back towards the exit, paying our dues by joining the sweaty bottleneck of fellow festival goers, our movement heavily restricted by a single narrow exit.

Comforted in the knowledge that we would be resting our heads on real pillows, in real beds, under a real roof, in a real hotel room, we felt glad for the opportunity to recharge our batteries, secure in the knowledge that there remained two more days of magical sun-drenched sonic orgasms.

DAY TWO

The next morning I was awakened by my cell phone. It was a woman from my bank letting me know that someone had gotten a hold of my debit card number. They made some low-level purchases to see that it worked — and then moved on to “bigger purchases.” I canceled the card and managed to find a Bank Of America where I could show my ID and withdraw some cash. Disaster was averted, but I was nonetheless required from that point forward to survive on a more conscientious budget. 

Once this white manʼs burden was resolved, Carl, Ryan and I made the 45 minute drive from Palm Springs to Indio and parked in the sea of automobiles once again; each action from each part of each day turning into a collection of rituals. We took our mushrooms and proceeded to hurry up and wait at the security check point for the festival.

After we got inside, we headed straight to one of the middle tent stages where Beach House was in the last third of their set. Though I had fallen in love with Victoria LeGrandeʼs voice, I was in anticipation of what followed Beach House — the soulful, lesbian power-disco-punk of Gossip, followed by the complex experimental pop-rock of Dirty Projectors.

Ryan and Carl decided to make their way over to the outdoor stage in hopes of getting great seats for Hot Chip, another electronic dance band with brilliant pop hooks, thus leaving me to my own devices until we planned to meet by the beer garden later that evening.

As the festival wore on I was painfully reminded of the outdoor concertʼs greatest frustration: all the incredibly beautiful bikini-clad women I would never have and would only hope to know. Of course, thereʼs nothing really conducive about the outdoor concert environment to being romantically successful because the awful truth is that everyone just wants to have a good time and be left alone.

In some other parallel dimension of my dreams I would imagine having all these beautiful women I saw, and I would know exactly how to achieve that aim but not here, not now, not with my shy and timid soul being the only gift available to me. So as it was, I would simply have to endure the benefit of my periphery, a little too afraid to really try and “close any deals.”

After Beach House was done, Gossip began setting up and I began to get excited when I saw Hannah, the bandʼs fierce, tattooed and attractive lesbian drummer sound checking her drum kit. Through the haze of my ballooned consciousness I made even more dreamy gaga-goo goo eyes at Hannah than I would normally, or than I did the one other time I saw the Gossip play back in Los Angeles.

Finally the stage was set and Hannah, along with the Gossipʼs bass player and guitarist all came out and began to launch into a thumping introduction.

When Beth Ditto finally emerged on stage everyone nearly shat and my already ballooning head felt like it was about to pop.

During the next 45 minutes Beth Ditto and company powered through such firecrackers as “Standing In The Way Of Control” and “Heavy Cross”, pummeling the audience with powerful messages of personal affirmation and pride.

Thankfully, most of the sets at Coachella were just an hour. Gossip made me feel like I had had my ass kicked. My consciousness was exhausted but they left me wanting more.

Once Gossip had left us in ruins I tried putting back together the pieces of myself and angled closer to the front of the stage. The idea was to plant myself firmly up and underneath the sound of the Dirty Projectors’ complex rhythms, time signatures and harmonies molded into the shape of very palatable pop hooks. I had heard stories about Dirty Projectors 12 hour rehearsals. Soon I believed that all of it was true and that their work had paid off. Dirty Projectors came on stage and delivered a set that was nothing less than sublime, especially to my altered state. Dave Longstreth, classically-trained guitarist and band leader led his crew through “Stillness Is The Move” and “Temecula Sunrise”. The three female sirensʼ harmonies were deadly seductive.

The sun was nearer to setting by the end of Dirty Projectors so I decided  to go see what remained of Hot Chip at the outdoor stage. As expected, the crowd was a swarm for Hot Chip, one of the most eagerly anticipated bands of the weekend. I thought it pointless to even try and locate my friends, so I headed back to the port-o-potties where I joined the throng waiting for the privilege to urinate inside a filthy vertical box.

As I was waiting, as if by some miraculous occurrence, out of all the many countless bodies passing in front of and behind me there appeared Ryan, just returning from the end of the Hot Chip set.

“How was it?” I asked.

“Great, we were pretty close up,” Ryan said. “Listen, Carlʼs foot is hurting pretty bad and heʼs not sure how much more he can keep walking around.”

Apparently Carl had suddenly started experiencing a flare up from an ankle injury he sustained when he fell from a motor scooter he had previously owned.

After we emptied ourselves and sanitized our hands, Ryan and I met up with Carl who was sitting on the ground close to one of the nearby tent stages.

We helped Carl up and he winced as we began making our way to the middle tent stage to see Devo.

At this point, we managed to meet up with an old lady roommate of mine who had her own miraculous tale to tell from the weekend: she and some friends drove all the way from L.A. without having tickets and managed to commune with a guy they found on the internet who claimed to be selling some. Waiting patiently out in the middle of rural California they had to be picked up by a strange car, wherein they met the supposed strange man from the internet. They were driven to a strange spot slightly further out in the middle of nowhere. The man sold them the tickets as promised. My former roommate made sure to let him know that if the tickets were bogus, that sheʼd come looking for him and thereʼd be hell to pay. Fortunately the tickets were real and she and her friends gained access to the festival.

Back in front of the tent stage waiting for Devo we didnʼt know what to expect. At the very least a novelty and at the very worst something sad, precious and pitiful to watch. After all, Devo had been one of the pioneering electronic bands of the early 1980s and their song “Whip It” was a staple of classic 80s radio air play. Now middle-aged and seldom seen, we braced ourselves for the possibility of a swift exit if necessary.

Instead, Devo came raging onto the stage at the peak of a climax in light and sound. They had costume changes, choreography, many great and recognizable songs as well as new tunes from the album they just recorded and released. Their playing was utterly flawless and most of all they possessed a strength and passion almost unparalleled from any band the entire weekend. Between Devo and The Specials, this made two for two classic bands from the past who upstaged most of their younger contemporaries. Suddenly, instead of feeling the anticipated sadness for an older generation, I felt insecure for my own.

From the catharsis of Devo we muted our excitement for Carlʼs throbbing ankle. He assured us that if we would like to stay a little longer that he could tolerate his discomfort, but that we would have to go before too long. Fortunately, Carl was also able to power himself with a few extra “bumps” he had remembered to bring, imbuing himself with the stamina to dance like a maniac for an extra extended period.

We had little interest for what remained of most the program but we were curious to check out what was playing in the electronic music tent. Where we had seen Deadmau5 the night before DJ Z-Trip was pummeling the crowd with his throbbing techno medley of cuts, samples and breaks. The highlight was when Z-Trip mashed up Major Lazerʼs “Pod De Flor” with the theme song from Beverly Hills Cop.

Exiting the polo grounds at the end of the second day we suffered the inhumanity of the mass bottleneck once again feeling like chickens led to the slaughter. I took this time to practice some deep meditative breathing, aided by the sublime notion of climbing back into our beds under an honest roof.

This was all so much fun, but I was relieved there was only one more day and that it couldnʼt last forever.

DAY THREE

That morning Carl let us know that he would not be able to endure the last day of the festival. He didnʼt want to risk exacerbating the condition of his ankle, but he gave us his blessing and encouraged us wholeheartedly to carry on without him. Seeing to it that Carl was comfortably bedridden in front of the television we left him to his own devices, supplied by a small pharmacy.

We headed out to the polo field one last time, intent upon arriving in time for the incredible succession of Owen Pallett and Deerhunter on the outdoor stage.

There in the makeshift parking lot we took our final allotment of mushrooms, squeezed through the bottleneck of the security check point and emerged inside for the home stretch — the final day of our debauchery-filled pop culture marathon.

Regardless of the heat, Owen Pallett came out wearing a suit and tie accompanied by nothing more than his violin and a sideman percussionist. Owen Pallett began each song by looping a single phrase on his violin, then layering many more musical phrases on top of the initial phrase until what resulted was the exact effect of a symphony orchestra.

My head felt like a floaty, mushy, amorphous oversized collection of nuclei conducted by music and my body felt lost inside itself, far removed from my surroundings.

Eventually Owen Pallett played “Lewis Takes His Shirt Off” and I suddenly felt nostalgic for the year 2010 — even though it was only April.

Owen Pallett left me glowing and none too soon, because then came Deerhunter — one of my favorite bands in recent memory and still one of my favorites to this day. Deerhunter’s artsy rock ʻnʼ roll followed nicely off the artsy pop of Owen Pallett who was the perfect appetizer to the entree.

Everything was great until midway through Deerhunterʼs set I began having misgivings about my condition. I canʼt remember exactly what song the band was playing when it happened, but the shrooms began to transform my bliss into a state of paranoid terror. I began to imagine horrible things happening there in the middle of the concert grounds, none of which came to pass, but which seized my consciousness all the same. In hindsight the episode would become a blur, like waking from a dream, but the impression of carnage, violence and chaos stayed with my sense memory.

When terrorʼs grip let go of me, Deerhunterʼs frontman Bradford Cox was thanking the crowd for coming out early in the day to see their set. Ryan and I decided it was the perfect time for a bathroom break. I chose not to tell him about my paranoid delusion.

We took some time to hydrate ourselves before Yo La Tengo and Spoon on the main stage. I was relieved to finally be coming down.

Fortunately for us - and especially for me - there was not much of a crowd amassed for Yo La Tengo. During the bandʼs set we had plenty of room to dance and frolic. Things must have gotten better because at one point I just managed to hear a female voice behind me saying “this is too good, weʼve got to get this guy dancing.” I turned around to find her filming me with her camera. I smiled and went about my business.

Yo La Tengo treated us to many of their greatest songs, including “Stockholm Syndrome” and “Autumn Sweater” and a disarmingly choreographed rendition of “You Can Have It All.”

Between Yo La Tengo’s set and Spoon, I got the chance to rest and come down further while contending with the fact that I would have to be back at my desk by 8:00 a.m. the next day. This meant that as soon as the concert was over just around midnight, there would be no respite. We would in fact have to collect Carl in whatever state he was in, and begin the trek home in time for me to procure no more than a couple hours of sleep.

I forced this all out of my head the same way I forced my paranoid delusion to go away as best I could earlier in the day and focused instead on Spoon. Spoon was reliably tight, catchy and at one point Bradford Cox from Deerhunter came out to play guitar on one of their songs.

At this point in the day, there really only remained one band left to see and that was Gorillaz — Damon Albarnʼs fake cartoon collective who had mostly spent their career shrouded in mystery.

Sitting on the ground waiting for Gorillaz to come on, Ryan and I hung back in the distance and enjoyed the sounds of a reunited Pavement and an independent Thom Yorke. Both bands sounded good but neither usurped our need to give our chemically beaten bodies a much needed rest.

Determined to finish on a high note, or at the very least get our moneyʼs worth, we finally picked ourselves up and moved closer towards the main stage in anticipation of Gorillaz.

The first song was the title track to their album, Plastic Beach — a tripped-out avant-hip hop song featuring Snoop Dogg. What became quickly apparent to me was that Snoop Dogg was nowhere to be seen. Instead, his image was projected onto a screen, his vocals programmed. I couldnʼt help but feel…cheated.

At other points during the Gorillaz performance when the whole band played together and everyone who had performed on the track from the album was actually present, it was great. Ultimately though, the whole thing was terribly inconsistent, mostly due to falsehood. If nothing else, Mick Jones and Paul Siminon from the Clash were reunited to round out this fake band and they were really playing! That at least was some form of consolation.

The Gorillaz closed their set, thus closing the entire festival and I didnʼt know how to feel. I didnʼt want to drive home and go to work the next day but I was ready for Coachella to be over.

During the show, Carl texted Ryan to let him know that he ended up taking a taxi to the ER to have his ankle x-rayed to make sure nothing was seriously wrong. This meant that we would end our Coachella weekend by picking up our friend at the hospital.

Carl looked no worse for the wear as I supported him from the curbside of the hospital into the back seat of my car. Ryan volunteered to drive us back home. I sat up front and was never quite able to drift off to sleep the entire drive.

It was about 5:00 a.m. when we got back to Los Angeles and I parted ways with Carl and Ryan.

I was so exhausted by the time I got back to my apartment in time to catch two hours of sleep, I felt almost nauseous. As soon as I relaxed and my eyelids closed, they snapped open again and it was time to wrench myself from bed with all my might and begin the slow, aching crawl to my car.

Dew was layered about, and the sun was rising gently but it was almost more than I could bare.

Through blurry-eyed delirium I climbed into my car and began the drive over to my ex-girlfriendʼs apartment so we could begin the journey to Culver City for a workday I hoped wouldnʼt prove too punishing and insufferable.

 “How was it,” she asked. Quaintly, I made the effort to stretch an exhausted but contented smirk from corner to corner of my mouth, nodding my head feebly. My life over the last three days was muted, and it was time to go back to work.

Read Part 1 of “A Year in Music: My Ex and Yeasayer”

 Read Part 2 of “A Year in Music: Teen Dream and Heartland”

Read Part 3 of “A Year in Music: Hot Chip, Local Natives and Emperor X”

Read Part 4 of “A Year in Music: Gorillaz and Joanna Newsom”

Blake Walker is an actor/writer/musician from Texas relocated to Los Angeles, CA. He is a sometimes performer with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, drummer and composer in the band, The Etiquette, and he can be found on the internet doing video sketches with his sketch group Extreme Tambourine. Blake also co-hosted the podcast Bit Parade.

Image of balloons over Coachella 2010 via Getty Images

ANALOG: an obituary for paperbacks (harbinger of death for all physical media) CAMERON MATHEWS

Books, Paperback.Paperback Books departed their life on the shelves of my home on Saturday, April 9, 2011, some at the age of 15 or older.  Books came from a storied ancestry that was born (on a scale for mass consumption) in 1440 to Johannes Gutenberg.  Throughout their lifetime, they became the standard delivery mechanism for information on a fiction and non-fiction level, with adventures and distribution worldwide.  They have inspired other media interpretations, both visual and audible.  They have won awards, some of which were created solely for the purpose of recognizing print books.  After a long battle with available shelf space, the books finally departed peacefully to a secondhand store in the afternoon, surrounded by family and friends.  They will long be remembered and may likely live again as devout believers cling to their pages and give them new life.  They were preceded in death by VHS tapes and compact discs, many who departed years before.  They are survived by their three sisters, the cookbooks; their children, a few sports and cooking magazines; and their distant cousins, the Blu-ray Discs.  The family wishes to thank the oak bookshelves that lovingly cared for these books in the last few years in our home.  Viewing and visitation is available Monday-Saturday from 9:00 A.M.. - 10:00 P.M. and Sunday from 10:00 A.M. - 8:00 P.M. at Half Price Books, 420 East F.M. 3040, in Lewisville, Texas.  In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to my Amazon account for procuring future digital books.

My first true entrepreneurial experience was in 1984, transcribing lyrics from popular music. I was in second grade, and I had just procured seven inches of black vinyl, the tiny grooves of which embedded the audio of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. 

After removing the incumbent disc, which included a photo of Dick Van Dyke and his fellow chimney sweeps dancing on the center label, I twisted the turntable’s centerpiece, causing its wider spindle to pop up for the 45’s larger hole.  A quick flip of the switch adjusted the speed setting from 33 to 45, and I carefully set the fresh black vinyl down in the center, lining up the needle. The first grooves full of dead space sounded almost silent, without the static hiss that would soon come with dust, time, and subsequent plays.
 
I carefully hand-wrote Jackson’s verse on lined notebook paper, screwing up words and phrases like “masquerade” and “jaws of the alien,” forcing me to slow the speed down to 33 rpms— and even use my thumb on the record’s center label to slow it further.
 
Listening to the same words over and over again, I eventually came up with some reasonable facsimile of a phrase containing words from the English language that made little sense.  I felt justified, though, since I didn’t even understand several clearly spoken phrases like the recommendation to “change that number on your dial.”  Still, once I got that sheet of lyrics printed, I made a copy for myself and another (manually, of course), to sell in class for a buck or two, which I fully intended to waste.

The class filed down the hall and into the library.  The librarian, whose name escapes me, directed us beyond the shelves to an open space, where a multimedia cart had been set up. We took our places on the orange and grey utilitarian carpet, sitting around the 20 or so inch television strapped to the top of the black metal structure.  
 
Once situated, or as situated as third- and fourth-graders could be, the glorious golden LaserDisc was extracted from its sleeve. We could see from the cover that it was The Secret of Nimh, knowing how it would play out before the disc was inserted into the black player on the shelf below the screen.  
 
The school would spin this as an entertaining activity for us, and we would get the opportunity to relax in this way on “Play Day” or other special, non-learning, activity days.  In reality, it also had to be a way for the teachers to get a small break from the horde.  
 
Motivation aside, we all found it preferable to studying or listening to lectures— no matter how many times we had seen Mrs. Brisby harness her power, or how many times Bilbo outwitted Smaug the dragon in the animated version of The Hobbit, which was the other standby.  When the lights came on, two previously napping students pushed up from their drool piles, and everyone left single-file, just as we had arrived.

It came in either purple & green or red & blue.  The two versions were otherwise identical, down to the enclosed clear cassette with white song titles printed on each side and the spools of tape with magnetically encoded audio magic inside.  Still, despite their otherwise similar contents, as I stared at the cassettes in the front of the record store, sitting in two-foot-tall stacks side-by-side, I had a decision to make.  
 
Armed with the knowledge that rap was cool, and that either version was bound to open doors for me musically, I knew that ultimately the color choice wouldn’t matter.  Once I owned it, I would be able to listen to Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels, D.J. Run, and Jam-Master Jay spinning rhymes and collaborating with the likes of Aerosmith in ways that would change the face of music.

Some of my friends already owned the album and I had their glowing recommendations to take with me, along with the somewhat giddy notion that I would own an album called Raising Hell, which was, obviously, bad-ass in itself.
 
Once purchased, I would memorize all the words not only to “Walk This Way” but also “It’s Tricky,” “Peter Piper,” and “My Adidas.”  I’d never forget the words to “You Be Illin’” and the campy situations described. Though, admittedly, from elementary school to adulthood, the entertainment value of someone ordering a Big Mac at a Kentucky Fried Chicken would decline.
 
As an adult, I would later repurchase this album at discount just to reconnect with childhood music. 

But on that day, in that store, with the white pegboard walls lined with cassettes from rock-dominated genres, I bought it for the first time — in red & blue.  The purple version was obviously the girls’ edition.

I don’t remember what we were watching, only vague facts— like that I was in Germany, and in the same room with my brother and cousins.  In fact, it’s possible that we weren’t even watching it, but rather just having a discussion around why exactly they would have two VCRs hooked to the same television.  The answer at the time was a given, that German movies got released more frequently on this mysterious “other” format, that I might have heard of, but certainly was not familiar with.  
 
What seemed reasonable to me at the time belied the intricate reality of the Betamax and VHS war that had spanned a decade, competing in format, content, and quality in an intricate dance a la the key knife fight in West Side Story. 

In my youth, I did not understand the corporate combatants and media hype that would eventually result in VHS reigning as king, and I would never have predicted the future Blu-ray and HD-DVD remix that would result in Sony’s landing on the winning side, for once.  I was in Germany, after all.

Ralph and Kacoo’s was a chain.  It really doesn’t matter if they had a New Orleans location, I should have eaten in other places when I was there.  Local places.  I’ve since returned and found my way to Royal Oyster House and Broussard’s.  Those, I would highly recommend.  As it was, I might as well have gone to McDonald’s and ordered a Filet-o-Fish for some local flair, which I think I did.  
 
What I could not find on my return travels was that music store, not that I was expending much effort looking for it or even similar places, anymore.  I knew it was on Canal, tucked somewhere in between souvenir shops, liquor stores, and tourist traps that reminded me of Panama City Beach, particularly with the way that the palm trees lined the streets as a bizarre and somewhat out of place foliage.   
 
I knew that over a decade ago, I had stood inside that music store for an hour or more, taking advantage of their air conditioning and flipping through the compact discs lined up in bins, marveling at the wide selection of Man or Astroman? and NOFX that I only found later in one other store in north Dallas.  Waco only had Hastings and a CD Warehouse, and while Hastings was pretty good about letting you special order from the catalog, it certainly could not beat holding the jewel cases in your hand and checking out the artwork and song titles up close.  I didn’t need to, of course.  I was in the kick of buying everything a band would produce, if I liked them.  
 
I had seen Man or Astroman? at City Stages the year before and later in Austin, and I was convinced. While I had yet to see Fat Mike, El Jefe, and friends in person, I had already listened to enough songs from friends of mine to be sold on them as well.
 
Still it was nice to hold a copy in my hands that could be my own, and scope out the jumping cowgirls on the cover with the green text on red background, and confirm by checking the back that I’d be getting “Linoleum” on this one, which I knew how to play before I had listened to the original.  
 
I had no business buying any of the CDs, really, for the money should have been spent to wiser use, but it didn’t matter to me at the time.  In the years that followed, Punk in Drublicgot plenty of airplay in my car.

 
Most likely the box could have stayed taped shut and been taken directly to the dumpster.  In fact, I pledged that the next time we moved, any such boxes in the same condition would and should suffer that fate. For three years, since my last major move, the box had been sitting in the closet of the second bedroom (which had served as my office and recording studio and residence of my iguana, Xela).

I sliced the clear packing tape with my box cutter and retracted the blade back into its metal handle.  I brushed dust off the top, and looked inside. Most items were— given my lack of a desire to find and use them in over one thousand days— predictably useless, but tucked away in this cardboard time capsule were five black cartridges of wonder that I extracted before discarding the rest: VHS tapes of The Maxx, Aeon Flux, and theStar Wars Trilogy.

June 12, 2011 — The transformation is almost complete.  In a maniacal pursuit of some pseudo-zen-like abandonment of physical objects, my receipt and storage of content has shifted to a collection of binary digits flying through the ether.  With a few exceptions, my mail and periodic telephone book delivery are diverted directly to my recycle bin.  They do not pass go, or collect $200, though some pass through the shredder on their journey.  Bill payments and overall correspondence are completed online or via email.  In this post-Napster-apocalyptic music landscape, I (legally) purchase my music, but only from DRM-free sources and without any physical CDs taking up space in modern art inspired towers, instead just flowing freely over a foot or two of cable into my iPod.  Books are now delivered instantly to me over the air, without the pesky trip to the store to peruse a mediocre supply of midlist titles managed by an accountant in corporate headquarters.  The last holdout in my physical media collections, Blu-ray discs and a couple of magazines, stick around just because I have been too lazy or cheap to figure out or pay for streaming movie titles, and I am unclear on how I would like to get the magazine content digitally.  The options are there, the onus is on me to figure it out, I suppose. It’s not entirely lost on me that this article, and most of my writing in the past decade, has been written for online publication.  The content I am producing is equally physical-media-free as the content I am consuming.  I am a human data recycling center. My daughter and even children a decade older than her will never know analog media at all, the concept of magnetic tape as a storage device as archaic as papyrus.  In relatively short order, other forms of physical media will disappear as well, anthropological artifacts of a less civilized society, restricted to collectors, museums, and the ancients. Even in the media-free world that we are evolving into, I cannot help but wonder what is next to devolve into oblivion.  Our gadgetry is merging, so I expect that to change the landscape, but is it unrealistic to envision a world without even the gadgets?  Or is it a world without content, once we’ve opened the floodgates to content producers and found that the masses devolve the quality below any perceived value?  I certainly don’t know.  Perhaps that means I’m next on the list.

Cameron Mathews currently lives in Lewisville, Texas with his wife, Meredith, their new daughter, and two dogs. He works in the telecommunications industry and has been interspersing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and technical writing for over a decade.  When he’s not writing, he enjoys landscaping, playing music, and brewing craft beers.  He can be reached at http://www.cameronmathews.com along with his blog, poetry, and other diversions.

Allan McLeod’s drawings accompany Cameron’s writing above. He is a writer, actor, and occasional illustrator who teaches & performs regularly at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles. View more of his work here.

MEDICINE: ancient philosophies and modern technologies JACQUELINE GABARDY

As a student of  Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for the past three and a half years, I have heard many times, “does acupuncture really work?” But considering acupuncture and herbal medicine have been studied, practiced and refined for over 2000 years now, it should really be a matter of “how does acupuncture work?”

This practice has been around since way before electricity was harnessed, before we discovered microbes and long before plastics and pharmaceuticals made modern medicine what it is today. It’s been used to successfully treat disorders across the entire spectrum of disease, including ones that Western doctors currently have no cures for - for example ADD/ADHD, chronic pain, gynecological disorders, allergies, auto-immune diseases and digestive disturbances. But since the medicine is based on a completely different philosophical structure than that of logic-based scientific method, it’s hard for some people in the West to understand.

Most Americans may think of acupuncture, herbal tea and Shiatsu massage when it comes to Eastern medicines, yet it’s increasingly more common to integrate these techniques with tools of modern medicine. Here in the states, these ancient medical modalities are viewed as “alternative” to Western medicine, completely separate and regulated by law to keep them so. But integration of medicine in Asian countries makes much more sense if you consider Eastern philosophies, one of the most basic concepts of which is  Yin and Yang - complimentary and opposing forces that are mutually reliant rather than mutually exclusive.

Quick side note before we move on: I had no idea before I started Chinese medical school but the word ‘yang’ is pronounced with a long A, not a short one. So ‘yang’ rhymes with ‘song’ rather than ‘hang’. The common mispronunciation is understandable considering the spelling of the word, but Chinese words have a whole different set of sounds than English ones, so attempts to spell Chinese words using the English alphabet are often unsuccessful.

While concepts of opposites exist in the Western philosophy,  Aristotelian logic is an either/or kind of logic, so opposites tend to be extremes like good or bad, hot or cold, up or down. Within this logic, extremes are usually mutually exclusive, so someone or something must be either good or bad, and cannot logically be both at the same time. In Eastern philosophy however, yin and yang are relative, they denote relationships like better or worse, hotter or colder, higher or lower; someone can be considered yang when compared to a more yin individual, but considered yin when compared to a more yang individual. No one object can be pure yin or pure yang, everything contains some of both, and that ratio is ever-changing.

The concept of yin and yang is illustrated in that hip black and white swirly that I probably had a sticker of on my 7th grade notebook. It’s called a taiji (pronounced tie-gee) and it is a physical representation of the concept of yin and yang. They are opposite in nature (represented by black and white), have opposing movements (ascending/descending), each contains a seed of the other (their dots) and they’re always consuming and transforming into each other (which is seen in their vanishing tails.)

There are some basic qualities assigned to both, for example: yang is considered the more masculine of the two, representing heat, movement, ascending motion, life, youth, daytime and activity. Yin is considered the more feminine of the two, representing cold, stillness, descending motion, death, old age, nighttime and rest. But just because yang is considered masculine does not mean a man cannot be more yin, or have a deficiency of yang. As anyone in the health care field can probably tell you, each body is different.

Even though yin and yang represent opposing actions, they are two sides of the same coin. They are the ebb and flow of life that we observe across the natural world, that sway us to and fro to keep us hovering within balance. We can see it in the highs and lows of day and night, summer and winter, waking and sleeping hours. But in Western science we observe the same flow in the sine waves that dominate nearly every natural process — not just environmentally like seasonal changes, lunar phases, tidal activity and sound waves, but also physiologically like heartbeats, brainwaves, circadian cycles, migration patterns, hormonal changes and body temperature. These all exhibit this same up and down motion.

With this concept of yin and yang down, we can understand a bit better how an Eastern practitioner may view the medicine. Rather than strictly keeping ancient and modern methods separate simply because they were developed in different parts of the world at different times, new innovations are welcomed if they can help get the job done. All with a grain of salt of course, invasive procedures are not usually recommended unless completely necessary but new forms of diagnosis can be extremely helpful in forming a correct diagnosis. For example, MRIs and ultrasound machines can show the exact position of tumors or other masses. EKGs can show in detail malfunctions of the heart, and chemical analysis of the blood is one of the most important tools for any practitioner when a clear differential diagnosis is needed. Avoiding these tools just for the sake of tradition would be considered as ignorant as refusing to use a stethoscope simply because it was invented in the 19th century by a French guy. (This is all, of course, pending any political influences which may have discouraged “Westernization,” but nowadays most Asian countries have very modernized medical systems, which still incorporate ancient methods as well.)

In China, a student can attain many different levels of medical degrees, the highest of which takes 8 years and licenses the student as what we could consider both an acupuncturist and a Western Medical doctor. They can do things like prescribe pharmaceuticals, deliver babies, administer injections, draw blood, perform surgeries and utilize modern tools of diagnosis like MRIs or x-rays (all of which are not allowed by acupuncturists in this country without a medical degree) as well as employing traditional modalities as they see fit. Many innovative programs find creative ways to involve both medicines, with great results. For example, the stroke recovery program in Tianji, China, which is featured in the film 9000 needles:

And although Acupuncturists here in America are not allowed to perform most Western medical procedures, they are very much expected to understand the Western medical world.  For example, the detail of anatomy and physiology - down to microscopic level - that modern medicine has unveiled, the Western medications patients may be on or treatments that may have been performed, as well as the basic terminology needed when communicating with other doctors. The Western-based coursework in most Acupuncture schools is close to half of the curriculum,  at mine it is closer to 45%.

There is also a great deal of research going on in China - and to some degree here - that studies the link between the two, not so different medicines. So we can now understand with a scientific mind how these ancient medicines work: with functional MRI machines we can see which parts of the brain are stimulated as different points on the body are needled, we can break down herbs and understand better the chemical components that make them so effective, and we can track the physiological changes in the body in response to herbs and acupuncture, to have a better idea of their effect on things like hormones, digestive enzymes, blood pressure and pain perception. This way, with more understanding of how the two medicines work together, the hope is to create new and better ways of getting and staying well.

I, myself came into this medicine with a background primarily in Western science. Only six months after graduating with a Bachelors of Science in Biology from USC, I found myself touring a Chinese medical school with a vague interest in herbal medicine but otherwise no clue as to what I was getting myself into. When I walked in to check it out, I had no interest in becoming an Acupuncturist and thought I could study herbs exclusively, which I quickly found out was not the case since they are studied and used together to treat more effectively. But for lack of anything better to do with my degree, I decided to enroll in classes for herbs, botony and  tai qi as I looked for a job as a barista. Nearly four years later I am needling in our student clinic, making herbal decoctions at home, hopefully finishing up with my classes soon and preparing to take my board exam at the end of next year. With any luck I will be in practice by 2013!

So I understand how most people trained with a Western mind would view this medicine, but after feeling the very tangible effects of the acupuncture treatments I received in my first few months at school, I was intrigued enough by the results to keep pursuing it. It took at least a year and a half at the beginning of my program to teach my brain a whole new way of thinking, starting from the very basic foundations the medicine based on.

But I love that we live in an age that these ancient traditions still work and we have so much wisdom still to be passed on, while each year brings amazing new innovations that are capable of showing us in ever greater detail how the human body works. To me this is simple proof that we are never done learning, and that each new breakthrough would not be possible without the countless aha moments that came before it.

Eastern and Western medicines may not be as separate as some people think they are, in a great part due to the fact that Eastern philosophy readily welcomes change, growth and adaptation. Integrating tools of modern medicine with ancient knowledge are different yet complimentary ways of getting the same thing done, simply the yin and the yang of healing.

                                                            
Jacqueline Gabardy is a food blogger in Los Angeles, CA.  A former vegan and vegetarian, she now has a new-found appreciation for meat and dairy, but is always most interested in highlighting fresh, seasonal and local produce from the farmers’ market.  When she is not snapping photos of her food, she is either in school or apprenticing with her mentor— studying to become an Acupuncturist.

PHOTOGRAPHY: a southern gothic love affair KATHRYN MAYO

I have always loved old things.  When I was growing up in Pleasant Hill, Alabama, I lived in a large antebellum plantation style house filled with objects that were once someone else’s.  My bed was referred to as “Bill’s bed” because it had been used by a relative named Bill many years before. The toys in my room had been played with by children who came long before me, knick-knacks were owned by someone else, and furniture was used by someone much, much older and long gone.  Everything around me was old.  Everything around me had a history that included someone else.

To the side of our home, just beyond a hayfield, was a small graveyard. The cemetery was created by people who had lived in my house many years before.  There were many stories about those buried in the intimate resting space. One that always stuck with me was about a mother who accidentally poisoned her three children and her spirit was thought to haunt our home.  As the story goes, when children were present in the house, she was happy and the haunting subsided.  When the house was empty, she made her presence known with bumps in the night, the sound of babies crying, and apparitions at the foot of the bed.

There were always adventures in “the old house.”  I was constantly finding faded papers, old clothes and objects like reading spectacles or tatting shuttles.  One day, exploring through our huge attic, we found a large box of glass plate negatives.  Holding them up to the light and seeing history come alive was a magical experience for me.  The people who populated my imagination were right in front of me … and suddenly very real.  The negatives were organized in neat boxes labeled “Houses,” “People,” “Horses” and “Woods & Bridge.”  I could vividly imagine their lives and their day-to-day activities as I looked through the delicate and beautiful glass plates.  At the time, the negatives were not printed.  But enough information was present to get an idea of how they dressed, how they styled their hair, and how they spent their free time.  

We moved from this house when I was ten and into a new, modern house that my parents built down the road.  I was sad to be leaving a place so rich with the past, a place that housed so much history, and so many stories.  We left much of its contents behind. Certain items were disbursed to family members, only some of the furniture moved to our new house.  The box of negatives found a new space at my grandparents’, under the bureau my father had used as a child. 

My parents divorced and life changed.  Pleasant Hill became more of a distant memory as I began to split my time between town and country.  I attended middle school and high school not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life.  While in college, I bounced from degree to degree and racked up quite a few credits.  One requirement, for my course of study at the time, was a photography course.  I soon fell in love with something and a passion was born.  I began taking photographs like mad, and discovered a love for staging my own photographs.  I would dress my sister up in a white dress and traipse all over Tuscaloosa finding broken-down tableaus for my photographs.

I found inspiration in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and Francesca Woodman.  I constantly searched for old buildings to stage my photos.  My teacher would occasionally ask me what my intentions were with all the “moodiness and white dresses.”  At the time, I honestly did not know. 

It took me a long time to realize how much of the imagery I was making was a product of my earlier experiences as a child.  

Sometimes, the origin of your journey is as much a mystery as the destination when you are in the middle of it. 

Perhaps, I was taking photographs of the woman who haunted my childhood? 

It’s almost as if I was trying to recapture some of my happiest memories with my imagery.

I graduated and then continued on to get my MFA in photography, selecting Tulane University partly because of the setting New Orleans provided.  I knew it was ripe with old homes, ghost stories, and a place with a heart for the past.  I began using found imagery along with my own photos, appropriating other past lives and incorporating them into my own mythology.

My imagery was mostly made with current technology—gelatin silver at the time—but made to look old, as if it could have been discovered in the box of vintage glass plates.  Superstitions I’d heard as a child  worked as a creative catalyst for my photos. 

“Kiss them hem of your dress if it’s turned up, and you will get a new dress,” “don’t step on a crack,” and “place onions on the bed for good luck in finding a mate” were just some of the early superstitions that dominated my imagination.  

As I created my own tableaux, I longed to incorporate the “true” processes that were used to create the initial imagery that inspired me, but was unable to find information on the processes or how to learn them.  I had heard that there was “a man” that had revived antique photographic processes, but the possibility of learning such a thing never really occurred to me.  So, I continued my journey: making imagery that looked old, that hearkened to the past, and hopefully conjured up memories and feelings of nostalgia.

I have never enjoyed creating imagery with a digital camera, but as the last few years have shown, it’s getting harder and harder to deny a format that is taking over photography like a fast growing bacteria.

I do, however, have to admit that I like the instant nature of a digital image, and for a while, I played with trying to make my digital images look like they were done with an antique process.

With the mystery of chemistry gone, I sought ways to incorporate a “hands on” approach to the digital images, but always felt something was missing.   I sewed into my images, I wrote on them, and tried to take the digital nature out.    

Unfortunately, for me, this became something of a hollow game.

Many years later, as I was preparing to teach photo history at the college where I am now a photography professor, a co-worker suggested we learn the antique wet plate collodion process.  We took a workshop with the hope of eventually demonstrating this process to our students and making photography come alive for them.  

I was instantly hooked.  

I have never stopped making plates and I have finally discovered a process that connects me to my own history.  It is a process that makes me feel alive and allows me to be the artist that I have always wanted to be.  As I talk to other wet platers, I hear the same thing coming from their mouths:  there is a reverence for the process, a respect for the chemicals, and an awe for the imagery.  I am making something that will last for a very long time, something that holds weight and is inherently a precious object in itself.  

In some ways, perhaps I am creating my own version on the box of plates left behind so many years ago.  In a way, the process is a bit like creating a digital image in the sense that the process is a fairly quick one.  The image has to be made while the plate is still wet and after exposure, is immediately processed.  The development is almost instantaneous and a positive image appears like magic as the image is fixed in chemistry.  

Making a wet plate helps me understand why so many people feared that their souls were stolen upon seeing an image of themselves.  There is a magic to the process that is quite hard to describe.  The exposures take upwards of 30 seconds, depending on how much natural light is available, and as a result, sitters have to stay still for a very long time.  There is a natural connection that is made with the model because of this long process.  When my subjects see the process they are intrigued and excited to view their negative image come up on the plate, disappear, and almost magically reappear again in positive form.  

In a world that is so fast paced and automated, I take comfort in a process that requires much skill and precision.  As I make each batch of collodion by hand, I feel like an alchemist and a magician preparing for a day’s work.  I take pride in how I coat each plate and strive to make my plates worthy of the image I hope to capture.  Wet plate collodion is a process that satisfies both my artistic side and the side of me that always thought being a scientist would be an amazing job.

I make imagery that many have described as being “scary”— but I find it comforting. 

I work side by side with my husband, who is also a photographer.  I taught him the process, and he has been captured by it, too. We spend hours talking about our next image and wait anxiously for the next time we will be able to shoot.

 There are bumps in the road—the process is long and tedious—and sometimes I just want to go back to shooting film or even pick up my digital camera and call it a day. My collodion chemistry can become contaminated, the wind blows too hard or the sun decides to hide.  But, in the end, I always do come back to this process that frustrates and enchants me. The creation of these plates haunt my imagination and inspire me.

Recently, my aunt mailed me the entire collection of glass plates from my childhood.  I am in the process of printing them and am slowly beginning to incorporate them into my own image making.  Peeking at them once again gives me the same feeling I had so many years ago—wonder, excitement, enchantment.  I hope that someday, when someone finds a box of my wet plate collodion images, they’ll wonder about the lives of the people who inhabited them and imagine a spectacular existence where the old and new collided.

Kathryn Mayo is a fine art photographer and professor of photography living in Northern California where she lives with her husband and many pets.  They both love collecting a variety of items and have recently begun searching for antique tintypes of cross-dressing ladies—it’s a slow but rewarding process.  She loves architecture, vintage clothes and toys, old cemeteries and is still hoping to catch a glimpse of a ghost one of these days. View more of her photography at http://numberfivestudio.com/.

**All the above images used here are courtesy of and copyright Kathryn Mayo. All rights are reserved. Do not re-post unless citing the original artist.