New show with a stunning array of berserk musical acts from about 1973 to the present - it's Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #38, and I hope you choose to listen to it. The first track, a newer-than-new, skittering one-minute spastic artpunk jam from Northwest Indiana's CCTV, will have you hooked for another hour - on this you shall mark my words.
Other new bands in the mix this time include BATTY, HLEP, EASTLINK, GOOD THROB, PARQUET COURTS and DARK TIMES; I've also got some new reissues/unearthings from The Spies, X__X, Jack Ruby and Dadamah, plus a bunch of library material from the likes of The Minutemen, Clinic, Solger, Half Japanese (pictured), Union Carbide Productions and more. And if for some reason you enjoy this show, you'll find comfort in the fact that there are 37 additional hours of Dynamite Hemorrhage programming that you're free to download as well.
Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #38.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #38 on Soundcloud.
Subscribe to the show on iTunes.
Track listing:
CCTV - Mind Control
HLEP - Drunk Cop
OPPOSITE SEX - La Rat
THE MINUTEMEN - Afternoons
CLINIC - IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth
THE SPIES - Egyptian Bird Song
PARQUET COURTS - Sunbathing Animal
THE SPITS - Get Our Kicks
THE BEGUILED - Fire Rock (That Nagging Voice)
GOOD THROB - Acid House
X__X - No No
DADAMAH - Violet Stains Red
BATTY - Summoning Call
UNION CARBIDE PRODUCTIONS - Financial Declaration
JACK RUBY - Bored Stiff
1/2 JAPANESE - Hey Laurie
WHITE FENCE - Growing Faith
DARK TIMES - Girl Hate
CRISIS - PC 1984
SOLGER - A Man
HECTOR - Wired Up
EASTLINK - What A Silly Day (Australia Day)
Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #37 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #36 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #35 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #34 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #33 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #32 (playlist)
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Saturday, May 17, 2014
BOOK REVIEW: "THE HARD WAY ON PURPOSE" by David Giffels
Perhaps because I’ve spent all of my adult life in a
city, San Francisco, that people are forever coming to, I’ve had a perverse fascination with those places in America
that people leave, and even with
godforsaken places that only scattered handfuls of people try to make a go of
in the first place (Dayton Duncan’s “Miles From Nowhere” being a great example).
David Giffels illuminates his lifelong city of Akron, Ohio – a place I’ve personally
never set foot in – in a superb set of essay-length reflections and
explanations that gets to the root of both his city’s and his own psyche. The
city’s, and that of the Rust Belt in general, is one of bootstrapped hard work,
loss, and a collective sense of “almost”. We almost got the Browns to Super Bowl. We almost had the best punk/new wave scene in the country in the late
70s (Akron – home of Devo, Tin Huey, the Rubber City Rebels and many others).
We almost kept LeBron James from
leaving his hometown of Akron and the state of Ohio – and so on.
Through nearly two dozen pieces, Giffels uses various
expository devices to try and definitively crack the Akron nut, always with
humor and plenty of humility. Childhood memories, ambivalent meditations on
“ruin porn”, historical treatises on the company buildings that made Akron “the
rubber city”, and a highly skeptical look at Akron’s claim to have invented the
hamburger are among the pleasures to be had. Giffels puts his personal stamp on
virtually every piece; for instance, the hamburger piece also includes him
eating nothing but hamburgers for a
week straight. Giffels also threads in much discussion of Akron’s underground
music scene in the 80s, which he himself participated in via an unnamed punk
band (perhaps someone you or I have even heard of, though I’m too lazy to Google
it right now), with an especially funny piece about his friend’s art gallery
complex being invaded by “anarchy girls” and industrial-music freaks from
Philadelphia for one night only.
His own psyche and relation to the city that nurtured
it is displayed in his endless fascination with Akron’s industrial past and his
near-messianic desire to preserve and build upon that past – not in the
historical documentation sense, though “The Hard Way On Purpose” does include a
bit of that. His preservation instincts are actually quite literal –
repurposing found bricks from demolished factories to build a pathway, for
instance, or in buying the most ruined ornate old Tudor house in the
neighborhood, for a song, just to fix it up to its former six-fireplace + servant’s
quarters glory. Perhaps it’s a way of attempting to reverse the “decline”
narrative that plagues this part of the country - quite deservedly, of course –
one brick and one house at a time. Beyond this, of course, is the fact that Giffels
is one of the few “born and raised and never left” Akron residents who knows only the Rust Belt era of the town. He
stayed where most others didn’t, and it’s quite touching as he lists off the
friends made and friends quickly lost in one poignant passage. It connects to
the deeper whole of “loss” and of “almost” that pervades this terrific and
well-written book about place, and
our place within that place.
Labels:
Books
Monday, May 12, 2014
DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #37
It's another edition of our hour-long series of podcasts/mixtapes/fake radio shows called DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO, coming to you for the 37th time since we kicked off this relatively rewarding endeavor late in 2012. I focused this one pretty laser-like on new stuff, both new bands and new reissues. In the former category, we've got stuff from Numb Bats, Good Throb, Advlts, Pang, Trick Mammoth, Constant Mongrel, Thee Oh Sees, Ausmuteants and Fleabite. Whoa. In the latter, I'm playing you things from Jack Ruby, X__X and Dadamah (pictured). Not one half bad.
See if you're buying one hour and 4 minutes of what we're selling - and please try some of the older shows while you're at it as well.
Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #37.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #37 via Soundcloud.
Subscribe to the show and get 'em all via iTunes.
Track Listing:
DADAMAH - Absent and Erotic Lives
GOOD THROB - No Taste
ADVLTS - Raw Nerves
FLEABITE - Last Call
AUSMUTEANTS - 15 Frames Per Second
CONSTANT MONGREL - New Shapes
NUMB BATS - Cry Baby
JOHNNY BOY - You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve
TRICK MAMMOTH - Doll
HOUSEHOLD - Never After
PANG - Relax
THE KIWI ANIMAL - Making Tracks
JACK RUBY - Hit and Run
MARS - Helen Forsdale
RED TRANSISTOR - Not Bite
THE GIZMOS - Mean Screen
X__X - A
BLACK BUG - Unicorn
THEE OH SEES - Encrypted Bounce
Past Shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #36 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #35 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #34 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #33 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #32 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #31 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #30 (playlist)
See if you're buying one hour and 4 minutes of what we're selling - and please try some of the older shows while you're at it as well.
Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #37.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #37 via Soundcloud.
Subscribe to the show and get 'em all via iTunes.
Track Listing:
DADAMAH - Absent and Erotic Lives
GOOD THROB - No Taste
ADVLTS - Raw Nerves
FLEABITE - Last Call
AUSMUTEANTS - 15 Frames Per Second
CONSTANT MONGREL - New Shapes
NUMB BATS - Cry Baby
JOHNNY BOY - You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve
TRICK MAMMOTH - Doll
HOUSEHOLD - Never After
PANG - Relax
THE KIWI ANIMAL - Making Tracks
JACK RUBY - Hit and Run
MARS - Helen Forsdale
RED TRANSISTOR - Not Bite
THE GIZMOS - Mean Screen
X__X - A
BLACK BUG - Unicorn
THEE OH SEES - Encrypted Bounce
Past Shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #36 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #35 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #34 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #33 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #32 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #31 (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #30 (playlist)
Labels:
Music
Thursday, May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW: "ONCE YOU BREAK A KNUCKLE - STORIES" by D.W. Wilson
I found my way through about three quarters of the stories in D.W. Wilson's new collection "ONCE YOU BREAK A KNUCKLE" before concluding that I pretty much had the rough, blue-collar feel of working-class Western Canada nailed, and called it a rueful day. I'd been on a pretty good hot streak reading and enjoying unfamiliar authors who tackled similar terrain of the lost, the confused and the foregone, all living in misbegotten places far from our urban centers. Daniel Woodrell's "The Outlaw Album" was a good one mining this field for psychological pathos; even better was Jodi Angel's amazing "You Only Get Letters From Jail". Wilson's characters, all male and generally of good heart if not sound mind, work the construction sites and police forces of the Kootenay Valley in British Columbia, rubbing up often against the darker side of humanity: meth addicts, hockey-crazed dolts and troublesome and feisty women in many flavors. It had a lot to speak for it, including the NY Times review that made me buy it in the first place.
That said, I found it to be overwritten, with too many flourished crammed into paragraphs, and a certain grating conversational rhythm that didn't strike me as particularly "real" - a cardinal sin when trying to convey the desperate humanity lurking below the surface in our fellow citizens. At times Wilson descends into "hick" dialect and story-telling mannerisms, which is all well and good, considering his subject matter, but it sometimes seems so ham-handed it makes me want to fly up to Invermere and see if the "puck sluts" and working stiffs of the town could truly actually converse in this manner.
No question that Wilson's got some fine chops - I certainly didn't make it as far as I did in the book just to prove a point. He unwraps these seemingly tough men quite well at times, without having to take them through a crucible of pain or through major life events in order for us to get to some deeper sense of their missed opportunities and regrets. There are also some well-scripted portraits of dead-end towns, where everything fun more or less ends on high school graduation day, and adulthood comes crashing into full force as inelegantly as you can imagine, with quick divorces, unloved children and abandoned jobs in its wake. I see a few things to recommend in bits and spurts - just not in book length, I'm afraid.
That said, I found it to be overwritten, with too many flourished crammed into paragraphs, and a certain grating conversational rhythm that didn't strike me as particularly "real" - a cardinal sin when trying to convey the desperate humanity lurking below the surface in our fellow citizens. At times Wilson descends into "hick" dialect and story-telling mannerisms, which is all well and good, considering his subject matter, but it sometimes seems so ham-handed it makes me want to fly up to Invermere and see if the "puck sluts" and working stiffs of the town could truly actually converse in this manner.
No question that Wilson's got some fine chops - I certainly didn't make it as far as I did in the book just to prove a point. He unwraps these seemingly tough men quite well at times, without having to take them through a crucible of pain or through major life events in order for us to get to some deeper sense of their missed opportunities and regrets. There are also some well-scripted portraits of dead-end towns, where everything fun more or less ends on high school graduation day, and adulthood comes crashing into full force as inelegantly as you can imagine, with quick divorces, unloved children and abandoned jobs in its wake. I see a few things to recommend in bits and spurts - just not in book length, I'm afraid.
Labels:
Books
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