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R.I.P. Precis. Any further blogging gets done on Trackable Hendershot

Lonely Jumbotrons

Remember in The Great Gatsby how there's the valley of ashes midway between the rural West Egg and New York City? It's a lonely, null-zone meridian with a gas station perfect for Tom's affair with Myrtle. Remember the billboard with the watchful Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg?. Remember how George Wilson refers to the eyes as God after his wife's death? The billboard was a terrific symbol for a post-industrial American concept of God. God speaks to us through billboards and Christians know this.

I remember that my mom and granddaddy's picture were featured on a billboard for Wood Presbyterian Home which had a quote from my mother "Dad Couldn't Be Any Happier." Granddaddy passed away that summer and the billboard was imbued with a spiritual aura.

Well, here in the post-modern era, in the oxygen-strangling flanks of Manhattan I have discovered the Javits Center Jumbotron. Yes, Jumbotron is the actual term for those large ad screens composed of teeming reefs of miniscule light-emitting diodes.
. I took this video at around 11 p.m. I had an awareness that I was the only viewer of all these turgid hot gigawatts shot out to entertain and grab only ME. It was like that awful scene in any science fiction movie where the suddenly aware machine addressed the protagonist via a screenhead of some sort. And when I left, it would continue to show its spiraling animation to absolutely no one save the insects wedded to its gleam. When the screen lit up and said "ASK," I actually felt as though I beheld the Great Burning Bush itself. Like the Deus Ex Machina Babyhead at the end of Matrix Revolutions (God, did anyone even watch that movie?) You know, I would say this city needs to shut off some lights at night. Might feed a small village somewhere.





Although for pure Blade Runner cuteness, you just can't beat these 4 little pixies I found in Chinatown at midnight to keep a lonely pedestrian company.

The Revolution Will Not Take Place at ABC No Rio

Things are a sloppy mess of aggression, grilled veggies, and bad plumbing at ABC No Rio, and have probably been so for 20 years, “a collectively-run center for art and activism” (read: Aimless Punk Collective) in the Lower East Side on this blistering heat of the day before July 4th, a humid wave that tests any punk’s commitment to latex and leather. As the bands set up, there’s an obnoxious class struggle in the backyard between the dirt poor kids trying to put on a Saturday Matinee Blowout and their tony soccer apparel hawking neighbors at the Alife Rivington Club trying to watch the World Cup. There’s a big cock-strutting gravel scratch over who threw a brick over the fence or dumped a bunch of green paint on blah-blah-blah, though one of the ABC kids later tells me that the paint was dumped from another building and the brick was thrown by someone from another collective who just happened to be hanging out in the backyard of this particular collective (Wonder how the complex autonomies of self-organizing post-Yippies holds up in the civil courtrooms of Centre Street?)
36 years after The Ramones screamed “Judy is a Punk” at CBGB’s and introduced the world to the power of three chords, Punk (at least this New York punk, not hardcore, nor metal) still seems to come mostly in two varieties--Quoth Lester Bangs in 1982-- Hardcore: “Rolling clods of lumpy excrement with broken bones sticking out” and Oi: “Craters of dribbly gruel with patchy tufts of straw poking up.”
The kids are still handing out buttons that say “Extinct Government” and “Fear is Control” in a rubbled courtyard that plays up to a 90’s era Belgrade aesthetic, but I don’t the hear the biofueled throttle of actual revolution (although they do want to get some photovoltaics, gray water recycling, and a planted green roof if you can spot them $2.6 million, brah). This scene is a cultural favela for millenial Indigo children and people with hyperactive thyroids who need to work out their mondo daddy issues by trapping oneself in a particular decade, sort of like the 40 year-old stoner who still surfs within the confines of AOL because he’s afraid someone will show him, like, a Robotic Pig Heart Jellyfish on Youtube. If you think I’m being hard on the creative output of ABC No Rio, I submit as evidence this stanza from Hobo Bob printed in their zine Stained Sheets (ew).
I have the oil black heart of New York
beating in my breast
I am covered with her street grime
the fuel stench of her yellow cabs
I stopped recording to stop the fight. How's that for gonzo?

My Brief 2008 Career as a Cultural Theorist

Way back in the yesteryears of 2008 I wrote two articles for Boaz Sender's ambitious project The HTML Times (We'll resurrect the sucker one these days, Boaz.) This was my attempt to mimic Bruce Sterling's brand of cultural critique. Anyways two articles, attached to a very defunct del.icio.us (sic?) cloud available here

Battle of the Marching Bands

Living in New York can be a drag because of too many rats in the box--a good half of them terminally insane. I consider myself to be a scene washout after 3 years of beer, bad art, and noise rock when I was living in Chicago. I'm rarely out past midnight because of the poor train service and drunken assholery. Williamsburg gives me an anxiety attack. I'm more comfortable living amongst the Carribeans and Hasidic Jews of Crown Heights where I'm certain I'm not part of its scene.
However, occasionally I stumble on a spectacle as I did last night at Galapagos where The Hungry March Band(A Brooklyn-based marching band and Texas Couscous from France vie it out in a battle of two marching bands. The performers outnumbered the audience, but the line between the two blurred fantastically in a phantasmagoria Moulin Rouge sort of scene. Briefly, my life was a musical last night. I was entranced by the wonderful shadowplay taking place on the walls.
Only in a cosmopolitan megacity such as London, New York, Paris, or Hong Kong could you get this huge consensus of performers. Thanks Josie and Tessa!

I act like a Starstruck Butthead in front of Sting

I thought it would be really cool to walk up to straight up to Sting at the premiere and shake his hand and record it on my I-Pod. After all I'm a plain Tennessean made somewhat good (but mostly broke) in the awful, big city. A complete shiny-eyed bohunk with one strap of his overhauls unbutt' come up here like Sister Carrie, Madame Bovary, Tom Jones, and that little French critter from Balzac's Lost Illusions. I've got a democratic feeling of equality like the Tennessee farmer who, after hearing Martin Van Buren speak, stepped up, shook the President's hand, and invited him "to come out and r'ar around with the boys." Why not videorecord the whole experience?
Well, first you'll notice that the presence of celebrity causes me to giggle like Butthead, but come on dude's name is Sting.
Second, I completely lose the gumption to stick the camera to the man's face so the screen goes all Stan Brakhage to the inside of my cuff and I sidle up to him as he's talking to Paul Stamets about a revolutionary cardboardbox that not only biodegrades but is laced with tree seeds and fungal spores so it will literally sprout a forest after it decomposes. I actually had this thought in my head, "Wow, I'm going to rescue Sting from this weird shroomy sociopath." Turns out dude is a genius in the movie.
I walk up to him, shake his hand and say, "I will always remember you as Feyd Rautha." He said, "Yes, you remember those flying underpants." What you don't see is Sting gesturing to his bodyguard tremendously. I then started going about Baron Harkonnen and the image being stuck in the basal ganglia, when I realized I was the lunatic he was trying to be rescued from. Well, I had terrible breath anyway.
Then, I read on the Internet that Sting was schoolteatcher at St. Paul's Middle School from 1971 to 1974 before starting a band called The Police and recording "Don't Stand So Close To Me." Now listen to that song and you tell me who you think is the creepy guy.