Psi Com >> The city bleeds rosy veins to empty streets

I can't believe it's still California Month, tremor #51:

Psi Com - "City Of 9 Gates"

(Mohini Records, 1985 / Triple X Records, 1993)

The post I wrote about a band called The Autumns mysteriously vanished, so I had to turn to a quickie alternate plan, and my oh my what a Plan B it is.  I mentioned my longtime obsession with this song in my other Psi Com post, so I decided to finally pull the trigger and post it.  I think the lyrics might be about an acid trip, but hopefully not.

I've had a crush on Alex Wagner for some time now, based on her frequent guest appearances on The Rachel Maddow Show and other such cable political shows.  She even helped me forget about my huge crush on fellow MSNBC contributor Ana Marie Cox, which is no small feat.  So I was overjoyed to see her get her own show this week, NOW With Alex Wagner.  I was pretty surprised to learn she was the editor-in-chief of hipster rag The Fader from 2003-7.  I'll admit that I used to skim that magazine strictly to determine what bands to avoid, but I still think it's neato that she was so immersed in music.  Wagner is a pretty powerful last name in showbiz, but I don't know anything about her ancestry, other than the fact that she appears to be at least half Asian.  (A guy from Psi Com looked Asian too, but I forgot his name.)  She looks like she's about 15, and constantly has this infectious ear-to-ear grin, as though she knows she has the winning Powerball ticket in her back pocket, even when casually eviscerating a douchebag pol.  Much like Maddow, she has a mind like a supercomputer and totally guides any conversation she's in.  I've never really seen anything quite like it, so check her show out.  There are hardly any clips on YouTube of her talking politics, and there are only a handful of pics of her on the Google, but I assure you this will soon change as America falls in love with her charming ways and makes her its first female President in about 25 years.  You heard it on Blowtorch Baby first.  Hopefully she won't tap any of those stupid Fader-approved hipster acts to play at her Inauguration.  (Can you even imagine how much America's worldwide standing would plummet if The Rapture or Sleigh Bells screeched their way through the Star-Spangled Banner or "Jesus, Take The Wheel" or whatever it is that they sing at Inaugurations?  We'd become a third-world nation overnight.)
In the meantime, mouth-breathers on conservative websites are having a field day disparaging her for her comments about the Second Amendment.  For example, this unflattering pic in a post at a site named Ammoland.com (really) is titled Freedom-Hating-News-Annalist-Alex-Wagner.jpg:

"I will squash your guns into non-deadly metallic implements such as silverware or paper clips, and you won't even be able to shoot me while I do it."

ROFL... "Annalist"?  Was that supposed to be a clever pun, or was it just a typo by their tobaccy-chewing intern goon?
She inspired this hatred by using her pesky First Amendment rights to say:

This face kills fascists

I don't necessarily agree with that, but I don't disagree with it either.  In a perfect world, guns would have never been invented, but they have been invented, so you have to face about the old adage "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."  And by "outlaws" I mean "Republicans and some random crackheads n' thugs."  (Go look up the origin of the word thug; it's not what you think.)  When I'm President, guns will still be legal, but it will be like in Holland where you have to prove you only want it for hunting, take a comprehensive course on using one, and submit to frequent home checks.  And even the tiniest offense will result in a lifetime loss of gun privileges.  Like, if you even cough on an American flag or pet a bald eagle's feathers in the wrong direction, NO GUNS FOR YOU.

Yesterday I donated some plants & a little cypress tree to Parkway Partners, then sold a bunch of CDs to Skully'z for the first time in 1.5 years.  Right before driving in to NOLA, I gave a baby Live Oak tree to an elderly guy who was walking down my street, who told me his name is Donald or Ronald Brown.  He was ecstatic.  While driving down Bourbon Street to Skully'z, I noticed a jazz singer with a great voice crooning in a courtyard, so I parked and then walked about a dozen blacks back to see who it was.  Her name was Eilleen, I think, and the place was called Cafe Beignet, you know, that place with those corny statues of Pete Fountain, Louis Armstrong, and Chris Owens out front.  It was my first time ever actually going in it, since it's so tourist-trap-y.  I watched her sing for about half an hour, with little finches perching on my table and on nearby wire chairs begging for crumbs, while I ate a blueberry yogurt on a crystal-clear, crisp (65º) afternoon.  It was pretty much my own little slice of paradise.  It was just her, a black lady, accompanied by a seated white dude on jazz guitar.  I finally went to Skully'z and bought Simple Minds' New Gold Dream on CD.  (Already had it on LP & cassette.)  We chuckled at a $400 Smiths box set he had just gotten in.  Then I headed to Domino Sound Record Shack and donated some free seed packets I'd picked up at Parkway Partners; I bought a nice Rahsaan Roland Kirk LP for 6 bucks, and the owner (Matt) let me have a bunch of The Wire magazines for free.  One of them has the band Broadcast on the cover, so I was reminded of their singer's recent death; I never liked their music too much, though.

Today I randomly ended up back to that part of town and saw that some sort of festival was going on, so of course I had to check it out.  Zion Trinity and Sharon Martin performed; I got some bland macaroni & cheese for $3.  An obese lady was sitting a table to sign copies of her book titled Wet, but I decided not to check out if it was about... that.  Apparently no one else wanted to either, because her table had no visitors.  I bought a few more things at Domino, including a Chameleons 7" I'd been wanting for many years.  Matt played some of Matana Roberts' new album and said he thinks it's a masterpiece.  Just another weekend of stumbling onto lots of cool shit in NOLA.  Not to rub it in or anything, but why anyone would want to live anywhere else on earth is beyond me...  Oh yeah, the heat, humidity, crime, govt. corruption, bad schools.  Well, they build character, as the dad in Calvin & Hobbes used to always say.  And another bonus is that Nicholas Cage recently moved away from here (I think), though he is allegedly constructing an elaborate pyramidal tomb in one of the cemeteries downtown.

Speaking of people with minds like supercomputers, I found this clip at about 2AM last night.  Many YouTube commenters have accused it of being a backwards video, but it looks legit:

Planets with similar climates: Catherine Wheel - "Ferment" (1992), Plexi - "Peel / He" (1995) & "Peel" (1996), The Sound - "Missiles" (~1979) & "New Dark Age" (1981), Christian Death - "Cavity - First Communion" (1981), The Chameleons - "Second Skin" (1983).

Psi Com >> There is no end to the figure 8

California Month, tremor #10:

Psi Com - "Ho Ka Hey"

(Mohini Records, 1985 / Triple X Records, 1993)

"Ho Ka Hey" is allegedly a rallying cry used by some tribe of Native Americans (I refuse to use the incorrect term "Indians"), which I heard means "Let's go get 'em!" or, more specifically, "Let's go kill 'em!"  As for why I'm posting this on 9/11, you can interpret it however you want, but I'm mainly doing it as a comment on the rush to war that most countries feel they need to do after being attacked.  I bought a copy of the Koran the other day for a few bucks, so that should be interesting reading, considering that I think the Bible and the Koran are responsible for setting the human race back tens of thousands of years.  But I like to skim them for entertainment value, and, oh yeah, here's the song you wanted.

It's not surprising that Psi Com would use such a term in a song, considering how most of these California post-punk / goth bands of the mid-'80s, such as Savage Republic, Crash Worship, Red Temple Spirits, etc., even early Red Hot Chili Peppers, used lots of tribal imagery and rhythms.  (And U.K. bands like The Cult and Fields Of The Nephilim did this pretty blatantly too, but in more of an image-based, black-cowboy-hat way.)  As for the band name, it was originally spelled Psi-Com.  I think it's slang for psychic communications, but I don't know.  I like how vague and clipped the name is.  This self-titled EP came out on Mohini Records in mid-1985 on 12" (only 1500 copies made), but over half of the pressing came warped from the factory, so quality copies are incredibly rare.  My favorite song on it is actually "City Of Nine Gates", but "Ho Ka Hey" is more visceral.  (And "City," though much more existential and cerebral, has some lyrics that would be inappropriate today, such as "The city's growing crooked / The city bleeds rosy veins to empty streets" and "Banging on the walls until they bleed.")

Psi Com was: Perry Farrell - vocals, some percussion; Kelly Wheeler - bass; Vince Duran - guitar; Aaron Sherer - drums

A band whose members refuse to even look at one another cannot last very long; photo from the CD booklet.

Perry went on to form a Led Zeppelin tribute act called Jane's Addiction and founded Lollapalooza and formed Porno For Pyros, etc., making him a cultural icon and Mr. Alternative Rock to many folks.  But with all due respect, nothing he did will ever come close to the quality level of Psi Com's EP.  It was kindly reissued in 1993 by Triple X Records on CD, cassette, limited-edition 12" (with several different covers), and numbered-edition 10".  Big ups to Triple X for giving it such a deluxe treatment.  I bought it on cassette in August '95, right before going off to start a bad year of college in Virginia, and quickly became obsessed with it.  This song's astounding bassline is obviously the star of the show, but the whisper-to-a-scream vocals and existential lyrics are top-notch too.  For example: "One end burns, one end freezes / The unlearned hold on to neither," "The answer comes before the lesson," and "The path we walk is not so straight / And there is no end to the figure 8."  Sounds like a lot of Buddhist or Hare Krishna mumbo-jumbo, but I kind of that sort of stuff.

It's kind of sad that Perry was doing pop songs as vacuous as "Jane Says" just a few years later.  You can find an enormous amount of info about this EP over at this great page.  I once read that the cover image is of a dead person during some war in Asia (lying on the ground) who was cropped out and reoriented vertically onto that image of a coastline.  I had always thought it was just Perry jumping in the air, during a particularly anorexic period of his life.  (When one is emulating Peter Murphy of Bauhaus, and/or Rozz Williams of Christian Death, and/or David Bowie, one has to forgo lots of calories.)

Helpful sticker on the 1993 Triple X reissue

Some more fond memories of California:
The blackberry field behind our condo, exploring Kirby Cove, Lombard Street, the occasional mini earthquake, feeding quails by hand in our backyard, seeing Joe Montana in a restaurant, going to a Warriors game, ice plants blanketing the hills of the Presidio, long drives to the big swimming pool in Marin County which often played Phil Collins songs on its PA system, a day trip to Silicon Valley, etc.

Informative and fashionable t-shirt I bought a few years ago

This is a photo I took for Fine Art Photography class at Loyola right before Halloween '97, late in the afternoon (hence the great shadows) in the French Market.  There were a lot of pumpkins being hawked.  I know it's a bit overexposed and hence  lacks enough dark tones, but I kind of like the washed-out, sunlit look of it.  According to his business card, his name was Zahdan Sterling, or maybe that was the name of his company.  Yes, there is a lot of brightly-colored, tie-dyed stuff in this photo.  I never noticed until after I developed it that there were two women hugging in the background.

I lost this camera, a fully manual old Ricoh or Nikon, when my rented canoe flipped in the Atchafalaya Swamp the following April!  One of the most harrowing experiences of my life... being stuck, alone, in water up to my neck, my bare feet on the muddy swamp bottom, about 100 feet offshore, in what is arguably the alligator capital of the world, with the tide rising and the sun about to set, peripherally worrying about getting some toes taken off by a snapping turtle.  After about 10 minutes, which seemed like 10 days, I figured out that to get back in a canoe, you have to hop in at one of the tips, so that the weight of the canoe and the weight of your body balance each other out.  Your first instinct is to try to get back in it on one of the broad sides, but it will keep flipping over every time.  The only reason I was there was to catch some reptiles and/or amphibians for my Herpetology class.  I did catch a cool water snake (a Nerodia fasciata, I think), and kept it as a pet for about a year before letting it go in Norco.

The only more harrowing experience I've had was when I was wandering in this unmarked grassy field in Chalmette or Violet, looking for... yup, reptiles and/or amphibians... in 2000.  I was holding only a tiny blue aquarium net.  Suddenly 4 dudes on ATV's peel up and surround me, one of them waving a rifle.  One of them may have been in a pickup truck, actually.  The armed one was an old redneck codger, screaming at me to get off his land.  I pointed out that there wasn't a No Trespassing sign, but this just made him angrier.  Somehow I weaseled my way out of it, and now I never do that sort of thing.  I guess a more harrowing thing that I witnessed was when my sister got swept away by a river current in the mid-'80s in California.  My dad and I ran along the bank, which was about a 10-foot high cliff, and I think he got her to grab onto his fishing pole or a branch.

Planets with similar climates: Bauhaus - "Kick In The Eye" (1981), Quicksand - "Fazer" (1992), Christian Death - "Desperate Hell" (1981), The Pop Group - "Colour Blind" (~1980), Sonic Youth feat. Mike Watt - "In The Kingdom #19" (1986), Moonshake - "City Poison" (1992), Fugazi - "Waiting Room" (1988).