Bring me the Head of That Fog Wall.

In general I don't "write" when the events in my life are moving along with no suspense. I "write" when I have a choking ball of venom threatening to treat my spinal fluid to a black flood of retarded heartbeats, wasting everyone I care about with a juvenile preoccupation of death camp impressions.

There is no remedy to these attacks. No plausible sentencing of my criminal thoughts will alleviate the psychic stench of my over-bearing paddle toward solitude. There is only knowing that sane revelations truly do come from fantasy-driven orderlies....

Poetic justice floats like oily residue on thick swamp water beneath me. My rick-shaw boat, stops in, gets analyzed by the local witch and Moves on to the next weigh station... undetected but feared just the same.

I am a dog. I am a dog. I am a dog... with no hunger driving me.

Our each and every cell is a battle scar.

I never want to write about my teenage years. There's so much I can't recall.

Everyone grows up hearing "When I was your age" or "When I was young..." followed by some pathetic tale of how technology and information has somehow devastated the emotional integrity of that person. You listen. You get it. What can you say? Getting over it
- is easier said than done. Our each and every cell is a battle scar. Hellraisers, each and every one of us, choking down fistfulls of human on every block like zombies stuck in a compost.

My equivalent to missing soda jerks and farming the land for a steady income- is a matter of the American shifting cultural energies haunting me as a child and stuffing me into a pre-paid coffin as an adult. A coffin of my choosing. I want the velvet lining. I want the pearlescent knob. I want the patch under the oak tree. I want the headstone to be edible. Whatever. I want my bones to be burned. I want King Kong to jerk off on my ashes and force you to sign for them.

I suppose I am lonely here. No more than anyone else probably. My relationship to everyone on this island is different than the relationships of other residents here. I get introduced as "The Doctor." I'm no doctor. I detest the mechanics of IT ALLtoo much to be a doctor. I screen my phone calls because 9 out of 10 calls has something to ask of me rather than offer me.. (not that answering the phone is about the eternal reception). I do get into the science behind medicine. Callouses make diabetic ulcers calling for amputation. Salt kills bacteria. Don't give Nitroglycerine to someone taking Viagra. Emergency Medicine is depressingly thrilling, but not here. No thrill here. Not under these circumstances. Not when I have to be the medic for an extended family of people who will always be predjudiced against me and use me when it suits their convenient disposable jock. It's not like I get out of the ambulance or punch out at work and I never see my patients again. They visit when they are drunk and tell me tragic stories all the while never mentioning how I couldn't revive their 65 year old brother..... And that's not the only barrier to us ever loving each other. Fuck it all. Boo Hoo. Maybe I have it wrong. Maybe you demonstrate love, by tormenting the creatures around you who share enough history with you to tolerate your unrelenting hate and fluctuating forgiveness... and maybe I show mine by giving you the room to do it... Yeah. Truthfully, that's likely for reasons I don't care to share with you... in this perpetual state of bombed out playing fields.

My favorite part of the male anatomy is the "snuff box". Always has been, mostly when I am watching the muscles grip the stick shift of a car I am riding passenger in- going somewhere I have never been-listening to something I have never heard feeling ..... bristly and deeply motivated even on dark and unknown roads I am confident being lost on and want to have at you on.... Capturing time can't be done, but I am willing to over-compensate often by leaving a trail of fermented crumbs. Typically, they are scavenged and kicked aside. Personally, that kind of battle turns me on, and with you on board, Where couldn't we "overcome"?

Last night I had a dream involving murderers, hotel security, elevators, towers, and my child hiding safely with my mother behind the door of a room only I knew the number to. When is it okay to enter a room knowing you may be leading an enemy into the fold but you are too tired to fight without reinforcements? Too exhausted to hold off the fight any longer?

Cleared the forest of the trees-have you?

If I had to jump in a time capsule, you wouldn't have the latch locked down long before I was carving out Anti-You messages into my flesh for Alien eyes. I can almost guarantee, "they" would still take your side. It's just how it goes. No hard feelings. One day I'll shoot some hard feelings your way though. so you have a way to measure my impact on you if you needed some help in the me-you-math department.

"The sides of my Uterus itch... I'm Afraid My Fractured Back Will Make Me a Vegetarian..."

Ahhh. My job. People. History. Life. Move On.

The Tiny Tower in the Corner

Maybe I only visit you when I'm failing everything. You aren't god. I never go to god. The Creator can go to the Hell he created. Everytime I see you in my dreams, I am climbing a corner fire pole to reach you, and then I wake up. There's always some soul you spared- gumming up my exit with a soup of out of touch questions about you. There's never enough time to answer your fool or leave you a note. I wake up and move to the couch every single time. You always seem to have weak fans. I joke constantly that I am where true failure begins.

Burnt Fuse Drop-Off Here.

If I said the World was tragic, you'd shove my face into your love.
And if I said the World was magic, you'd parade me through the streets by my cunt.

"I want a war" Vox/chorus A.D. Take 1

I'm here to make war.
I made peace with myself, and I want some more.
I'm here to kill the wolf that killed my dog.

I'm here to wage a war.
Let me tell you what you're fighting for.
The means to an end... and how exciting...
The meaning of it all.

Don't worry if you beat your fists down.
There's a million walls.
Don't worry if you have to re-group
There's a million souls.

I'm here to wage war.
I'm here to kill the wolf that killed my dog.
I'm loading the arsenal
into the vehicle.

I want war.
You're gonna hear shit from me you never heard before.
I want control in a small way.
I swallowed the Earth and everybody praying.

I made peace with myself and I want some more.

I'm here to kill the wolf that killed my dog.

wolves

This Village is in a wild state of disrepair. We've got a liquor store and no church. We received month-old produce yesterday after going 2 months with nothing. Our water is constantly freezing. Wolves are eating our dogs. (4 dogs this week,out of 12 including my 6 year old husky Joan Jett). New town hires look like embalmed drag queens and are barely functioning on their steady diet of vodka. We have ZERO law enforcement. The School is probably going to close next year because we have 5 of the ten kids needed to get government funding. It's all or nothing. The tenth kid equals $450,000 to run for the year and the other nine students might as well be invisible chopped liver. I think it's totally unconstitutional. If the School closes, we get sent leaflets from private agencies wanting to help us home school. If the School closes, families will never move here with children. The jobs we need filled in our village are of major importance and if we don't have a school, the already dusty job postings will never be filled. Our mayor is a commercial fisherman who is is never here. My husband is the acting Vice Mayor, and the stress level is through the roof here. There's maybe 15 able bodied adults on the island (2 of whom are registered pedophiles). We're constantly getting freaked out by Earthquakes and Tsunami warnings. Mail planes and contact with the "outside world" are making it in once a week if we are lucky. My two year old refuses to shit on the toilet. I have family fighting in Iraq. The tribe I work for went under major Reconstruction and I keep getting in trouble at every teleconference for antagonizing them. I probably shouldn't go this far, but one of my grandmothers is on an Oxygen Concentrator and the other is suicidal. My little brother took a knife to his throat and was found wandering the streets of Australia. My kid brother... a newly diagnosed Paranoid Delusional Schizophrenic Fugitive (who's being visited by my mother's identical twin sister tomorrow.) So also, the Grizzly bears are starting to wake up from their long sleep on this Refuge. Refuge meaning we aren't supposed to kill them even though they break into my house in the middle of the night. When we do have to kill them, we have to decapitate and skin them, then send the skins out to Fish and Game. My grizzly dreams started last night. Our new post master hasn't hung the flag in months because she's got an 8 month old at work with her. Not sure why this bothers me. Something about it seems wrong. Not to mention it's fucking Easter time. I'm almost convinced that a Flu Pandemic is inevitable and the fashionable "red" campaign ain't seen nothing yet...But on top of all of this, my job is to take care of people. I am fucking spent. So... I'm not tagging my inner walls with smiley faces right now.... I do have a pretty cool hydroponic herb garden though.

"I do not need to be rescued. I am the rescuer. "~Grover

"The Bugle Sounds, The Charge Begins..."

In William Golding's, The Lord Of The Flies, a handful of boys make their first move toward self governance. They blow a conch shell on the beach to gather the other survivors of the WWII evacuee's plane crash. Surely as this first note is blown with proper intention, the lives of William's boys are rocketed straight to Hell. There is a golden haze encompassing this group of pig-killing choir boys. Man vs. Man. Boy vs. Boy... vs Nature etc., etc. It totally fascinates me.

The bugle and trumpet have often been used interchangeably and each of their histories is long and varied. Most horn players could tell you some really interesting shit about history. Something like this... maybe:

"Ancient trumpets were used at religious ceremonies and associated with magical rites. Burials, circumcisions, and sunset rites (to ensure the sun would return) were a few of the early ceremonies in which the trumpet was used. It was a male-dominated practice and among certain tribes of the Amazon any woman who looked at a trumpet was killed. The tradition of playing at sunrise (Reveille), sunset (Retreat), and at burials (Taps) may have evolved from these ancient rituals." Read more here. The trumpet has been around longer, but the Bugle rose to prominence quickly for use in military campaigns. It originated from German hunting horns.

During the American Civil War, the Bugle could be heard from a distance of three miles over the sounds of artillery. Responsibility for sounding out commands and movement, interpreting the music of the Enemy bugle, playing at funerals and "lifting spirits" all fell under the Bugler's job description. How do you get that job? Volunteer? Were any of these Buglers (or drummers for that matter) musicians before the war? Do you think they were ever targeted because of their important role - like medics in wars of the past?


There is a story that the Union army officer, Colonel James H. Wilson, employed 250 buglers during the battle of Front Royal, in Virginia on September 21st., 1864. The Union buglers charged the Confederate lines with each of them screaming through their instruments at the same time. The Confederates broke and ran in full flight.
This story is not confirmed, but it wouldn't be the first time such a tactic was used. Roman Legion... Zulu Nation.... I always imagined that buglers were solitary individuals and that's probably from product advertising and not from being a genius, but I'm pretty sure (without really investigating) there were many buglers in every conflict. The utilization of horn players in battle goes back for centuries. As long as you could hear your Trumpeter or Bugle Boy or bagpipe player, you knew you were still okay in some way. How do military units fair when communication is lost? Take out the Bugler. No more direction. No more wake up call. Lose the Last Rites... It wouldn't take long after that for things to fall apart without exceptional leadership. Seems like a smart enemy would train their sights on the horns before anything else!

Though there is this:

是故）百戰百勝，非善之善者也；不戰而屈人之兵，善之善者也
One hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful.~ The Art of War


My propensity for lateral thinking takes me away from the Bugler for a second, so that we can talk about television actors who play the criminals in re-enactments on shows like America's Most Wanted. I can't help but think that there are scads of people who believe they are watching the actual crime itself unfold before them. Years ago, a slew of mid-westerners wouldn't eat chicken because of an X-Files episode they saw. KFC, Lazy Boys, fruited plains, John Walsh. I wager that acting in a Cold Case Files type of show, would have you soon after suffering the scrutiny of security at grocery stores and airports. I think these actors aren't safe from having their identity mistaken, unless all crime show actors live in Los Angeles. Because If you live there long enough, you just accept look-a-likes and criminals because everyone is a bastard. I once told a Houston traffic cop, that I had just seen a guy who was on the FBI's most wanted list 2 blocks away. He didn't take me seriously. It was probably my delivery. I'm not saying that crime scene re-enactors are stupid for having their trade and trying to make rent. I'm not saying anything. This is an aside. This whole thing is an aside.


The most famous Bugle music I know is TAPS. Taps replaced a song called "Lights Out" which was a military tattoo. The tattoo was predominantly used to tell Bartenders to "Turn off their taps" at 9:30pm sharp as soldiers were meant to return to their barracks. So, when you hear Taps playing at the next military funeral look at it like a last call for alcohol. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Bugles were eventually outmoded with the invention of radio, but up until the Vietnam War soldiers were trained in bugle calls, although today they are mostly used in ceremonies. Popular modern tunes include: "Come to Breakfast", "Haven't You Had Enough Alcohol" and "You're Dead".

One story about how Taps came to be, talks about a Union soldier who happens upon a dying Confederate soldier in a thicket. Though he risked punishment, the Union soldier brought the dying man to his camp and asked that he be spared. The guy died, but in his pocket was a piece of music. It was discovered that the young man was actually the runaway son of the Union soldier who found him, and the piece of music in his pocket was Taps... Sounds like a tidy and romantic little moral lesson doesn't it? That's why it's not true. Most scholars agree that Union Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield wrote TAPS, and handed it to his Bugler, Oliver Norton, in 1862. It was played softly because the usual 3 volley tribute played for the dead would give away their location and get them killed. Ever see footage of soldiers smoking Opium and blasting "Purple Haze" and then they've been blown to Hell in the next frame? Back to the music. Sort of.

I'm sure that I am not the only one who considers battle cries musical. Along with wolves howling, pencils sharpening, elevator shafts dropping, glass breaking, fan lights clinking, radio static hissing and sea lions fucking on icebergs... all music to me. A single word can be poetry. A spark can be fire. A drop of water can be a tidal wave. Canyons don't jut out of deserts because of mystical reasoning or solely because of scientific arguments. The big picture has nothing to do with our logic or our desire. All music to me! Which brings me to the Rebel Yell!

“Then arose that do-or-die expression, that maniacal maelstrom of sound; that penetrating, rasping, shrieking, blood-curdling noise that could be heard for miles and whose volume reached the heavens--such an expression as never yet came from the throats of sane men, but from men whom the seething blast of an imaginary hell would not check while the sound lasted.” -Colonel Keller Anderson of Kentucky's Orphan Brigade.

"At last it grew too dark to fight. Then away to our left and rear some of Bragg's people set up 'the rebel yell'. It was taken up successively and passed around to our front, along our right and in behind us again, until it seemed almost to have got to the point whence it started. It was the ugliest sound that any mortal ever heard -- even a mortal exhausted and unnerved by two days of hard fighting, without sleep, without rest, without food and without hope..." - Narrative of then-Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce, 2nd Brigade, 2nd Division, XXI Corps, Army of the Cumberland, at the Battle of Chickamauga (Last Union defenses on Horseshoe Ridge, September 20, 1863)


So, what did we learn? The Rebel Yell wasn't just a song by Billy-Leather-Dick-Idol, kids. It was the battle cry of Confederate soldiers used during the American Civil War. It was said to sound like a rabbit screaming, or an "Indian" whoop, or a wolf howl. There is a million stunning sounds out there in the Universe trying to vie for being on our individual life's soundtrack. I can't think of any sound more terrifying than being surrounded by thousands of armed men screaming and closing in to kill me. Actually, I can think of a more chilling sound. Hunters surrounding a dead stag and trumpeting a celebratory kill! Who would deny that this is also music?

My ancestors painted their faces blue and ran naked into skirmishes screaming their battle cry. It's a little different now. Armies are pounding Celine Dion and Muslim chants across militarized zones to drive their enemy's nuts and their morale down. Seems like it would just make the listener more determined and more hateful! Make them want to do anything to shut off the devil sound. Maybe the point is to drive men away from their Zen, and force them to act prematurely so they bungle their strategies. What other point is there to using music on front lines now-a-days? The Occasional artist travels overseas for publicity and the boosting of record sales - playing to rapidly aging boys and girls we kissed with death and big promises about "freedom". Does standing in the middle of a battlefield require meditation? How does all of this shit work? Why are we so vile? Maybe some soldiers would say they couldn't have made it through war without music. I'm sure that's true. Now let's see how they react in a department store or convenience store when confronted with their songs of war, 2 years later. If they had a particularly rough go at war, they would likely stop everything and leave the premises. And it wouldn't be with a smile on their face. Music itself could be the trigger to a bullet that you can never dodge. But you can clickhere, to see what kind of music this group is sending the soldiers in the Middle East to listen to.

One participant of a modern survival education camp a couple of years ago was mortified by the idea of shitting in the wilderness. She just couldn't do it. She had a real fear of crapping in public like an animal. She preferred instead to hold her bowels and be flown out by helicopter on the verge of death. I know that strange psychological things can overcome people at times, but what kind of music does a person like her need to get through the day? What songs does she need to make it on her battlefield of life? Dave Matthews? Cold Play? It's probably not Wagner. It's probably not anything I listen to, right? What kind of music would I take to War with me? In our own way, we are all on the front lines of our own bodies and souls, fighting the whole Universe to maintain our defensive lines. But who cares about what music people like when we all swell with group gluttony on a Death Star blowing conches and forming alliances with the same results? Music isn't going to save mankind. It's like graffiti in stereo. It is beautiful, but that doesn't really help us on a global front does it? Don't get me wrong, I like listening to, talking about, making and reading about music, but it's not much of an escape or a consolation - given how fucked up life is. While watching a documentary about Mahler, there was a quote about how Music is so important because it is about the here and now, and the here and now is all we really have. To be honest, I don't know what that means, because tell me if I'm wrong... Wasn't there a yesterday?



My favorite listing is "A"


Son of Ravyn, and myself have both been participating in The International Mixtape Project for some time. If you're into exchanging mix cd's, it's pretty cool. Yesterday I recieved a "Lips and Assholes" mix featuring music from artists with inflated egos. Plus they're cool, because Ryan Mixtape links to the NAP from their site.

Congratulations to the Cramer family. Here's to wishing you all the best . And finally, I hope your art show goes well Kilian.



Most of the NAP's readers have presumably seen this U.N.K.L.E./Radiohead/DJ Shadow "Rabbit in Your Headlights" video directed by Jonathan Glazer, but if you haven't ... it's worth seeing.