Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#9: Already High (to Brother Kit with love)

Crank the twitching hours
crank the twitching days
let the love we buried
rise up and choke them
in the tower
ring the bells
and call to arms
those who’ve sworn to this
and those who’ve bled with us
Crank the twitching hours
&crank the twitching days
by tooth and nail we give over
our time for our lives
and find
that survival is no longer prize
but winning is
living to fight
another day.

Music Journalism

How can a 64-year-old John Lee Hooker song lure me into one of the douchiest bars on W.6th?
Rock and Roll that’s how.
Maybe I can hear the black voodoo in a sharecroppers heart, up from the delta and his first time in a big city anywhere, pluggin’ in and talkin’ bout the Henry Swing Club, probably terrified but certain he would take over Detroit and the World with rock&roll motherfucker.  yeah
b/c I was born in a small town just outside the City and the blues always sounded alright wit me and felt even better.
I truly believe that Johnny Lee was the first punkrocker O.G.  Maybe him&Wolf, certainly Son but perhaps not Muddy.  I shudder anytime anyone mentions the Stones, their eyes glazed over in dumb reverence to industry dogma.  I shudder when these folks are my people, in my country b/c
don’t you know those half-a-fags were listening to American folk music?  Slave hollers and r&b, barn burners and jukejoint stompers that had been blasting in shotgun shacks of the developing rural ghettos of America for decades?
We gave the world rock&roll.  Well, the blackman did.  And all he was listening to was the whiteman’s blues-music from other disenfranchised agrarians, downsized by the Industrial Revolution, singin’ they sad cowboy songs by campfires in the new wastelands of America.
America gave the world rock&roll and took everything else.  We did.  We gave it to the World.  And Europe.  So lower middle class snots can support heroin addictions and cruise liners to the Spanish country side with their super model girlfriends.  So their vapid phony rock&roll can pervade mass consciousness until its way past obsolete and meaning anything (if it ever did), but by then they’ll have books to write that’ll be bestsellers that are really nothing but more stroking off in our faces.  Fucking cunts.

The blues is why I don’t like:
Jack White, The Black Keys, Any Blues Revisionist Band, Eric Clapton, Bono/U2, The Rolling Stones and etc. etc. etc.  The classic rock catalog should be retired.  Anything contemporary that offers nothing but whiffs of classic rock that amount to nothing but farts should remain in the pop end of the spectrum, run their course and be flushed&forgotten.  And don’t worry about them, America.  They’ll catch a bump in about 20-30 years w/ generational biopics and books about nothing while we boogie wit Iggy&Zevon&Randy Newman&Hot Snakes&Cory Branan&Lovey Dovies&Thee Nosebleeds.  Don’t worry about them, punkrocker.  They will get fooled again.

Hey hey, my my,
rock and roll can never die.
-Neil Young

 

A Blog About My Friend

Bevan McShea.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         .                                                                                                                                    

Singer-Songwriter Jim Trainer Featured On Today’s On The Hill Series

Greetings Punkrockers.  Please allow me to fill you in on the many projects we have cooking down here at the office.

-I’m the featured performer of Kettle Pot Tracks’ On The Hill Series today.  Please click to tune in for an interview and a live-to-tape performance  of a song of mine called Oh, Angelina.
–Swamp EP will celebrate its two-year anniversary with its digital release in May.  Additional artwork and some previously unreleased tracks will be available with purchase.
–Farewell to Armor, my debut full-length collection of poetry will be available at select Starbucks locations in the Philadelphia area.
I’ll be doing another reading w/the incredible Lacey Roop in the Spring.  Look for some press coming downwire about the book and the EP.  Need a copy of the book?  Please drop me a line at:  jamesmichaeltrainer@gmail.com
-After almost four years in this town I’ve landed a gig.  The last Thursday of every month I’ll be performing at the super cool&intimate House Wine, from 7-10pm.

My gig as a music critic has prompted me to write about music that I truly love.  I think I’ll call it One From The Heart and give you 300-450 words about albums that have enhanced my life.  Albums that never fail to take me on their journey.  Albums I use for church and therapy.  Old time religion, rock&roll.

We’re all buzzing down here at the Office trying to get these projects off to you w/o a hitch.  Also, I am changing my life and finally completing my certification to teach Yoga this Spring.  Big change, soon come.

Be well.

The Other Kind

There are two kinds of blogs that I will always dread&abhor.  One of them is thee hated self-promotional blog.
-from Going For The Throat on Friday

The other kind is what Ms. Hipstercrite has coined a selfie.  A completely self-referential blog utterly mired in ego, embarrassingly candid and terribly assuming.  The truth about the Global Village is that we must insinuate ourselves and hip the world to our own tastes&political views and individuality and whatever-the-fuck.  I’m guilty. I admit it.  And worse.  I’m trying to parlay it into a career.

In the meantime the morning comes early for a live-in caregiver.  Shower day.  I had the old man shit, showered and shaved before 9am.  And now the golden hours, the 150 minutes or so when I can tap the black tar, screw it on and get it off.
I ran out of material on Friday.  I guess these things happen when your mission is to publish 800 words every day.  The well will run dry.  In attempting to avoid shameless self-promotional blogs I can get into some real heart-on-sleeve horseshit.  Bloviating personal history or the oft-repeated trope of a waterhead writer.  Aho.

Friday’s blog was a real doozy.  This highwire act I do on here everyday can either be the best game in town or something to tip the scales over to the suicide-option side.
That’s why I’m redacting it.  Fuck it.  I shudder when I give out my business card knowing that the home page on this blog is like the armoir in my grandmother’s bedroom growing up.  She had wigs in there.  And lingerie.  And big fat Mom-Mom bras.  And playboy magazines and cartons of camel straights and little bottles of liquor&hair grease for Pop-Pop.  Right beneath the portrait of Jesus flying along beside the truck driver, protecting him.  I found a lot of interesting (scarring) things in there and I will never be the same.  I’ve seen things from in there while hiding as a pudgy Italian kid that could turn your hair white or make you pray to your Jesus to please, please make me clean again.

My point is, while the anti-hero of this blog might be me (or an idealized and vengeful version of me), he ain’t exactly who I want to be.  But by some strange twist of fate I have found an inexhaustible source of material and it’s writing about writing.  Blogging about blogging.  The inspiration is the writer’s search for inspiration.  Perfect.  But it ain’t easy.  It’s like burning the heart for fuel or tightrope walkin in two ton shoes.

The stockings&heels and perfumes and wads of 20s in my Mom-Mom’s armoir were real.  What my sisters&I weathered in that house growing up was real even if it’s all over now.  While I may always hate writing blogs of a purely self-promotional nature, I will always hate blogs that reveal too much even more.  And on dry, sexless days when the world’s stupidity is greater than gravity and another deadline slowly grinds the enamel down, I will abstain from drawing on the enormous storehouse of my personal history.  Try to steer clear of Planet Jim until I get my mojo back and we can just let the music play.

Will I be able to report the cold hards to you on the daily?
Can I give you 800 words every day, neat&fine, without meandering down memory lane and sharing stories about the whiskey&sex and Jesus I found in an old armoir in my Mom-Mom’s bedroom growing up Catholic in Upper Darby?

I’ll try.

You know, I tried, I tried to keep it short
I know, it took too fucking long.
-Minor Threat, Think Again

How To Become A Music Critic

A Herbsaint bender ain’t bad, per se, but this one was. I felt like I was paying for something I did in my past and I deserved it. That’s why&how come that rueful thick green bottle was in my kitchen, counter-side, for 7days and nights.
I was shacked up at the Fox Den, laying down with a squat glass full of the yellow stuff  and cigarette ash on my cargo shorts when the door blast open. She stood there, 6’1 and ba-boom to the floor. She wore black heels, a knee-length, knit black skirt and a black female-tux top. Her hair was done up in a serious bun, two blonde curls struck down her forehead like fists. She came into the place swinging her buxom around.
Her lips were blood red&full. Everything about her said that she was not fucking around.
“But…,” I started to say as she towered over me.
She threw up her hand and dropped a bag of CDs down on me.  They bounced off my crotch and I was ashamed and turned on.  Then she turned around and walked back out. I loved watching her go. I heard her heels crank down the stairs and she was gone.

That’s how I became a  music critic.

Even though you’re wearin’ those
up-town high heels
I can tell from your giant step
you been walkin’ through the cotton fields
-Old Crow Medicine Show, Down Home Girl

The Worst Kind Of Trouble Is No Trouble At All

Trainer’s fine baritone, compelling songwriting, and unrelenting rhythm drive this tune that could have been unearthed on some Lomax recording just as easily as written last week: it’s timeless.
–Michael Batchelor, Curator of On The Hill

There are two kinds of blogs that I will always dread&abhor.  One of them is thee hated self-promotional blog.  Seems like, at this stage of the game, I should have a girl doing this for me.  She should dress business-formal, just this side of sexy, and pay visit to the office.  A hot girl Friday in glasses and heels.  She could get this stuff off to you and I could watch, drink and systematically bend, break or obliterate any mores or rules of conduct and sexual harassment.  But, I digress..
I have lots to share, good&cherished reader.  The Pope has stepped down and a Nazi hasn’t quit that much ass since Hitler resigned from the Third Reich with a bullet to the head.  The Grammys happened this week and despite its asslicking bloviation of un-threatening and irrelevant culture, rock&roll will never die.  President Obama delivered his State of the Union on Tuesday, revealing the profound and ever-deepening extent of my utter apathy about politics.  I’m just giving you the hard stuff, Brother.  No chaser.  Drink it down.

My trouble these days is no trouble at all and it seems that the only lasting and final danger is this contentment.  Also, I’ve developed some nasty habits to get me through.  It’s all gravy up on this vista and slowly killing myself with cigarettes&alcohol doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore.  Perhaps this is my Karma.
I come from a long line of alcoholics.  The Irish side of me drank to get through the Twentieth Century and the Italian side did worse.  Don’t get me wrong, that I’ve survived at all and am here today is testament to my ancestors.  They did what they had to do to close out the bloody age of Pisces.  They fought, fucked and killed but mostly they just smoked&drank.  Like any good American would, new to the country on the streets of Southwest Philly and involved in utterly dysfunctional marriages and brutal dayjobs as laborers and masons.I am no different.  The bottom is always the bottom and the sky is always risin’.  I didn’t get this far without an Irish-Italian American’s spit&spite-the ire of the Irish or the redhot passion of a dago’s fire.

But now I look in.  The battlefield’s been leveled.  There’s nothing but old soldiers and champions up on this plateau and there’s no room for losers.  I smoke fat black Maduros in the sun.  Drink my coffee and my beer at cafe tables but still peel a few dollars off my wad for gnarly landlocked sailors, drunk with madness-the insane and the homeless.  The homeless are the only folks in the world you’ll ever hear me saying God Bless You to.  It’s because it’s the only possible way I could sincerely mean it and, truly, I hope that if there is a God he will bless them.  Then…I’m off.  I fly the cafe(s) and  make my way back to the mansion.  I climb the fire escape and slide down, nice&sleazy, into the good life.
Not a fucking thing wrong in my life right now, Brother.  But I’ve got some dirty habits I need to break.  It’s killing me but worse-it’s weak.  Also, it’s nothing special.  Like any smoker, I suffer from the dissociative schism of doing something that pleases me profoundly but is also fucking killing me.There’s a lot in store for us all during this most auspicious year of the Water Snake.  As I told you before, I am going up on the mountain.  It’s time to set the record straight.  I’ve been interviewed for Mike Batchelor’s On the Hill Series and it should be up on the site next couple days or so.  I landed a gig reviewing music which should be a good ride until the publisher finds out that we’re all mad here and she should have known better than to give the job to a perverted poet with an anger problem.  Aho.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my beautiful Editor is on her way over to the office, hopefully dressed business formal and just this side of sexy.  She’s a bright flower and she’ll be in charge of all such self-promotional blogs as this from here on out.

What a drag it is getting old, eh Brother?  See you up on the mountain motherfuckers.

Response To A Fan Letter

I lied to you the other day about my coffee maker.  She’s fine.  Missing some parts but whatever.  Still crankin’ out the good stuff.  I lie about a lot of things but I try to reserve my dishonesty for only the most pressing and important matters.  All trivial, meaningless and mundane information is given due import and delivered with unshakable honesty.

I’m not on this blog to give you the truth.  You’re on your own with that one, Brother.  I sit the long hours on the sinking throne everyday to bring you transmission.  800words.  Neat.  Fine.  This blog is a series of character sketches.  The character is me and the scenario is my everyday life.   It could change at any moment but thus far all I have ever done is try to write myself out of a fucking chair.  But you knew that.

Because you’re smart&hip and liberal and you’re my friend.  You get me.  You know who Heyoke is, and out here on the streets we all know who the  Big Boss Man is.  That several of you join me on here regularly, and some of you rogues drop in to catch up on the many missives in the archive, thrills me, completes me.  I always wanted to be a columnist and now I am one.  I don’t want to touch on the paradox&quagmire of Internet Lit.  Let me just say that it’s gone down and we better catch up with technology, before its regulated obsolete and assimilated by the Few or worse-when what’s coming downwire from the Many is a cheap, flimsy art written by ex-Presidents and fratboys.

The Jester is in.  As we move forward with the publication of Going For The Throat, it is my duty to give you the gross&hairy minutiae of my life and subsequently find ways to make it look like a joke.  It’s a joke right?  Because fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke and, if you can’t laugh you may as well cry.  Die laughing.  It’s the byline of this blog for a reason.

Thanks for all your emails.  I’d rather not address questions about my work and I’m certainly not going to answer any personal questions considering that it’s all here, Jack.  You have it all.  Straight from the source.
Art is a means of survival for me.  That’s about as much as I feel like sharing with you about it.
Also, I’m not alone.  There are many of us.  Our re-doubled hearts peek out over the fault lines of Empire, we whisper softly or yell out loud across the borderline to our brothers&sisters out there in their forever night, and we say:
I hear you.  Strength coming.  Soon.

It’s like radar or radio.  True communication.
We both know that I’m a transmission junkie and I’ve got to get my fix.  But this blog is certainly not, nor will it ever be, the truth.  The truth is I’m sitting in this chair for approximately 4 hours every day and I can’t fucking stand it and I beat myself up for not doing it longer.  I’m giving it to you straight because, hey-that’s the kind of guy I am.  But I’m not giving you the truth.
Go get your own truth.  And send it out.

We’re waiting.

Grammys Recap

The theme of last night’s 54th Annual Grammy Awards could well have been:  We’re the Grammys, aren’t we Awesome?
Host LL Cool J sang the shows praises:  recanting how he moved through the ranks from a semi-underground and mostly meaningless rapper watching the Grammys as a football playing youth to the champion of a major TV network on which the show was being broadcast.  It was like ouroboros except the snake was sucking its dick at both ends.

Performing highlights included an LSD/Alice in Wonderland inspired pop-song performance with strong oedipal tones.  Other meaningless acts competed with their own paint-by-numbers mythology&themes, while striving for complete sterility.
The walks down Memory Lane with dead people the show never gave credit to and more We’re the Grammys! Aren’t We Awesome? moments were especially retarded.
The best thing about last night’s show?
Not being able to tell the difference between vapid&sterile performances from artists I couldn’t give a fuck about and the commercial breaks, as the Target ads really stole the show ie. there was no difference between the ads and the show.

all the broken toys lie on the floor
there’s no more laughter from down the hall
mirror mirror mirror on the wall
whatever could have happened to them all?
–Colin Hay, Children On Parade

Day In The Life Of A Writer

SUBMISSIONS…Stop sending them. What we have, we are not reading. What we were going to use, we won’t. What we requested… well you should still write it, but for yourself.
–Bastards&Whores Magazine

Thought I broke the old machine.  She’s black like everything else I purchased that dark day in December 2009.  We were splitting the scene and “leaving the Farm.”  The roomate would end up in the 4th largest city in the U.S. while yours truly slid down, nice&sleazy, into the Shoal Creek Arms.
I had bought these items for my move:
-black plates
-black coffee mugs
-black silverware
-and this, most mighty of black coffee machines.
Today there was a metal spring in my coffee, the little plastic nipple had come off and was floating there in my cup, too.  I heard back from the zine-no contributor’s copies available and Bastards&Whores had shut down on “indefinite hiatus”-my submissions as good as gone.
That coffee maker fired over 90nights on the day job.  I was working in a warehouse at Real&Alexander until I landed a bartending gig at the Whip In.  I almost kissed Singhai’s feet when I got the job.  That’s about the time I switched to Yerba Matte.  The machine complied and churned out gallons of that good green stuff.  Turns out I’d work 10x harder and have to put up with infinitely more BS working there but on my first shift I went home with the tragically beautiful Lizaveta and it never stopped raining.  I knew I was trapped and it would take a little over 3 years to the day (today) until I could break out of the cycles of suffering brought on at the altars of spiritual greed&lust.  Put it to you this way-give a writer, this writer, unlimited amounts of gourmet beer, saddle him up behind a bar at the up&coming hippest spot in Hippie Town for desperate&bored young ladies with drinking problems and I’ll give you 3 years, Jack.  I’d probably still be there if I never got laid off.  Plus, my writing suffered.  It’s all angry&beerstained and largely unsubmitted.  I truly appreciate the work that made it though.  Those poems and etc. are stronger than time and what a fucking miracle the long hours on the sinking throne can be.

Meanwhile, I’m looking through pieces that didn’t make it into the book and some other things I’ve been working on.  I’m still kicking myself in the balls for not submitting to Philadelphia Stories.  I only came back from that town the day before, just in time for their Winter deadline but-no.  I’d have to settle in to 11days on shift, and your wretched recanting of empty consumerism-the holidays.
I had three pieces written by the time I woke up on my second day back in town.  They were ready.  I wasn’t.

I just swallowed two tiny pieces of black plastic floating in my black mug of extra-dark French Roast.  I got the bigger of the two pieces out with my index finger but when I went for the other it fell back in so I just called it a day and drank it down.
The Year of the Snake is upon us and this one’s been lying low in the weeds and thrush.  I been caught up in the dayjob and I’ve got a bad case of the Submission blues.
I’m going up on the mountain.  Won’t be back for some time.  I’m learning the Analytics and mechanics of blog writing thanks to Ms. Hipstercrite, and I’m amassing and tweaking the hardware for the MAMU.  I’ll be appearing in a small room under the hot lights in a town near you and hopefully on the pages of the various poetry collections printed in the Spring/Summer/Fall of 2013.

I’m breaking the longview down into days.  Days like these when the old black machine breaks down but nothing is really wrong.  We’ll be together again.  See you on the streets motherfucker.