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[pronetoaccidents]

Can be collection of photography, Oral History, (auto)biographies, whatever the fuck you get the idea..



I recommend them all, obviously, but the Lester Bands compilation is amazing. He chose to write primarily about his true love, music, but as a writer he could have transcended that and crossed any literary boundaries. He's an amazing fucking writer, absurd and brutally honest and poetic, very poetic. I could have put any of his brilliant reviews/philosohpical rants but this piece/interview with Kraftwerk from '78 is real sweet..

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Some skeezix from one of the local dailies was up here the other day to do a "human interest" story on the phenomenon you're holding in your hands, and naturally our beneficent publisher hauled me into his office to answer this fish's edition of the perennial: "Where is rock going?"

"It's being taken over by the Germans and the machines," I unhesitatingly answered. And this I believe to my funky soul. Everybody has been hearing about "krautrock", and the stupnagling success of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" is more than just the latest evidence in support of the case for Teutonic raillery, more than just a record, it is an indictment. An indictment of all those who would resist the bloodless iron will and order of the ineluctable dawn of the Machine Age.

THEY USED TO CALL CHUCK BERRY A "GUITAR MECHANIC" (at least I heard a Moody Blues fan say that once).
Why? Because any idiot could play his lines. Which, as we have all known since the prehistory of punk rock, is the very beauty of them. But think: If any idiot can play them, why not eliminate such genetic mistakes altogether, punch "Johnny B. Goode" into a Computer printout, and let the machines do it in total passive acquiescence to the Cybernetic Inevitable?

As is well known, it was the Germans who invented methamphetamine, which of all accessible tools has brought human beings within the dosest twitch of machinehood, and without methamphetamine we would never have had such high plasma marks of the counterculture as Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Blue Cheer, Cream, and Creem [T]he Reich never died, it just reincarnated in American archetypes ground out by hollow-eyed, jerky-fingered mannikins locked into their typewriters and guitars like rhinoceroses copulating....

But there is more to the Cybernetic Inevitable than this sont of methanasia. There are, in the words of the Poet, "machines of loving grace." There is, hovering dean far from the bumt metal reek of exploded stars, the intricate balm of Kraftwerk....
When was the last time you heard a German band go galloping oft at 965 MPH hot on the heels of oblivion? No, they realize that the ultimate power is exercised calmly, whether it's Can with their endless rotary connections, Tangerine Dream plumbing the sargassan depths, or Kraftwerk sailing airlocked down the Autobahn.

In the beginning there was feedback: the machines speaking on their own, answering their supposed masters with shrieks ot misalliance. Gradually, the humans learned to control the feedback, or thought they did, and the next step was the introduction of more highly refined forms of distortion and antificial sound, in the form of the synthesizer, which the human beings also sought to control.
In the music of Kraftwerk, and bands like them present and to come, we see at last the fitting culmination of this revolution, as the machines not merely overpower and play the human beings but absorb them, until the scientist and his technology, having developed a higher consciousness of its own, are one and the same.

Kraftwerk, whose name means power plant, have a word for this ecstatic congress: Menschmaschine, which translates as "man-machine." I am conversing with Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, coleaders of Kraftwerk....

"I think the synthesizer is very responsive to a person," says Ralf, whose boyish visage is somewhat less severe than that of Florian, who looks, as a friend put it, "like he could build a computer or push a button and blow up half the world with the same amount of emotion." "lt's referred to as cold machinery," Ralf continues, "but as soon as you put a different person in the synthesizer, it's very responsive to the different vibrations. l think it's much more sensitive than a traditional instrument like a guitar.

I asked Hütter if a synthesizer could tell what kind of person you are and he replied: "Yes. lt's like an acoustic mirror." I remarked that the next logical step would be for the machines to play you. He nodded: "Yes. We do this. lt's like a robot thing, when it gets up to a certain stage. lt starts playing...it's no longer you and I, it's lt. Not all machines have this consciousness, however. Some machines are just limited to onepiece of work, but complex machines...
"The whole complex we use," continues Florian, referring to the Equipment and headquarters in...Düsseldorf, "can be regarded as one machine, even though it is divided into different pieces." Induding, of course, the human beings within....

I told them that I considered their music rather anti-emotional, and Florian quietly and patiently explained that ",emotion' is a strange word. There is a cold emotion and other emotion, both equally valid. lt's not body emotion, it's mental emotion. We like to ignore the audience while we play, and take all our concentration into the music. We are very much interested in origin of music. the source of music. The pure sound is something we would very much like to achieve."

They have been chasing the p.s.'s tail tor quite a while. Setting out to be electronic classical composers in the Stockhausen tradition, they grew up listening on the one hand to late-night broadcasts of electronic music, on the other to the American Pop music imported via radio and TV-especially the Beach Boys who were a heavy influence, as 5 obvious from 'Autobahn', although "we are not aiming so much for the music, it's the psychological structure of someone like the Beach Boys." They met at a musical academy, began in 1970 to set up their own studio, "and started working on the music, building equipment," for the eventual rearmament of their fatherland.

kraftwerk cover"After the war," explains Ralf, "German entertainment was destroyed. The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know where to feel American music and where to feel ourselves. We are the first German group to record in our own language, use our electronic background, and create a Central European identity for ourselves.

So you see another group like Tangerine Dream, although they are German they have an English name, so they create onstage an Anglo-American identity, which we completely deny.
We want the whole world to know our background. We cannot deny we are from Germany, because the German mentality, which is more advanced, will always be a part of our behavior. We create out of the German language, the mother language, which is very' mechanical, we use as the basic structure ot our music. Also the machines, from the industries of Germany."

As tor the machines taking over, all the better. "We use tapes, prerecorded. and we play tapes also in our performance. When we recorded on TV we were not allowed to play the tape as a part of the performance, because the musicians union felt that they would be put out of work. But I think just the opposite: With better machines, you will be able to do better work, and you will be able to spend your time on energies on a higher level.
"We don't need a choir," adds Florian. "We just turn this key, and there's the choir."
I wondered aloud if they would like to see it get to the point of electrodes in the brain so that whatever they thought would come through a loudspeaker.
"Yes," enthused Ralf, "this would be fantastic."
The final solution to the music problem, I suggested."
"No, not the solution. The next step."

[skateandannoy]

My friend gave me a copy of All Ages: Reflections on Hardcore and Straightedge that book was really interesting.

Free Pizza for Life!

[Aaron]

[BlakeK]

I've not read a lot of "punk books". I would like to read Free Pizza for Life, though.

Back when Ben Weasel was simply known as a cantankerous asshole and not a right wing, abusive, crazy person, I read his novel Like Hell. It was okay. The sexual stuff in it was kind of weird and awkward to read but the book was actually well written. I would like to read John Pierson's book, Weasels In a Box which I believe is a mostly non fictional account of life in Screeching Weasel. The fact that Ben Weasel doesn't like the book makes me want to read it more.

I don't read a lot anymore but my favorite book is The Grapes of Wrath. I have yet to read all of 1984 but I would like to finish it. I always liked Animal Farm though I didn't really appreciate it when I was in 5th grade.

[pronetoaccidents]

I really wanna read the Nick Blinko (singer for Rudimentary Peni) novel, The Primal Screamer. It's loosely autobiographical. Blinko spent a good chunk of his life in Margaret Thatcher era- English Mental Instututions, struggled with suicidal thoughts and schizophrenia while never missing a beat artistically. The music is haunting but it's his drawings that he's gained a lot of recognition for.. there absurdly intricate and beautiful..

I also want to get his collection of drawings, the book having the same name as a concept album he wrote, Visions of Pope Adrian 37th, "written while he was being detained in an English psychiatric hospital under Section 3 of the UK's 1983 Mental Health Act. During that period, Nick was convinced that he was Pope Adrian 37th."

"the need to make pictures is stronger than the desire for the psychic 'stability' brought by therapeutic drugs which adversely affects his ability to work. His images are constructed of microscopically detailed elements, sometimes consisting of literally hundreds of interconnecting figures and faces, which he draws without the aid of magnifying lenses and which contain an iconography that places him in the company of the likes of Bosch, Bruegel and the late Goya. These pictures produced in periods when he was not taking medication bring no respite from the psychic torment and delusions from which he suffers. In order to make art, Blinko risks total psychological exposure'.

[skateandannoy]

I've been planning on reading Primal Screamer for years. It's back in print finally so I can without spending $80

[lindsey]

those drawings are dope

[pronetoaccidents]

yeah they're really sweet. you can find hundreds more. just type his name on google and voila!

[momitsnowme]

Got this at the library and have been reading it all week:

[BlakeK]

Got this at the library and have been reading it all week:

Please tell me that this is a punk rock version of Animal Farm where at the end, those who looked inside could not tell the difference between the animals and music executives.

[jer]

that would be much better. the actual book is pretty stupid, even for a kids' book.

[momitsnowme]

haha, yep.

[pronetoaccidents]

And this one was really awesome.. it's a spin on the 33 1/3 music series and it's about a fav band of mine (radon) written by cometbus.. check it..

[mohawk_mike]

"Kink" by Dave Davies and "X-Ray" by Ray Davies make an excellent pair of rock books to read back to back.  They're both insane but in different ways, and despite being brothers raised in the same home who played in the same band together, there's not much overlap.  "Kink" talks about Dave being abducted by aliens and "X-Ray" is written like it's a post-apocolyptic novel/memoir.  You also don't need to be a Kinks fan to enjoy these.

I read Primal Screamer in high school and I remember being let down by it, but maybe I should give it another go.