Author Archives: bc

Life in the Underground Press

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Our intrepid group of plucky young punk rock artists arrived at the 2005 Philly Zine Fest with a wide assortment of indie comix & art, ready to introduce ourselves to a wider world, that we optimistically assumed would welcome us with open arms and wallets. I mean, why wouldn’t they?

We’d worked so hard, published so many comix, and were so gd excited, that the idea of failure had never really crossed our minds. I mean, why would it?

But after about 2 hours of complete invisibility to the passing crowd of festival attendees a desperate idea occurred to me. Give the comix out for free. It was clear we weren’t going to make any money from this event, and as poverty stricken as I was at the time, the point of the comix weren’t to make money anyway, it was to communicate. So I called out the audible, maybe much to the chagrin of some of my more business savvy collaborators, all of the comix on the table were now free.

And the momentum of the day swung rapidly in our favor! Our once desolate corner was now mobbed with people, we were in the mix! We were meeting the world and the world was meeting us and it was joyous and awesome.

At the end of the day we had put several hundred comix into circulation. It felt great. It felt like we’d taken a loss and turned it into a win. It felt like this was the thing that was going to lead to the next thing, and we’d look back on this day as a pivotal turning point.

As we left the venue, feeling entirely elated, I beheld a wild spectacle! The courtyard of the venue, in lovely West Philadelphia, covered in our discarded comix, blowing in the wind. Overflowing trashcans stuffed with our comix, spilling out into an indifferent universe. Our comix were literal garbage. In light of such dramatic evidence it would have been tough to deny that I’d made a tactical blunder, but I did it anyway, and with a tightly balled fist raised to sky, defiantly declared, “THEN WE’LL CHOKE THEIR RIVERS WITH OUR DEAD!”

THE “MIND” INDESTRUCTIBLE

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bc comic made for Robert Anton Wilson’s Tale of the Tribe MLA course (2005)

The funny chap with the stash is supposed to be Ezra Pound,
a problematic fav who wrote:

“4 times was the city rebuilded, Hooo Fasa
Gassir, Hooo Fasa dell’ Italia tradita
now in the mind indestructible, Gassir, Hooo Fasa
with four giants at the four corners
and four gates mid-wall Hooo Fasa
and a terrace the colour of stars”
– Canto 74

RAW explains:

“Hooo means somthing like hooray or hallelujah
Fasa = the tribe or the king

From an African “tale of the tribe”
collected by Frobenius

Wagadu = a divine, or magick, city
which existed four times
and each time got lost again
first thru vanity
second thru lying
third thru greed
fourth thru feuding

Wagadu still exists in some sense
“in the mind indestructible”
and will appear again
when all people transcend
vanity, lies, greed and vendettta

Hooo Fasa

Hooo Fasa

gets repeated 10 times at the end of the song

Hooo Fasa “

and a George Kearns quote by way of Eric Wagner:

“…the unnamed African seekers of a city of the mind, Wagadu (both divinity and city), whom we come to recognize by their cry, “Hooo Fasa.” They can metamorphose into each other, as they do in Frazer, to become Isis-Kuanon, Isis-Luna, Circe-Titania, or Adonis-Tamuz.”

I take the “mind” Indestructible as the non-local class of all minds, which after all is No Mind!

RAW comments:

“You captured the essence of Pound’s use of the Sudanese legend —
even though rain and industrial waste are hardly equal conditions
in the death camp where a rapist and murderer was hanged every day.

Hooo Fasa”

Fair Enough!

REINCARCERATED PARTS BOYZ

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Once upon a whatchamacallit, MC BEN and I were posted up at the parts counter at Baker Jeep Eagle, whiling the day away on the early internet, probably blasting The Pretty Tony Album, when JEFF HARRIS burst into the scene bragging about his amazing mystical powers!

In this case, he was claiming to have mastered the art of reincarnation, such that he could come back in whatever form he wished.

He’d been clinically dead once before, IIRC, though the story shifted back and forth between him being shot in the head and a car accident that sent his head crashing into the dashboard radio. In either case, he was left with an indent in the center of his forehead that gave the impression of an anti third eye, and a predisposition towards seizures. An early archetype of Blvd mythology.

He once gave me puppy dog eyes while trying to convince me to come smoke crack with him and a sex worker in the side bathroom. When I very politely declined his generous offer he pouted for the rest of the day. Then the next day he pulled a knife on me, threatening to cut me up if I ever engaged in that very same activity that the day before he begged me to indulge in. This isn’t inconsistent behavior, of course, just multidimensional characterization :)))

So when a twice born dark prophet claims to have mastered the endless cycle of death & rebirth, you might as well hear him out!

I figured I’d put him to the task of solving the central mystery of Indian Religion & Philosophy:
“What if you don’t want to come back at all?”

Without hesitation, he exclaimed: “Follow me!”
We walked out into the back lot, and he pointed down at the asphalt:
“See that right there?”
The only thing I could see was a small, insignificant pebble.
“This?” I said, holding up the little rock.

He smiled, nodded, and walked away.

I’m 99% sure he was just doing a bit, but on the other hand, I kinda maybe got his point…

BEHOLD THE SOPHIC HYDROLITH!

“You hear what you want to hear, but you believe what you know!”
– JEFF HARRIS


[WILL INSERT AUDIO OF JH’S STORY ABOUT THE FOGHAT CONCERT ONCE I FIND IT]

“REJECTED” PROLOGUE & MIXTAPE

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Why REJECTED is a bad comic that nobody needs to read, but I love it anyways!

REJECTED is comprised of fragments from 4 different rejected comic book proposals circa 2003-04. In hindsight, they were all pretty crummy comics and deserved to be rejected. I had also made the mistake of basing characters on myself and my girlfriend at the time, so when I got dumped shortly thereafter the premise of the comix quickly became null and void.

So I’m 23 years old, moving into my brother’s basement, with a box full of reject comix pages, and no prospects of any kind. What do I do? I didn’t want all that work to go completely to waste, so I cut up all my rejected comic proposals into a single absurd story, and slapped on an embarrassingly ridiculous ending.

I then submitted my meta-reject comic to the Delaware Division of the Arts for some residency grant program they have, knowing I’d never get it, but just wanting to keep it pushing. The response I got back was amazing! Not only did I not get the award, but the rejection letter contained a lengthy, almost angry, denouncement of my work. Most rejection letters are very brief, “we regret to inform you… thanks and best wishes,” but this was something else entirely! The person who was tasked with judging my work didn’t just want to reject it, they wanted to destroy it. My favorite line, amidst all the name calling, and one that I enjoyed so much that I included it in future editions of the book, complained that it “never approaches the qualities of fiction found in even its most experimental forms.”  Admittedly this is certainly how delusions function, but I began to think maybe I was actually on to something after all…

So yes, against the better judgement of experts and professionals all over the country, this comic exists. It’s not particularly great, though perhaps worth a gander, in a rubber necking type of way, and however awkward it is in parts, I’m very proud there’s something instead of nothing.

(Also, following the lead of my fav early 2000’s comic writers, Chynna Clugston, Jim Mahfood, and Dan Robinson, the comic features soundtrack queues.)

So here’s the REJECTED MIXTAPE

P.S. The original edition of this comic, the one that was ripped to shreds by the Delaware Division of the Arts, was assembled at 1 AM in the Kinkos that used to be on 202 in Wilmington, DE, with the help of a nice lady called Samantha. She wandered into the store wearing a hospital gown and bracelet, presumably having had a rough evening. She asked what I was doing and if I needed any help. Samantha was under the impression that maybe she was helping a famous artist with what would be a hit book. I would have dissuaded her of this notion, but I suspected, in that moment, she needed to be a part of something much bigger and better than I could actually offer, so I let her think what she thought. She collated the pages as they were coming off the printer, it really was quite helpful! She asked for a signed copy of the comic as a parting gift, as if this exchange was in any way worth her while, but I hope the misunderstanding brought her some comfort and/or joy :)))

SIGNAL/STATIC

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Though the VCR and accompanying VHS library were excellent tools for exploring ideaspace, live TV was my constant companion.

10 or so channels of broadcast signals, permeating the skies, dialed in through the static of a temperamental TV antennae.

It was definitely an imperfect connection to the global village, but there was a certain charm in trying to adjust the rabbit ears to catch just enough of the transmission to see the show. Unwound wire coat hangers adorned with tin foil, bent this way and that, until some random and arbitrary arrangement magically tuned in the desperately sought signal.

For bonus points this was often done on black & white TV sets, because though color TVs had been around for 2 decades already, those more expensive sets were usually reserved for adult spaces, and most other TVs I’d encounter as a kid were ancient, tiny, and lacking in color.

Then came one day the cable!

Video Home Systems

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A point of pride in my youth was figuring out how to program the VCR, which basically just meant scheduling when, what channel, and for how long the VCR would record. An unimpressive capability by current standards, but for a 7 year old in 1987, what wanted to watch late night hockey games, it was pretty neat. Hyperbolically marveling at the complexity of VCR programming was a staple of 80’s sitcoms and stand up comedy, and I very much enjoyed having a one up over the adults, no matter how arbitrary.

Though I wouldn’t unlock the true power of the videocassette recorder for a couple more years, when I stumbled upon the magic of AV inputs & outputs.

In addition to the VCR we also had a Camcorder, which was itself itself a miraculous gizmo, and while I had fun enough making terrible home movies, there was something even better that it could do…

The Camcorder recorded onto these small tapes, VHS-Cs, which couldn’t fit in the VCR. So if I wanted to watch something recorded by the Camcorder I’d have to use these yellow, red, and white tipped cables to connect the Camcorder’s output ports to the VCR’s input ports, at which point the signal would go from the Camcorder to the VCR to the TV. Even as a live feed, with the obligatory recursive feedback loops, But then! I noticed the Camcorder also had input ports and the VCR also had output ports, which gave me a crazy idea…

So let’s say, hypothetically speaking, I rented Batman (1989) from the local video store, and I put the VHS in the VCR, with the AV cables connected so the signal was going out from the VCR and into the Camcorder, and I pressed play on the VCR and record on the Camcorder, could I make my own copy of Batman?

My grand experiment. Too good to be true though, right?

Imagine my delight when this great work was accomplished!

It was a 2 step process whereby I had to record from the original VHS to a VHS-C and then back to a blank VHS.

I began earnestly and diligently archiving the sacred culture of my people on super long play magnetic tape. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wrestlemania VI, The Great Outdoors, Robocop, everything that was good and awesome in my world went into the collection. My bootleg akashic records. Information do want to be free though :)))

The Same Roturns

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I’m a little bit too old to be a digital native, the media sphere of my youth was comprised of an electric meshnet of cable TV, the VCR, and a camcorder. With these now primitive tools I cobbled together my analog worldview.

One of my earliest memories, around the age of 3, is an obsession with the rewind button on the VCR. I had a VHS recording of the Looney Tunes short film “Duck Amuck” that I would obsessively watch over and over again. In the cartoon Daffy Duck gets into an argument with his animator, which escalates into a surreal metafictional hullabaloo. As soon as the story reached it’s epic conclusion, with a long press of a button, I’d return again to the beginning. An interactive, non-linear, medium aware, story circle, repeating again and again and again, until! I broke the RWD button. One of the first times I remember ever really getting into trouble as a kid.

Broken RWD buttons were epidemic in early 80’s VCRs, resulting in the proliferation of a separate device made just for rewinding VHS cassettes. Ours looked like a red sports car. It’s little engine roared as it rewound tapes back to their beginnings at incredible speed. VHS tape rewinding etiquette may eventually come to the attention of future anthropologists, wondering about the cultural significance of the ancient aphorism “Be Kind, Rewind.”