Their's No Escaping "Irony"

My last post was about Irony. Then later that day I watched Futurama online, and Irony was a subject of dialogue at several points, one character debunking another's labelling something Ironic until finally someone whips out a dictionary and reads the definition.

Such are my super powers. I think about It, and It appears. But only when no chips are down, and when I least expect It. There's no money or glory or even crime-fighting benefit to this power,...and It makes me very happy.*

Which may be Ironic. Or maybe what's Ironic is that I thought about Irony and randomly saw a show about it,...Nah, that's not It. Or maybe it's that I keep writing about Irony with a growing confusion as to it's meaning. Could be, although I suspect the confusion is Karma busting me for picking on Alanis Morissette (did I spell that right?**).

*  Cartoons also make me happy, and I like Futurama a lot, so I looked up the Ironic episode just now (here), and found out that it was the finale of the original series. It's called "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings." Ironic, don't you think, that I was procrastinating both while watching the show and looking it up later.

**  Because mis-spelling it at this point would be like using the wrong "there" their. Totally embarassing.
 

RVA Hardcore History: Death Piggy

During Reagan's second term, the Party purged the once-beloved Death Piggy

 
The internet has many makers of lists and databases, masters of arcanery and esoterica,  publishers of data and history. I'm not one of them, but sometimes I do pluck from this orchard when I bake up a blog, and I thank the geeks and rememberers of the world, who make it so easy for lazy people like me to delve into that most important of contemporary social issues: hardcore punk in early 1980s Richmond Virginia.

Today's graphic comes from the internet somewhere, in a corner I cannot recall. It's a flier for a...read it yourself. The Death Piggy logo underlying the "Banned" symbol, that perturbed swine sticking his tongue out, was ubiquitous in the early '80s, and archaeologists will discover the image when they sift through the rubble of VCU and the Fan. I drew it and so did dozens of other punks over a course of years: on jeans and arms, on bathroom stalls, on buildings and cop cars. OK, maybe I made up that last one, but Death Piggy was widespread, staring at passers by from DC to Raleigh, almost none of whom knew the hostile hog. 

Lots of people know about GWAR, that karmic joke on Dave Brockie, who concocted the band as a joke and was consumed, cornered in a world where people love him as long as he wears the costume, and who write off Death Piggy as proto-GWAR, trivia.

Not me. Then and now, Death Piggy is one of my favorite bands. They played a bunch of the hardcore punk shows, and I saw them a bunch of times. At least once, I left a show before the Famous Band would play, high on Death Piggy and not wanting to come down for a diva like Rollins or some big tall mohawk band of Brits.

Why? Because I guess to me Death Piggy was the most genuinely free music I'd heard. They could thrash, but also resort to a stoney echo or all kinds of other shit (I told you, I'm not a list-maker). The lyrics were absurdly entertaining, all the more so because the singer was a fluent and inventive singer of Cartoonese. Before being trapped by GWAR regalia, they just wore whatever felt right that day, no fealty whatsoever to black leather. When the band wasn't playing, they'd dance with the rest of us. Freedom.

Richmond's puerco muerto was eventually slaughtered by the dark overlords of GWAR, but the spirit lives on. It comforts the afflicted with the pleasing aroma of bacon, and whenever a punk kid is derided for not wearing the uniform, the spirit causes the derider to wet himself. And for those of us in the Virginia Diaspora, Death Piggy reminds us of days when Richmond punks were free, crazy, and in love with a piggy.

[NOTE: Were I a real blogger, I'd link to Death Piggy songs, or maybe just post a link with some pithy but twit-length comment. But I am not. There are a bunch of their songs on myspace and youtube, go get 'em yourself.]

Ratified Treaty?

Last year, as the season of seeds filled out, I wrote of rats. I haven't been seeing so many lately, but Olympians unafraid to broach subjects rodential confirm that our fair burg continues to have an issue. My last conversation with the pest control guy (yeah, "control," because they don't even pretend to be able to exterminate the population on even a local basis) revealed that the population is booming. The big Norwegian rats have only advanced a little way uphill from the downtown and waterfront, but black rats (a.k.a. roof rats and maybe some other names, Rattus rattus suggesting that scientists saw this kind first, or worship them as the archetype) are everywhere, moving beyond our neighborhoods and into the woods. Roof rats are smaller than their viking cousins, and maybe less berserk, so I was a little relieved to know that what inhabited my neighborhood, although I'd have been happier with kangaroo rats, which are not really rats, but a desert creature, or maybe just a denizen of old Warner Brothers cartoons.


Initially, I signed a non-aggression pact. As long as they refrained from giving me and my family the black death, I'd leave them be. Other than compost (comprised primarily of fresh-ish veggie scraps that they don't really like anyway), I was not obligated to provide aid of any sort. They would aerate the soil, do some clean-up (my yard would be a thicket of hazel otherwise), and stay in their territory, which is to say the Outside. 


But one of their number, whether rat bastard or dirty rat I cannot say, started cheating, and before long they were chewing holes under the bathroom, living in the attic, and finally deciding that they should come through the wallboard and into our home. 

Enough.


I killed a couple, and hired rat guy to get some more. We hardened the defensive perimeter. Rats are smart enough not to want to work too hard, or to risk their lives, and they kept out. Michael Pollan wrote about the Omnivore's Dilemma, but the Opportunity of rats and every other omnivore is that when denied one thing (the bacon on my kitchen counter), they make do with something else (the calendula seeds in my garden). I tried to avoid setting out a buffet by keeping the dog's food inside (even though Mr. Crow would not share much with rats anyway) and canceling plans for the backyard granary. 


The truce seems to have held, and I see fewer rats than I used to. Maybe they are in a downward trend for a while. Populations of rapid breeders tend to have booms and busts, and even though the winter was not that bad, we're still a few months away from the abundance of late summer and fall, when seeds and nuts will be everywhere. More likely, the rodents are underground. 

Literally. Lots of tunnel activity evident lately. I only hope that they are just trying to avoid being seen, afraid of being picked off by humans and hawks. My fear is that they're using the truce to breed an army (rat mammas can pump out ten in a litter, several times a year for about three years), or breach the perimeter surreptitiously in advance of a massive assault, or bring in explosives under the house foundation. 


For the time being, though, hope trumps fear, and I continue to make offerings of compost (and they continue to drag it into their tunnels, transforming it into soil), and have not killed any this year. Once the house was clear, I un-hired the rat guy and stopped setting traps. We'll see if that works, or if this is just another scam like Hitler's non-aggression pact with Russia. (Ew, bad comparison. I don't wanna be Stalin.)


No doubt there will be more to this story. The sickly hairless tale of rats and humans will continue to co-evolve. We're stuck with each other.

Saturated

I like nature. But as you may have noticed from some recent photos, I like sature. I saturate the hell out of some shots, and mess around with the color. Maybe because I have a lot of photos of grey days, and don't feel like I have to slavishly reproduce nature to love it. Maybe I am shiftless.

Or, maybe it's that that strain of mutancy that struck me 30 or so years ago has never been cured. Then, symptoms included hair bleached, blacked, and partially shaven. Clothes torn and meant to menace. People who paid attention could see the inconspicuous roots: middle class, suburban, performing well on standardized tests, and not very likely to fight the cops or die young. But the contrast was dialed way up, the colors were different than preppie era Mid-Atlantica, and there really was starkness and darkness the likes of which you cannot imagine if you have never lived through Reagan with his eager finger on the button.

Through a series of unexpected coincidences and alliances, the colors changed again. When you feel ya a good philia coming on, some new interest, and the doors appear and open, then lights flood in and the darkness seeps out to become a flimsy membrane separating universes you can transcend. Somehow, this expressed as less black, diminishing hair ministrations, and a lot more paisley. Eventually it would dampen into earthier hues, but 25 years ago was a time of oscillating from day-glo to thrift store treasure and less tie dye than you'd think. I became a cartoon, not just for the magic powers, but because the '80's needed a good cartoon, mired in the Smurf and He-Man nadir of American animation as it was. Lessons remain and reverberate from those cartoon characters: Joe Science, Lemon Meringue Hair, Monkee Michael Nesmith's lesser known cousin. (Under the heading of "Coincidence, or Cosmic Reverberation?": the TV just cut to a shot of a wee chameleon wandering through a forest of mushrooms).

Then it was time for something completely different. A decade in Hawai`i, exposed to da max and saturated in reefwater blue and mauka greens. Tropical colors hanging loose on shirts larger (to make room for all the results of ono grinds and aloha), but not as gaudy as you'd imagine: the back of the fabric faces out on locals, I still bought at thrift stores, and I wore them often under tropical sun. There were lessons in humility and culture, and a garden that managed to show me new roots while bringing me back to some that had grown for generations in Virginia soil.

Another series of not-so-unexpected events meant the Hawai`i thing could not be sustained, and a partnership between coincidence and intent brought me to the northwest. Colors more subdued than ever as far as the clothes go, me more sub-dude. Blending in for the most part (or not--I might be underestimating my slovenliness, which may be cartoonish for all I know). Saturation, hi-exposure hi-contrast images occur primarily in my mind for month upon drizzly month. Words vivid, livid, and lurid make their way into black and white. I dunno what the picture for this period will look like, and so it is an image from this time that I've played with for this post.
 
So, I no stay Hawai`i anymore, nor can I even remember it without a sepia filter of nostalgia and fuzzy recall. I never was a very good hippie; never tried, really, there being enough punk remaining to relentlessly mock hippies who were 20 years too late to be anything more than historical re-enactors. My ears still ring with punk shows that ended 20 years from now, but I don't even have enough gumption to go down and yell at today's re-enactors, and don't really get into costumery anymore. Things change.


And things stay the same. Like roots. Everywhere I've lived, the native people had roots cultural and literal. Sustenance for society and stomach. As much as I might look or even think different, there has always been some tether between me and the earth, some string through me and my people. Saturated and distorted as some snapshots of my life have been, the roots just hang in there, more or less the same. 

[Seriously, what changes less in the shots above than that little plant, it's yellow flowers, it's big happy root belly? How is it that in the last shot, where nothing else is the color that it was in so-called reality, can the plant persist unadalterated? Must be that I am a meddler, not a creator. Ego has its limits.]

Acme

A week or so ago, I drove through Acme. The name triggers memories of just about everfy Saturday morning between the penultimate year of the '60s and maybe the mid-1980s. Because Acme is the company that made catapults, rocket packs, pressure cooker lids that fit on rabbit burrows, and just about every other accoutrement of pre-computer technology a coyote could want to capture prey.

I'd always thought of Acme as a statement of high self worth, rudimentary branding that implied superlacy, and happened to come up early in the phone listings (before ham-handed companies started the A-race: AA Plumbing, AAA Travel Agency, AAAA Handi-Man). But here it was, the town, a few unmarked pole barns at the edge surely packed with giant sling-shots, magnetic bird seed, and such.

Washington kindly puts "Entering ___" signs at every little town. Precious few buck the trend and put up signs with some other phrasing. One of the things that keeps me entertained on long road trips are the Entering signs, like when the town is named after a person. I feel a little uncomfortable Entering Milton, the female towns being more my speed. Then there's Lebam (Mabel backwards, hmmm).

But back to Acme. The coyote association is probably true, since the town is located at a valley bottom. Who else but a trickster would give a name meaning Summit to a trown in a valley bottom, close to Mosquito Lake?

Someday, I will go back when I can spend some time. Maybe eat at the restaurant catering to bikers (somethign about Hog Trough). Maybe see if I can buy a back-mounted fan and sail and save on shipping.