Animals Know When You're Out of Film

-For Andre Noseworthy-

Monday night at 1
I was returning to WLUW
there was this lone man, an older guy sweating bullets as he ran around
Loyola's racetrack.
One of those brown rabbits
who've just this year
forayed to Roger's Park
had become startled and run onto the course.
Unsure of where to veer
it just made sure
to stay ahead
and let itself be chased
by this crazed older man

I picked up an infant
waiting to get bitten,
and put it back down

by 2 I was unusually tired
and well aware that the entire school
in its first week of classes
had picked up the undeniable smell of urine

It's a Jesuit school full of Muslims
I don't completely get it

Northeastern
with the exception of WZRD
smells like a hospital
and put me in a foul mood

I used to arrive at WZRD just in time to see the sun setting over a Slavic graveyard.

WLUW has a lot more rules than WZRD, even after the big shakeups.
perhaps that's the difference between freeform and commercially-viable, uncommercial product.

The place lacks history. It's pristine, with walls completely undefaced. Their turntables are hidden like some bastard behind a locked door.
Their no alcohol and drug policies seem more than winks and nudges and Don't get caught. By the time I was done at the Wizard I was practically straightedge anyway, at least within its hallowed halls.

Two years ago we were kings. We owned monday nights and the city had no counteroffer to distract us. It was James with the tits, Skateboard Dan, and then myself. Me and Dan and random skate kids and coeds til classes started. Brett would come in and play us ragtime covers of punk songs. Mountain Dew and Popov and corn moonshine and random games of truth or dare and the school security showing up just as someone was getting dressed again. Half a dozen fake bands, a few handfulls of mushrooms. There was a time when anyone could just show up and everyone did.

One night, nearly everyone who was a part of my life decided to visit me in groups of two or three. Twenty people, including my roommate's drugdealer Coco, whom he wanted to impress. It was pretty beautiful, even though the station manager showed up and had me kick out the lot.

It was a smaller group then: Miriam, Budros, Vicky, Brett, Dan, Livewire, Sosa, Casey, Tourettes Liz, Tania, Cowboy, Duo, whoever I was dating. We went through the couch one night. It was the comfiest couch in the world even if it did smell like anus, and half the city's avant noise community had probably fucked on it at one time or another, if not at the Wizard, then afterhours at the Nervous Center, where it had lived before. Inside the cushions we found a dagger laced with powder. The dagger, we found out, was placed there by Carol. She's placed a Wiccan protection spell on the blade for the sanctity of a place we freely acknowledged housed ghosts that had as much options for places to stay as we did.

She was outraged by the cocaine though..

As I walked home Tuesday morning, the sun was just rising out of the lake. The water looked like a white newborn's head, all soft pink with ripples and tremors of purple. No one was out but the combers and residents of the beach, who shifted and turned to try and hide from morning. They had set up forts, in groups of twos and fours all along the park. Soon there would be joggers and dew, and everywhere you look August in Chicago's fat spiders. By 7, the streets were packed with girls who looked like pornstars walking dogs that looked like wildebeests.Not wildebeests as they exist in nature, but more wildebeests the way they appeared in your head when you first heard the word. I locked myself in a basement in my old neighborhood and closed my eyes, vowing to wake up earlier from now on.

---

lab and pack rat-i do this more for me than for you
here's a set list

the Eric Burdon and War set:
Eric Burdon and War - "Paint it Black"

the crazy saxophone set:
Les Baton Rouge - "Chloe Yurtz"
Essential Logic- "Music is a Better Noise"
Motorpsycho and Jaga Jazzist Horns - "Theme de Yo-Yo"

softer shit set:
Nick Drake - "Three Hours"
The Baptist Generals - "Creeper"
Wire - "Practice Makes Perfect"

the teensy, tinsy set:
Colin James and his LITTLE Big Band - "Marry Anne"
Stiff LITTLE Fingers - "The Only One"
LITTLE Richard - "Bama Lama, Lama Loo"

ANNOUNCEMENT: Get it? Teensy? Little? I'll keep pulling that cornball crap if you don't call in and make requests.

the female vocalists enticing the wrong element set:
Portishead - "Strangers" (by request)
Gabby La La - "Pirates"

the loud rock bands that we may see again but not in the same form ever set:
Dead Kennedy's - "California Uber Alles" (playing soon if you can stomach the band sans Jello)
Guitar Wolf - "Highway Baby" (RIP Hideki Sekuguchi)
the Wayouts - "Better Days" (old Chicago pop punk, broken up I think)

dj shit set:
DJ Shadow - "Stem/Long Stem" (request)
4th Pyramid - "Aquatic"
Felix da Housecat - "Everyone is Someone in LA"

the I don't know set. One of the best
Bob Marley - "Judge Not"
Opium Jukebox - "Paranoid"
Sun Ra and his Arkestra - "Pleasure"

female vocalists:
Sons and Daughters - "Broken Bones"
Siouxie and the Banshees - "Happy House"
Azita - "Wasn't in the Bargain" (faded out after a minute because the song sucked so much ass)

hip HOP and dance:
Felt - "Marvin Gaye"
DJ Signify w Buck 65 - "Winters Going"
Gold Chains and Sue Cie - "No Tomorrow"

By this point it was 4:30 and I dropped the idea of sets and everything gets more interesting

Skamaphrodites - "Claw Hammer"
Tom Waits - "Shake it"
Dizee Rascal - "Learn"
Nobukazu Takemura - "Conical Flask"
Kinski - "Hot Stenographer"
Nancy Sinatra - "2 Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad"
The Damned - "Neat Neat Neat"
The Residents - "Easter Woman"
Mutantes - "Hey Boy"
Hayden Thompson "Rockabilly Girl"
Ursula 1000 - "The Shake"
Max Cloud - "The Informer"
I am Kloot - "An Ordinary Child"
Balkan Blues - the Romanian track
Elvis Costello and the Attractors - "Green Shirt"
Ravi Harris and the Prophets - "Path of the Blazing Sarong"
Quasar Wut-Wut - "Beaver Fever"
Firewater - "Some Velvet Morning"
Monolake - "Pipeline"
Lord of the Yum Yum - "Habanera"
OOIOO - "Sister 001"
Twang Bang - "I feel Weird"
Folksongs for the Afterlife - "Death by Melody"
Mayumi Chiwaki and Pilar Stupa - "Slice of Life"
Blondie - "X-Offender"
Zolar X - "The Horizon Suite: Overture or Air/Tomorrow is Sunrise/Inside the Outside/Sound Barrier"

Currently listening:
Lillian
By Alias