Rehearsing for a concert in Los Angeles. Al Satterwhite, 1974 | buy print

There are nights when I listen to “Jesus Children of America” for hours. Dig that plush and slightly ominous bass before it erupts into one of the most reassuring and righteous songs I’ve ever heard. He sings about Jesus, yes, but he questions where we find our faith. The song is a challenge to faith in religion: “Tell me holy roller, are you standing like a soldier? Are you standing for everything you talk about?” A challenge to people who find it in drugs: “Are you happy when you stick a needle in your vein? Tell the truth.” A challenge to our preoccupation with the superficial: “Transcendental meditation gives you peace of mind.” A sense of urgency is shot through the whole thing, as if the world might come undone at any moment. “You’d better tell your story fast,” he sings.

Wonder built the songs on Innervisions from his Fender Rhodes keyboard and Moog synthesizer, a groundbreaking approach in 1973. Loaded with classics like “Living for the City” and “Higher Ground,” Innervisions went on to win a Grammy for the album of the year and, forty years later, it continues to appear on lists of the best albums of all-time.

Three days after the album was released, Wonder performed in South Carolina. After the show, he was sleeping in the passenger seat as the band drove north through Durham. A truck loaded with timber hit the brakes. The car crashed and a log smashed through the windshield, striking Wonder in his forehead. He spent four days in a coma. “We brought one of his instruments — I think it was the clarinet — to the hospital,” said his friend Ira Tucker. “For a while, Stevie just looked at it. You could see he was afraid to touch it because he didn’t know if he still had it in him. He didn’t know if he could still play. And then, when he finally did touch it… man, you could just see the happiness spreading all over him. I’ll never forget that.”

Wonder lost his sense of smell but he found God. “I would like to believe in reincarnation,” he said. “I would like to believe that there’s another life. I think that sometimes your consciousness can happen on this earth a second time around. For me, I wrote ‘Higher Ground’ even before the accident. Something must have been telling me that something was going to happen to make me aware of a lot of things and to get myself together.”

Further reading: Stevie Wonder’s biography; Wikipedia; the TONTO synthesizer

Stevie Wonder – Jesus Children of America
from Innervisions. Tamla, 1973 | buy vinyl | buy mp3s

Montgomery, Alabama. I parked in front of the First White House of the Confederacy just after midnight. Jefferson Davis. George Wallace. This nation tore itself to pieces and patched itself up with Jim Crow laws. Rosa Parks. King. I sat in the dark, staring at this strange house. My telephone says that it got four stars on Yelp. The promotional materials say Jefferson Davis “was held by his Africans in genuine affection as well as highest esteem.” The annual Jefferson Davis birthday party will be held on June 4 with a guest speaker and cake.

I scroll through the streets of Hank Williams and Big Mama Thornton, listening to the radio worry about leftists in our government. Boulevards and cigar shops are named after Zelda Fitzgerald, whose great-uncle built the First White House. Back on Highway 82, I drive past adult video stores and trucker spas. A giant image of a handgun on a billboard: “Report the piece and get the prize! Text THUG to the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office.” A handwritten sign nailed to a tree asks me if I’m horny and I’m not sure.

An old woman on the radio talks about severed feet washing up on the Pacific coastline. “Chopped-off feet were coming in with the tide and nobody knew why,” she says. Another caller talks about disemboweled bodies in New Mexico. “Humans don’t have the technology to suck out a person’s intestines through their naval, yet that’s what happened.” 35,000 people go missing every year and everybody on this radio program believes they are abducted by aliens. People complain that there’s not a better historical record of UFO abductions. The conversation steers to the Illuminati, as it usually does after midnight. During commercial breaks I memorize the radio jingles for machines that control your brainwaves while you sleep. Wake up energized and get more done.

Nebraska. Speeding through dark prairie with only the pale green glow of the dashboard, I listen to a midnight preacher rattle and roar, talking about how the Apocalypse is near, how the mark of the beast is everywhere you look and yes, it’s possible to believe these are truly the end of days. There’s certainly an uptick in advertising for emergency rations. Then I catch myself and wonder why we’re always rooting for the end of the world. We’ve been doing it since the beginning of time. We like hearing that our cause is righteous. It’s a cheap yet effective way of protecting privilege. We enjoy feeling chosen.

At the California Institute of Psychics, only two of every one hundred applicants are selected, so you’re guaranteed a good reading or your money back.

A concerned caller says, “My friends just roll their eyes when I tell them Satan is real. How can I convince them?” Answer: “If your friends don’t believe that Hell is here on earth, they’re morally deficient and you need to find new friends.” A trifecta of billboards appears on the horizon: Adult Superstore next to Abortion Is Murder next to Discount Vasectomy (“Pay for one side get the other free!”)

At three in the morning I briefly consider buying a product that will convert stagnant pond water into fresh drinking water for my whole family. “The coming economic disaster will transform the globe. Are you prepared?” A retired general talks about remote viewing and a young man from Thunderbird Heights worries about the kill shot from the sun. I lose the signal before I can find out what this means. Beneath the static, I swear I hear a woman whispering, “You need to hide your mind.”

Funkadelic – Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?
from Funkadelic. Westbound, 1970 | buy vinyl | buy mp3s
The internet says that this song contained “the beginnings of Funkadelic’s mythology, namely that ‘Funkadelic’ and ‘the Funk’ are alien in origin but not dangerous…” More.

Further reading: First White House of the Confederacy; Coast to Coast AM; Remote Viewing

There’s nothing on County Road 59 in western Nebraska, but it’s a beautiful kind of nothing. Prairie, scrub brush, sleepy cattle, and lots of sky. A few miles beyond the town of Alliance, a familiar structure appears on the horizon: the crumbling gates of Stonehenge, built from junked cars painted ghostly white. After his father passed away in 1982, Jim Reinders built “Carhenge” on the family farm as a memorial. The city council ordered the sheriff to tear it down. “I thought the city council was giving Jim a pretty bum rap,” the sheriff said, so she lobbied the community and Carhenge still stands today. A few other cars are strewn along the perimeter. A gravestone reads: “Here lie three bones of foreign cars. They served our purpose while Detroit slept. Now Detroit is awake and America’s great!”

A half-buried car sits on a hill, its face pointed into the sky. This is where the American landscape reaches its logical conclusion: eerie monuments built from the machines that shaped our nation.

Roger Troutman, 1981

Tonight we’re rewinding to Dayton, Ohio in 1979 where Roger Troutman’s rocking a sequin jacket and singing “More Bounce to the Ounce” through his custom-built vocoder aka the Electro Harmonix Golden Throat. Together Roger and his brother Larry formed Zapp, one of the most influential forces behind funk, electro, low-riding Cadillacs, and robot voices. This is the intersection of Funkadelic, Kraftwerk, and Cybotron, and it seems like a good way to begin the midnight show.

Twenty years after this recording, Larry shot and killed Roger before turning the gun on himself. The motive remains unclear.

Zapp – More Bounce to the Ounce
from Zapp. Warner Bros, 1980 | buy mp3s | buy vinyl

Somewhere along the border of North and South Carolina.

The signs never stop: You’ll Be Tickled Pink at South of the Border. 90 miles. Time for a Paws? South of the Border. 72 miles. You Never Sausage a Place! (Everybody’s a Weiner at Pedro’s!) 50 miles. Somtheeng Dee’frent! South of the Border. 26 miles. Keep Yelling Kids, They’ll Stop. 21 miles. Pedro’s Weather Report: Chilly Today, Hot Tamale! 17 miles. Too Moch Tequila! South of the Border.

For over 170 miles, Interstate 95 delivers a relentless attack of puns from a cartoon bandito named Pedro who desperately urges you to visit South of the Border. Thirty billboards later, I finally reached the state line that separates North and South Carolina, and of course I needed to stop and find out what the hell Pedro was banging on about for the past three hours: It’s the biggest rest stop/trucker shower/trinket shop/fireworks store/mini-golf compound in the world.

Pedro wears a sombrero, a poncho, and a big mustache. He vibes like a flickering fever-dream racist Disney cartoon, and the effect is compounded when he’s one hundred feet tall and surrounded by Pedro’s Pleasure Dome, Pedro’s Reality Ride, and the Sombrero Room Restaurant.

South of the Border started in 1950 as Alan Schafer’s bar, which was a popular oasis for residents living in North Carolina’s dry counties. According to Roadside America, Schafer began importing Mexican souvenirs and arranged for two Mexican boys to come to America and work for him. “Somebody began calling them Pedro and Pancho,” he said. “And since it fit into the theme, we began calling them both Pedro.” Today, all South of the Border workers, regardless of race, are called Pedro.

I parked the car and gazed up at Pedro’s dead painted eyes. A couple of college kids in a jeep hollered at the animal statues. Families wandered through the maze of parking lots, looking perplexed as they passed by Pedro’s Africa Shop and Pedro’s Leather Shop. The fireworks supermarket advertised military and senior citizen discounts. As I stood on the walkway over Route 301 watching the sun sink behind the neon sombreros, a man in a black t-shirt and camouflage pants approached. We stood together and watched the traffic and tourists. “Hell of a place, isn’t it?” he said. “That’s a good word for it,” I said. It may be one of the ickiest parts of America, but it’s also one of the most effectively marketed. I stopped for it.

This is an excerpt from my book, The Road to Somewhere (W.W. Norton, 2011). Further reading: South of the Border; Alan Schafer;

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The Coasters – Down in Mexico
ATCO, 1956
Such a beautiful and strange song, like watching Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil on a bad trip. With so many of these old bands, if you dig up their backstory. you’ll find grim stories of self-destruction, poverty, exploitation, and violence. The Coasters were no exception. “Saxophonist and “fifth Coaster” King Curtis was stabbed to death by two junkies outside his apartment building in 1971. Cornelius Gunter was shot to death while sitting in a Las Vegas parking garage in 1990. Nate Wilson, a member of one of Gunter’s offshoot Coasters groups, was shot and his body dismembered in 1980. Former manager Patrick Cavanaugh was convicted of the murder after Wilson threatened to notify authorities of Cavanaugh’s intent to buy furniture with stolen checks. The Coasters continue to appear regularly on oldies shows and PBS specials as old favorites and are available for bookings.” More…

Somewhere in North Dakota.

The back roads in Nebraska and the Dakotas are lonely places. Surreal hills and endless prairie. The only car on the road. When the occasional semi or pick-up truck passes by, the driver usually gives a little nod or wave, two strangers making contact at 80 miles per hour before returning to the solitude of the Great Plains. There’s plenty of room out here to drift and think. This changed when I crossed I-94 into the northwest corner of North Dakota. Trucks everywhere. I’ve never seen so many trucks in my life, thundering rigs hauling complicated machines that I could not decipher. Crawling through miles of bone-rattling traffic, there’s a fundamental disconnect. The blank landscape says these roads should be empty.

This corner of North Dakota is changing. I heard it on the radio. Commercials for crushing and drilling supplies. Job listings for an exciting career in the energy industry. Public service announcements telling me that being tired on the job can kill people. “Recognize when you’ve had enough and turn the operation over to someone else.” Auger bits and thermal wear. Fire-retardant clothing. Weekend barrel racing. A caller on a local talk show says “stripper buses” with poles in the aisle shuttle oil workers from the “man camps” to bars and escort services. Cut to commercial: “With money flowing like oil in North Dakota, now’s the time to invest in gold!”

Money is flowing in North Dakota. So is traffic. A few remote farming towns sit on what is known as the Bakken oil field. It was discovered in 1951 but nobody knew how to get at the oil, which is sandwiched between shale rock across 200,000 square miles. Today we know how to get it. Hydraulic fracturing, a controversial horizontal drilling process. Anywhere between 14 to 24 billion barrels of oil are waiting beneath all that empty land. This is enough oil to fuel America for three or four years. Some recent estimates go as high at 500 billion barrels, which is probably a fantasy. Last year, daily oil production began to outstrip the ability to ship it out of the Bakken.

Honk if you love Obama so I can flip you off. I love the smell of diesel fuel in the morning. Pumping hard and drilling deep. Walking through the Walmart parking lot, I dig the bumper stickers on the backs of muddy trucks. Some oil workers were camping in the parking lot until Walmart told them to go away. On the radio, I heard that Walmart was simply leaving groceries on forklifts because people were buying everything before they could put it on the shelves. This I wanted to see. But there were no palettes or forklifts. Turns out you can’t trust everything you hear on AM radio. Bottled water, potato chips, and energy drinks were running low, otherwise the only thing out of the ordinary was a very long line of men waiting at Customer Service to send money home.

Everybody’s talking about the boom. In the town of Williston, the population jumped from 12,000 to 20,000 in four years. Another 5000 are expected this year. Same story in the surrounding towns of New Town, Watford City, and Alexander (where the Ten Commandments are posted at either end of its small Main Street). There’s talk of eminent domain, spiking rents, new highways across residents’ farms and fields, moving the high school, and building a new airport. Everybody’s affected by oil. I try to think of parallels, of an external force that’s rocked an entire community, pulling it together while tearing it into new factions. The only thing I can come up with is the failure of the levees after Hurricane Katrina.

After driving nearly 90,000 miles through America, I’ve seen hundreds of small towns struggling to retain and attract residents. The oil boom towns suddenly find themselves with too many people, and many workers live in company-owned “man camps” where they wait for better housing to become available. The roads are chewed up from the truck traffic and the area’s utilities and services are being pushed beyond their limits. These are the side effects of a population boom.

I drove to North Dakota to meet with Todd Melby, a journalist for public radio. He’s spending the year in Williston covering the boom, thanks to Localore. (At Civic Center, we’re creating a visual identity for the project, putting Todd’s audio portraits online with the aid of Zeega, and developing a series of public engagement materials to begin a conversation about the impact of the boom.) Housing is in short supply and motels are booked months in advance. Many residents are renting their homes. Todd’s staying with a remarkable woman named Chris, a writer and painter and phenomenally generous cook. She seems excited about the new people in town, hoping it will add some diversity and new ideas to the community. Others aren’t so sure how this will play out. “We’re used to white Christian farmers whose families came from Scandinavia,” said one woman. “We’re a quiet farming community and there are a lot of people who’d like to keep it that way.” Chris recently began painting her memories of how the land used to be, hoping to capture it “before it’s all covered in oil rigs.”

I ate a cheeseburger in a makeshift burger joint with a dirty carpet laid over the dirt and plastic walls to keep the wind out. Sitting at a picnic table with workers from the patch, we watched FOX News on a giant plasma screen hanging from the wall. “My daughter wants to visit,” said a trucker from California. “But this place is a shithole vortex.” He was a medical student before he had kids and began working at Microsoft. Now he’s got a son who was nearly killed in Afghanistan and another who wants to go. “Guns, guns, guns! Every kid just wants to shoot a damned gun. America is the world’s pitbull. You need somebody bullied? We’ll do it.” He talks about the stress of having a child in the military. “Now I just tell my kids if you want to go to war, let me shoot you myself so at least I’ll know where your body is.” Like everyone else with out-of-state plates, he’s in North Dakota because the money’s good. Some workers in the patch make over $250,000. On several local radio shows I heard people say that if you can get to North Dakota and pass a drug test, you’ll probably make at least $100,000.

A big man from Idaho named Bobcat John sells knives from his truck on the side of the road. A motorcycle with a blue-pink glitter pinwheel taped to the handlebars is parked nearby.

Todd interviewed Bobcat John. “I’ve never seen so many trucks in one place in my life,” he said. “It gets so dusty, you can hardly see my knives.” Listen to the audio profile here.

I pointed the car south. 1870 miles to New Orleans. I sped past rigs, doghouses, and pump jacks on the horizon. I thought of Chris, of her optimism about her changing community twinned with her determination to capture a landscape and perhaps a way of life that’s fading quickly. A loud crack interrupted my thoughts. A rock from a passing truck shattered the corner of my windshield. Driving through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, I watched the crack spread down and slowly drill horizontally across the entire windshield.

Note: There are so many stories radiating from the oil. Housing, loneliness, food, traffic, violence, city planning, sex work, clothing, environmental concerns. Todd Melby will be covering these stories all year. Stay tuned for the Black Gold Boom project, launching next month. In the meantime, check out Todd’s audio profiles here.

Further reading: Bakken Formation; New Boom Reshapes Oil World; Oil Investing; Bakken Oil Info; Boom a Blessing and a Curse.

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Johnny Greenwood – Oil
from There Will Be Blood. Nonesuch Records, 2007 | buy mp3s

Somewhere in the Mojave desert.

Whenever I get into the car around sunset, I want to keep pushing west into the Mojave desert. All that strange spiritual space. The cheap motor lodges that advertise color television. The remote bars with blinking neon signs that you can hear. This is a soundtrack for long drives, cheap motels, and late nights.

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James A. Reeves – Mojave Super Eight
59 minutes

01. AM Radio Scan #12
02. The Counts – Enchanted Sea
03. Dale Hawkins – Everglades
04. Wanda Jackson – Funnel of Love
05. The Saxons – Camel Walk
06. AM Radio Scan #18
07. The Centurions – Bullwinkle Part II
08. The Doors – Riders on the Storm
09. Balmorhea – Night Squall
10. P.G. Six – Letter
11. America – Ventura Highway
12. AM Radio Scan #20
13. Van Morrison – It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
14. Eleventh Hours
15. Tom Waits – Jockey Full of Bourbon
16. Lee Hazlewood – The Night Before
17. Mojave 3 – My Life in Art
18. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – East Hastings
19. AM Radio Scan #13

Many thanks to the Mississippi Records Tape Series for turning me on to Dale Hawkins and The Counts.

Somewhere in Wyoming

The opening riff rings like a busted alarm clock that wakes you up then drags you under the waves, pulling you down into a bad American dream. A liquid guitar plays. A man blows into a jittery electric jug. A spooked voice wails, singing about the place where the pyramid meets the eye.

I first heard the 13th Floor Elevators while driving through the Mojave desert in the middle of the night. Roky Erickson’s unhinged voice nearly sent me off the road. He sang like a bad trip, like something dirty clinging to the spine. He sang in symbols: the pyramids, oceans, flowers, and eyes that would soon bloom across every psychedelic rock record sleeve. The lyrics to “Slip Inside This House” have something to do with transcendentalism and Gurdjieff, but it’s Erickson’s voice that digs into you. He could be singing about anything. All that matters is the way he rolls and snarls like the perfect lone voice in the night, translating the babble of 1967 into a staggering piece of rock ’n roll. When I stepped outside the car and looked at the satellite dishes and military installations on the horizon, his nervous energy made perfect sense. If your limbs begin dissolving in the water that you tread. “Slip Inside This House” is fundamental Americana and, after digging a bit deeper, this song showed me some dark places near the outer limits of psychiatry and drugs.

I went to see a psychiatrist the other day. I wanted to tackle my bouts with panic and depression. Thanks to the movies, my expectations were high. I imagined laying on a leather chaise in a room lined with dark wood bookcases. I rehearsed dramatic exchanges in which I was reluctant and defiant before tapping into a wellspring of forgotten childhood memories and bravely fighting back the tears. Instead, I sat in a plastic chair in a clinical room with cheap drywall and dead pink-grey carpet, a diploma on the wall next to a watercolor of a parade. I filled out a self-assessment quiz and scored off the charts. I spoke of depersonalization, of feeling like a camera sometimes. She told me that I spoke about anxiety beautifully, which is one of the finest compliments that I’ve ever received.

She asked when I first felt the pain in my neck, the symptoms of arthritis, stenosis, and tinnitus. Driving south after my grandfather’s funeral, I said. Right after I’d been on a book tour in which I talked about losing my mom. She said the timing wasn’t a coincidence, that grief can wreck the body. She talked about holistic health, about a well-known study she conducted that suggested people are more likely to develop cancer following the death of a spouse. When I got home, I looked up my psychiatrist on the internet and discovered that she briefly lost her license for substance abuse. This endeared her to me. It must have been a tough climb back.

The 13th Floor Elevators came out of Texas in 1965. They lashed together rock, blues, and country into a strange amalgam and hit it big for a few months, appearing twice on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Some say they coined the term “psychedelic music”. They certainly defined it, plumbing the interior world with fuzz pedals and acid, tripping nonstop. In 1968, Erickson started speaking nonsense on stage. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sent to a psychiatric hospital where he involuntarily received electroconvulsive therapy. The following year, Erickson was busted in Austin for possession of one joint. Facing a ten-year prison term, his lawyer advised him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Experts testified about the effects of LSD. He was sent to the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy and Thorazine treatments while playing in a band with serial killers and rapists. He remained in custody until 1972, another brilliant mind destroyed by the lunatic machinery of the state.

There’s a giant pyramid on an empty plain in the middle of Wyoming, a monument to Oakes and Oliver Ames, two brothers who made millions selling shovels to Gold Rush miners before building the nation’s transcontinental railroad and embezzling fifty million dollars along the way. I imagine this sun-baked pyramid whenever I listen to the 13th Floor Elevators sing about where the pyramid meets the eye, dreaming of the strange mythologies and structures dotting our deserts and plains.

The psychiatrist offered me lots of drugs. She said it’d be professional misconduct if she didn’t. “You have an inefficient system,” she said. She drew a picture of drops of serotonin dripping onto receptors that she called ‘sprouts’. I told her that I didn’t want to tamper with my circuitry. What if I couldn’t write? Brooding is a key part of the process, even if I’d like to tamp it down a bit. “Eleven percent of Americans take anti-depressants,” she said. “Perhaps we’re just not evolved enough as a species to effectively deal with the stressors of the modern age.”

These are exciting days, yet I often feel like my circuits are blown. Too much. Too loud. Many of us feel this way. We’ve been saying it since the beginning of time.

After Erickson was released from the asylum, he got even weirder, convinced that he was a Martian until 1982 and stealing his neighbor’s mail in search of secret messages. His younger brother finally got Erickson the help he needed. He’s since been canonized with a documentary called You’re Gonna Miss Me and he recently performed at SXSW in Austin and the Coachella Festival. The happiest possible ending.

I thought about Roky Erickson last night while sitting on the steps of a motel at the edge of the world in Cameron, Louisiana, down in the bottom guts of America where they make our oil and you need to take a ferry to get across the highway. I thought about creativity, bad luck, and the thrum of a good rock song on a Saturday night. Old fishing boats and trailers sat in the moonlight. Houses teetered up high on stilts, bracing for the next storm. Semi trucks with painted flames slept in empty lots while oil fires burned out in the Gulf. I thought about the occasional flickr of urgency, of reaching far out for something new and coming so close it might hurt you. This is what I hear when I listen to “Slip Inside This House”.

America loves tragic artists, particularly the ones that burn out on booze and drugs. Perhaps the mythology of creativity, mental illness, and substance abuse is too difficult to unpack. But it makes good drama from the sidelines, especially if there’s redemption on the other side.

Seems like these days we use drugs to maintain normalcy: Adderall and Ritalin, Xanax and Ambien. Or maybe I’m just getting old and moving in different circles.

I left the psychiatrist’s office with more information but less insight. I wondered about the relationship between pharmaceuticals and personality, about the exponential increase in diagnoses of depression and panic disorder. I looked at the scrawled prescription in my hand and wondered if I’d fill it. Perhaps I’m too stubborn to reduce my perception of myself to a network of synapses and serotonin. The endless debate: science versus the soul. When I listen to Erickson sing, the mystical side wins.

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The 13th Floor Elevators – Slip Inside This House
From Easter Everywhere. International Artists, 1967 | buy mp3s
You think you can’t, you wish you could. I know you can, I wish you would. Slip inside this house as you pass by.

Carhenge, Nebraska

“Driving was the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was patriotic. When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on.”

—Hari Kunzru, Gods Without Men

Ten days until I’m back on the road. Alabama. North Carolina. Philadelphia. New York. Toronto. Detroit. Chicago, and then a hard shot to the top of North Dakota to check out the oil boom and work with Todd Melby and Localore before speeding south across the plains to Texhoma. Not sure what I’ll listen to, but this is a good start:

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Legowelt – Tristate Cruisin’ III
from Legowelt’s website

Somewhere in the Florida Everglades.

They’ve got televisions in every damned restaurant these days. “It was my favorite swimsuit,” says a spokesmodel. “I felt sexy in it but confident.” A news anchor with aerodynamic hair looks me in the eye and says our passwords on the internet will be replaced by our retinas and heartbeats. “It might happen sooner than you think,” she says. I walk through large malls with nothing that I need. Somebody in North Dakota tells me I can buy my own drone for $300.

An old TV in the corner of the bar shows a cigar-chomping real estate developer paving a highway over Bugs Bunny’s rabbit hole. “You can either move out or we’ll blast ya out!” I wait for Bugs to pull out his ACME bazooka. Meanwhile an old man in a jean jacket snaps into his phone, “Just flip on your windshield wipers when it ain’t raining and you’ll see what I’m talking about.” This sounds profound, like a new way of looking at the world. I close my eyes and imagine the possibilities.

Whenever I look at the news I see lunatic sentences: He said the ‘secular left’ undermines American values established by the Founding Fathers as he sought to rejuvenate his presidential bid… Or: I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. This election has been going on for thirty-two years now, ever since they wrote a script for the actor in the cowboy hat. Each year they put more explosions in the screenplay, desperate to keep the audience in their seats.

I try to block out the political chatter but the information seeps into my head nonetheless, statistics and sound bites flowing through some collective membrane while we sleep. Grown men talk about the threat of birth control and gay marriage and people take them seriously. I flip on the news and see war in everybody’s eyes. The fundamentalists want to invade the fundamentalists. Maybe it’s a good time for America to end. In 1917, Jacques Vaché argued that true protest required more than deserting a war or a nation. It demanded “desertion from within.” I turn up the radio on a Persian pop track from ’74 and think about what this means. Tend my garden. Read more fiction. Cheer the end of nations. I’d like to visit Havana but my country won’t let me.

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Marjan – Kavir-e Del
from Pomegranates: Persian Pop, Funk, Folk and Psych of the 60s and 70s | buy vinyl
“We hope that Iranians around the world will rediscover these songs. This collection is, in some sense, dedicated to a generation in self-imposed mental exile, due to years of war and catastrophe; decades of lies and bombs; a fundamentalist theocracy of reformist shams; addiction; isolation and alienation; unemployment, and inflation.” More…