Darwin's needs better customer service

            For Cambridge’s rapidly expanding café society and the many visitors who are drawn to the area, Darwin’s on Cambridge Street is a nice place to grab good coffee and sandwiches. With the recent renovations to the main library which used to be frequented primarily by hobos, the surge of new patrons with money to throw is virtually incessant, and it is common to find a long line in the shop which, despite being medium-sized, is often cramped. It would be hard to imagine so many teenagers with the taste or money for Darwin’s when I went to high school across the street fifteen years ago, when the location was a laundromat. In fact, with the typical wait to order, pick up and consume a sandwich most kids probably would’ve gotten to class late and received detention. But, for the working adult enjoying a precious day off, the food (and drink) is worth the wait. It is difficult to be exceptionally pleased with any café’s coffee, but Darwin’s does quite a good job, and also offers a fine assortment of quality teas. Moreover, their sandwiches are fresh and delicious, particularly the breakfast sandwiches, which are a far cry from the typical grab-and-go variety.

            While the wait and crowdedness are unavoidable (and justifiable) one thing the store on Cambridge Street could stand to improve, considerably, is their customer service. Again, the flow may be non-stop and the tasks routine, but in a service-oriented job, particularly one that is tip-based, the customer truly should come first. We are paying your wages, we are driving profits for the business; of course it is difficult to keep a fast-paced small business in an urban university environment properly staffed, but in the meantime, you have a job to do.

            So, when a customer approaches you at the counter, after waiting through the line, and asks “How are you?”, your mere response of “good” isn’t good enough; in fact, you are the one who should be asking me how I am, and if I should happen not to reciprocate the congenial concern, you would be professional enough not to take it personally. But instead, you simply say “good” and clearly have no interest in how I am.

            There is a larger trend of young people not taking their job seriously as they are just supplementing the education that their parents subsidize so that they can grow up to be waiting in this same line and treated with the same blank iGeneration affect. In any case, a couple weekends ago my wife and I ordered breakfast and latte’s and the wait for the drinks was ridiculous; almost as long as it took to make the food. We were not the only patrons left waiting for espresso beverages and some of them, who had ordered after us, I heard complain to the counter staff. Apparently Darwin’s has a new process for espresso which is supposed to ensure superior quality, but in the meantime ensures an extra-lengthy wait time. However, when we finally went up to ask what was up with ours, it turns out they had never even begun making them. Again, I understand it is difficult to stay on top of everything. Unfortunately, this will sometimes land on the customer, and, when there are staffing issues, on the employee as well. I heard the woman who never made our drinks yelling at her staff to make more decaf if they used the last of it!

            Anyway, we’ve been there a couple times since and I have been pleased with the service, and of course the food is great, but as with café’s around here in general, Darwin’s needs to improve the customer service they provide. This is how they present themselves to the community, and we are taking notice.

@dGabeEvau

Grace McKagan and the Pink Slips

            Some of you may have thought that rock and roll was dead. Apparently, not only is rock still alive, but it’s better than ever! What could be more “rock n’ roll” than a teenage girl putting a cherry in her mouth? This, in fact, is the new image of hard rock…and it’s true, hard rock has always put image above substance. In the 80’s and early 90’s, Guns N Roses, the final rock band, if you ask me, epitomized the trashy, drugged-out style of decadence that had become the dominant esthetic of its day. True, they also combined classic songwriting, brilliantly introspective poeticism, magnificently histrionic vocals, and top-notch instrumental virtuosity; but they did it all while still being “cool” and making it almost look like anybody could do it, if they were fucked up enough. After all, that’s pretty much what punk rock is all about, except for the bit about talent.

            The soul of the band, and probably its most underappreciated member, was always bassist Duff McKagan. No one could better combine the raw driving energy (and monotonous straight eighth-notes) of early punk with the deft melodicism of classic bass players like James Jamerson (of Mo-Town fame) and Sir Paul McCartney. Onstage and off, Duff was ever the quintessential drunk punk, finally putting the bottle down on doctor’s orders, after helping to create an unparalleled reputation of anarchy and intoxication, not to mention some of the greatest heavy rock music ever made, and accruing stamps in his passport from countries he has no recollection of visiting. But he left that all behind, to focus on being a father and husband, take care of himself, and still continue to make some pretty decent music (although nothing can touch the classics); which is more than most rockstars can say for themselves. Hopefully he did a good job keeping his kids away from the dangers he succumbed to in his own youth, while still encouraging them to have fun and enjoy the freedom of youth…that’s the challenge every parent faces, who had too much of a good time when they were young. One thing is sure, though: he couldn’t keep his daughter, Grace from rock and roll.

            I first heard of Grace McKagan’s group The Pink Slips through a tweet linking to the following article on Nasty Gal, which colored my perception from the get-go. The tweet claimed

Whoever said rock ‘n’ roll was dead hasn't met our girl Grace McKagan

and showed one of the pictures from the photo shoot, of which the article contains excessively more. I tweeted back my disagreement, saying

actually, Joe, think you just proved it. image-obsessed

media + a famous daddy's not vital or revolutionary

because I really don’t think it is; I don’t think using images of a teenage girl to sell rock and roll music is anything new, nor is it respectable, whether she is the artist or merely a model to sell some male artist’s “creativity.” Of course, I may be alone on this one, as the modern masturbatory media has so permeated our society that this may seem all perfectly well and good. In any case, Grace, or “Grave” as she wants to be called, aka @PinkSlips97 did not appreciate my response and complained

hey! why do you think I changed my name to GRAVE?to avoid ppl

like u from assuming I'm talentless bc I'm someone's daughter!

            Sorry Grace; did not mean to offend you! If this is too harsh criticism I think perhaps you are making the wrong career decision. In fact at that point I had made no statement about her lack of talent (nor have I so far) but was merely expressing my irritation that this photo-shoot of a celebrity’s teenage daughter was being used to encourage anyone to listen to her music. In fact, she must realize the fact that anyone is talking about her at all (with the optimistic exception of the cute boy in first period) is due to her father’s fame. It is clear from her tweet, however, that she still has a school-age mentality, as she cannot handle criticism from me, let alone a real journalist. In an interview with Glide Magazine from 2014 Grace calls her band’s music ‘New Wave/Synth Pop/Punk but with like a modern 2014 twist.’

            ‘I think it’s modern because we’re all so young… we grew up in this technology age and the whole internet age so I think that has a lot to do with our music and the influence on it.’ Indeed, this new generation is hipper, when it comes to music, than her father’s generation of DIY fandom: ‘When I was eight and nine, I’d make playlists on my iPod Nano and my dad would be like, “Who is this?”

            Grace admits the reason for releasing her band’s debut EP, Say L’or Venus, is that she was tired of her peers making fun of her for being in a band, and she wanted to put out the music ‘to prove them all wrong and be like, “Just listen to it.” You can’t make any judgments without listening to it. ‘ So, to be fair, I gave her music a listen, after her fans on twitter insisted I would change my mind once I heard her. Some of them still continue to favorite her pathetic tweet of upset, one of the decisive factors for my deciding to write this “review”.

            The EP opens with ‘Googlie Eyes’, a pretty generic 90’s/early 2000’s sounding rock song with a decent guitar riff over which Grace expresses those new wave influences. The song’s title shows its sheltered adolescent inspiration, along with tracks like ‘Dream Boy’ and ‘Bratty Attitude’. Not surprising, as songwriting is a painless process she effortlessly fits into her day: ‘Honestly, every song usually doesn’t take me more than three to four hours at the most. I usually write like a song after school…It’s a really quick process and that’s how I like to work. If I stay on the same thing for too long, I just get bored and I don’t want to do it anymore.’

            The track that all of her cheerleaders (OK, there really aren’t that many) keep hyping up is the single/video ‘Foxy Feline.’ In the video, Grace parades around, underdressed on a mock stage, wearing sunglasses and bright lipstick. Grace monotonously whispers ‘She’s a femme fatale, she’s a foxy feline’ repeatedly, in a manner that I imagine is supposed to seem sexy and cool, licking her painted lips annoyingly. Her vocals in the verse sound basically identical to the plastic modern pop music that she’s supposed to be an antidote to, segueing into the pre-chorus, which is supposed to be dramatic by breaking down what passes for the song’s rhythm, in which the singer repetitively rhymes ‘Your heart starts breakin’ with ‘for God’s sake, n’; poetry if I ever heard it. The song features a flanged-out No Doubt rip-off guitar riff. Throughout the video the camera cuts to Grace flailing on the ground, posing as a rockstar, albeit with no pants on. Apparently we are all supposed to be in awe of this blond child strutting around, although Grace says the song is based on her own insecurity, and basically a fantasy. ‘So when I’m onstage I feel like I kind of personify that dream of, “Oh my God, I want to have all the boys swoon over me and think I’m like this amazing girl.”

            We shouldn’t be too hard on her, then. After all, countless male rockstars have chosen their path out of a similar fantasy, to be liked by women. And most rockstars, male or female, have been incredibly shallow; in fact, the icons that Grace claims as influence such as David Bowie and Alice Cooper were more image than music, and perhaps she could fit in with their company: except her image is nothing new or particularly exciting. Performing on stage in your underwear and yelling like a little kid who grew up on Blink-182 does not a very powerful persona make. It has been decades since there has been any seriousness to rock and roll. At the same time, teenage angst is not an ignoble or inappropriate theme for rock music. Chuck Berry, who all but invented the genre, often wrote about high school romance and related topics. The difference is that Berry was a lyrical genius and tapped into the heart of teenage America, captivating the youth across racial and economic barriers and encapsulating something unique about American culture at that time, solidifying it as high Art. Grace McKagan is putting on these “bad girl” hard-rock pretensions while quite accurately reflecting her cultural identity as the sheltered product of consumerism and the “iGeneration”. In another interview at the Download Festival in 2015 she talks about leaving school early for photo shoots, and having teachers ask her whether that was really important, to which she responded ‘Is economics class really important in my life? I don’t think so’; which is no surprise, why would she need to worry about money? Her rich and famous father, on the other hand, learned the hard way that even being in the biggest rock band in the world didn’t always lead to financial security (especially when you leave the accounting to someone else, to focus on more important matters like drinking) and later entered business school to study finance. (In the same interview she admits the possibility that the real reason for her choosing the stage name ‘Grave’ other than people not referring to her as ‘Duff McKagan’s Daughter’ is that she had gotten used to her phone autocorrecting ‘Grace’ to ‘Grave’ – I promise I’ll never use the word ‘autocorrect’ in another article again.)

            We can only hope that ‘Grave’ does not succumb to the typical pressures on a female pop singer (or her family history for excessive living – which would actually add credibility to the bad-girl image she supposedly wished to cultivate) if in fact anybody actually does take notice of her. She may enjoy the attention for the moment, and perhaps that fantasy does provide her with an impetus, but I think it is sad that women (and, increasingly, girls) are expected to act so ridiculous in order to be taken seriously, and in an age where images are used to generate cash flow, by appealing to the base impulse of a thoroughly manipulated consumer who has been indoctrinated deeply in notions of how women should look and act, of which the modern ‘bad-girl’ esthetic in indie-rock and now even pop music is but the latest variation, I hope her record company has her true best interests at heart (as she is too young and, clearly, naïve to know what those are) and does not start ‘pimping her out’ as they say – but perhaps it’s too late, as after all, is it really important to leave school early to go do a photo shoot? Of course, I imagine her father, like myself, and like most future rockstars, probably used to leave class to go drink or get high.

            And it’s not only women who the rock industry exploits. GNR’s own frontman Axl Rose was also used by the media, who used images of the beautiful young man to make money, just as they did with Jim Morrison, and then weigh every controversy to get readers (or viewers, or followers, or “Likes” in today’s terms) with no regard to the artists themselves or what art even is. Entertainment media is a parasite, a cold-blooded vampire which feasts upon the passions of youth because it has lost all the vitality of its own save a perpetual hard-on and the vague literary affect of a cheap hangover. If Duff had any sense he’d tell his daughter to steer clear of the whole mess – if this article should be the worst criticism to befall her, I’d say she’s lucky.

            Perhaps she should have stuck with the acoustic ‘singer-songwriter’ vibe she was going for before she decided she was a hard-rock diva. Or perhaps not. Her acoustic version of Iggy Pop’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, aside from being a method of torture too inhumane for the People’s Republic of China, shows how completely disconnected she is from the source she attempts to draw on, and again, a teenage girl cooing that she wants to ‘be your dog’ has different connotations than the fucked-up proto-punk legend evoked, even if it boils down to the same thing. If she didn’t have her family’s fame to get anyone talking, perhaps you could find her band playing acoustic covers at local open mics. Clearly she isn’t ready for any sort of true rock audience, as she tells Glide Magazine ‘it kind of sucks cause a lot of my shows are 21+ so there’s not a lot of girls out there, or boys, they’re usually adults’ and what does a 21+ crowd know about rock and roll anyhow? Don’t trust anyone over 13!

@dGabeEvau

'Literary Rogues' by Andrew Shaffer

            I picked up Literary Rogues at the library recently when I needed something to read while my kids used the computers. Also, I needed something to get away from the more historiographical reading I’ve been straining my neck with, although this book turned out to be an interesting bit of history in its own right. I suppose the title was intriguing enough; a quick skim through the beginning of the book left me unsure whether to take it or not, but as I couldn’t find anything else I figured I’d give it a shot. You can never find what you’re looking for, now that there’s no physical card catalog, but sometimes the right book just jumps out at you. I do miss the old stacks from my library; the main branch of Cambridge, MA’s public library is now one of the most well-known in the world, I’m told; it’s not what it was in the good old days, when I went to high school next door and cut class to read Antonin Artaud and dream of being a literary rogue myself.

            But you see, my position has changed on so many things, now that I’m an adult, that part of my reason for choosing this book was to refute the admiration I once held for some of these ill-behaved literati. However, the book itself proved to be interesting and informative, before I even reached the chapters on my youthful idols. Shaffer traces the origins of perverse penmanship to the Marquis de Sade, infamous for his bizarre sexual obsessions and both the life and writings they inspired. Personally, although I haven’t read any of Sade’s writings, and I didn’t know much of his history before Rogues, I have never had an affinity for his persona, as it seems to me based on cruelty and depravity, without the redemptive element of genius or personal drive that some of these other ‘bad boys of Western literature’ arguably possess. Likewise, the following two chapters on eighteenth century English opium addicts, who happened to write poetry, was good perspective, but again I found nothing to draw my ego in to the personalities of Coleridge and de Quincey. Despite my youthful interest in drug literature, I had never read these English fops and I can’t say that I will now. What is accomplished, however, in these early chapters especially, is to demonstrate how lonely and unrewarding the path of the solitary writer often proves to be, even in cases where the artist has received immortal praise. One must be hardened, to the remonstrances of friends and family, to the harsh world of solitude, and to all the pains one rather courts than avoids in the pursuit of his art, while at the same time somehow remaining soft towards that tender impulse inside, nurturing the creative wonder inside with all the warmth and love that one withdraws from everything, and every one, else. The literary road remains less travelled, and now although it is less prohibited, it is also more well-beaten and causes less of a stir, eclipsed by popular music and reality television.

            After these sensitive souls we turn to Lord Byron, whose legendary sexual exploits I think betray a major part of the modern fascination we have towards these figures in general. There is a sort of vicarious cult attached to money, fame and sex that is characteristic of the decline of aristocratic and ecclesiastical values over the past two or three centuries. While the eruption of the mass libido, so violently constrained for ages by arbitrary and inhuman moral restrictions, is no surprise, what is perhaps worth lamenting is the inversion of values which posits excess and decadence, overall lack of discipline, as ideals to be cultivated (or at least adulated) in youth, until the modern man has no sense of decency or responsibility and any appeal to rekindle these important human achievements is summarily dismissed as reactionarily conservative.

            …and so on, until the French so-called ‘Decadent’ writers, particularly the poets Baudelaire and later, Rimbaud, who signified a glorification of decadence as conversely virtuous. What strikes the mature reader is how the desires and unrestrained passions of youth have become embedded in our culture as possessing value in and of themselves, their ‘cool factor’, and this despite the overall predominance of liberal morality in this same demographic. But we shall note this phenomenon in vain, as it has already, too late, been imbedded in the modern esthetic, just as certain opposing virtues were in vogue at one time, and therefore beyond question, implicit as dogma. It is testament to the sublime beauty of these French poets’ work, and in particular the blurring of the distinction between prose and poetry, between thought and feeling, which had such a profound effect on so many generations to come, and in fact inspired the chief esthetic of rock music from the mid-to-late 60’s which still holds sway in the modern cult of today’s youth. Rimbaud in particular was a hero of visionary magnitude to later poets, including the American ‘Beat’ writers, and rock musicians like Jim Morrison of The Doors. France’s influence on modern world culture is the grossest decadence, through the effeminization of European literature and the contagion of Parisian fashion and the idolatry of anorexics, perfumes and prostitution…although Rimbaud himself is striking as one of the few men (or boys) in Literary Rogues not obsessed with brothels and promiscuity…caught up in a turbulent homosexual relationship with older poet Paul Verlaine, his is the quintessential story of youthful innocence lost. After writing the greatest poetry of the French language, Arthur Rimbaud, barely a young man, turned his back on letters, forever. Perhaps this is the moral we should take away from the book.

            But we move on. Those ‘Beats’ we spoke of in America, probably my favorite writers as a teenager, a right-of-passage for so many young people for the past half-century and more, all over the world. This is what I was waiting for the whole time, reading the book. One gets the impression I wasn’t the only one. It seems like once they got past these curious characters, so contradictory, so full of freedom and suffering and youthful foolishness, the author and/or his editors got sloppy, as the grammar and punctuation decline noticeably after this point. I certainly began to lose interest, and in fact I am anxious to hurry on and complete this article. But let us stop for a moment and hover over the spectre of literary rebellion in post-war America, and its deeper implications for the nation’s intellectual psyche. In retrospect, Allen Ginsberg is probably the only one of these writers who can really be said to stand for anything, to possess any art, any substance. Kerouac is a phase, something that touches some of us in a very personal way, myself not least of all due to shared small-town Massachusetts roots in childhood, loneliness and the weathervane-like sense of a loss in the current of the American soul. But Kerouac’s alcoholism and frequenting of child prostitutes in Mexico must lead us to abandon this mystique of decadence altogether, with less a sense of moral outrage at the popularity such men have enjoyed than a sober realization that perhaps English poet William Blake’s famed ‘road of excess’ is really a dead-end street. William Burroughs, for all his brilliance, was merely a creep, a junkie, a deadbeat rich-boy who lucked out and sold books, books which, to be sure, overturned deeply-rooted psychological and literary assumptions, but without any positive influence on society. This was a bitter, hateful man who blamed the whole world for the rejection of his would-be childhood boyfriend and the stifling alienation of his well-to-do Mid-Western upbringing. Ginsberg, aside from being a gifted poet who understood poetics and poet tradition while still revolutionizing the genre, who worshipped the great American poet Walt Whitman (who wasn’t enough of a drunk or philanderer to make it into this book) who believed in religious values even as he fought against religious dogma; Ginsberg was an champion of gay rights, pacifism, environmentalism and freedom of expression, an advocate for his fellow artists often to the neglect of his own ambitions, and early proponent of marijuana reform, as well as publicly testifying that LSD should indeed remain legal so long as all other avenues to freedom of thought were patently denied to citizens of the free world.

            All-in-all, the book is well-written, with a characteristically modern synthesis of gonzo journalistic intrigue and sober scholarship. Indeed, the research that went into the work shows through more often than not, balancing any obvious bias in regards to the subject matter. Quite frankly, it would be either boring, on the one hand, or overly adulating to write about them in a way other than Shaffer has undertaken. The book itself is short and captivating, easy to read straight-through. Shaffer makes strong connections from chapter to chapter, tying his subjects together in time and space, making bold conceptual leaps, literary allusions and displaying a sharp grasp of the social and cultural climate in which these artists all wrote, something that is easily lost on the modern reader of dated literature, and which indeed is critical to the understanding of any form of art.

            The last sentence of the book’s last chapter (prior to the postscript) quotes writer James Frey, “Writers today are polite and meek and scared of bad publicity. Unless that changes, they will fade away.” The challenge, as I see it, for the future of literature is to reclaim that sense of strength and urgency, of courage and individualism that does in fact seem to have faded away, while also disowning the new modern liberal pornographic commercialized esthetic which permeates every facet of our culture, from literature and music to film, journalism and politics. Shaffer’s book will not provide any answers to the questions that must confront today’s writer if she wants to stand out from the crowd; it will give a fascinating and at times entertaining overview of how we arrived at this point.

@dGabeEvau

'The 7th House' EP

            I first dug the Seventh House at the newly relocated Out of the Blue Gallery in Central Square one evening this snow-dumped Winter, after grabbing a Mark n’ Stormy at the Middle East and a bottle of Tecate at Picante’s while my friends ate burritos. This was my 1^st time @ the new OOTB Gallery. When I walked in this guy opening was playing acoustic guitar, corny shit n’ singin’, their audience (a bunch of 19-23 year old hippies) start hypin’ and jumpin’ up n’ down, like some kinda kumbaya campfire sing-along on mescaline; anyway I tried to make fun of them to my bassist but his brother shush’ed me.

            The show was pretty ill, I was definitely impressed my first time hearing the 7^th, their bassist was tight as hell, and Mars Jupiter’s rhymes were pretty refreshing from what I’m used to hearing around. And it was there I got the new EP limited edition cassette tape w/ hand-designed cover by visual artist Sam Billy. Although the cover itself was dazzling with its mystical beauty, no track listing was present, either on the cover or the tape itself. I approached Mars Jupiter at a grocery store near where I saw them play and asked if there was any way to get a track listing but I was mocked and turned away so the artist could continue discerning gluten-free items to fuel his creativity.

            So the album unfolds, a tapestry of chaos, live and funky as true hip-hop should be. There is very little actual rapping on this EP; which, in my opinion, is the way hip-hop needs to continue to evolve, to move somewhat from the shadow of the emcee. The EP starts off with a deliberate, heavy drumbeat, layered with tight bass and reverb-drenched guitar. Something is happening under the surface, beneath the conscious layer of sound; this is not a group that just tries to steal you with a club mix right up front. They want to be sure you’re on for the ride, first.

Any case the 2^nd track gets things real live. Some kind of slow-flanging Star-Trek Enterprise synth draws it out, before going into a funkier passage reminiscent of early hip-hop.

“Can you turn this down? I feel like I’m in the 80’s”, my wife tells me. That’s true: it reminds me of Afrikaa Bambaata and Grand Master Flash’s old instrumental jams and makes me wish I could breakdance or at least just fall on the kitchen floor without getting all filthy.

            Space is a primal element in true hip-hop, with its roots in Jamaican dub and toasting, and its connection to early electronic music as well. Elliot’s basslines hold things down at all times, gravity regulating motion cyclically and thus giving birth to time: the rhythm, the beat. Some of the vocal samples repeated with delay over the spacey beat on this 3^rd track sound kind of weak and detract from the overall vibe….like Dub without King Tubby at the wheels….

I like this next song with the glassy-vibraphone type sound. Reminds me of a late-90’s type rap groove, GangStarr, Wu, Kool Keith….The programming and drums, samples etc. is really well done. Even my wife likes this one. However, at a certain point it loses dynamic function of the rhythm as the attack gets muddled in a dragging beat; it doesn’t sync on the beat properly. Perhaps not the best choice of drum samples for this drawn-out break anyway.

            The fifth track is the best: the beat is hard, the sample tight. I like the minor modality, the maraca, the slow, drawn-out guitar someone’s playing. But of course, the bass is the center, pulsive and hypnotic. The snare sound fits perfect and the 2 and 4 really connect viscerally. This track really has that mood like Lee Perry or Augustus Pablo, Inner Circle or some shit. This could be the hot jam in town this summer on humid nights fo sho. It segues into another 90’s-style beat for a measure or two and then drops off right back into that eerie groove.

            Track Six has a tight enough beat, although after the last track it isn’t quite as driving. The programming and the guitar are pretty funky though, just in more of an ambient way. Overall this is a tight EP to have on in the room while blazing up, washing the dishes, or whatever else you like to do with the stereo on. What will get this group more exposure is getting some more rhymes out there:        

            “El Mu” is the final track and the only one with lyrics, identifying itself by association with the make-believe lost continent of Lemuria in true white-urban-hippy fashion. My only real disappointment with the album was not hearing all the sick rhymes Mars dropped on us at Out of the Blue. This track is pretty dope and between me and you, the brand-new video I peeped at an exclusive press screening this past Thursday is off-the-hook. The idea of Lemuria is somewhat similar to Atlantis, an ancient civilization with magic-gem-powered tech industries is virtually destroyed by flood or other cataclysmic occurrence, dudes be hiding out underground in caves in the American Southwest, they pop up in India and Madagascar (along with the continent’s namesake, the Lemur) and just generally await the new age of consciousness when we reclaim the power of the crystals or teleport to Vega or, for more options, Google “bullshit” and contemplate the impossibilities for hours.

I saw them again at the Lily Pad last Full Moon. They had some new cats playing with them this time: the keyboardist was very funky, psychedelic even with his textures, also playing guitar on a couple #’s. The other guitarist they had was really tight, his funk guitar got the place going and drew the beat out, percussively interweaving Elliot’s deep basslines and the DJ’s scratching on the turntables; although it seemed like he hadn’t been given the track listing, either.

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with members of the group on their own turf, the so-called “Seventh House” and I was flattered that they let such a small-time journalist over the crib and I wasn’t even wearing a skirt. We were talking about literature and Buddhism as I waited for Mars Jupiter to show up; when he did he was excited to tell everybody about some Jamaican guy he saw at Radio Shack. As we began the interview Mars started rolling a cigarette.

“Is that tobacco?”, I asked.

“It both is, and it isn’t”, was Mars’s reply.

“Well, can I have some?”

“Bruh, get’cher dirty corduroys off o’ here, this isn’t a couch it’s a love seat, there ain’t room for two pairs of tan corduroys….”

So I took the spliff and moved away. Damn, guess cats don’t have that much love to go around these days, don’t wanna sit on the love-seat with me, I thought this was love. (I love the music, anyway. Isn’t that what it’s all about?) I figured, however, the real cause of Mars asking me to move could have been that I had spilled valerian on my pants earlier, and it still reeked. In any case, I had no trouble maintaining journalistic lucidity, as the bud wasn’t all that strong. I did enjoy the flavored seltzer they were serving in wine glasses, though.

            “Anyway, we’re about to rehearse for our gig tomorrow. We’re really excited about this show: the audience is going to be educated, with a greater maturity level than the crowds we’ve been used to so far. It’s great to get people movin’, but when you can connect to their minds…”

            “Any chance I could get the setlist for tomorrow’s show?”

            “Alright, this interview’s over.”

            As I walked home in the pouring rain, that beat from the 5^th track just kept playing in my head.

*check out 7th House on Bandcamp (includes track listing!)

@dGabeEvau