If you’re a highly sensitive purist, DON’T bother with On the Bro’d: Every Sentence of Kerouac Retold for Bros. It will only sully your palate and piss you off. If you’ve never actually read On the Road, well, you should experience that first, most definitely. Particularly if you are bright-eyed, collegiate (pre or post) and fulla beans. For while it may retain its verve when read at a later age, the classic Kerouac scroll is, first and foremost, a young adventurer’s screed.

via DJ Dead Billy, thanks.

But hey, all you crabby old culture vultures who eat sacred cow burgers with zeal and favor the thigh bones of vegan Sarah Lawrence humanities majors for your walking sticks, pull up to the groaning board and dig the fuck in. If, perhaps, you remain secretly convinced that young Jack and pals could have stood to be a bit less self-indulgent, paternalistic, or just plain fuckwitted, this satirical retelling may provide you with nourishing vindication.

On the Bro’d is exactly what the title describes. References to beer bongs, pimps, Axe Body Spray, Sparks, popped collars, bottle service and “Wonderwall” abound. From its official press release (yes, apparently it has an official press release, ugh): “On The Road is an American classic and the seminal work of the Beat generation, but much of it’s lost in translation when read by the generation that goes to the club and then beats.” The as-of-yet unnamed author insists that his reinterpretation is both appropriate and relevant, seeing as the original book was goaded by the “stirring unrest and genius of a generation of bros.” Nnnngh.

Profoundly cynical and relentlessly obnoxious, On the Bro’d will make you weep and laugh and barf for the future of American culture as only a seasoned NYC designer/writer/humor blogger can make you weep/laugh/barf. So enjoy. Or not. Either way, you have my love and empathy.

Via Slim –who says he was reminded of it when he read this piece by a mother defending her five-year-old son’s Daphne costume– comes this awesome sauce:

This poster can be purchased on the cheap, or downloaded for free at the Crimethinc site as part of their “Gender Subversion Kit”.

“Part poster, part zine, and made to be deployed in an endless number of environments, the Gender Subversion Kit is a 22″x14” two-color poster on the outside and a line art illustrated gender-fuck coloring book road map for both kids and adults on the inside. Inspired by and adapted from the boys will be girls will be boys . . . coloring book by JT and Irit, we took the parts we loved the most, made a few small changes, and mass produced it on the cheap.”

Setting the scene: it’s a balmy late afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, summer of 2010. An amazing feature opportunity has suddenly presented itself, bringing Zoetica and I together for an impromptu interview/photo shoot at the Standard Hotel— a populuxe wet-dream of a place with Jenny Holzer art and an imitation Calder mobile in its lobby. Our esteemed subject has agreed to meet us for a drink at the Googiegasmic 24/7 Restaurant on the ground floor.

Photo by Zoetica Ebb.

Later in the evening, he’ll ride an elevator up to the swanky retro Rooftop Bar to DJ a killer set of “hyper lounge” for the likes of Sasha Grey, Mildred Von, the director of Lip Service, Miyu Decay, Andy Ristaino, Courtney Riot, and a slew of soused software convention-goers. But for now, he’s holding court at our corner table, and he’s got Zo and me doubled over in helpless fits of laughter. As our cackling reaches a crescendo, fellow patrons look up from their $20 cheeseburgers in confusion. Perhaps this pale, slim, soft spoken and immaculately dressed Englishman with the barest hint of a smile on his face isn’t the instigator they expected. One thing’s for sure: David J Haskins surprised the hell out of us! Delightfully so.

David J in the lobby of the downtown LA Standard Hotel. Photo by Zoetica Ebb.

As Zo sets up her next shot, I sip my coffee and ask the man who wrote the lyrics for Bauhaus‘ seminal song, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” if vampirism is, in fact, the secret to his youthful appearance. “I’m actually very wrinkled from the waist down,” he says. Hastily, I wipe up my spit take. “Don’t print that.” Zo insists that we should print that. “Oh, all right. You can print that.” A few minutes later, he launches into an anecdote about “the infamous pan-flute monkey” from Love and Rockets’ music video for ‘No New Tale to Tell’: “The handler put peanuts down all of the pipe shafts.” The idea being that the monkey would try to tip them out to eat and appear to be playing the flute. “Worked out pretty well. But when the little bugger wasn’t trying to get at the peanuts,” (David J’s voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper) “he was wanking. Endlessly. For hours. Hours and hours. And staring at us.” Zo does her best to keep the camera steady. “It was quite impressive, actually! And a little terrifying. No one wanted to go near the filthy thing.”

Giggle fits notwithstanding, professionalism prevails. Zo gets some great shots, and in of spite being uncharacteristically twitterpated (can’t be helped; I smoked my very first clove while listening to “Who Killed Mister Moonlight“), I’m able to nab an in-depth, thoughtful interview from a most multifaceted and influential progenitor of post-punk alternative culture.

David J, making mischief at the Standard Hotel’s 24/7 Restaurant. Photo by Zoetica Ebb.

It’s hard to know where to begin with you! The range and diversity of the creative projects you’ve been involved with for over the course of your career is astounding. In addition to being a musician and a lyricist, you’re a visual artist, playwright … and more recently, you’ve even gotten into screenwriting?
Just in the last year, yes. I embarked on that with a partner, Don C. Tyler, and we have a fantastic chemistry.  So far it’s going very well, it’s picking up. We have a couple of different scripts in the works. I am actually contracted not to talk about the subject matter of either of them, sorry, but I can tell you they’re tangentially connected. And yes, I’ve written some plays. I was going to say I just finished my second play, but really it’s the third, because initially, I got into writing for the stage after creating this 12-minute play about punk rock called Anarchy In The Gold Street Wimpy. It had never occurred me to write one before, but my publicist, Versa Manos, was friends with this theatre company in Atlanta, Georgia, called Dad’s Garage. They were looking for submissions for a theatrical presentation of short 12-minute plays based on the idea of punk rock. She suggested I should have a go at it, and so I did. I thought, well, I was there, after all. Going to shows in 1976, when punk rock was full-on.

Awww, jeez. Rest in peace, Pete Steele. (Sorry to get a bit morbid, guys. Then again, it is almost Dia de los Muertos.)

Living the American Nightmare “is an independently made documentary shot in HD directed by PawL BaZiLe.” Its main focus is Myke Hideous, the relatively obscure artist and lead singer of Empire Hideous and the Bronx Casket Company who briefly filled in as lead vocalist for the Misfits in the late nineties, long after its best-known frontman, Glenn Danzig, had left the band.

Through various accounts from Hideous, in addition to a series of interviews with a variety of veteran musicians, from Danzig and Steele to Ramones mastermind Arturo Vega to Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, LtAN “tells the story of what it costs working class people to be musicians, and the pitfalls of success with no payoff.”

Myke Hideous portrait by Kyle Cassidy.

Judging by its teaser and trailer, the mood of the entire film’s gloomy but empowering. “The sacrifice to make a living as an artist is incredible, and we have a strong cast of guests in this film to explain misconceptions and realities. We’ve spoken to everyone from independent bands still [of] high school age, to Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of famers.”

According to admin on its Facebook page, Living the American Nightmare should be out by this year’s end, or early next. Rock on, fellas. Keep us posted, please!

One of the fiercest, capsule strangest, cialis sale coolest grand dames of punk rock has left us. Ari Up, free-spirited vocalist for the UK punk band, The Slits (as well as countless subsequent music projects), has died after a long, unspecified illness. She was 48 years old.

Anyone who ever had the privilege of seeing Ari perform –or even just to be in the same room with her and that huge, husky laugh– knows what a tremendous force of nature she was. Her ongoing mission: “to fight for musical expression, women, and cultural freedom.” Love you, Baby Ari. Madussa. True Warrior. The mission continues.

Holy balls, kids. HOLY. BALLS.

These are stills from a clip of one seriously wackypants “Japanese punk rock Exorcist homage” called (appropriately enough) The Exorsister. It comes to us courtesy of the ever-terrifying and wondrous Weird Shit Magnet that is Dogmeat, who says “I’m laughing, because this is one clip where even I ask myself ‘Where do you get these?’ Stick around for the octopus attack… as if you would turn this off!”

Definitely not safe for work. Click the collection of stills above… IF YOUR DARE.

Between 1976 and 1981, the saucy female dance troupe Legs & Co. reigned supreme on the BBC television series Top of the Pops. Sometimes their skits were impressively, lavishly corny. Other times, um, not quite so lavish, but still epically cheeztacular:

Via Dogmeat. (The highway is his only girlfriend ’cause he goes by so quick.)

That was their 1977 take on the incredible Mr. Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner”. It’s probably the single most atrocious discopunk mashup I’ve ever seen, short of this. (And yet, Leg & Co’s interpretation really isn’t that much more addled than the Sex Pistols‘ cover, is it?)

Silver lining: that TOTP clip just sent me on an two hour-long Richman/Modern Lovers binge on YouTube. They’re compiled below for your own viewing pleasure.

We haven’t mentioned “punk rock mathematician” Tom Henderson here before, have we? Gotta fix that, pronto.

First, go here to read a fantastic interview at Technoccult to get a sense of Henderson’s deeply personal and accessible philosophy of mathematics. After that, if you find that your brainy bits are delightfully fizzy, go to the Mathpunk site to read MORE fizzmaking stuff, or listen to the Math For Primates podcast. And then, if you find Henderson to be just as badass, brilliant and MAXIMUMADORBZ as so many of us already do, head over to Kickstarter to watch his deeply endearing pitch video for the Punk Mathematics book project:

Punk Mathematics will be a series of mathematical stories. It is written for readers who are interested in having their minds expanded by the strange metaphors and implications of mathematics, even if they’re not always on friendly terms with equations. Better living through probability; the fractal dimension of cities and cancers; using orders of magnitude to detect bullshit; free will and quantum economics; and the mathematics of cooperation in a networked world on the brink of a No Future collapse.

It looks like Henderson’s more than reached his financial goal, but don’t let that dissuade you from tucking some more money into his punk-as-fuck fanny pack. Every little bit helps, and this book sounds unlike anything else that’s being published these days.

Америка! Get those fireworks, make sure you don’t blow any fingers off, slap a Teabagger. Enjoy! Meanwhile, for us, it was a weekend of milestones: we signed all 1,000 copies of Issue 05, Mer met Courtney for the first time in meatspace after years of remote collaboration, the three editors reunited for the first time in almost a year, and we charted a path for Issue 06 and beyond. For the rest of the weekend, we’re in a post-productivity stupor, but we’d like to leave you with the above: from the same land that brought you Lady Yu and Asgarda, the ballad “America” by Ukranian punk band Brothers Gadyukin. Translations are welcome in the comments.

Last weekend, I ventured to a fundraising bash at the gargantuan, labyrinthine Vulcan complex in industrial Oakland. Coilhouse correspondent Neil Girling has aptly described the bohemian warehouse collective as “something of a dollhouse mixed with a rabbit warren.” Magical place. The folks over there literally just finished building out their new Vulcan Theater wing. Tons of gonzo musical acts and DJs came out to help them raise some cash and celebrate: Thee Hobo Gobbelins, David Satori of Beats Antique, Totter, Sour Mash Hug, various Vau de Vire Society performers, Sisters of Honk, Gooferman, Barry Syska, and a band I’d never heard of before, Tornado Rider:

via

From the back of the crowded room, I watched the butch-yet-elfin trio set up their gear and line check. Warming up, drummer Scott Manke and bassist Graham Terry displayed precise and prodigious punk/metal chops and sported broad, welcoming smiles. Bad asses, both. They were soon joined by singer/cellist Rushad Eggleston, who wore a Robin Hood cap with hot pink lightning bolts adhered to it, a matching pair of exercise shorts, lime green tights, sneakers, and little else.

Two words sum up Eggleston’s persona succinctly: delightfully implausible. His countenance and physique are a bit like Frodo Baggins’… that is, if Frodo was hella manic, worked out a lot and washed down his lembas bread with entire crates of Volt High Performance Energy Drinks.

via

Eggleston plugged his axe (lav mic’d, plastered with day-glo stickers, guitar strapped) into a batch of effects pedals and let loose with a string of arpeggiations that could leave no doubt: this fella had been classically schooled out the wazoo, but long since abandoned baroque, powdered wig fare for PURE UNTRAMMELED RAWKNESS.

Tornado Rider launched fists first into a blazing 40 minute set that peaked with a song called “I’m a Falcon”.  Manke and Terry provided thunderous vamping as Eggelston leaped from the stage, scaled the wall with his cello slung over his shoulder and perched, teetering, on the balcony railing to rock out, howling “I’M A FALCON. I’M A FALCON. YEAH… THE FASTEST BIRD ALIVE. THE MASTER OF THE SKY. YEEAAHHYUH!” Here’s a clip of that same song performed at the Magnolia Festival a while ago. Eggleston took the madness a step further, launching into a tuneful, shredding solo while hanging upside down from the ceiling:

Eggleston’s jaw-dropping climb begins about 4 minutes in.

Guys, you really need to see this shit live. It’s raw, joyful, silly, gorgeous virtuosity. Go. Seriously. GO. Dance. Get your asses rocked and grin until your faces hurt. You won’t regret it, I promise. Tornado Rider is touring all over the States this year, with more dates in the works for Europe at some point down the line. Deep southerners, a heads up to you especially– they’ll be playing the fuck of Florida this week and next. GO. GO. GO. GO. And a very good morning to you all.

Tons more T.R. clips after the jump.