the band [2010]

for Michael Frieseman

"The more intensively the work of art destroys

rational objective logic, the greater the

possibilities of artistic form."

— Kurt Schwitters

"Sounds good to me, oh yeah, uh huh, 'cause 

I don't know what else to believe."

— The Chapped Buttholes

In the autumn of 1988, on a day nothing like today, eight pasty teenage malcontents gathered in a parking lot, somewhere not too far from where they are now, in the shadow of the 7-Eleven logo, and bandied about them their educations and their embryonic hopes, as if they were not apart from the world, as if they cared for one another.  And, above any amorous constraints, they came to the collective realization that they were exceedingly tall.

Later, damp and hunched beneath the first of many dropped ceilings, one struck, upon an unsoiled mattress, the tentative, virginal rhythm of an ulterior tribe, while two recited consistent poems, as dueling manifestos, and another choked the neck of another.  When eventually they rose from this fundament, stained and moist, only one walked away, leaving the others to form the band.

The band consisted of the poets, and a skate-punk; a gifted entertainer, and his gangly, irregular sidekick; a confrontational, closeted homosexual, and another just biding his time.  These were the original basement slouchers, and they were awkward.  And they were, of course, great.  In addition, throughout the years, they occasionally sought augmentation, for elemental reasons, and several odd others joined in, including: a long-haired metal scholar, a thickset daddy's boy, an imperial in flannel, a boisterous instigator, and a wailing, suicidal maniac.

Their music was that of alienation and boredom; ignorance and frustration; confusion and aspiration.  Their lyrics spoke of swollen complacency, animal indecision, unrealistic expectations and artistic failure, while serving to hold each to the height of each, and to perpetuate the parking, beneath the 7-Eleven sign.  And, their unified song rang true for twenty years, until they were, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, no longer tall.

           Today, the band is an abortion, broken, at a multitude of short distances from itself, with its members growing ever shorter beneath a dozen dim signs.  And the music is retarded, if it is at all.