"Hacienda Bridge #14" (subtitled "Reading Words about Reading Words") is an issue of Hardy Fox and Charles Bobuck's Hacienda Bridge newsletter, sent to mailing list subscribers on April 15th 2017.
This newsletter is not archived on Mailchimp - the archived version below has been transposed from a copy kept in the personal archives of a Mysterious Spanish Lady.
The newsletter[]
Note: Some format changes have been made (image positioning, additional headings, etc.) to create an easily readable version of this newsletter within the restrictions of this wiki. Such changes have been made as infrequently as possible to present the closest possible representation of the text as it originally appeared. Links in the text to other wiki articles are included by The Mysterious Spanish Ladies in order to help facilitate easy navigation and further reading. Typographical errors featured in the original text have not been corrected.
Reading Words about Reading Words[]
IN THE BOOK STORE WE HAVE
Hacienda Bridge has been pumping out the beats for your enjoyment for a number of months now.
However, we are NOT only about sound. We are ALSO about words.
++++ In February of 2016 we published an iBook (with music) and a PDF (without music) of a free book: THIS is for readers: the wax and wane of Charles Bobuck.
THIS combines text, music and images to tell the origins of Charles Bobuck. A CD was also released of selected music from the iBook, THIS (CD).
with music (requires a Mac or iPad)
https://itunes.apple.com/au/book/this-is-for-readers/id1087115736?mt=11
without music
http://www.hardyfox.com/public_html/THIS_for_READERS:noMusic.pdf
++++ In August of 2016 we published iBook number two, The Swords of Slidell. Again we combine text, images and music to tell the story of a young woman’s very strange first sexual adventure. Additionally, we released a CD that combined the music from the iBook with selected readings from the tale, The Swords of Slidell (CD).
https://itunes.apple.com/au/book/the-swords-of-slidell/id1129364212?mt=11
++++ Continuing with our experimentation of WORD BASED forms, today we release a third word project, WALLPAPER. This time we have a short story that combines music, images and text, but we have made it an audio book. The entire story is read for you. Read along or just sit back and enjoy. It is presented as a website and is free to experience.
http://www.hardyfox.com/tarnation/WALLPAPER/
Access the FREE short story
KLANGGALERIE MUSIC STORE[]
CLANK CLANK CLANK
A collection of 9 demos of BobUck's reworking of Meet The Residents from 2014. EP CD (2017)
A TOOK Limited Edition (300 copies)
coming May 15
EGGS FOR BREAKFAST
26 of BobUck's finest Tiny Tunes. Includes the infamous BLACK TAR collection. CD (2017)
BOBUCK PLAYS THE RESIDENTS
A collection of radical arrangements of music Charles Bobuck co-wrote for The Residents over his 40 year history as a composer. CD (2016)
WHAT WAS LEFT OF GRANDPA
Charles Bobuck's tribute to his jazz loving Grandpa. CD (2015)
THIS
The Wax and the Wane of Charles Bobuck CD (2015)
DOT.COM
A compilation of music from Charles Bobuck and The Residents. Includes the first CD appearance of Bobuck's RADIO THOREAU remixes. CD (2015)
WALTER ROBOTKA
Dreads and Drolls by Arthur Machen
The word issue[]
I guess I should contribute something to this. Because apart from running KLANGGALERIE, I run a small book shop in Vienna, MORD+MUSIK. I work for Klang in the mornings, I work in the shop in the afternoon. Like with music, my interest in the written word is rather specific. My favorite genre is weird fiction. Weird, macabre, supernatural, even horror, call it what you will. I love it all. And because I run a boutique niche label myself, I love and try to support genre publishers, too. I like small presses, as they call themselves in the UK, independent publishing houses if you prefer that term.
There's even a link between those books and my music releases. My favorite publisher of all is a family-run business called Tartarus Press. A husband and wife share all the work. Rosalie Parker takes care of contemporary authors, while Ray Russell is responsible for the classics that Tartarus publish. For them it all started through an interest in the British writer Arthur Machen (right). Machen may not be a household name, but he is a classic in his genre. Born in Wales in 1863, he soon started to write and combined his interest in the occult and pagan with the literary decadence movement of the time. Because of the scandalous reception of his work he quickly sold well. Stephen King once called Machen's novella, The Great God Pan, the "best horror story in the English language".
But back to Tartarus. In the meantime, the small publishing house located in the English Yorkshire Dales has published all of Machen's books. They also translate foreign authors into English, like Gustav Meyrink's Golem, E.T.A. Hoffman's Sandman or Jean Lorrain's decadent works in French. Tartarus also take care of high class contemporary weird fiction. The complete works by Robert Aickman were recently released in a new edition, and many young writers, mainly from the UK, get a luxurious publishing possibility if Ray and Rosalie think their work is good enough. What makes Tartarus books so special is also the great care they take with the design of their books. Their hardcovers all come in yellow dust jackets, and only the highest quality in bookbinding can be expected if you get a title from them.
So where is the link to music you will ask yourself? Well, as it happens, Ray Russell is not only a fantastic writer himself, but also a great composer and musician. Klanggalerie has published two CDs by Ray, one entitled Ghosts, the other being a soundtrack to a novel of his turned into a film: Bloody Baudelaire.
On the British isles, there are several of these publishers that produce high quality limited edition books of the genre. One should mention PS Publishing next, maybe the most productive of them all, doing Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction in colorful limited hardback editions, or Swan River Press from Ireland who specialize more in classic authors.
One of the first of these fine publishers was a Canadian company. Ash-Tree Press started like many of their colleagues with small chapbooks, a European style of inexpensive booklets, but soon became the biggest of the specialized book publishers. Founded in 1994 they mainly reprinted notable collections of ghost stories in the beginning, with well-known writers like M.R. James or Sheridan LeFanu, but soon expanded their activities to doing original collections by young and modern writers. Sadly, Ash-Tree press hasn't showed any activity for 7 years, but their books still belong to the most beautiful hardcovers you will find on the market.
In the German speaking market the situation is very different: short stories aren't popular here at all. Big publishers like Random House don't even bother to publish them, unless a famous author can't be stopped from writing some. But there are several independent publishers that specialize in supernatural fiction, the biggest one possibly Festa Verlag, which unfortunately has found its niche now in brutal and sadistic horror novels.
If you are interested in subtle horror or macabre literature, you'll have to stick to the English language market. If you aren't a collector or your budget is small, there are publishers who do paperbacks. Valancourt Books is an outstanding publisher from Richmond, Virginia. They have several series, doing Gothic literature, supernatural, but also LBGT interest. Their paperbacks usually reprint the original book covers and have extensive fore or afterwards that give a lot of extra information about the authors and their books.
If your wallet is even emptier than that, that's still no excuse not to buy good weird fiction. Wordsworth in the UK have a series of paperbacks that sell for the price of a coffee. And their titles are fantastic, often reprinting authors who were previously released by one of the aforementioned publishers. I add a list of links for your enjoyment, happy browsing and come and visit us at MORD+MUSIK when you're in Vienna.
http://www.valancourtbooks.com/
http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/
http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/ashtreecurrent.html
http://wordsworth-editions.com/
-- Walter Robotka
The Stone - Hardy Fox's serialized novella[]
The Stone ch. 3 - Hardy Fox[]
Previously....
Peter, the local priest thinks he might have a ghost at the church. He called his friend Charles Bobuck to come help him investigate. But Charlie falls asleep and gets woken in an unusual manner.
----------
"Charles, this is Dr Hill," the calm voice sang liltingly. "When I count to three, you will wake up but will remember nothing of what has happened.
One...
Two...
Three."
Dr. Hill passed a hand slowly over Charles' face.
I cannot sleep. The moonlight is shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, dark, flat stone.
Whenever the disc of the full moon begins to shrink and its right-hand side starts to wither—like a face approaching old age, in which one cheek becomes hollow and wrinkled before the other—that is the time at night I am overtaken by a dark restlessness. I am not asleep, I am not awake, and real life mingles with what I have read or seen on TV, like a river flowing into a salty sea.
I had been reading about the life of the Buddha before I went to bed, and one passage kept coming back to me in a thousand variations, going back to the beginning again and again:
A crow flew to a stone which looked like a piece of liver, thinking perhaps it had found something good to eat. But when the crow discovered that it was a stone and not a piece of liver, it flew away to seek food elsewhere.
Like the crow that left the stone, so do we abandon Siddhartha Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our appreciation of his simplicity.
The image of the stone that looked like a piece of liver multiplied in my mind to become a dried-up riverbed.
I am walking along, picking up smooth pebbles, bluish-grey ones with specks of glittering dust. I rack my brains, but I still have no idea what to do with them. Then I find black ones with patches of sulfurous yellow, like the petrified attempts of a child to form crude, blotched salamanders.
I want to throw these pebbles, far away from me, but they keep falling out of my hand, and I cannot force them from my sight.All the stones that ever played a role in my life push up out of the earth around me.Some are struggling clumsily to work their way up through the sand to the light, like huge, slate-colored crabs when the tide comes in, as if they were doing their utmost to catch my eye, to tell me things of infinite importance. Others, exhausted, fall back weakly into their holes and abandon all hope of ever being able to deliver their message.Sighing, I again notice the moonlight lying on the humped cover at the bottom of the bed like a dark, flat stone.
The stone seems familiar. It hides somewhere in the debris of my memory and looks like a piece of liver. A church. The stone was in a church.
I tried to block the stone from my mind by imagining the end of the rainwater pipe reaching the ground outside my window, bent at an obtuse angle, its rim eaten away by rust.
I tried to force that pipe image into my mind to calm my thoughts and put them back to sleep.
No luck.
Again and again, again and again, persistent, tireless as a wind chime blown by the wind, an obstinate voice inside me kept insisting, “That is not the stone you remember. That is not the stone that looks like a piece of liver.”
There was no escape from the voice nor from the fuzzy memory of a stone in a church.
I explained to the voice that it was all beside the point. The voice went silent for a little while, but started up again, imperceptibly at first, with its insistence.
“Yes, it is beside the point, but it’s still not the stone that looks like a piece of liver, the stone you remember.”I was slowly filled with an uncomfortable sense of my own lack of control of my own mind.
I’m not certain what happened after that. Perhaps I merely gave up all resistance. All I know is that my body was lying asleep in bed and my senses were no longer attached to it.
“Who am I now that I am asleep,” asked my mind?
But then I remembered that, being asleep, I no longer controlled my mouth with which I could respond; and I was afraid that the voice would start up again with its endless interrogation about the stone and the piece of liver. I no longer wish to remember the stone nor the church.
My room grew bright then faded to grey and I found myself standing in a gloomy courtyard, and through the reddish arch of a gateway opposite, across the narrow, filthy street, I could see a shady second-hand furniture dealer leaning against his shop-front which had all kinds of worthless items sitting round the open doorway.
The shop did add a bit of color to an otherwise bland street, but I was neither curious nor surprised at seeing it. I had been living in this neighborhood for a long time now and accepted it as normal, though truthfully, it was not.
I made my way up the worn steps to my apartment.
Then I heard footsteps going up the higher flights ahead of me, and when I reached my door I saw that it was Rosina, the seventeen-year-old redhead girl belonging to the shop owner I had seen earlier, Frankie Wasser.
She stood with her back against the banisters, arching her body lasciviously forcing me to rub against her to pass. She had her hands curled around the iron rail for support and I could see the pale gleam of her bare arms in the murky light.
I avoided making eye contact.
Her teasing smile and waxy, rocking-horse face disgusted me. She had white, bloated flesh. I found her red eyelashes as repulsive as those of rabbits.
I unlocked my door and closed it behind me.
Rosina was part of a red-haired tribe which was repulsive in its physical characteristics. The men had long, skinny necks with protuberant Adam’s apples. Everything about them was freckled, and they spent their whole life fighting an unending, losing battle against their sex drive.
It was not at all clear to me how I had come to assume Rosina and the shop keeper were in any way related. I have never seen her anywhere near the old man, nor even noticed them calling out to each other.
However, she was usually in our courtyard or hanging around the dark corners and passages of our apartment building.
I wanted to drag my thoughts away from Rosina, so I looked out my open window. I could see Frankie Wasser, standing outside his shop. He was leaning against the wall of the arched opening, clipping his fingernails. As if he had felt my eyes on him, he suddenly turned his face up towards me, a horrible, expressionless face, with its round, fish eyes and gaping harelip. He seemed to me like a human spider that could sense the slightest touch on its web, however unconcerned it pretends to be.
How did he support himself? I had no idea. The same dead, worthless objects sat around the arched entrance to his shop, day after day, year in, year out. I could have drawn them with my eyes shut: the side table missing a drawer, the picture painted on yellowing paper of a strange arrangement of soldiers; and in front, a row of round iron bar stools standing close to each other so that no one can enter his shop.
These objects never increased or decreased in number, and whenever the occasional passerby stopped and asked the price of something, Wasser seemed to become angry. The two parts of his harelip curled up as he spewed out a torrent of incomprehensible words in an irritated, gurgling, stuttering bass, so that the potential buyer lost all interest and walked away.
Suddenly, Wasser’s gaze turned to my neighboring apartment. What could he find to look at there? I was certain the apartment was empty.
Then I heard a sound, someone entered that apartment next door. Through the thin wall I could hear a male and a female voice talking to each other. But it would have been impossible for the dealer to have heard that from down below.
Someone moved outside my door, and I guessed it must be Rosina, still standing out there, hot with expectation that I might take her into my bed.
And below, on the half-landing, Louis, the pockmarked adolescent, would be waiting to see if I would open my door; even here in my room I could feel his hatred and jealousy. He was afraid to come any closer because Rosina might see him. He had become obsessed with her moistness, yet his feelings mostly took the form of rage fed by the bleak, gloomy atmosphere of this building.
Louis and his twin brother Jerome were a year younger than Rosina but far younger mentally. I could scarcely remember their father, a baker who specialized in communion wafers. Now they were looked after by an old woman, meaning that she provided them with lodgings; for that they had to hand over whatever they managed to beg or steal. I heard her job was laying out corpses at the morgue.
I often used to see Louis, Jerome and Rosina playing together innocently in the yard when they were children.
Those times were long since gone.
Louis often spent the whole day chasing after the red-haired girl. If he couldn’t find her anywhere he would creep to my door and wait, a scowl on his face, in hopes she would pass by. At such times, as I sit at my work, I could imagine him lurking outside in the corridor, listening with his head bent forward on his gaunt neck certain that Rosita was with me.
Sometimes the silence would be broken by an outburst of noise: Jerome, who is deaf and dumb, and whose head is permanently filled with a crazed lust for Rosina, roamed the house like a wild animal, and the howling he could emit, half out of his mind with jealousy and suspicion, was so eerie that it would make me involuntarily shudder. He was looking for the pair of them. He always assumed they were together somewhere, and he rushed about in a frenzy, goaded on by the idea that he must be at his brother's heels to make sure there is nothing going on with Rosina that doesn’t include him.
It was precisely this unceasing torment of the deaf-mute which, I suspect, kept provoking Rosina into carrying on with his brother. Whenever she became bored, Louis always thought up some new piece of nastiness to arouse her lust. For example, they would let Jerome catch them sprawled naked on the bed, and then, when he was sufficiently beside himself with fury, slyly lure him into dark corridors where they had set up vicious traps, rusty barrel-hoops that shot up when he stepped on them or rakes with the points sticking up to trip him, bloodying his hands and knees.
From time to time, Rosina would think up some devilish trick of her own. All at once she would change her behavior towards Jerome, acting as if she had suddenly taken a liking to him. With the smile that was permanently fixed on her face, she touched the poor deaf-mute in ways that drove him almost insane with arousal.
Once I saw him standing in front of her in the courtyard, and she held so tightly to his crotch and licked her lips so insistently, that I thought he would cum at any moment. The sweat was pouring down his face with the superhuman effort it required of him to grasp the meaning of her message which was deliberately hurried, deliberately unclear.
He spent the whole of the following day in a fever of expectation of a rendezvous on the steps of a half-ruined house farther along the narrow alley behind the building. Rosita would never show up.
My mind shifted again to the apartment next door, a cheerful woman’s singing came through the wall. Singing in this building? There was no one living anywhere in the neighborhood capable of such happiness.
Then it came back to me that a few days ago Zac, my puppeteer friend, had told me that some young man had rented the next door studio apartment from him, at a high rent, clearly to be able to meet up with his illicit lover undisturbed.
Again happy singing, stirring vague images in my mind.
But then the singing stopped. I heard a piercing scream from the room next door. Startled, I listened to what was going on. The door to the room rattled violently and the next moment my unlocked door opened and a woman rushed in, her hair undone, her face as white as a sheet, wearing only a blanket flung round her bare shoulders.
"Mr. Bobuck, hide me, for Christ’s sake, hide me!"
Before I could answer, my door flew open a second time and immediately slammed closed. For just a flash, the face of Frankie Wasser was visible, frowning as though wearing some Halloween mask.
The woman waited a bit, apologized and slipped back out of my room.
A round patch of light appeared before me, and by the light of the moon I recognized the foot of my bed.
Oh right, I remembered. I am asleep.
The woman had called me "Mr. Bobuck." The name stood in golden letters before my memory. Long ago I was sitting at a table in Starbucks and noticed, as I was about to leave, an iPhone laying face down. Picking it up, I saw a name and email address in the "If Found" app, "Charles Bobuck." I put the phone in my pocket, but somehow I have never gotten around to returning it. Instead I use it as my own phone. I look at his photos so often that I often think I know the people.
Then, without warning, that awful voice returned, the voice which kept insisting I must remember the stone, the stone that looked like a piece of liver.
Quickly, I blocked that voice with a vision of Rosina’s sharp profile in my mind with its sickly sweet grin and red eyelashes. That confused the voice, which immediately subsided.
Ah, Rosina’s face! It was stronger than that voice and its mindless obsession with the stone that is not liver.
- to be continued
Ask Hardy shit[]
Q: Who or what inspired you? Somewhere along the line I read that a lot of Residents music refers to Harry Partch.[]
No. Harry Partch is fantastic, but both Residents and Harry Partch were following interests in Indonesian music and other percussion orchestras, not each other. Residents are attracted to a wild variety of artists and styles. The American Composer Series pointed to that. Though technology has to be credited too. Synths, samplers, MIDI, digital manipulation. A lot of things to explore.
Q: I had seen that none of the Residents were musicians. How did you accomplish sophisticated musical moments?[]
The Residents were not accomplished musicians, but some did have rudimentary training. But for the fancy stuff, they worked with outside musicians. If we needed a Laurie Amat type vocal part, we called up Laurie. Also the earlier mentioned technology.
Q: What is your opinion on the idea of 'physical product'?[]
A physical product usually means the project is actually finished. No more fine tuning anything. I like physical product. We are going to keep doing it here, I'm not doing fuzzy downloads until the physical product sells out. My iPhone has NO MUSIC ON IT.
Q: To what extent do The Residents or those associated with them practice magick? And for what purpose?[]
The closest The Residents have ever gotten to magic is Penn & Teller. Those guys will tell you it is all tricky illusions and The Residents believe that as well. It takes being superstitious to be religious, and none of us ever paid attention to that particular cultural aspect.
Q: Why were concerts so rare in the early days, then suddenly in 1982 or so you started touring?[]
There are different Residents for doing different things. The original Residents made music by layering recordings. That was not possible to do on stage in real time. In 1982, samplers came into existence which allowed layers to be built in the studio and then played back using a keyboard on stage.
So a performing Residents was built by adding to the original core. However there were only three touring shows over the next dozen years. Mole, 13th, CUBE E. So it wasn't like they suddenly became a touring band.
The real emphasis on touring happened once interest in records faded. Public interest in live shows got stronger because one could not download a performance.
Q: I see The Residents are touring Europe in the fall. Do you have any clues or ideas what we can expect to see?[]
I will guess that it will be a show of mostly older material as bands tend to do when touring. As you understand, I'm not working with the group and have not even met all the "Residents" for this tour. I just realized that I don't even know who The Residents are now myself!
Q: I've read that a "Gypsy" would administer the Residents ceremonial drugs when they had sessions. Regardless of that being true or not, how much of an impact did drug use have on the Residents musical output?[]
Funny. Any idea what the drugs were supposed to be because coffee was very popular? Sadly. there were no Gypsies or other exotic creatures, nor were there drugs in play, including marijuana which was widely popular and available in the early days. The reason was that The Residents didn't trust they would make good decisions in an altered state. It is the same reason not to drink and drive. The Residents had a period in their youth when they tried various drugs, but outgrew it and never had that kind of dependence.
Q: I was hoping Mr. Bobuck might be able to shed some light on Prelude to "The Teds".[]
Prelude to The Teds came about with the joining of a couple of different things. First, and probably most important, They Might Be Giants "commissioned" a piece for a CD series they were doing. We had some left over music sketches from Our Finest Flowers which had not been used for that project plus we had some ideas to shape into lyrics for a project called The Teds about two guys that together made one person. We saw an opportunity to test some Ted ideas so we took the opportunity to combine these three things into "Prelude to the Teds."
It turned out much better than anticipated.
Buck's audio bit for this newsletter[]
Will Rothers[]
"In the beginning, was the word." That always seemed like something a writer world say. In this case, the Bible, which is where that quote is from. A musician might think differently about what was in the beginning. Sound was probably on the first day of creation, words not until the sixth.
"Words" are a stand-in for the tangible and the intangible. They are vague references and often useless unless the one hearing or reading the word has the same information of the originator of the word. Even "piss" can be misunderstood between a US person and a UK person. Some words are just plain crazy. I mean, fuhgedaboudit.
Humans do love words. We will buy a product just because the word "organic" is written on the package. The Glenn Miller Orchestra is still touring even though Mr. Miller died decades ago and not a soul in the orchestra was yet born when Glenn Miller was around. But if called the Miller Glenn Orchestra, they couldn't get hired. It has to be the right words in the right order.
And there are the forbidden words. The words we don't say, or only say in a context that makes it kind of okay. My mother would freak out if, as a kid, I would say "hell" or "damn" unless I was discussing how a sinner would be dammed to go to hell. Then it was okay. Sort of okay.
I find it hard to imagine a world without words, but I can imagine that words could become archaic, more academic in their usage. I can imagine a world with direct thought transference without the necessity of words being part of the equation. Words would be social props used for making small talk because there is no mindful small talk. Kind of like the way that top hats have become only used for eclectic social events.
I suppose that the best zen statement I have ever heard about words was made by The Trashmen many decades ago.
Bird is the Word.
- Will Rothers
A person was once sentenced to deportation by Donald Trump. Trump couldn't decide how to send him out of the country so he said to the person, you can write anything you want, if it is true, I will ship you in a train's box car, if it is not true I will ship you in a train's cattle car.
After the person handed Trump his message, Trump became confused and said he was a FAKE PERSON but did not ship him out of the country. What did the person write?
-- answer below
Next time on Hacienda Bridge[]
Next time we meet on Hacienda Bridge,
we pick on ten guitar pickers for The Residents.
Links[]
- Web Site http://hardyfox.com
- Bandcamp https://bobuck.bandcamp.com/music
- Klanggalerie http://www.klanggalerie.com/gg240
- MVD http://mvdshop.com/search?q=BOBUCK
- Hacienda Bridge Blog https://hardyfoxblog.wordpress.com/
- iTunes Bookstore https://itunes.apple.com/au/book/the-swords-of-slidell/id1129364212?mt=11
- The Residents http://www.residents.com
"You will ship me in a cattle car."
Copyright © 2017 Hacienda Bridge, All rights reserved.
See also[]
- Hacienda Bridge
- Hacienda Bridge newsletter
- Hardy Fox
- Charles Bobuck
- Will Rothers
- Walter Robotka
- Klanggalerie
- "The Stone"
- "Wallpaper"
Resources[]
- H. Fox & Bobuck #14 (PDF file, 2.26 MB)