Kamera

Aughts Philly was long on glamour, indeed. Was the city glamour market necessarily cornered for that time period? Not from what I saw. Part of the attraction of Chicago in the Aughts was that you could see from a distance, right there online, all kinds of glamour bleeding out in different directions. So many presses, journals, reading series, so much dynamism, and the online presence was, indeed, immense. Once I got a taste of Aughts Chicago, I went slightly crazy with it. First, I was going to be there, then I was there. The second of four visits, in the summer of 2007, when I was still hitched to Mary H, was well documented. Mary H and Abby, as they had been in the early Aughts, had glamour-puss rivals in Simone and Kristy, as is seen here. The fact that Simone and Kristy were also powerful heads-of-state made it so that I could not not feel, that second visit, that I had securely arrived, even as I had done Myopic the first visit, met other heads-of-state. What do Philadelphia and Chicago have in common? They both happen to be big, real cities. That's a deceptively simple thing to say, but seasoned city-watchers will know what I mean. Through Wilco, Chi-Town also had an Aughts rock record of note, which Philly did not. I like to hear Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as Tweedy & Co's answer to Third/Sister Lovers. Decomposition and decay. Even as a walk down North Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park does something so Main Street Manayunk, and Bucktown does something so Roxborough, that people watching closely, about Philly-Chi-Town, would not be surprised that something had to give, and it did. Against decay.

More Than A Woman

So, the Bee Gees aren't supposed to be creepy, right? Yet, I've always heard & seen both Saturday Night Fever and the adjacent soundtrack as creepy. The songs are written ass-backwards, with all those loopy strings on them. Mid-Aughts Philly was also written ass-backwards, so to speak. Plenty of loopy strings, too. The sense that when Hannah Miller showed up, so many antes got upped among us, that we might as well all been hanging out, so to speak, and hanging loose, on the Verrazano Bridge. This, I documented in '24 on PennSound. Hannah Miller's Lady Godiva-ish sense of drama, and intensity, made everything around here pick up a macabre tinge. It was all life and death. That's why the political types she often ran with were, I felt, an odd choice for her. They affirmed her need for relevance, but denied the primordial sense that she needed to be dramatically backlit for intrigue and romance. The Saturday Night Fever level of the mid-Aughts was about fooling around on the Eternity version of the Verrazano Bridge. That's where Hannah and I did our dance. Within the sphere of danger. Also like Lorca's duende. And Hannah carried so much gut-level danger with her that everything she did and said could make your own guts drop. More than a woman to me, indeed. Even if it all had to happen hit-and-run style. The opposite, I would think, of the political. 

Drown

As may be a pressing question for interested parties: does State College bear out its existence from the heart of Pennsyltucky? Even more important: is Jen a Pennsyltucky Princess? The answer is no and yes. State College, like Philadelphia itself, subsists surrounded on all sides by Pennsyltucky territories. But the influx, in the small college town, of students and faculty from Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere renders the place cosmopolitan enough not to fall prey to Pennsyltucky syndromes. Where Jen was from, Liverpool, in the Harrisburg 'burbs, really is el primo Pennsyltucky real estate. Which means that, between being a city suburbs kid and being high as a kite on crack, I was destined for a big culture shock when I crashed there in '96. I felt strongly at the time: I could either channel Johnny Cash or Arthur Rimbaud. I chose Rimbaud. Back, also, to the Nineties. The cultural Nineties in America have a long and short version for me. In the compressed narrative form: the Nineties let popular culture get much more real than it usually does. This, I watched from State College. But The Pumpkins were a Zeitgeist band about the issue of real musical reality impinging on corporate third-world-ism and death-emphasis. With a soundtrack like The Pumpkins, it was easy to get transcendental. And ride the Nineties roller-coaster and appreciate it for all it was worth. 

Obscured

Springtime always makes me think of State College. Worth saying that, where writing is concerned, my years in State College were my apprentice years. Seriously creative people know— to get to the point where you can create what you want to create, years have to be ploughed through of churning out garbage. From 1994 until the spring, specifically, of 1998, I did, in fact, churn out my fair share of garbage in State College. I witnessed the Alternative Revolution tempest at the same time, from State College. The Pumpkins were, also in fact, demi-gods in State College. They were everywhere. Even the football guys. And when To Happy Valley appeared on PennSound in 2024, it got lost in the shuffle a little bit. It shouldn't have, because, in the spring of 1998, I had the most profound creative breakthrough I ever had, at least until Apparition Poems. Over a succession of days in April, I found myself using language to pierce through reality-holes in a way I never had before. The right forms appeared at the right times. My last increment of time in State College, April to Novemeber 1998, was thus, by far the happiest. I passed my own self-imposed Comp Exams. And this is a Pumpkins tune I heard at a party in someone's flat in May, that sent me into a paroxysm of ecstasy. Earth magic and rock magic together. The spring that arrives, and never really leaves. 

Jeepster

When Blazevox re-released the e-book Beams in 2025, I had no recourse but to revisit the fall of 2007, when the e-book initially appeared. I had just broken up with Mary H, again. Temple was Temple. At the Last Drop, Annie Daley, who appears as Dana Blasconi in Letters to Dead Masters, was documenting a bunch of heavy situations in a heavy-handed fashion. Thus, we had not only Electric Warrior, as is seen here, but Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and In the Court of the Crimson King. Records were never spun lightly at the Last Drop. You might or might not know the purpose, at any given time, but the not-casual approach to hipster-ism was their stock in trade. The moodiness, kinkiness, and sexiness of the T. Rex formed, as of the fall of 2007, a nice power block against the ogre stuff. Did the crowd notice I suddenly had books out? Some of them did. But the situation, me against an array of people in books, all in a line, was a congested one. It was a time when I relied on Chicago to really get my kicks, and feel like I was breaking new ground. The early and mid-Aughts were the really magical Philadelphia years. Even as the Last Drop remained a solid anchor-place, a place that mattered. 

Miss You

The reason I had for having to hear Some Girls, and "Miss You," interminably in the mid-Aughts, is a typical one. McGlinchey's was a bar, on 15th Street between Locust and Spruce in Center City, that served as a night-by-night base of operations for the Philly Free School then. McGlinchey's in the mid-Aughts had two flagship albums filling up the nightly music roster— Some Girls and London Calling— so The Clash and The Stones were an imperious presence there. What I say about Mary Evelyn Harju in Buffalo 8 is the truth— for personal reasons, she wanted to be absolutely still, absolutely quiet in East Falls then. But what that meant in practice for me, is that with all the riotous drunkenness, there was still a quiet space in me somewhere that was lonesome for the sense of solid connectedness I'd had with her. Hannah was another tornado, but with the juggernaut her life was, no real space remained that I could see to bond with her in a marriage-like way, as I had done with Mary H. Abby similar, and the rest. I missed Mary. So that the deep-in-your-cups version of hearing The Stones, who I'd seen on their Steel Wheels tour as a kid, was the dominant version here, as the long, long drunken nights of the mid-Aughts in Philly played themselves out.   

Peg

Peg, in this song, is, or appears to be an aspiring actress, Jade, from Equations, as is seen here in Scud, is an established actress. However, in presenting the two of them, however much I might value Scud, or Equations, I myself am acting, and with an ulterior motive. You see, the drama in the mid-Aughts was around Syd, but it was also around these guys. Nights of drama, in which, phone-call by phone-call, e-mail by e-mail, Mike Land and  I planned our next move, always with Steely Dan being spun on the side. Not to mention taking the Dan stuff to Henniker and making it resonate with Henniker Heat. So, with Syd first on the list, the second thing to be spun at the Highwire was Steely Dan. The real-life Jade to emerge in the mid-Aughts was like to tangent to the Jade in the book. "Didn't mean to get scarlet on your hands, son." There it was— the entire period of wanton mid-Aughts excess in Philadelphia was shaken loose with a sense that all that session-musician slickness, artfully obfuscating all that intense warpage, put us on the surface the right way. Then, all the quicksand beneath us could stay manageable for a while. And back to Peg, and the sense that Syd with a Donald Fagen chaser might seem like an odd bet, but everything in Aughts Philly was an odd bet, wasn't it?

Hold On, Hold On

And we can thank the supreme girl magus warrior of Aughts Philadelphia, for leaving us no pictures whatsoever. Plenty of paintings, no pictures. Thanks, Jenny Kanzler. Who, btw, if anyone is wondering, does deserve to be a pin-up next to Mary and Abby. Another looker. But, as I was saying— 2008 was the big joker in the pack year for Aughts Philly, as far as I could see. The party was still going on— sort of. And when Jenny Kanzler showed up in 2008, we were just to be friends. And sparring partners. This, after all the indeterminacy of the early Aughts. Doom and gloom rhetoric, heart-of-darkness alibis, javelins waiting to be hurled— this painter had turned abrasive. Had always been— sort of. What got published in 2025 in Talking About Strawberries is about someone who, like Neko Case in this song, loves the Devil. Neko Case herself being relevant as another Aughts talisman person who was just around. Someone I discovered, in fact, in 2008, after Mary and I had bitten the fucking dust, man. Abby was running around loose somewhere, and I didn't know where. Neko Case— country noir. For those around the country to understand— Philly, beneath the patina of East Coast-ishness, does have a country streak. Philly happens to be surrounded by Pennsyltucky territories on all sides, including Reading, which is Taylor Swift. Neko Case works in Philly. And Jenny Kanzler loved us enough to leave us no pictures. Sympathy for the Devil?

Astronomy Domine

Craziness. Telekinetic powers. A Tintoretto-ish sense of ascension/descension (moving the music, moving the audience). But, most of all, Syd Barrett, as a signifier in rock music, had and has so much to do with mind expansion, over and above anything else. Syd Barrett: a human conduit for expanding your mental, or hyper-mental, parameters. The Philly Free School wanted that energy around us. The shows at the Highwire Gallery we staged, as I have written about, were meant to be as mind-expanding, awareness-expanding, as possible, and by any means necessary. Spectacles. So that, helps to understand that as the initial audience began to shuffle in, what they would hear, more often than not, is Syd. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This embedded, is the first track from the album. And this is relevant to what just went up on P.F.S. Post, and elsewhere, about the incredible debauched ambience of the shows, because we put the right talismans out, like Syd, and bang! Presto! They worked! Syd was what was most representatively spun at the Highwire. The Khyber, btw, didn't give us enough control to spin anything. You couldn't do that there. But the Highwire was boundlessly about what we boundlessly wanted it to be about. Some people took that energy, Tintoretto-style, and ascended, some, like Anastasia in the piece, went into descent mode. Odd intervals. Chromatics. Our translation of UFO in 1967. There aren't many authentic ways to recreate that energy, if anyone is interested in doing so. This song is one. 

I'm Waiting For The Man

About New York in the Nineties, there could be a lot to say. There could be, if Manhattan for me was more than a series of near-misses. Something big almost happened for me in Manhattan, a number of times, as a writer and an artist, but in the end, nothing really coalesced. All of which means that I have to cut against a number of conventional grains to tell my story the right way. Where and how it was that, over the course of the twentieth century, New York was able to take a formidable lead over Philadelphia culturally on the East Coast, I know. It's a tangled story, and it involves the government, the racier, nastier parts of Europe, and the will of the founding fathers. Not to mention, also, what has been built into New York as an ultimate purpose from the beginning. It's not a nice purpose. But suffice it to say, the true-blue writer, uncorrupted by willingness to dilute himself in any way to express himself, has always been persona non grata in New York. That's me. Whatever ground was broken for me in Manhattan at the end of the Nineties, would have to be the kind of sideways and backwards ground that expressed something inessential, incidental, if also intriguing to some. Thus, what I now have on Art Recess 2. Abby has to come up, but here I speak for myself, not Abby. Time will tell what records were kept to really understand what Abby thought of her home town. My home town too, sort of: I was born in Manhattan. Or, rather, I arrived in New York, on February 7, 1976.

Alright

If you were wondering if there ever would or could be a Philadelphia riposte to Sex and the City, you need look no further than the Philly Free School. A little coyness would seem to be appropriate, because we  were always about doing serious work, and having our work be taken seriously. But as I have written about Mary on Art Recess 2, we were all extremely serious about playing, being players, too. If you want to stick us with the geek mold for having been classicists, you are going to have to get the fuck out of our way. We played, played for real, and played for keeps. About matters of the flesh, Mary was a gaming avatar. The city that gave some real kids, like Mary and I, a stage on which to really play happens to be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, babes. New York up close is a chastity belt kind of place. We spent the Aughts with steam coming off the streets, out of the bars, issuing even from the galleries. The whole game, as this piece addresses, starts for Mary and I in the Nineties. As we learned the ropes, subconsciously we knew we would be ready for each other. And for whoever else came along.   

Hungry Like The Wolf

Not much to say that what Abby & I do relates to Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. It doesn't. Yet I call us Neo-Romantics, and the aegis thing we have going for the Aughts Neo-Romanticism, for complicated reasons. Then, there were the New Romantics in pop music in the early-to-mid-Eighties. They are worth bringing up here, because, on both musical and fashion levels, they were Gaetan Spurgin's bag. Gaetan, as I have written about in The Seattle Star and Scud, resembled Mary H in that he cared very much about self-presentation. His clothes were a part of who he was, and he related to them as such. The band he was in when I met him as of 1999, Metro, played music more tilted to straight rock, but their fashion moves were a Goth-ed out version of the Neo-Romantics. Not the posh side of the New Romantics, as it were, the racy side of them. A heavy emphasis on Eighties fashion meant that Gaetan's studio, as was later established, always had the New Romantics lined up to be played at key times. Gaetan's thing with glam meant, along with other things, that he was often the most elegantly wasted human being on the East Coast. Nineties grunge passed him by, and he had nothing to say to indie rockers either. Watching Gaetan share venue space with indie rockers was always amusing, because he was a stickler for sharp dressing and indie rock dudes in those days dressed down. Also interesting to understand that Gaetan was real, human, and had some depth to him. He could turn off the New Romantic persona whenever he needed to. Mercurial. And, with lots of European experience, an interesting contrast to the rest of Aughts Philadelphia.  

Blow Out (Don't You Want Me?)

Can't not notice the balls-out, extraordinary resemblance this classic vid holds to Brian De Palma's Blow Out, from 1981. In terms of what a song/video can do, a milestone. Not to mention the female lead (Ms. Sully), her also extraordinary resemblance to Justine Caskey. Word up.