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PURCHASE
Author: ian.caskey@gmail.com
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We’ve got new songs!
From my music collaboration with Bentley Wood. These cuts come from an EP we’ve got brewing called Black Sprigs. Gothic folk songs set in a fictional midwestern town, loosely based on police blotters from Montana. Somber, heart-wrenching, and strange. Songs of frustration, homelessness, unfulfilled promises and buried desires. Threadbare, stark instrumentation with acoustic guitar, tonewheel organ, and humming. It’s the music of a many lost days.
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The Return to Kungming
In 1998, I spent Christmas with my paternal grandparents in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. There I recorded my grandfather, a WWII veteran Army Air Corps pilot, recounting one of his missions from the war. It was footage that I had shelved for more than twenty years. I knew I wanted to make something of it someday. Now it’s been almost more than ten years since he passed away. Making this video was also a chance for me to spend time with him again. I’m so glad he was one of the “lucky” ones to survive the war.
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Reuben Radding
This is a mini-doc/interview with Reuben Radding. He’s photographer who often takes pics in and around New York City.
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Man of the Saw
Ahhh, the soothing sounds of the Chainsaw Americans. You can hear them, less than a quarter mile away, marching up the avenue. Thousands of them, buzzing in unison. Louder than a flock of Harleys. There’s only one sound missing from that march and that’s the sound of my Vaz Deferenz KR-14.
A stub titanium blade with monster horsepower.
That stump daddy may look like a chump chainsaw, but the speed of the chain and zero-gravity weight makes up for what it lacks in a long-dong of titanium steel. The song of my Vaz Deferenz is a mighty scree. One I’ll be cranking sooner than later. Generally, I’m not an open carry kind of guy. That’s why I left my Vaz in Harlow’s apartment. But soon as I drop him off, I’ll crank up the Vaz, grind that stump daddy over my head, join the march, my saw among the many.
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After the Rides
We took the shuttle to the entrance of the theme park. My father said, Remember our car is in Squiggly section C.
The day was thrilling.
When we returned to Squiggly section C, there was another family inside our car. They looked just like our family. My father stopped my mother and me from yelling at them as they drove away.
We sat in the empty parking space. Many families came and went. None of them noticed us. A girl from one of the families stepped on my hand without acknowledging me. Eventually the parking lot was empty. The theme park tower lights shut down. We were exhausted and hungry.
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Voicemails from Boulder
My friend, Alex, had been drinking full time in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We used to call him baloney turntable because there was a warped round of sun-cured baloney on his turntable. Everything in his apartment was at crawl level, the mattress, loads of to-go bags and empty pizza boxes, and pictures he’d ripped from hardcore-and-industrial music magazines to tape to the wall. His drinking progressed until his family put him on a one-way flight to a long-term rehab in Boulder, Colorado. That’s when he started calling me and leaving me these incendiary voicemails. Why I felt the need to transcribe and make audio renditions of them I still don’t know, except for finding them utterly compelling.
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Dear Neighbor
Let’s say your next-door neighbor, who may or may not be mentally ill, wrote you a letter. This happened to my friend, Brian, in the fall of 2013. He was living in a sherbet-orange bungalow with his wife and three-year-old son in Highland Park, L.A. The letter was out on the walkway to the front door. No postage. When he picked it up, he noted his neighbor’s name, Ashley, in the return address.
In the year that Brian had been living there they had rarely spoken to one another. Ashley was a quiet neighbor, a mumbler in his mid-to-late forties, who kept to his side of the fence. Brian figured he might be living on disability. He never thought of him as a threat.
Ashley was often seen pacing about his own yard in an orange hoodie, smoking one Kool cigarette after the other. But the evening Brian discovered the letter on the walkway, Ashley was neither out on the lawn, nor peering out from behind the slats of his cream-colored bungalow. Brian could have just thrown the letter away without reading it, rather than bringing it to the kitchen to open it up with a butter knife.
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Secret Project Robot
This is from a release party at Secret Project Robot for the limited edition chapbook: Dollhouse Mountain (2012), a companion chapbook to Rodents in the Penile Garden (2011). These books were written during a celibate period in my life—in large part to exorcise the ghouls, farts, and horny demons from overruling my psyche. (But do they ever go away?)
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More Starlight, Please
Two men. Orson Welles and Marlon Brando. They veered off road somewhere in the Sonoran desert. South of the border. They crashed into a saguaro cactus. Over twenty feet high. The top swayed and dropped like an alien green chandelier. The rooftop buckled. The windshield cracked. Steam hissed from under the engine hood. Orson’s silver hair was askew as he stumbled out of the baby blue Coupe DeVille. A trickle of blood trailed from his eyebrow. He shouted out into the desert plain.
“Kiki!”
His toy poodle, black as the night. She was somewhere out there. She had bounded fast as a jackrabbit out the backseat window soon as they had crashed into the saguaro. Again he shouted her name, his voice booming out among the cacti and desert scrub.
Brando was outside the Coupe DeVille sizing up the damage. The saguaro, pronged with a hefty multitude of spiny arms, would take at least five men with push brooms to prod off the car. Then Brando gawked up at the starry night sky as if the galactic sprawl was from where the saguaro had crash landed. He swept both of his hands over his thick white hair as he continued to gaze up into the cosmos, the Milky Way a phantasmagoric spunk on all of outer space. He remained in awe.