This is the new Juiceboxxx video, “The Saga Never Ends,” from his upcoming mixtape.

If Valerie just does four more videos, I think she’ll have a larger YouTube presence than me.

P.S. The reason I named her “Valerie Solanas” is that, when I first rescued her from the OC pound, she used to bark at MEN. A LOT. Especially manly men. I found out later that she does this because she LOVES men, but that’s another story…

There was a time during the second half of the George W. Bush administration where I went through the second most painful breakup of my life: the girl I was living with left me and almost immediately took up with a far handsomer, younger, and incredibly richer guy. The life we’d just started together in a fancy-schmantzy loft in Santee Court downtown went belly up. And yet wouldn’t you know it? Somehow my ex sublet another apartment in the same building, which meant she moved out but didn’t really move out. I had to get out of there and find better accommodations before I wound up torturing myself over whether I did or didn’t see her car in her parking space every night.

In hindsight, I might have landed on my feet even better than she did. I had just conned my way into a lucrative tech job, and then I immediately earned a bunch of money in a weird stock sale thing. Theoretically, I was a single man, young, okay-enough looking and with a bunch of money in my pockets.

But I was depressed as only a 20-something in love can be. I ended up frittering away a lot of that money on boozin’ and random purchases and partying and bad car choices. And then one afternoon, I jumped over a friend’s fence on a goof and broke my right foot, which meant expensive cab rides all the damn time, even to work in the morning. Downtown L.A. to Pasadena every morning in a cab costs something like a million bucks.

But there was one feather in my cap that I never failed to appreciate, and that was the loft apartment I moved into on Santa Fe and 7th. This was the best home I have ever had. It wasn’t a mere loft apartment with tall ceilings–it was a warehouse, made out of bricks, with a real bathroom and hardwood floors and couches and nice partitioned rooms, but also the scuffiness that comes with converting something industrial into something homey. It was a ground floor space that was as convenient for functional warehouse behavior as it was for living; my roommate frequently brought his car in to work on, which you could do easily, since there was a huge metal garage door on one wall. This had once been the kind of place where train cars pulled up and unloaded cargo, where men got to work and punched a card to prove they’d been there. And now it was a haven for a would-be artist trying to quit smoking, a blisteringly precise drummer who bartended the Standard at night, and me.

My room, semi-partitioned off from the meat and potatoes of the loft, was over 1000 square feet, a huge cavern all to itself. There was no doorway to it, just an entrance so big I had to commission a seamstress friend to make giant curtains to provide a little privacy. Cleaning was a snap: just push stuff over to one wall and run a broom through things. Over the bed area in that room were two giant black metal beams that came to a point above my bed, like something straight out of Metropolis, or maybe a Ronnie James Dio video. For the girls who came over and ended up having sex with me, climbing into my bed must have been like climbing into some cushiony corner of the Blade Runner set, with a bit of the live-action He-Man movie and Larry Clark’s Kids thrown in (me being a mix between Tully and, I dunno, Chloe Sevigny, but when she’s all drugged and talking to gross cabbies).

That was an era when, by my meager standards, I had incredible success getting women to sleep with me. Bear in mind, I was a complete wreck, with a weird page boy haircut and a bunch of goofy hats and no sense of style—and due to the broken foot, I was on crutches a good portion of the time. Clearly it wasn’t my own charms that seduced these ladies: it must have been the apartment.

I mean, even the exterior of our building was cool! There were fake double-doors in front, since it had been the exterior of Rolling Stone Magazine in the movie Almost Famous!

Actually, our neck of the woods was kind of like Exterior City. This being the Toy District, we were near a lot of industrial looking facades, including our own building, and the L.A. River was basically our backyard. Every other week we’d have bulletins on our doors letting us know that they’d be shooting an episode of 24 or an action movie, and to expect “helicopters and gunfire.”

But it took us until one of our roommates moved out to find out how badly people wanted to film inside of our warehouse. One of the first responses we had to our Craigslist post for a new roommate was a music video director: “I don’t want to live there, I want to film there!” One Russian pop group video later, a lucrative side business was born. Another, then another, then another music video was shot at our warehouse on Santa Fe Ave, each one leaving tons of free craft services and a bunch of gouges in the floor.

And so it came to pass that one morning I found myself lying in bed, me and my current amour unable to keep sleeping, because this song was playing over and over again just outside my bedroom. Even compared to all the bands that had been there before, this video shoot was loud. FUCKING loud, like louder than a metal gig, loud enough that I was afraid the cops might come, even though it wasn’t even a live recording; the band (think they were called Colorforms at the time) were just lip-synching to their own loud song and hitting drums over it.

Given what I know about myself at that age, there was a strong chance that I’d drank a lot and partied a lot and had probably been up until the wee hours the night before, doing god knows what with the angel next to me. I was NOT pleased with this volume situation, not at fucking all. And worse, the band  kept playing the beginning part of the song over and over again, the part where her voice starts up at the top of her range and twists its way down, like a sing-song, Regina Spector nursery rhyme: “IIII think that we make a pretty good team/don’t think we should break up, nooooooo...”

It was a fucking terrible experience to snuggle your way through, groggily, from the other side of a flimsy wall. And as you can see in the video, the singer kept changing outfits, and each new outfit change meant a run through the song about ten more times. In my memory, the shoot only lasted until mid-day, but they must have kept recording for a while to get all that footage in all the permutations.

Eventually we got up and wandered around the borders of the house, just off-screen of the giant white background they brought (or was it a green screen?), bemused with how many people it took to make this video that didn’t have a lot of things going on in it, and yet how few people and little money it seemed to be requiring.

You know, suddenly it didn’t seem so terrible that this was going on. What fun to see people baring their souls to a camera in your own house! It was clear that the singer really wanted this to work: there was confidence in her eyes, but I also detected something like desperation, that this shoot had better work because she had invested so much time and probably so much money, and that all the people around her might very well disappear if this video didn’t lead to even bigger and better things. The other guys in the band—well, they looked like serious nerds to me, which in my utter exhaustion, I found both hilarious and humbling. I wasn’t a nerd at all! And yet no one wanted me to be in their videos (well, not yet, but that’s another story).

Years later, I can listen to this song with much different ears. I can hear the craft in it, and the bouncy bass lines care of the long-haired “nerd” I now realize was Bram Inscore, who went on to play with Beck and Coco Kixx and a ton of others, including my personal fave, Electrocute. And of course, there’s Alex Lilly’s wonderful voice. Yes, only now after hearing the song and looking her up do I realize that it is this Alex Lilly who is in the Living Sisters, where her melodious voice blends with some of my other favorites of the modern era). It looks like she and Bram have a new incarnation, Touché, and I’m excited to hear more from them.

It’s a wonder what seven years and a good, non-hungover night’s sleep can do to improve your sense of enjoyment. Now when I hear this song (and I’ve been playing it all day) it makes me smile. It makes me remember being in a bed, the noonday sun coming in around those metal beams, a lovely young woman with me to curse the loud music and yet laugh at how fun life is, how ridiculous it can be, in a world where people would pay money to put a screen in someone else’s house because it was kind of like a warehouse, on the ground floor, near the L.A. River.

And now we don’t live there anymore, and it’s a real warehouse, and the company that operates out of our old place smashed out that bedroom wall. Even if somehow I could kick out the guy whose desk now sits below my metal beams and get the keys for myself, there’s no wall anymore to put the green screen on one side of, with sleepy hungover lovers on the other side to grimace and grouch and grin. The way I’m headed, I might never be woken up by a band recording a video again.

But I doubt it.

-D. M. Collins

Roots Ask No Permission

Roots ask no permission to take hold;

They only need an environment.

I want to be drunk on foolishness

Until all taste buds leave my mouth,

Or until my senses are dull,

Or the banshees quit their song.

The winds collapse their sails

The paper stops its trail

And the empty, standing invitation waits you out.

Breathe in, accept the invitation to travel to unexpected places.

Places that fill spaces we create in our minds,

Minds that we leave bleeding,

Happy,

Trickle into our lives

With no regard to the paths they lead us to,

Yet show us more than we could ever conceive.

Left to our own devices,

We wallow in our vices,

Up to our chins in sins.

Sins of pleasure,

Sins of passion,

Sins that only spill from the mind of a

Strictly

Religious

Conservative,

The kind a liberal ceases to imagine,

To leave a literal sense of the world,

A case of the sincere sense of the word,

Of ice age mountains

Collapsing amongst the warming of the earth.

Thanks and thanks and thanks again to Brother Bobby Bones, who first introduced me to Shuggie’s music.

-D. M. Collins 

The line-up this time has some really great authors and poets, including a return visit from the wonderful Jessica Ceballos, who wowed us a few short months ago. But it also has my old band mate, Asa Ferry, one of the best songwriters I’ve ever worked with and a man who really captures reality in a way not all of us catch or perceive–even if he just reads a sentence, it’ll make you float away later, looking at cumulus clouds and wondering why you’ve never seen the little shimmers that cascade from puff-pocket to puff-pocket before.

We also have Ryan Fuller from Fort King, and … goddam, there are too many people to talk about! Just read the list and kick yourself if you’re unable to attend:

Jessica Ceballos (Bluebird Readings)
Roy Rogers Oldencamp (Bluefat)
Beverly M. Collins (Quiet Observations)
Daniel Austin Warren (Black Hand)
Asa Ferry (Kind Hearts & Coronets)
Ryan Fuller (Fort King)

As always, this event is “hosted” by the not-ready-for-print-time player, L.A. RECORD’s D. M. Collins. That’s me!

A Rrose in a Prose
@the Hedgehog
2201 W. Sunset Blvd
(same side o’ the street as Mohawk Bend)
in Echo Park
April 28th @ 3 p.m.

-D. M.  Collins

-D. M. Collins

But our guest of honor, Allison Anders, couldn’t be there–she had the sniffles and was a little under the weather.

I thought it would be fun to have the audience write her a get well letter, but not a conventional one–rather, we’d write it as an Exquisite Corpse, the dadaist game that if you don’t know by now, you must have had no fun in high school. Basically, you take a poem or story or drawing, one person starts it off, and the next person does the next little bit only getting to see where the connection is but not what the piece as a whole might be, not until it’s finished.

We opted for the prosaic Exquisite Corpse, where one person writes five lines, paragraph-style, and then passes it along to the next person, who only sees the fifth line and has to try and continue the thought. And it started off great, much like a get-well letter should be! But then very very quickly it descended into a place of madness, of darkness, sex, and depravity, so that I’m worried it will be like a Groundhog’s Day of health and scare Allison back into sickville! Truth be told, I think some of the people didn’t listen to my full instructions and thought they were writing a poem, not a get-well letter, which explains all the blood and cum. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to actually show this to Allison. Maybe she’ll stumble across it after she’s feeling a little better.

Here is the final piece we came up with. For the sake of clarity, I’m titling it:




SODA AND THE WOMB

Dear Allison,

My name is Mallison. I know, weird right? I’ve known many women named Allison (or Alison), and our relationships have been passionate and tempestuous. I hope my baby doesn’t wake up. Is that a non-sequitur? Perhaps, but I’m just being honest here.

We’re sitting here, relaxing, enjoying our coffee, and it’s the foremost thing on my mind. XXX. I want you to feel good! You have shared so much joy, inspired such creation. I’m closing my eyes & sending love and picturing you naked.

In the bathtub
drinking Coca-cola
and sending a fax to the
Skype.

A nice medium for virtual sex
will get you better
in body and soul
electric spirit electric sex

Crazy girls make the best nest
Salami bitch and brazen whore
Trickster meets a lackluster boar
La la la baking with flour
Staring down the craven hour

You can see things coming into focus, sharp, clear, bright—then fluffy, cottony, floaty again, but this time it’s totally fun.

And the demons will be on the run. So many hearts need to be won! The world catches up to you. True blue indigo womb.

You fascinate the fascination of my body up against yours. Smashed in blood mixed with sweat.

I reach for you
drawing you in
licking the blood off your stomach

I CHOKE ON YOUR DAD’S CUM
and all your mother’s insecurities

-Ryan Fuller, Drew Denny, Flannery Lunsford, Charles Mallison,  Greg Saunders, et al.

The bad news is, due to health concerns, Allison Anders will not be joining us. We should compose an Exquisite Corpse poem for her to help her feel better! As long as things go well, and they seem to be doing so, she’ll likely be on her feet for next month, or in the months to come. Luckily, we do have a representative from her camp, as Flannery Lunsford, the star of her film Strutter, will be reading with us.

It’s at the Hedgehog in Echo Park, 2201 W. Sunset Blvd, at 3 p.m. See you there!

P.S. More info at the Facebook invite HERE.