Hacienda Bridge no. 13
"Hacienda Bridge #13" (subtitled "Goddamn The Tar Man") is an issue of Hardy Fox and Charles Bobuck's Hacienda Bridge newsletter, sent to mailing list subscribers on April 1st, 2017.
This issue discusses Fox and Bobuck's Residents offshoot project Black Tar and the Cry Babies, and details a lengthy (but fictional) discography of previously unknown recordings by the group. Each entry includes one example track; these pieces of music were later gathered into the compilation album TAR-Nation: The Best of Black Tar and the Cry Babies. Despite this, all of the songs credited here to Black Tar were actually produced by an artist known as Stark Effect, and included as an April Fool's joke.
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.
Black Tar and the Cry Babies formed in 1982 when natural cell division, as foretold in the Book of Ibbur, forced the creation of two groups from what was originally only singular. One would carry the plus banner of the original Residents and the other would become the TAR, the minus creation, the un-Residents some would say, though that implies the un was a lesser embodiment. This was not true. Balance was the critical and delicate requirement, they had to balance.
This balance of light and dark, which is required by the Book of Ibbur, is called the "stone." The Residents would only be seen if they were the visible stone. The TAR accepted the invisible stone with grace and honor. If either strayed from the stone, evolution could reform them as the forbidden ARGOL.
A bell rung at midnight and the TAR is free of the shadow land.
Goddamn The Tar Man
The Poison of Time continues with the highly textured sound of The Entails of Tomorrow. It is an album of regret for time lost, of time ill spent, of time wasted by reading books instead of writing them.
◊◊◊ Bunny Rabbits, Satan, Cheese and Milk*
Black Tar and the Cry Babies discography
The Entrails of Tomorrow is a concept album about "Jonny." It follows Jonny through a series of morphs, from a discarded candy wrapper to a broken utility pole. Each form has a unique outlook on the world that ultimately leads the listener to understand that we are all Jonny.
"Perhaps this is no more than an elaborate, not very funny joke. I am not amused." Christian Daily News
Pink deviates from the usual style of Black Tar. Pink stands for Personal Interactive Nano Komputer. It is an artificial intelligence music composing machine. It played all the music on this EP in real time.
"This has all the joy of listening to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music on a rainy day." San Francisco Spectator
Season of the Witch is a series of dramatic abstracts set against pop lyrics. It features words from songs by Donovan, Crosby, Stills, and Nash; Leslie Gore, and, long time band favorites, Ace of Base.
Often referred to as Tar's "world" album, Smells Funny on the Inside can be seen as the most exotic of all their albums, evoking imaginary lands that could exist in the Middle East and Asia.
But this album's exotic land is not on the planet, it explores the organs of the human body, a kind of musical version of the film, Fantastic Voyage.
"Truly mind-bending" Rolling Stone
A darkly humorous satire of capitalist culture. Though, ironically, it contains some of the most popular music that Tar has ever recorded.
"Obey Consume" has the ability to make one shake his booty even though cringing. That doesn't stop it from being the best party album Tar has ever recorded.
"My feet won't stop tapping, but I never claimed my feet were the smartest part of my body." The Denver Post
In the previous chapter....
Peter, the local priest thinks he might have a ghost at the church. He called his friend Charles Bobuck to come help him investigate.
----------
Peter plopped down onto the pew and said, "I better call the sheriff."
Charles said, "Wait just a minute. Let me make sure the liver is still there."
Peter yelled to him, "Take a picture with your phone and we will send it to the deputy."
Charlie stopped at the door of the room, and slowly whispered, "Peter, I think you better come see this."
Peter’s brain suggested he stay right where he was but his feet were quickly taking him over to look into the room.
His worst expectations were confirmed. There against the back wall, sitting slouched in the poorly lit room was a nude man. Vomit spilled down his torso and onto the floor. The dripping liquid was being consumed by a swarm of black ants.
The person lifted his head and Peter saw it was the same face he had seen before. Peter whispered, “take a picture.” and Charlie lifted his phone and flashed. But even by the light of the flash it was easy for them to see that the photograph only showed the bare back wall. The man was gone just like before.
They checked the photo. It was a photo of ants eating vomit, but that was too abstract looking to represent any kind of proof. Charlie looked at Peter and said, “I don’t think you should call the deputy, this is not deputy type work.”
“I need to get home, too,” said Charlie. “Roman is making dinner.” Roman was Bobuck’s husband. Roman was a great cook. Peter gave a concerned look toward Charlie and Charlie, reading the priest's mind, suggested that he spend the night at their house and not stay alone at the rectory. Peter agreed that he didn't want to be alone.
Roman had made a mushroom lasagna and there was plenty to go around. Roman listened to the story with disbelief as they ate thin pasta slabs dripping in sauce and vegetables.
Charlie suggested that, while it was not a normal thing to see, that Peter’s education was full of similar events. Why shouldn’t there be weird things happening now like seem fairly common in the Bible? That maybe it was an angel. Peter said that angels always appear with a purpose, they don’t show up looking horrified and confused. “I think it is a ghost.”
Charlie didn’t believe in ghosts, but did accept that unexplained phenomena exists. He said that when he was younger, he had had a period of time he was diagnosed as epileptic. That when he had a seizure, his sense was that he was transported to a different place. “Maybe it is like that only an actual transport to a different place.”
The appearance seemed to be associated with that little side room and it seemed to happen about the same time of evening. The nude phantom didn't seem to be threatening. Charlie suggested that the next day they should wait in the room, themselves naked to reduce the fear factor should he appear again. They could try to speak to him. At worse it could provide more information, and if he didn’t appear nothing was lost.
Peter shuddered at the thought of them being caught naked in the little room. He knew Charlie well enough to sense that it could be nothing more than an excuse to be naked in the church.
The next morning Roman prepared a breakfast of crepes with clotted cream and homemade raspberry jam with a side of miniature turkey sausage medallions. Fortified, the two ghost hunters returned to the church, encouraged and excited by healthy sunshine after weeks of rain. Peter, unlike Charlie, actually had priest work to do, so Charlie went off to the nave alone. Opening the door to the little side room, he hoped to find a surprise waiting for him, but the room did not contain any naked ghost men. He went in and inspected the floor with the flashlight he had remembered to bring from home. Of particular interest was the "vomit" which was mostly gone, carried away by ambitious ants. What remained did not appear to be vomit. Bobuck thought to himself, ectoplasm, the sticky substance often associated with the appearance of ghosts. This surprised him because he really did not wish to believe in ghosts. He scraped some up into a little pill bottle. He wasn't sure why. There was no lab to send it to, no local college professor friend to analyze it. He felt he had gotten too much of his sleuthing instructions from watching TV, but he had no other guidelines. It was true that Charles was guessing at the substance. It was not ectoplasm. It was conductive gel.
Charles Bobuck sat on a pew staring into the little side room. What clue did he have to follow? A thirty-ish nude male. Why nude, he pondered. People were rarely nude in normal life. Maybe that was a clue. People bathed nude but the man wasn't wet. In fact the best answer was that the man was sleeping since most people sleep nude. No one would be sleeping yet in our time zone, so he assumed that it was a person who was not in the United States. He guessed Europe.
Charles lay down on the pew while still keeping an eye on the small room. Why was the man appearing here?
Slowly his eyes grew tired and he wondered what was keeping Peter. A deep sleep overtook him.
From nowhere, a naked man appeared at his side and purposely sat down on top of Charles head until the results appeared more like a centaur than any human ever seen. At one point the mans penis perfectly aligned with Charles' nose. The resulting image was quite funny though no one was around to appreciate it but Jesus hanging there on the altar. Then he stretched out, slowly being absorbed into the sleeping human, until all that was left was a sleeping Bobuck.
"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.
- to be continued
The Best when only the best will do.
Coming soon from KLANGGALERIE
show your support
get your membership card for TAR-NATION now
Hardy Fox and Klanggalerie present TOOK #4
more information on the CD release HERE
Coming May 15.
It's after the end of the world.
Don't you know that yet?
- Sun Ra
Obviously Sun Ra didn’t mean that we had managed to blow up the rock we call Earth in a poorly thought out war. That could still happen.
What I think Mr. Ra meant is that our culture, "the world," has hit some point that is worth noting. And that humans are too preoccupied with the past to notice.
I mentioned recently that music has evolved into a state similar to painting. Paintings are nice. Music is nice. Being horrified by cubism or rioting over The Rite of Spring is just not going to happen anymore.
We can have a painting of black on black. But we aren’t shocked. It could be unpainted canvas, or no canvas and only the wall showing behind stretcher bars. Doesn’t matter. We are over the idea of painting. Painting is so Tuesday.
Music is the same way. John Cage can record silence, but we don’t riot. The Residents can record wind and it doesn’t matter. People still tap their feet to it.
Once it doesn’t matter, it is over. Kaput.
How likely is anyone to be shocked by music these days? An earthshaking movie? A radical book? Maybe you will get a surprising product that actually removes bathtub scum without scrubbing, or a mobile device you don’t have to actually hold to use. Now arts amuse, not surprise. The surprise is anticipated, the shock is consumed before you actually have a chance to be shocked.
The day that the iPhone 7 was released, Apple news feeds were filled with articles on what to expect in the iPhone 8. When iPhone 8 comes out it will seem like old news and interest will be in the iPhone 11 or 14. The surprise is consumed in advance.
The “thing” has been replaced with an emotional need to fill a void: the excitement of expectation.
A big mover of this way of thinking is social media. People feel a need to communicate constantly, but in general, people have nothing to say. Words are stand-ins for experiences.
No one gets any attention for talking about what is common knowledge. So people resort to rumors and leaks for things that are coming in the future, the next Star Wars movie, perhaps. The culture has adapted and now feeds on that kind of energy.
Trump was not elected because he has plans. He offered to fill the void, "make America great again," though having no meaning it did combine the looking backwards with looking forwards. The past and the future are both illusions. It is a promise to fill voids with The Rite of Spring or Cubism, only from the mind of a politician. He can’t do it, voids can’t be filled. That is why it is a void.
Cultural apathy is not a bad thing though. It comes from a good place. It should be seen that we have at last progressed to the state where, not only does art not need to be sanctioned by the state or the church, it doesn’t even have to exist at all. That is linear progress. The human can now go beyond Renaissance paintings of Jesus to current epoch paintings of nothing and be seen as different versions of the same thing, a painting. Likewise, from Beethoven to Sun Ra can be heard as versions of the same thing, music. I mean, that is remarkable.
So here we are. We won. We got what we wanted: art opened the doors and now we see there are no doors. There never were doors. The message all along with art was to tell us that there are no rules, but now that we know that, what can we do with that information. Some will say we scramble back to when there were rules. That is where dictators come from. Stop free thought, control with excessive rules.
Others will be the donkey constantly trying to get that carrot... living in the anticipation of filling a void.
Both ideas are shit and only extensions of old brain. New brain? Well, new brain says not only are there no rules, there is no void. There never was a void.
Russia and the Eyeballs
Meetings with Russia have been much in the news lately. So here is a brief history of The Residents in Russia.
2001 The Residents made their first trip to Russia. Their equipment was held at the airport until they bribed an official.
Lenin's tomb was opened for them to see the dead former leader.
2003, they returned to Russia having local flights that did not want to carry their show equipment, almost leaving it sitting on the tarmac.
2010. The venue had not prepared for their staging needs in advance.
(2015, Charles Bobuck announces he will not play Russia due to their treatment of the LGBT community and other human rights violations.)
2016 - The remaining members return to Moscow. The Residents were not allowed to play the festival they were hired to play, which was shut down. because proper bribes had not been paid to officials.
Your purchasing of the
CD in February created a contribution of
$650 for Planned Parenthood of Northern California.
Hacienda Bridge thanks your generosity.
Ask Hardy Shit returns next newsletter
Next time on Hacienda Bridge
Next time we meet on Hacienda Bridge, we read words. Which came first, reading or writing?
HAPPY FOOLS DAY
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
* Composed by David Dixon, except I Got You Babe by Sonny Bobo. Performed by Stark Effect.
Copyright © 2017 Hacienda Bridge, All rights reserved.
See also
- Hacienda Bridge
- Hacienda Bridge newsletter
- Hardy Fox
- Charles Bobuck
- Will Rothers
- Klanggalerie
- Black Tar and the Cry Babies
- TAR-Nation
- Eggs For Breakfast
- "The Stone"
Resources
- H. Fox & Bobuck #13 (PDF file, 1.33 MB)