They Live
The Golden Rule: He Who Has the Gold Makes the Rule
You’re 12 or 13 and some film or album falls onto you and forever leaves an aesthetic dent in your psyche. Maybe you outgrow it, but sometimes you regrow it, seeing it anew. The camp decamps and your world echoes that essential feeling.
Two John Carpenter films did me and still do me. They Live and Prince of Darkness. One is about hidden power, the other is about an inescapable future.
Put on the Sunglasses, Rowdy Roddy Piper
It made sense to me as a kid. A city beneath the city. Take away all this color and read it to me in black and white.
Thirty-plus years later, there’s no need to cloak the message. Nobody wants to be awake anyway. Look, the life-optimization gadget merchants know:
(Calling all crews: Please come color up this billboard.)
Listen to this Wall.
In the parking lot on Haight and Shrader, right down the street from Escape From New York Pizza (inspired by another John Carpenter film) is one of the most enduring pieces of street art in San Francisco:
Rarely defaced and always healed, this message has survived for coming up on ten years. From the high waiting rooms of hematology and neurology at UCSF Parnassus, you can read this sign standing out amid the color and the canopy. Waiting for test results, sweating the diagnosis, you can fix your gaze on this black and white mantra.
Then you can take the train home.
The Name of the Game is “Make it Through Life”
I spent a lot of 2023 walking and listening to this ambient composition by YouTuber and synth expert Jay Hosking, which samples a pivotal scene from They Live. The scene is a discussion between Nada (Roddy Piper) and Frank Armitage (Keith David) during their lunch break at a construction site. Hosking transcribes the conversation over his song in real-time.
(The conversation begins at 6:10. But it’s worth listening to the whole piece.)
At the end, Frank asks Nada: “So how you gonna make it?” Nada, despite having seen the real world through the magic Ray-Bans, still manages to say without irony:
“I deliver a hard day’s work for my money. I just want a chance. It’ll come. I believe in America. I follow the rules. Everybody’s got their own hard times these days.”
They way Jay stretches and slows the sample, we understand Nada still speaks from a chosen sleep.
(This track also appears on Jay Hosking’s Bandcamp album “The North Shore - Ambient Works,” available here.)
Trash Bin Tarot: Blue Bin of The Sexy Freak
Black bin, green bin, gray bin, blue bin. These are the four suits.
Drawing for January 2nd, 2024:
Sometimes we need reminding that for all our drives for radical reinvention, we possess innate and indispensable qualities. City chicken (X-eye dead version) speaks to you from beyond the grave of 2023. Affixed to a blue recycling suit, city chicken wants you to know that though your form may be reborn, you are THE sexy freak, not merely A sexy freak. It is known on Clayton Street. Embrace your high/low, baby. UBU.
END TRANSMISSION.
-ERR