Rag Magazine Issue 3

Welcome to issue 3 of rag mag. Your ol' pal Creature here to let you know about 2 new ongoing features this week. Fresh back from a protest at the statehouse in Providence today with Mr. Mittens and the Wasteland Chick. Get out on the streets and resist. Witnessing a white nationalist meltdown in real time may be terrifying, but like the people in a pick up truck who drove by the protest and spit at my pre-teen daughter, they are literally scared of children because they are fascist piss babies. Anyway this week introducing “Splinters” by artist Leela Corman and part one of “Creature on the Road” by Mr. Mittens. All that plus Wasteland Chick is back with another classic punk song review and, as always, Creature's Double Feature. See ya next issue.

Scenes from the Providence Anti-Fascist Protest at the Statehouse on 2/17. Photos and video by Creature.

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“Splinters” - by Leela Corman

Wasteland Chick

This is my spirit animal everyday. What up, fellow wasteland chicks. How are you doing? I’m doing good. The song we’ll be reviewing today is “I’m Stranded” by the Saints. I give this song a 7.8 out of ten. This song is pretty good. It’s very vibe-able and melodic. It has a very exciting melody, and is pretty cool. The lyrics are a bit repetitive, but are very cool. A lot of repetition, as I mentioned, but there’s an exciting feeling in the lyrics and melody of the song, and I would definitely listen again. My final review: 7.8 out of ten, very vibe-able, a bit repetitive in the lyrics, but an exciting feeling is present in the song itself, so I would definitely listen again, like on the way to the beach, or at a party.

Sincerely, Wasteland Chick.

Demo-lition with the Pledge Pins

I caught the apes in Pledge Pins live a couple times last year and had a blast. Blown out catchy budget rock vibes and it doesn’t hurt that the guitarist is a hell of a baker. Fresh baked cookies is quite the incentive to see a band live in my middle age. haha. I picked up their demo tape, We Don’t Mind Dancin’ and it is a great throwback to the 90s budget rock with a great trashy sound. These simians take the classic cramps/mummies/fevers approach towards song writing by just playing other people’s songs. But you know they are overachievers cuz they actually wrote some of these lyrics. Check em out and hopefully they will be playing around again soon.

Record Time Magazine

What has your pal Creature been reading lately when not watching the rapid fall of the US into an outright dictatorship? That’s right its a brand new physical media only magazine by Scott Soriano, who you may remember from 90s garage punks Los Huevos, running the inimitable S-S records releasing classic records by the likes of A Frames, Cheveu and Nothing People, and the great, shortlived Z Gun zine. Here he is back with a wide range of contributors talking about all things records. Issues 1 and 2 are a diverse mix talking about everything from a deep dive into the fake punk world of every version of Ca Plane Pour Moi (Jet Boy Jet Girl), Sex pistols bootlegs, and Jack Webb of Dragnet fame and his association with jazz. Well researched, interesting, and Scott’s editorial blurb in issue 2 sums up a lot of what I think about record collecting. “I dig records for a lot of reasons. On of these reasons is the freedom that comes with analog. You do what you do how you want to do it, when you want to do it, figuring out how to do it as you go along, and no one monitors or takes notes on what you are doing. You go to the record store and buy an album, it’s nobody’s business but yours.” A great source of discovery here. Check it out at:

https://recordtimeorg.wordpress.com/

Records of the day for your ol’ friend Creature are a late 90’s swedish totalitar-esque raw punk blast from Chainsaw (despite being a one man band in the here and now) and a recent reissue of Ngozi Family’s Heavey Connection. Chainsaw’s When Will We Die is a solo effort by Jeff Poot and makes me want to smash my face into a wall. Ngozi Family’s Heavy Connection has abig sticker introducing me to Zamrock on it, and while I am already familiar, if you are not, get onto that heavy, fuzzed out Zamrock sound. “I really shot her…with my gun..yes I did”. I picked up these records in lovely Providence at two of our great record shops, Armageddon Shop and Analog Underground, so maybe you can too.

Creature’s soul song of the day is Nothing Takes The Place of You by Touissant McCall. The rawness of his voice just moves me.

“Creature on the Road-Part One” - by Mr. Mittens

I pulled my cargo van off the old paved road that wound through the miles of gold and green pine trees and turned left onto uneven ground hidden beneath a thin but persistent fog. This road (if you could call it that anymore) had once been a two lane asphalt strip that had been built to allow passage through a bog and the fetid swampland that surrounded it, but of course that was all gone now. My mom would tell me how cranberries were farmed out here, harvested in the swamp water tinted rust by the pine trees that circled both sides of the bog, but that was before I was born. A chemical spill and the runoff from it had caused the bogs to steam and churn, making the water too acidic for any vegetation to withstand life inside of it. This was the toughest part of my haul, the road sloped and dipped, big chunks of asphalt had been swallowed by the water on either side turning the two lane road into a treacherous and uneven strip with hazardous water on either side desperate to pull you in.

If the van slid or leaned too far I could kiss my ass goodbye. I could likely escape if the van submerged, but there was no wading back to land safely through toxic sludge like this. The only way to make it through the next 10 or 12 miles was to drive slow and keep my eyes open. When I was young and the bog road had still been reasonably wide, my mother would take me riding out here, she preferred it to the highway and all of its cameras. She would speed over the dying bog, a William Onyeabor cassette wedged in the player. The chemical fallout worsened however, and the state finally marked the entire barrens “at your own risk” meaning they had no desire to police it, and so if you found yourself out here, expect no punishment or assistance. Still, she’d suit herself up and go for a spin. She’s actually out here somewhere between the tip of the fourth submerged streetlight and the seventh. Her car, her cassette and her body forever dissolving into smaller and smaller unseeable pieces beneath the egg colored water. I find it brings me a weird sort of peace to drive this road, despite its dangers.

I unbuckle my seatbelt and turn the headlights up as high as they’ll go. The sun is low, hovering red and orange like an autumn leaf over the water. The fog’s clearing up nicely too, which will hopefully take some time off of the trip. As a driver, I don’t have to answer to anyone about time. There’s no guarantee for the recipient when I’ll arrive, but I still take a certain amount of pride in making sure the wait on the other end is as short as possible. Still, there’s no need to be risky on this leg of the drive, I could make up the time on a better road down the line.

The sun would set in about half an hour or less, and then the fog would clear once the ground cooled down. The sun was always too close and too hot nowadays, sometimes it felt like a dragon that lived directly above your shoulder, but out here near the bogs, the heated water turned itself into a toxic vapor during the day time. It smelled of rotten trash and rotten meat and it could slither its way into your vents causing you a terrible headache or spine cracking nausea depending on how your body tried to purge itself. I had no plans to spin out into the bog because of a migraine or spend another month over a bowl. I’d already lost too much work and I was down a pant size. But this time of year, when the moon brings cool air, it pushes itself back towards the bog and keeps it there as though someone had pressed a big pause button. There was no better time to take this delivery job, the weeks in between the heat and the ice are the only time to drive this road and I needed the work.

I idled along the road keeping my eyes ahead of me, feeling the sunset on my cheek. Soon, I’d see some Pineys catch up to me. They loved drivers, or more likely they loved headlights. There was a mutually beneficial relationship between the Pineys and the drivers, the Pineys got the benefit of a well lit walk and they kicked any debris out of the driver’s path all while keeping the speed of the vehicle in check. Any driver who would dare to fuck with them didn’t appreciate keeping some karma in their pocket for a bad day. When the chemical spill grew too large to contain, most of the remaining residents around this area finally relented and left. Most of the animals who’d lived here before the first human had given it a name, either fled or died out succumbing to disease after disease.

My mother had told me that when she was young and her mother would drive this road, she would watch jewel eyed crows with pieces of cranberry on their beaks sit like kings on the strange bent branches that grew straight up from the bottom of the bog. She had witnessed foxes and raccoons scuttle along the pine needles as they crossed the ends on either side of the bog road. Once, she’d watched a white bird with wings like a bed sheet and long legs sun itself under the November sun, as a stretched possum smashed by the wheels of a car bled out into the bog on the other side of the road. Nothing much with four legs or fur lives out here now, not even flat toads or birds with wings of any shape. There’s only two species that still remain in live numbers out here in the barrens, bats and Pineys. Both existing this far out in stubborn defiance of the evacuation order.

The bats have found survival by escaping the heat and the vapor by living deep within the abandoned factories that dot the barrens. I’m not certain what they used to make, even my mother didn’t know. I asked her one time why they didn’t rebuild them or build something new in their place but she’d laughed and said “there’s not a lot of love for the future out here, and not nearly enough respect for what has passed, some places prefer to stay in the worst of their moments Creature.” She had a way of phrasing that I’d always liked, even if it made no goddamn sense to me.

The Pineys, like the bats, hiding out in the daytime and living huddled in the deep dark tunnels they’ve built under their homes, returning to the surface in the evening to congregate and cook under the moon. The state had tried to use a bit of force to drive them out, but real born Pineys are a stupid and secretive group of people with a long history of handling threats with over exaggerated retaliation. They burned three troopers alive nailing their melted corpses forever glued inside their radiation suits to the first, second and third streetlights. The state left a tractor trailer full of supplies open on the road, and the world as it was moved on without them. The Pineys had simply receded further and further into the pine trees rebuilding cabins above cool dark trenches. Their homes were made from the scraps of old ones and reassembled like the pieces of a puzzle. Everyone assumed they would die, there were so many threats to living this close to the epicenter of the spill, cancer and other diseases let alone the threat of water and food shortages. Don’t get me wrong, cancer and hunger had culled the families by a wide margin, but in the past decades their numbers had steadily increased.

The Pineys, like the bats, seemed to have adapted to the toxicity and scarcity out of sheer force of will. Their lives seemed pitiable, but hell if I didn’t respect it. Several of the drivers I’ve talked to think that over time the toxicity has made them impervious to thirst or hunger, a few staunchly believe that the Piney’s have always had a sort of magic passed down in the blood. There’s a story my mother had been told when she was young about a monster who’d claimed the bogs and the land around it as its own. When the Pineys arrived out here in their carts and carriages the monster tried in vain to push them out but the Pineys wouldn’t go. They lost children, they lost livestock, all plucked like fruit from a tree by the monster, but they refused to be told what to do or where to go. In the end, they agreed to give their next life to the monster in exchange for the promise that they would never be moved again. Eventually, the monster moved on but those stupid bastards remained.

I don’t particularly believe in any sort of magic, but who knows, maybe they do have a bit of it in them. They’re certainly an odd group, made even more so by a couple generations worth of poison and bat meat. It’s hard to find any of them with hair anymore or fingernails. Most have visible tumors or growths on their faces or under their clothing. Personally, I haven’t seen a Piney that was more than five feet tall since before the last guardrail spray painted a neon yellow, had finally dissolved into the bog. They moved slowly and talked as little as possible. Gangrene- my dispatcher, said that it’s because their brains had been turned to mush by the inbreeding and sickness. I think they’re just hyper focused on survival, and they limit their energy to only necessary tasks. What the hell does Gangrene know anyway, they live in a school bus.

…to be continued.

Well, that’s it for another issue of Rag Mag, see ya next time and hopefully at some of the events below.