492 Cafe

I invented a point of view that says Obama is the last white president. I thought about some situations where I wouldn't want to be found dead. I drank some hardening cider, went and hassled a rat. I thought about being autistic.

I made double enemies with a turtle. I went intertubing and I learned about Chris Lydon and the dandy man.

I took the number 1 bus to Dudley to shoot video at Chuck Turner's support rally and press conference. Along the way, I taunt T patrons for reading the Metro, which, I remind them, is corporate propaganda.

I find the #1, which wasn't on the lower busway, as I thought the MBTA website told me. It was on Mass Ave at or around Harvard Wigglesworth Hall D or E. For reference, the Red Line concrete hot-air mushroom for homeless hand-warming is at the end of Wigglesworth A.

At the bus stop, I discover a guy I knew from CCTV. He's a veteran who's into 911 Truth. I did a conference audio job for them last year at Fanny Hall. Great crowd, great time. The vet had disrupted a Chomsky speech I was supposed to amplify and record, and MIT had unexpectedly shut down the room amplifiers, so I was pissing angry scorpions, since Chomsky's about the quietest speaker alive.

So the vet shouted to the audience about his personal revolutionary political beliefs with until a woman finally shouted him down and rallied the others to banish him. I caught up with him a few weeks later in a church. We exchanged angry words, and he threatened me that I'll never work in this town again? Seriously. It wasn't my fault that when I ran the sound on his TV production, and someone didn't patch the audio in correctly, and we lost the sound. I ran the board, and had no way to know what happens after that. Maybe the angry veteran was right. Maybe we were sabotaged on that project, but did my job.

So we chat intensely about Soviet Realism, about Andre the Giant, and about what's happening to Chuck Turner, and he leaflets some bus passengers. He says the revolution will be televised, and I ask whether the television will be revolutionized. It continues until we arrive at Dudley, and I meet Chuck U at Turner's office, and I set up a camera, and he adds his mic to the growing stack. I mic the audience for good measure. As we wait, some chuckleheaded camera man clips a mic behind the loudspeaker, a Cobreflex III folded sectoral horn the Communist Union bus drivers have set up. It'll sound like shit back there, I mumble. "Probably what their evil masters want, so as to imply the rally sound sucked, where it only half sucked. The horns are hard on the ears. I could have brought my JBL's, and a mult box, and the communist bus driver union president, a guy who testified at my first wiretapping trial ... who once described the audio craft as "heavy lifting," had strung his cords too tight, and now and then a speaker would crackle out, requiring adjustment.

I'd tried, years ago, to help these guys with their gear. The rectangular horn that someone mounted sideways on a heavy cardboard tube, so the sound sprays up and down in a vertical line, rather than filling a useable audience space. I theorized this was likely to radicalize a lot of moles, squirrels and birds, because the head communist is really dramatic. Someone told me he paid some kid to rip his shirt during a speech, and I was there when it happened. This freaky kid, I swear he was autistic, attacked, and they pinned him and humiliated him. Then he got up, grabbed his crotchal area and gestured to me. I got all this, and in the end, HCIC is grandstanding up a hailstorm, nipples poking through where the crazy kid had presumably ripped the shirt. But I didn't see who ripped the shirt, so I don't know. That happened on the same spot as I wiretapped Officer Harer making crazy, illegal threats. The appeals court found that I had secretly recorded three MBTA Officers, even though I had only been accused of recording two. The judges also compared my recording equipment to a bag of drugs, the cops listed "a cassette deck and microphone" in the charges against me as a "weapon or controlled substance" and court house guards twice handed me weapons receipts while holding my cameras. This is true. If you bring a camera into a Massachusetts court house, they will take it, and issue you a receipt. But al the receipts say "weapon receipt." Presumably, if you handed them a sandwich, they would issue a weapon receipt. Apparently the Commonwealth is painfully aware that anything can be used as a weapon. Being that "the state" is best defined as the entity that is able to employ violence with impunity, it is in the state's interest to hoarde weapons, and to keep them out of the hands of regular people. In a court house, they carry weapons designed to kill, and you can't have a camera, and if you do, it's a weapon.
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