The Karaoke Threat

The stage is set, and it's green – green floor, green wall, and green gaffer's tape covering the flaps we rigged to cover electrical outlets in what used to be the prison's barber shop. A microphone stand breaks the monochromatic expanse, standing alone in front of the unnaturally verdant backdrop. LED fixtures shine from every angle, and the lenses of three cameras impassively wait to take in today's performance.

Opposite the stage is an eight-foot-wide black desk fronted in smoky gray Plexiglas, where the two judges sit in front of black drapes. Their microphones aren't on, and they're discussing unrelated matters while a crew bustles in attendance to last-minute details. Just off-camera, in a cramped semicircle of six stackable, tan, plastic chairs, sits today's motley assortment of contestants, excitedly chatting amongst themselves. The setting described here is XSTREAM Media's studio, where my coworkers and I in the prison's media center record shows on topics that run a gamut from in-cell cooking (THIS IS FIRE) to conversations about music (The Playlist), to embarking on needle-and-thread projects (Sew What?). I currently manage the whole fiasco, scheduling, setting up for, and directing shows, then doing most of the editing and compositing that comprise the post-production process. I do all this, but I'm hardly the star. The distinction of top billing belongs today to the half dozen people readying themselves to appear on what is arguably XSTREAM Media's most daunting production. The Karaoke Threat is a singing competition. It demands that participants bring their A-game, brace themselves for the unexpected, and leave self-seriousness at the door. Round One starts with six. Each wrote their name a song selection on the signup sheet that hung in the gym for the past month. Our two judges – my fellow Team XSTREAM member Kenny and the winner of the show's last go-round – score every contestant on voice quality, technical accuracy, and "wow" factor. Only half of the people who sing in Round One move ahead to Round Two. In Round Two, the judges choose the three remaining contestants' songs, then someone else gets eliminated. The final round is a zero-sum affair where each singer chooses what song their opponent will perform. Round Three can get a little crazy. Whoever wins gets to not only return as a judge in the next installment but also to call out, or "threaten," someone else to sign up and compete. XSTREAM Media offers a trivia competition (I Knew That!), a weekly panel discussion (4Thought), a cheekily hosted movie of the week (Spotlight Cinema), video-game walkthroughs (The Game Corner), life-coaching (Real Talk), daily five-minute news broadcasts, and more. It's little wonder why Prison Journalism Project called XSTREAM "a media giant." But it's The Karaoke Threat, our felonious riff on shows like The Voice and American Idol, that holds the honor of being our audience favorite. From behind a literal curtain, I cue up everyone's selections. Jackie's opening the show with "One Love," by Trey Songz. Then Greg, an older guy in my wing, is performing the New Edition throwback "Candy Girl." Chelsea, a transgender woman, is doing Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time" after that. Next is Brian, the clean-cut host of the XSTREAM series Spotlight Cinema, doing the Rollins Band hit "Liar." Arthur, a developmentally disabled man, is giving his best to R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly." And last up is resident goofball Kenyatta, singing "Forget You," by Cee Lo Green. The studio's desktop computer, where I'm posted, has access to hundreds of karaoke videos on XSTREAMnet, sourced from YouTube by our bosses and saved in a growing library. I can't watch the performers from where I sit, but I can see what they see on the display mounted to the judges' desk. I notice every time they screw up the words. The judges don't. Sometimes I think it allows me to appreciate the performances on a different level; sometimes I think it just allows me to deduct more points for inaccuracy. Not that it matters, either way. My scores are the karaoke equivalent of fantasy football. A lieutenant approached me one morning at breakfast, last month sometime, to say that even the guards who work the midnight shift are Karaoke Threat fans. She said that after the prison quiets down, they sometimes get together in the custody complex and watch a little TV. If The Karaoke Threat is on, they usually root for the prisoner who shines boots for the staff, who appears regularly on the show and never fails to get fully into the spirit of things. Music truly can bring people together, and the lineup today represents a unity and diversity that XSTREAM tries to foster with everything we do. When Jackie, Kenyatta, and Arthur qualify for Round Two, the tiny studio erupts with almost deafening applause. In a few weeks, this episode will broadcast throughout the facility, and everyone will momentarily see Arthur as a hero – a status his life has rarely permitted him to have. As for Chelsea, even though she doesn't get a score high enough to advance, it's not because she's trans but simply because her singing is howlingly bad. She still has fun and sticks around to cheer on her former competition.

Jackie and Kenyatta enter Round Three, having chosen Katy Perry's "Roar" and Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off." I've actually never heard either of these sung by the original artist, but having no basis for comparison might be good thing, considering.

The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything Is...

Turning forty-two in prison could've been an invitation for depression. Just as likely, it could've simply passed without fanfare, an otherwise unremarkable Monday in a place renowned for fostering undifferentiated days. Something like a conspiracy unfolded, though. The people I love took steps to make my forty-second special. They made not only the day great but the week as well.

Goodness began trickling in last week, with the first of the birthday cards and a bizarre video on my tablet. Those colorful greetings came from all over, from neighboring states and countries on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean alike, all of them wishing me good cheer, good health, and, of course, impending freedom. Each card I opened brought a smile, so very appreciated. In the middle of one night, I awoke to several envelopes slid across the floor by the door. I had gone to sleep assuming that a guard delivered Friday's mail without me noticing. That hadn't been the case. (Like most things here, mail delivery times are wildly inconsistent.) Curious, but not wanting to wake Jeff with the crinkling of paper at 2:30 in the morning, I had to be content with stacking the mail on my footlocker and waiting until closer to sunup before opening my little trove.

Then, on Friday my Amazon wish list shortened with a single visit to the prison's property room. I left work early and crossed the yard, expecting to pick up a book; the officer brought out a small stack instead. I suddenly found myself at my allowed limit. As I've said many times before, this is a nice problem to have.

"Don't make any plans for dinner Saturday," said Luke, apparently eager to add "personal chef" to the descriptors I already have for him – neighbor, work supervisor, Buddhist services facilitator, friend. "I'm making lasagna and garlic bread. Happy early birthday."

He spent hours prepping. Near the end, I watched him carry a stack of bowls full of sausage to the microwave, what must've been six pounds of meat. My friend went all out. He presented me with a casserole-dish-sized Tupperware container full of the end product, plus two garlic-dusted bagels, for Jeff and me to share. Normally I get a food visit from my mother and friends. COVID-19 prevented that this year. But my early-birthday lasagna made for a good-enough substitute. Afterward, stuffed almost to the max, Jeff and I concluded the feast with some Little Debbie Star Crunches.

The mood that I met Monday with was one of quiet pleasure. Contentment. This is forty-two, I thought at my reflection above the sink. Not too shabby.

"I didn't get you anything," Jeff said by way of good morning, "But happy birthday." This sentiment from my cellmate, who usually just frowns on birthday celebrations, was cool. Maybe we can consider it progress.

At work I just loafed. My three coworkers offered me a free day, to let me just sit at my desk and watch whatever I wanted at the computer. I'm now nearly through all of David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return. Since I accepted that I'd never get answers after the original run ended, being so close to them now, twenty-five years after I first saw the series, is a uniquely fulfilling gift indeed.

Later, once I came back to the house, I made phone calls, read a bit, and began making thank-yous for the many people who made the day extra special – because what better way to celebrate the anniversary of my birth than by appreciating everyone who contributes to this precious life?

Tom Waits Time Machine

"Tango Till They're Sore" is the fifth track on the timeless Tom Waits album Rain Dogs, released by Island Records in 1989. It clocks in at less than three minutes but that brief amount of time can do a lot. Its effect on me is a kind of time travel, twenty-three years into the past.

The song opens with an off-key barroom piano, perhaps one that's missing keys, and a metronomic ticking like someone tapping a sliver of plastic on a sheet of linoleum. The plinking melody is soon joined, all at once, by an upright bass, a couple of brass instruments, and the plaintive vocals of the Vagabond, the estimable Mr. Waits, whose voice makes Joe Cocker's sound almost AutoTune-smooth by comparison.

Without ever adopting an actual narrative, "Tango Till They're Sore" takes the perspective of a hedonist ruminating in a flophouse, considering how he wants his death, and subsequent funeral, to be. "I guess daisies'll have to do," Waits croaks, a man resigned to dying because he plans to have a good time in the process. ("Let me fall out of the window with confetti in my hair," the chorus pleads.) His list of final requests, for the funeral and beyond, includes a roast pig, a rousing New Orleans band, and someone hang on to his beloved clarinet "until I get back in town." You could call this funereal optimism.

I once mentioned the song in a short blog post that functioned as a belated eulogy for my friend Justin. Lounging around his condo with my friends, following a late-summer evening our favorite local record store, I heard Tom Waits for the very first time and practically climbed the walls to get away from the minor-key cacophony of Rain Dogs' opening track, "Singapore."

I warmed to the sound eventually. It just took a few listens. If I've learned anything about music in my years since, it's that some of the hardest stuff to hear can become the most satisfying, the most meaningfully enjoyable music there is. That's what Tom Waits was for me. It got so I couldn't get enough of his scratchy growl, his song's surreal characters, his devil-may-care musical style, and his singular persona.

As for that song from Rain Dogs, it came to be associated with Justin, a friend whose death comprises one half of the single most harmful, most enduring, most resented event of my life. Even today I can't hear it and not think of how Justin talked and talked about his funeral, about the different ways he'd thought about dying. He'd never discussed the way he actually died, of course, taking his own life within hours of his girlfriend's mysterious, grisly death. And that incongruity has contributed to the endurance of my feelings about the song, which are somehow simultaneously scornful and tender.

I appreciate difficult music that doesn't give itself up to listener all at once, the way a pop song does. I like the intellectual struggle to understand what it is that a piece of music is intended to do; why it works, sonically speaking; what message, if any, it contains. Working toward an understanding deepens a listener's relationship to it. Deep listening enriches your relationship to the music, giving it a chance to sink into your bones as you sink into its melodies, rhythms, and lyrics. Eventually it might even become part of you.

"Tango Till They're Sore" became a part of me more than half my lifetime ago. It's not a song I hum in the shower, nor one that I find myself wanting, at random moments, to hear. But when I get in a certain mood and feel like cueing up Rain Dogs on a warm Midwestern night, the whiskey-warped melody that starts plinking along, eleven minutes into the album, throws me right back into the long-past past. A resurrection. A revival. A memory not worth indulging but there, and strangely enjoyed, just the same.

Do All Bald White Guys Look Like All Other Bald White Guys?

What is it about white guys with shaved heads? Even if there's no real resemblance beyond the shiny dome, we get compared to other white guys with shaved heads all the time. Or at least I do. It's ridiculous.

Since I first took a razor to my scalp at nineteen, I've been likened to a slew of other men with prominent pates, fictional and otherwise:

1. Household product mascots

2. Cinematic misfits

3. Angry young men

4. Pod people

5. The undead

6. Comic book aliens (technically not white at all)

7. Teen drama supervillains

8. Video game characters

9. Rock stars

10. Anime heroes

I only kind of agree with that last one, and I've never even watched the series.

Black Celebration: A Personal History of Goth

Can someone join a subculture without knowing it exists? Is it possible for a single person to comprise a sub-subculture — a clique of one? These are questions I contemplated a lot, based on how I spent my teens and young adulthood.

The riotous colors of 1993 hurt my eyes. Worse yet, its hot dance-poppy tracks (think: Haddaway, Tag Team, Ace of Base) burned in the open cut of my deepening depression. I rejected all of it. The alternative was literal: alternative — as in, alternative music, as in, more specifically, grunge, which to most minds meant Nirvana, a band I could barely stand. Mainstream culture left me feeling conspicuously out of place. Aimless and alone, I stumbled down the gloomy, unlit path of goth.

Before all-black clothes and eyeliner became my daily wear, I'd never heard the word goth. It's likely that I encountered the iconic look — the pitch dark hair, the deathly complexion, the silver-buckled, -spiked, and -chained accessories — in a movie, on TV, in a book, or on the streets of a foreign city before adopting goth's dark splendor for myself. But contrary to what you'd expect, I never set out to dress that way. My transition was organic, a product of several factors.

I came by the pale skin honestly, thanks to genetics and insomnia. Being an overweight tween had inclined me to wear black, which seemed to slim away a bit of my huskiness. The mysterious, the Romantic, the (I'll just go ahead and say it) Byronic had always compelled me. Temperamentally speaking, autism spectrum disorder and major depression made me standoffish. Through my father's broad musical tastes and penchant for nightlife I was exposed to pulsing, subversive-feeling stuff that struck nerves I hadn't known I possessed. Shut in my candlelit room, writing tormented poems while darkwave beats, borrowed from my dad's music library, trembled from the stereo, I was like a caterpillar in its cocoon. All the stuff swirling around in there was bound to solidify into some new form of life eventually.

I emerged as a beautiful black butterfly shortly before turning fourteen. As my personal mythology has it, the trigger was seeing a daytime talk show on which a "troubled" teen spoke about why he wore that ghastly makeup and black velvet, lace, and leather. The dramatic monologue he delivered, about coping with darkness by embracing darkness, was my own angst given voice. Before that epiphanic Oprah episode (or whatever it was) I'd believed myself alone in feeling this way. In the egocentrism of youth, what teen doesn't think he's the first, the only — even when that exclusivity is to his detriment? Regardless, from that day forward, every time someone asked why I dressed all in black, I answered in one of two ways: either "Color is nothing more than trumpery and lies," or "Because the price of tomatoes has fluctuated again." I was a blast at parties. (No one invited me to parties.)

Better than any other lesson, school taught me that I did not fit. The adjective peerless implies good — unequaled, unrivaled. But I dropped out of my academically prestigious high school in large part because I had neither equals nor rivals. To be an outcast, that is, to be cast out, you have to first be in. I'd joined no clubs, hitched myself to no teams, took part in no extracurriculars. I'd walked to classes unaccompanied, literally on the fringe. Except in the eyes of one accidental girlfriend who mistook my awkwardness for cool, I was a non-entity.

I was eventually old enough for the clubs that, if only one night a week, played the darkwave and industrial (i.e., goth) music that lured palefaced youth out of seclusion. In preparation, I'd powder my nose, smear my eyes with kohl, take one last appraising look at myself in the mirror. My studded collar and high Doc Martens looked suitably fetishistic. My silver rings glinted. My lacquered fingernails reflected darkly. I'd head for the car, slipping a Djarum Black from its box. I'd light the clove cigarette and inhale. I'd turn the ignition key. I'd crank up the music and drive.

The parking lot would be scattered with vehicles and little groups of black-clad twenty-somethings, all rendered paler than normal in the sulfurous light. Most showed up every week, drawn by the camaraderie of other gothic oddities. The DJ was basically irrelevant; no one ever really danced. Like me, they huddled at the periphery of the dance floor and watched the poseurs do their thing. The poseurs were the worst. The poseurs were whoever they suspected of wearing color during the week, and anyone deemed insufficiently cool. Which was everyone.

Inside, the club's red lights would smooth and unblemish every face. "This Corrosion," a Sisters of Mercy song so stereotypical as to be almost a joke, would crash along while everyone feigned indifference. I'd stand, drinking my nonalcoholic drink, not talking to any of the people milling around, ignoring me. Many hugged each other, displaying affection more freely than you might expect from people wearing spikes and claw rings.

Although I looked the part, my club experiences were from a certain standpoint no different from school. Perhaps recognized by sight, I remained unacknowledged, unknown. I returned, week after week, in the hope of making a friend, yet lacked the wherewithal to break the ice. After a few hours, I'd go home feeling more alone than when I arrived.

Online newsgroups and IRCs (Internet chat groups) opened the world of goth to me, in the form of band recommendations, links to clothing boutiques, recipes for cocktails, lots of biting social criticism, and tips for coloring everything, from clothes to flowers, black. Goth's online contingent was even more fiercely cliquish and territorial than the clubgoers, but as long as I didn't try joining in, I could slink along the virtual periphery, reading their tips, quips, and laments, and silently judge those self-appointed arbiters of gothic taste and macabre fashion.

I couldn't stand those elitists' mentality, the way they gazed down with gother-than-thou scorn from their obsidian tower. I soon disassociated myself from the lot of them, the online contingent and their real-life counterparts. I continued to dress the part, and certainly didn't give up the music I loved so much, but I wouldn't permit anyone to mistake appearance for substance. For instance, my father was on the phone in the next room one afternoon, talking to a friend about me. I heard him say, "He's too goth to go see Mrs. Doubtfire with us." Without getting up from my computer desk, I shouted, "I'm not goth!" And I meant it. However, this irony was not lost on me: in my browser window was a man in black lipstick, modeling a very tall pair of boots beside a crying angel statue. That picture made me really want to buy those boots. Deep down, I was goth as fuck. No impassioned arguments would change that.

A thousand essays and academic papers have been written with the title "What Is Goth?" Debates over what (or who) does and doesn't qualify as goth continue to rage on the Internet. Goth is what was once freely called a lifestyle — heavy on the style. It's precisely this quality of insubstantiality that I believe has made it so difficult to define. It's shallow, and you can't base an ethos, and certainly not a philosophy, on black clothing and minor-key music. So, what happens when the kids who dress in impractical, pseudo-archaic outfits and head for the club, as I once did, realize the vacuousness of this aesthetic ideal they've built their lives around?

I chose to dance to the beat of my own drum machine. I toned down the eyeliner. I put away the spiked leather collar. I embraced my ungothly geekiness full-on, with Frisbee in the park, They Might Be Giants on my stereo, and posters of the periodic table of elements in my kitchen. I grew up and all but forgot about the subculture that had seemed so tantalizingly close to my heart.

It sounds like a riddle: I clothe myself in shadow but will not be overshadowed. My sound is dark as night itself. I am forty and still love The Nightmare Before Christmas. What am I?

Kiosk Chaos

Prisoners in Missouri can pay for music and download it to their new JP5s tablet, but the shopping involves a trip. And a wait to use this hideous thing.

 

JPay installed multipurpose kiosks just like this one in prisons throughout the state. One is in each wing of the housing units I've seen. Although the tablets have Wi-Fi connections to JPay's secure e-mail service, video transfers and monetary transactions require a physical syncing. I have to take my device downstairs, wait in line, plug in the USB cable that dangles so awkwardly from the kiosk's side, and wait a minute or so for data to be exchanged. Only then can I browse the media catalog.

The men with no imaginations and even less money seem to spend the most time on the kiosk, wishing for music they can't afford, and sampling those songs in fifteen-second intervals. The only way to hear anything on the kiosk is to lift its retro-style telephone handset to your ear and hope the wing's background noise isn't at screamy levels. Thus the bored music-samplers are not only getting a very abbreviated experience of their chosen material, the tracks' audio is also piss-poor. They're missing out quantitatively and qualitatively. This deters none of them.

Each prisoner gets a maximum of five kiosk logins per day, at ten minutes per session. It's still too much. The line forms early, usually right after the 6 AM count clears. At any given time, no fewer than two people stand waiting. This endures until evening lockdown, when guards practically have to pry someone's fingers off the metal trackball before he'll retire for the night. Whoever had been next in line has to then come to terms with squandering another stretch of time, and hope he can make it to the line earlier tomorrow.

In general, we residents of the honor dorm comport ourselves with more restraint and respect than prisoners in general population. Problems nevertheless arise. Keeping track of who's next in line gets tricky when someone promises the next spot in line to his buddy instead of the man who's been standing patiently nearby, waiting his turn. Being no doormat myself, I've had one tense exchange resulting from this. At least two confrontations over the JPay kiosks have escalated into fights in honor dorm units. In one, a man almost had an eye thumbed out of his skull. His opponent must've really, really wanted whatever song that was.

I've blogged here before about the surprising amount of music suddenly available to me. Having some expendable funds means contemplating what amazing music I might spend them on. I'd also prefer to avoid grievous bodily harm. The most certain way that I know is to keep off the kiosk as much as possible. It's not an easy temptation to avoid.

Life in Prison with a Tablet PC

On Thursday afternoon, three caseworkers entered the wing with a couple of large, nondescript cardboard boxes and an air of impatience. The JP5s tablets we ordered in October (first blogged about here this past February) had finally arrived!

"Go to your cells, gentlemen, and stand by your doors," an earnest woman in civilian clothes told us. "We'll call you by cell number. You'll come down here and sign for your tablet, then go back to your cell until the rest of the tablets have been passed out."

The occupants of 6D complied with a swiftness that I found amazing. Normally, getting prisoners corralled is a process requiring minutes on end, but this was different — our yearlong wait was at its end.

The caseworkers set up camp at a central table, spreading out packing slips and the kind of redundant paperwork that keeps bureaucrats in business. Noise in the wing died to stage whispers, with the occasional snort of muffled laughter, as the apparatchiks made ready.

Minutes passed. Then the woman squawked, "One-oh-one."

Flouting the directive, I left my door wide open but poured a glass of iced tea and sat back down with the book I'd been reading. Nietzsche made interesting company as the trio worked their way to 208. Only after Cell 206 went downstairs did I set my glass on the desk and stand as assigned.

The trade was more than fair: my signature, DOC number, and the date on a little square of paper, for a seven-inch Android device, charger, and pair of ear buds — all in a resealable plastic bag. The accompanying "Quick Start" information card was several steps down from the thoughts of the German philosopher, and didn't say a thing about charging the lithium-ion battery before syncing the tablet. I did so anyway, while the rest of the wing — more than fifty men, some of whom had taken the day off work specifically for this — impatiently queued for the JPay kiosk. Owners' haste caused a few tablets to die mid-sync. It took less than twenty minutes for mine to reach 100% charge. So when my turn at the kiosk arrived, everything went off without a hitch.

What's it like, having my first handheld touch-screen device? It's definitely a novelty. I once blogged about being "A Very Technical Boy," so I do have thoughts beyond the "This thing's so cool!" variety. Most of them come down to technical matters: the JP5s tablet I got for free last week is faster, more powerful , and sixty-four times more capacious than the first PC I built. (If that's not something to make a guy feel out-of-date....)

A friend sent me birthday money with the condition that I use it to buy music for what he calls my "wannabe iPad." It'd been many moons since I last acquired new tunes, so I responded eagerly: "Can do!" And I did. As I thumb-type this, Savages' outstanding album Adore Life is propelling me like a cattle prod to the brain. Thanks again, John, so very much!

JPay's music selection — basically iTunes for prisoners — is big, even impressive. It makes the acquisitive music lover in me want all the things. I'm not alone in this. For years, Missouri prisoners have been limited to buying CDs from catalog vendors, which is about as limiting as you'd expect. It's especially bad if your tastes, like mine, range far afield of radio hits. The floodgates now have opened. Overheard conversations reveal that some other honor-dorm residents have already blown their entire month's budget, solely on music downloads. Do we blame poor impulse control, or freshly liberated zeal?

For sure, the mood around here has been jovial. Spontaneous dancing is not uncommon. It wierded me out, the first couple of times I witnessed it. Now I know better: the telltale white dots of ear buds confirm that a person's not experiencing a schizoid auditory-delusion, just bumping sick beats. A downcast gaze, likewise, no longer means that a person's in the dumps, only that he's engrossed in whatever's on his little LED screen.

I don't know how the scene might look in another month or so, after the tablets' newness wears off. There's already been a dropoff of kiosk use in the first forty-eight hours, as guys' digital wallets are emptied by media purchases. More settling could still occur. Of course, it could be that JPay is deliberately withholding services, waiting until the initial rush dies away before reinvigorating sales with movie downloads and game apps, both of which have been promised. Just alert me when there's a word processor with a print-on-demand feature — or at least when the e-reader app is available. Meanwhile, I'll be in my cell, luxuriating in fine sounds as I continue trying to write my way out of prison.

Something Old, Something New (Sonically Speaking)

When the iconic British post-punk/deathrock band Siouxsie & the Banshees entered Surry Sound to record their 1981 album Juju, — nine spiky guitar- and drum-propelled tracks that epitomized the sound of my teenage years — I shat myself. Of course I did; in '81 I was still a baby, squirming on the carpet of a three-bedroom house in suburban Middle America, with no awareness of Siouxsie Sioux or her band. I must have soiled fifty diapers in the weeks it took them to lay down all of Juju, never mind the time it took to master the tapes.

Fourteen years after Siouxsie & the Banshees' first show, at the 100 Club Punk Festival, I fell hard for their melodic take on punk. (Siouxsie's innovative mix of Queen-of-the-Nile makeup and bondage gear helped.) As my musical tastes developed, they stuck close to the period and the place — bands and artists who got their start in late-'70s, early-'80s Britain. My horizons expanded as I got older, but I still love that old-school goth sound. Juju never got old.

We were talking about the tablet computer I'll have any day now, and my mother asked about downloadable songs: "Do you even want new music? I thought you were stuck on that old stuff."

I guess that last week's post about meeting my musical kindred confused her. Hearing some old favorites for the first time in decades has been unbelievably cool, sure, but there's a huge difference between still loving Siouxsie & the Banshees and listening to nothing else.

 

Suddenly being able to buy music whenever, rather than only three times per year, and (if the album isn't up to par) on a track-by-track basis, changes everything. I'm no longer held back by the twenty-CD limit the Missouri DOC imposes. Now there's a new dilemma. I tweeted about it, here, last Tuesday: how's a guy to choose, given JPay's selection?

So many contemporary groups and artists I've wanted to sample are available now, including Youth Code, Savages, Silent Servant, Vatican Shadow, Anasazi, the Chameleons (UK), and the Soft Moon. My musical wish list will have to be kept in check. A preliminary search also showed pages of Siouxsie stuff, including some released since my imprisonment... and a 2006 remaster of Juju.

 

Balance, I tell myself, and take a few cleansing breaths. Balance and restraint. You've still got to use soap and eat. Oh, but you do have a birthday coming up.

P2P (Prisoner to Prisoner) Music Sharing

"What'd you bring me, Byron?" he asks, his squinty smile not quite reminding me of someone. "Am I gonna cry with joy?"

This is only my third time speaking with Luke, and already we're first-naming it — a rare thing in prison, where surnames without the honorific "Mr." are the norm. Luke's a friend of a friend of my cellmate's. He's also in Gavel Club. But what brought us together in conversation was overhearing him run down a few of the music acts he searched for, the day that JPay opened its MP3 library to Missouri prisoners last week: the Legendary Pink Dots (and Tear Garden), the Sisters of Mercy, Front 242, and other decidedly Byronic favorites. Weirdly enough, it ended up being him who cornered me at the next Gavel Club meeting.

That was then. Today we're in the Learning Center, where he works and where I watch occasional Great Courses lecture videos. I've bought a handful of CDs — Chelsea Wolfe, Xiu Xiu, the Cure — for him to rip to the institution's virtual jukebox. (Fun fact: per US copyright law, prisons and oil rigs aren't public spaces. Copying my discs to our TV guide's "Gothic, Industrial, Electronic, New Wave" playlist is totally legal.) He's impressed by my offering, and the expression on his face clarifies things for me: Christian Bale and Ed Norton's love child — that's who he looks like.

"Pornography? Man, what a great album."

"A wrist-slashing masterpiece," I say, quoting some forgotten music critic.

 

"Do you know who Gary Numan is?"

"I have Replicas and Telekon back in the cell."

He squints, skeptically. Definitely Ed Norton. "What's your favorite Ministry album?"

"With Sympathy. Their synth pop stuff is more my speed. 'Every Day Is Halloween'? Come on!"

Suddenly it's like we're in a scene from High Fidelity. Luke wants my top five electronic acts. After a couple seconds' delay, I tell him "Okay, of course Gary Numan, godfather of the genre. Then I'd have to say Depeche Mode, New Order, Kraftwerk —"

"I was thinking of, like, bands on Metropolis, Nettwerk, Projekt. But old school — that's nice."

"— and Björk."

"She's not really an electronic artist. Was it Medulla that she recorded with those a cappella singers?"

Before I open my mouth to defend my position, and before Luke brings out a stack of his own CDs for me to plunder in exchange, I know that he and I are going to get along great.

The Whistling Plague

Those cherubic heads drawn in the corners of old maps, representing the four winds, with their puckered lips and Louis Armstrong cheeks? The little man who moved into my wing a few weeks back makes the same face but contributes nothing aesthetically pleasing by doing so. In fact, his presence only taints the already iffy wing ambiance.

Can a person ever be said to whistle aggressively? To rephrase: can someone whistle in such a way that the sound constitutes a deliberate imposition, a taunt, a challenge — a sonic fuck you to all within earshot? This loud little prick seems to spend all day blaring a tuneless mess out of his face. And now he's not alone.

Bad behavior is contagious. Suddenly, every guy running around with a chip on his shoulder has a song in his heart that he wants to share, however inartfully.

Noise is, across personality types and constitutions, a universal irritant. The louder it is, the more stress it induces. Ask the abused detainees of Abu Ghraib prison about AC/DC, or Navy SEALS about Hell Week's cacophony, or Manuel Noriega about the heavy-metal onslaught of his compound by U.S. forces' loudspeakers in 1989 — prolonged exposure to high-volume sound will drive you out of your mind.

Because of my neurological "complications," whistling of any volume or musical competency is generally on par with the smell of baby powder or, perhaps more relatably, biting a nice, big piece of aluminum foil. I dislike most of the people in my wing anyway. They act as if the world owes them something; they disregard the most common courtesies. The eruption of largely atonal whistling by people whose presence was already powerfully unpleasant is just shit-icing on the turd cake.

Why whistle in public at all? Like humming or singing to onself, it's a form of expression that's okay when you're alone — and basically not at any other time. Consider that no sane, reasonable human would, say, walk through their workplace honking at random. How is whistling different? In whose mind is whistling as piercingly as possible acceptable? And yet I am surrounded on all sides by those oblivious to their own behavior, and those too arrogant to care who's put off by it. Either failing goes a long way toward an explanation of why they're in prison in the first place.

Patient Zero, the small-statured man who brought the Whistling Plague upon us, moved in two months after someone assaulted him. He threatened and insulted a man using "his" shower, and that man leapt out, stark naked and dripping, to beat him down. Maybe someone else will get fed up with his dissonance, but even if I were that lucky there'd still be the remaining infected. My only hope against the Whistling Plague is my over-the-ear headphones.

The Astonishing Kindness of Sacred Bones Records

I'm limited. What little I can do is therefore cherished. Sometimes someone else's willingness to take an extra step allows me to have a smidgen more than usual, and these instances are like shooting stars in my fixed sky — reminders to keep looking up.

A recent letter from Sacred Bones Records, the boutique label in Brooklyn, New York, that releases albums by filmmakers David Lynch and John Carpenter, as well as those by less recognizable (to most) artists such as Moon Duo and Pharmakon, was one such bright appearance. "We would be more than happy to get music to you," it said, "and hope that it can take you out of your situation, even if only briefly." 

Wow. Amid all there must be for a record label — even a small one — to fuss with on a daily basis, to agree to some prisoner's request to accept a piddly cashier's check, then pack and ship a couple of CDs… then astonish that prisoner with offers to substantially reduce their prices and send demos to him for free — that is simply beautiful. I hadn't even dropped pariahblog.com into my signature when I reached out, because it didn't seem relevant. They just thought my earnest request was enough. 

The CDs arrived on Wednesday morning. At the special price, I ended up with four for what I anticipated paying for two: albums by Pop. 1280, Zola Jesus, Case Studies, and a compilation of vintage goth and post-punk groups. 

There are so few opportunities for new music to come my way, and hardly any of what I hear is the sort of thing that stirs me. This stuff, though — this is the bee's knees. So thank you, Caleb and everyone else at Sacred Bones, for setting me abuzz with happiness. 

When Will Missouri Let Its Prisoners Join the Electronic Conversation?

Washington, North Dakota, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana — all states that now sell mini-tablet computers to their prisoners for personal use. For around fifty dollars, vendors such as JPay and Keefe Group offer the devices to penitentiaries, preloaded with (administratively limited) software for music downloads, gaming, and e-mail, thereby affording the incarcerated another, much-needed connection to the distant world.

Of course victims’ rights groups are terrified of what the National Organization for Victim Assistance’s mouthpiece described last year as “unrestricted and unsupervised outreach where inmates can revictimize or continue to intimidate victims.” However, because e-mail is even easier to monitor than the already-permitted (and well-policed) telephone conversations prisoners are having (think: filters and automated keyword monitoring, plus ease of storage and of live-human retrieval), NOVA’s argument is a little silly. The frequently extreme perspective of victims’ rights groups should be taken into consideration when weighing what privileges prisoners ought to be granted. Many would have convicts of every stripe sentenced to hard labor and bread-and-water diets.

To be fair, there are prisoners who might try to use electronic means to commit their nefarious deeds, but no more than are currently doing so with cell phones smuggled in by guards and other prison staff. (It’s interesting to point out here that illicit cell phone use in Texas prisons plummeted when the Lone Star State installed telephones in its facilities’ housing units, a statistic one Texas prison official attributed, on record with techno-culture magazine Wired, to most prisoners simply wanting to call home.) For public and institutional safety, the channels for contraband need to be closed. Until staff members are caught red-handed, breaking rules, it’s an unfortunate fact that prison administrators tend to treat their staff as being beyond reproach. This would have to change before truly effective security measures could be enacted. Maybe victims’ rights groups should recalibrate their sights to aim at greater institutional scrutiny of prison employees.

Prisoners with a supportive social structure beyond the facility walls have been shown, in study after study, more likely to rehabilitate and less likely to reoffend, and there can be little doubt that being able to send and receive e-mail will improve prisoners’ feelings of connectedness to loved ones and society as a whole. I’ve personally bemoaned the inconvenience of snail mail for years. Not only would my contacts appreciate not having to fold, seal, and stamp everything they send my way, the editors, scholars, and businesses I sometimes reach out to would be more apt to reply (you might be amazed by the number of people for whom an enclosed SASE is not sufficient motivation).

Yes, mine is a biased opinion. I’m ready to get back to Information Age communication methods. This ubergeek struggled mightily, while awaiting trial in the county detention center, with symptoms of Internet withdrawal — disconnectedness from always-on friendships, mainly — and the thirteen-year interim hasn’t done anything to mitigate my frustration. Being able to tap out e-mails from my bunk and view pics in my inbox of my mother’s trips abroad, my godson’s childhood milestones, my friends’ #humblebrag Instagram posts (I’m far less interested in games, or even MP3s) would do so much to reduce the isolation that is my normal. Loath as I am to entertain thoughts of things to make my prison stay more comfortable, it seems as though, as long as I have to be sequestered by injustice, buying a gadget to ease the pangs of separation seems like a worthy consideration.

It took until 2004 before the Missouri Department of Corrections gave its prisoners the go-ahead to buy CD players. It started selling us flat-screen TVs a few years later. Devices are one matter, social betterment is quite another. So is money. States that offer prisoners the mini-tablet computers I mentioned earlier don’t only profit from markups on the hardware. When Keefe Group introduced its MP3 player and penitentiary approved music-download service in 2009, it netted more than a million song downloads, each of which deposited a percentage into the state’s coffers, too — and that’s solely music, a luxury. E-mail satisfies a deeper craving — that for human contact — and is self-perpetuating, since nearly every click of Send leads to another click of Read, which, in turn, leads to a click of Reply. There’s money to be made here, broke Missouri, and I’m willing to let you have mine.

Touch and Go Records Make My Month

The Black Heart Procession are one of my favorite bands. I discovered them after a glowing review of their 1999 sophomore album, 2, was printed in an independent local paper, and fell in love with the recording’s haunting lo-fi sound, the band’s unique instrumentation (the third track on 2, “A Light So Dim,” lists drums, guitar, saw, SH-1000, waterphone, noises, piano, organ, and toy piano), and the sense of lovelorn desperation running through the lyrics:

There are no trains that leave from the maze
Your only chance was a ship to escape
You’ll be the lighthouse in the storm
I’ll be the ship with a thousand dead souls
But how long will they believe in a light so dim?
Down in the gallows the darkness glows
But it’s hard to see in the hearts of them
If you see a light, call down below
I’ll be moving and sorting out our fears
But how long will we believe in a light so dim?
Time is all we have, so take the time
Time is all we have, so take the time to make the time
Throw down the line, I’ll see to climb
If it’s held close it may just work
If you are the lighthouse in the storm
I’ll be the ship filled with a thousand dead souls
Time is all we have, so take the time
Time is all we have, so take the time
Time is all we have, so take the time to make the time

BHP released another album soon thereafter, which I relished at least as much. But that’s where my collecting stopped. When their fourth album dropped, I was locked away in a prison cell with no music but what came through a portable Panasonic tape player that got intermittent, fuzzy radio reception.

A friend hosted a weekly punk show on KKFI, an independent Kansas City public radio station, and sometimes she’d break up sets of Crass, the Misfits, and Nashville Pussy to dedicate a song to me, off one of the CDs from my at-home collection. Thanks to Madeline’s (now long gone) show and Sonic Spectrum, with Robert Moore, a much-respected local dejay, I got my occasional fix of Black Heart Procession music and was able to keep up with sporadic bits of their later work. Some I captured on cassette tapes, which I then played over and over and over again, heedless as always to the dangers of nostalgia, but genuinely happy.

The prison eventually allowed its inmate population to buy CD players and to mail order discs from approved vendors, which was nice, but by then I’d compiled a little bestiary of mix tapes I was loath to part with. A few things I’d recorded were irreplaceable — live in-studio or onstage sets — giving me at least one solid reason not to make the switch to digital. Quantity was another. The rules cap inmates’ collections at twenty cassettes or CDs, so switching meant ditching my ninety-minute recordings for a format that averaged just over half that playing time. However, new releases weren’t available on tape. As wave after wave of unfamiliar sounds washed over my bulwarks like the songs of sirens, my resolve crumbled. It was only a matter of time before I surrendered and dived in.

Compact discs were already on their way out by then, surpassed in popularity by compressed-bitrate convenience, and the few vendors that still did business with the incarcerated, via certified checks and postal delivery — Union Supply Direct, Music by Mail, Walkenhorst’s, Pack Central — carried only a smattering of CDs by the Billboard-uncharted bands and artists I most enjoy. My Deserted Island Collection is comprised of some great stuff today, all of it from the aforementioned companies, but there’s not much else they stock that I’m itching for. To get that, I had to change how I scratched.

“Dear Touch and Go Records,” I wrote a couple of months ago, explaining as concisely as I could, to whomever happened to check the company’s mailbox, how profoundly I love the Black Heart Procession’s music, how 2 was the band’s only album I’d been able to track down and order, and how my unfortunate circumstances made buying from an amply stocked online vendor, such as Amazon, impossible. “Can you help me?” I practically begged.

With an enclosed self-addressed, stamped envelope I suspected might never get used, I dropped my letter in the box. A reply came soon. It was handwritten on tan stationary with the Touch and Go logo in red at the top of the page. At the bottom, in the same red, was printed, “the nice label”:

Hi Byron,

Thanks for writing, and thanks for your interest in the Black Heart Procession! We haven’t had a mail order division in around five years, so we looked around for a store/vendor who could fulfill your request. Somewhat surprisingly, we couldn’t find one... The Internet has made ordering music by mail go the way of the dinosaur. So... we decided to make a one-time exception in this case and ship an order to you directly.

The writer went on to list all three albums I wanted that the Black Heart Procession put out through Touch and Go — Three, Amore del Tropico, and The Spell — with prices and shipping costs.

Here’s the thing: I realize that Touch and Go Records is a business, meaning their clear and obvious goal is to make money, and that, in the interest of money-making, collecting about forty dollars on the sale of some older merchandise that wasn’t moving makes good sense. But there were so many reasons for them to have ignored my letter — that its return address was a prison; that indulging my unorthodox request would be a hassle; that the payoff, even for a struggling indie label, would amount to chump change.... “The nice label,” indeed. It’s a gesture that makes me smile, just thinking about it.

My package of BHP CDs should be arriving any day now. A friend with his own copy of Three, when I mentioned this serendipitous tidbit to him, suggested we throw a listening party (“musically group our consciousness with a great album,” he elaborated) once my order gets here. At a prearranged date and time, we’ll cue it up simultaneously and revel in the melodies. Music like a talisman joining faraway friends. If it’s held close, it may just work.

My Prison Possessions

Everything I own has to fit inside a metal footlocker that sits along one wall of my small two-man cell, so stuff is kept to a minimum. But what stuff does this refer to, exactly? Aside from an inordinate amount of paperwork, impeccably organized in folders and a huge accordion file, and without the assorted hygeine items and foodstuffs from the Crossroads canteen I keep on hand, the list that follows encompasses everything that Byron C. Case has to his name. May your voyeuristic curiosities be sated at last.

* * * * *

This is my Old Faithful — the machine on which I've written everything for the past six years, from blog posts to book manuscripts. It's my life support system. That said, I'd prefer a laptop in my cell (even an Apple product, at this point).

The aging TV that sits on the shelf in my cell is missing a button, shows reds as magentas on one area of the screen, and, on the average day, gets an hour and a half of use. The canteen sells flat screen TVs now, but The Walking Dead, The Americans, American Horror Story, and an occasional movie don't justify the exorbitant upgrade cost.  

The canteen stopped selling boomboxes in 2004. Mine was one of the last few. Its analog tuner isn't great, but the external antenna means I get good enough reception within my concrete-and-steel box to listen to the two radio stations that, for a few hours a week, play music I like.

Oh, the Precioussssss! We loves the Precious, yes we does. We needs its singing in our headses, to get away from the nasty sounds. We hates the sounds. CDs makes us happy, makes us happy, makes us happy. Musics makes us forget the walls and the evil sounds.

Historically I've hated how best-of compilations are put together. Crackle, by Bauhaus, is an exception, featuring the heartbeat-quickening drums of "In The Flat Field", the morose bat-cave hit "Bela Lugosi's Dead", and the twinkling, uplifting "Spirit". This album is the perfect cure for days when ennui starts creeping on: a "Kick in the Eye" usually does the trick.

This is beautiful, melancholy lo-fi rock from one of the best bands to debut in the '90s. 2 is the Black Heart Procession's second album, and makes the ideal soundtrack to solo wintertime walks around the snowy prison yard.

I like to put this album of Black Tape for a Blue Girl's atmospheric synths, swooning strings, and dramatic vocals on whenever I need to transport myself elsewhere, far away from my harsh confines.

One of my friends, a fellow Depeche Mode fan, has a hard time understanding why I like the grunge- and gospel-kissed Songs of Faith and Devotion as much as the synth-pop pioneers' prior hit album (the dark masterpiece Violator). I guess it's the exultant vocals and full sonic palette that have made this record so personally relevant, all these years.

Captivating vocals by Dave Gahan, strong songwriting by Martin Gore, and a studio crammed with vintage synths and drum machines make Depeche Mode's 2009 release, Sounds of the Universe, an invigorating, inspiring listen.

On these cabaret punks' first single, Amanda Palmer sings, "This bridge was written / to make you feel smitten / with my sad picture of girl getting bitter". And it worked. I've been in love with the quirky music of the Dresden Dolls ever since this 2003 debut album.

No, Virginia... is easily the best collection of outtakes I've heard by any band or artist. True to form, this final (?) album from the duo of Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione (together, the Dresden Dolls) alternately tugs and tears listeners' heart strings: "Night Reconnaisance" is a song about stealing lawn ornaments; a double amputee finds love online, in "Ultima Espiranza"; and the smoldering "Boston" pins down the terrible, temporary transcendence of romantic love.

From the liner notes that accompany The Best of Joy Division: "because we all live in dream worlds // because we remember when we were young // because the helpless dead tend to be visited by the sentimental, and not necessarily profitless, exertions of the living".

I remember nicking Pretty Hate Machine from my father's massive music collection when I was twelve, then skulking off to listen to it in my room, heavy curtains drawn. Even back then, I recognized the dark dance-floor magic at work on Trent Reznor's first Nine Inch Nails recording.

I wasn't even two years old when Telekon  — the last good Gary Numan album until the '90s — came out. Still, its themes of alienation and emotional confusion, set to Numan's synthesizer-driven arrangements, became the soundtrack to my young adult life. The single "We Are Glass" gives me chills every time I hear it.

With production by a small army of big names in synth-pop, EBM, and industrial music, Gary Numan's two-disc Hybrid Sessions features newly recorded favorites, both recent and vintage, by the godfather of electronic music. These fresh variations of "Cars", "Down in the Park", and "Are 'Friends' Electric?" make me wish I could take a compact sports-tuned import out for a midday zoom. For me, this is feel-good music.

Amanda Palmer's first solo album, recorded after the Dresden Dolls were mothballed. Ben Folds produced, and among the guest artists to appear are St. Vincent and former Dead Kennedys guitarist, East Bay Ray. It's piano rock to make Elton John blush, Billy Joel flee in terror, and Regina Spektor break into tears.

Once upon a time, in the magical land of Brooklyn, a young cellist formed a band with two other fetching cello-players. They called this band Rasputina. The music they played together was very loud indeed, and it was often full of snark and obscure historial references to make the townspeople smirk and titter into their cuffs and nosegays. And so did the traveling minstrels bring much joy to the land, and, in particular, to one pale lad locked deep in a dungeon in a distant kingdom....

The first Siouxsie & the Banshees album I ever owned was the ornate, poppy Superstition, but the deeper I delved into their post-punk back catalog, the more I found to like. When the jagged sound of Juju was being set down at Surrey Sound, in England, I was just two years old, but the recording's smart, irreverent, drum-heavy tracks (such as "Into the Light" and "Arabian Nights") make that chronological tidbit meaningless.

Peepshow marked what I consider the band's full embrace of the dark pop sound that brought Siouxsie & the Banshees their almost-mainstream status, here in the US. The album's big single, "Peek-a-Boo", still gets radio play today, but the track I'm most enamored with here is "Ornaments of Gold".

Various Failures. The title alone makes it easy for me to overlook my usual dislike of compilation albums. This two-disc set includes almost all of my favorite Swans songs from the 1988-1992 period, including "The Other Side of the World", "Love Will Save You", "Blind", and "Please Remember Me". Melancholy? Sure, sometimes. Misanthropic? Almost comically so. Masterful? Without a doubt.

If I were only allowed to listen to one album for the rest of my life, it would be Replicas. The lonely-android rock that typified Gary Numan's early songwriting was never better than it was on songs like "Me! I Disconnect from You" and "We Have a Technical". And the futuristic angst of "Down in the Park" will probably haunt modern synth-pop acts for decades still to come.

I discovered the neo-goth dance music of Nika Roza Danilova (who records as Zola Jesus) through a magazine review, which led me to her delectable 2010 Valusia EP. She immediately leapt to the top of my list of  noteworthy recent artists after I listened to the retro-tinged "Hikikomori" and the simple lamentations of piano and her soulful voice on "Skin", both from this debut LP, Conatus.

I prefer my New Oxford American Dictionary because of its Oxford pedigree and because it's not fusty, like American Heritage, or seemingly dumbed down, like Merriam Webster. This third edition gets referenced many times a day, in my writing hours, and almost never leaves me without a sold answer to my queries.

For when that perfect word eludes me. A thesaurus will just as easily lead a writer astray as point her to a worthy synonym, but the organization of this particular Roget's by category, rather than by alphabetical word listings, comes in handy when I want to find, say, a list of phobias by subject (fear of worms = vermiphobia), or of the events in a triathlon (100-meter dash, high jump, shot put). 

A fan. Because otherwise summers would mean slow-roasting in my allegedly climate-controlled cell. Why is the housing clear? Presumably so prisoners with more furtive intentions than I do can't stash contraband inside.

I really do wish my Casio wristwatch had an alarm, but it's better than nothing. You're probably asking yourself, "Why does someone in prison need to know what time it is?" If you have to ask, you'll never know.