Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew Hamlin Joint

 

THE EX FILES

I first met Ffej, or first differentiated him from human-shaped vapor and grit settling Evergreen State College's campus in a nimbus from pool table to Pepsi machine to deli, on the shoot of his film Macho Mike, about a fellow who wakes up one morning to find his penis running away, and must chase it. (I later asked Ffej if he'd read Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose" and he'd never even heard of it--here's another toast to Gene Roddenberry's deus ex machina, Parallel Development of Planets). Staging a festive scene through which Mike pursues his member, Ffej posted an invitation to A-Dorm's staidly infamous 9th Floor Communal Kitchen, which rarely stood intact after a Saturday night and from the outside balcony of which furniture and urine often hung suspended for heroic milliseconds before their tragic free-falls, advertising free beer as an incentive. (This got him talked to by Housing gods; promoting free drinks within Housing gives rise to what Frank Zappa liked to label "legal complications,").

My friend Don and I ambled over, took a table, pretended to be drunker than we actually had a chance to get on "Reeb" (appropriate enough for a Ffej project). Don left early, disgusted at the bad beer and, I suspect, the respirating flesh of fellow homo sapiens (it wasn't too many more years before he stopped appearing in public altogether). I finished the shoot, though I never saw the finished film, and subsequent to graduation in '92 I'd catch up with Ffej over bright and amber fluids in the Monkey Pub, the ballad of this girlfriend, that girlfriend, some analog synthesizers (this was circa '94 when pawn shops practically gave away 70's gear and the Rentals' "Friends of P" had just barely exploded the bomb to blow several zeroes back into the asking prices), some gigs (I rarely attended, I confess) and finally this self-released CD, Attack and Decay.

Evergreen absorbs the misfit-minded in society, it spots them sufficient time, stimulation and thus the incentive (spurred further by isolation, in its tree-shrouded concrete park of a campus) to take the plunge and make out the misfit pledge; then it expectorates them back out onto the earth like so many shredded carrot salad bits, bidding them let their light shine for as long, to much purpose, as a lamp with limited oil, or a short candle, might avail one amidst a dark and clotted forest of unknown size. Ffej works in a hospital cafeteria. My Greener friend Ernie found work in a cookie factory. Another friend found work doing bone-density scans, a job he freely admits "they could train a monkey to do," but it leaves him time for reading and playing the Wasters' "Rocker on the Run," and what other eleven dollar an hour occupation might allow that? I myself follow Thomas Dolby's ambition to "lead an exotic lifestyle" and find in this many moments like about an hour ago, munching down the Number Three Extra Value Meal with Diet Coke, Jonathan Yardley's biography of Frederick Exley parked in front of my nose, trying to lose myself in the life of a confirmed outsider, unable to pound my head under Exley's water which roils with wifebeating, indifference to children fathered, and a ostinato drunkenness I'm sure would send me under the sod to keep him company, stabbingly aware instead that with today's withdrawals (rent and my calzone tab), I'm left with not quite enough money to pay next month's bills, and the last two checks from my last two jobs haven't arrived yet.

Ffej speaks in many tongues over the record, not all of them permutations of tape stretching, and he sketches many attitudes toward the central problem, snakes together in one sometimes self-contradicting meta-attitude. The opening two-piece suite introduces himself a la Laurie Anderson as an airline pilot, a quiet, reasoned voice of authority peppering itself with subtle chortles of power: "Those of you to the right will catch an awe-inspiring eyeful of the Mountains of Burden, the Jungles of Madness, and some warning sign we're just going to ignore. Those of you down in the cargo bay can't see a damn thing, can you? Well, I have a feeling you like it that way..." "Rollin' Ball o'Life" vents Ffej's Shel Silverstein instincts with much of Shel's stoic relativism; the Ball o'Life fights the Ball o'Light in gargled doggerel verses, and at the end the former is stuck with his digested enemy within--"Even at night/Or when it rains/The light's still there/Inside my many brains/It'll take some layers/It'll even dent'em/But it won't stop/My momentum!"

"Word of the Day" brings up from the on-deck circle that perhaps inevitable voice of quiet whining, a bus boy whose position "boiled down to kissing the asses of numerous rich, dumb tourists." But a co-worker, a rich ersatz baritone, asks him for the Word of the Day.

"Huh?" our singer responds. "NOPE, CAN'T BE! WRONG ANSWER" the baritone comfortably comes back. Ffej wants to know why "Huh?" can't be the Word of the Day: "Because from that word stems MEDIOCRITY."

"Well, maybe, just perhaps maybe," Ffej spits, "today is a MEDIOCRE day"--a kill shot, or so it would have been circa 1992 or in any Kevin Smith movie. The booming counterpoint's having none of it. "You see now, that's where you wrong, Ffej," it trumps him, trumps him, "TODAY IS A GREAT DAY!"

Sometimes Ffej flails against the inevitability of frustration-- "call it a problem, you only give it power/You call it a phase and you're only gonna wait forever," he preaches in "Critical Mass,"-- "they're gonna lean on me with their best...Well just LET'EM." Empty affirmations, pinging no resonance from the whole wide world? Possibly. But Ffej stuffs firm affirmation with a goofy twist down the mouth of desperation, and this bold resistance to the Cult of Huh? makes a bold leap of faith, a hopeful sign that the spirit of '92 is flushing itself down history's commode.

And even if you don't relate to Ffej's invective--sprung in the mung of hipster jive with warm/bittersweet aftertastes of humility/small-sigh fatalism to help the medicine go down--I fairly imagine you'll groove on the analog synth sounds, harnessed up for everything from the diarrhetic downswoop of "Critical Mass"'s intro to the 1984 pulse, with oscillating car horns, of "Concrete Trip" (bolstered, as in other areas, by an archaic drum machine programmed cleverly enough to sound like a passionate, slightly sloppy carbon-based life form.)

Frederick Exley's masterwork A Fan's Notes made a study of, as Yardley reminds us, "a subject about which it is no longer fashionable to talk--the inner struggles attendant to being a white middle-class male in late twentieth-century America." No longer fashionable quite possibly, but Ffej's work shows the problem stills presents an ambrosial plug for unfashionable, Shel Silverstein-remembering folks feeling an empty ache between the cheek and the gum.

(Check out Ffej's web site at http://www.speakeasy.org/~ffej for more noodles.)

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