Pre-breakup, we had talked about putting No Authority, Direction, or Control up here on the site for free download. Since I am an asshole I decided instead to go behind everybody’s back and employ another strategy. I put together “01/07-09/08″, which refers to the epoch since Gerry joined up — the definitive Meltdowns line-up, if you will.  It is every proper recording we’ve finished, gathered chronologically by release date in one handy ZIP file. That includes all of No Authority, the “Yule Tide” digi-single, Them Letdowns, and one new track. You can also grab each track individually if you’d like.

Just head on over to the front page at www.themeltdowns.com to get your fill.

The new track, “Morning News“, is from recording sessions intended for a third EP. I carefully reviewed these sessions (we had six tracks worth after a few days work) and it was the only song that was complete enough to mix. Then I stayed up way too late last night mixing the shit out of it. Despite engineering that session in our tiny hole in the wall studio with inexpensive mics, I am pleased with how it sounds.  The performances were spot-on and there is definitely shit loads of energy. We’re unlikely to ever play the song again, as it wasn’t even in our recent live set, so I couldn’t help myself but give this away for free. So, there it is, the last Meltdowns recording. 

The picture was taken during our trip to North Carolina. The van is all packed up and we’re ready to drive back to Jersey. 

An update: as mentioned below, Adam and I are going to finish out a few of the remaining gigs we booked as Meltdowns with our friends Eddie and Joe from the Imperialists.  We’ve arrived at a name for the interim project.

Ben Franklin

This tickles us to no end.  See you Saturday!

Friends, The Meltdowns are no more.

It may come as a surprise to most, but some irreconcilable differences came to a head at last. Billy and I will be enlisting the help of the wonderful, talented, and kind Joe Borges and Eddie Garcia Garza of The Imperialists to help us finish up the remainder of our scheduled shows. I will probably introduce us as the Meltperialists, or Terrorism, or something equally ridiculous.

It has been a fun and wild ride, and without a doubt the most rewarding experience I have embarked on in my life. The four of us will continue to play music - but no longer together. At the outset The Meltdowns was the baby of Billy and I, and had seen three line-up changes in our four years. Yet, the addition of Gerry and Lloyd brought something true, uninhibited, and grounded to the mix. To me, The Meltdowns will always be the four of us.

As sad as I am, this is still a life of possibilities. The future awaits.

I will keep this spot updated to let you know what we are all up to.

With Love,
Adam

We’ve cancelled tonight’s show at Matchless, my apologies.  

I’m not sure I can describe how awesome this is. So I’ll just show you the video.

“I was ready to say ‘YES’ to EVERYTHING!”

My friend Mer @ Coilhouse sends word of a neat interview with Alan Moore, author of Watchmen.  He always has rather fucking interesting things to say about art and culture, and fucking with mediums and discussing how we tend to interpret work:

I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying… It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can’t we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.

Mer writes in response:

We’ve entered an era ruled by scavengers. We are starving for substance. Obviously, we can’t look to Hollywood schlockbusters to nourish us. Still, the platform of narrative movie making has its own profound and distinctive magic. Here’s hoping that somehow, thanks to the increasing accessibility of equipment and relative price decrease in digital film and editing software, more and more storytellers standing beyond the gates of the sausage factory will be goaded, either by hunger or the pure urgency of inspiration, into making their own moving pictures.

Let’s hope, indeed!  In fact, I’m not even sure we have to hope, I think it’s kind of inevitable.

On a related note, I recently finished Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, and one passage that has struck my brain with his cane is this:

“Now holllld on.  A seventy-year-old serial killer is gonna lecture me on the intynets.”

“Seventy-one.  And I think it’s important you learn this for the future of your enterprise.  We agree that if something is available on television and in bookstores and the papers and all, it’s mainstream, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, how can something on the world’s electronic mass-communication net not also be mainstream?  It’s easily found.  You told me your friend there saw acquaintances of the gentlemen from Ohio on the Web.”

“Did I?  Okay.  I’m a little drunk.”

“There you are, you see?  It’s not that strange a world, when you can see images of men with testes full of saline just as easily as you can visit the wonderful world of Disney online.  That’s not underground.  It’s mainstream.  Just like me.”

That is a striking idea.  As an artist, if you put your work online (your music, for example), and you are now certifiably Main Stream™.  Huh.

Just like every force must have an opposite and equal reaction, I wonder if the reaction to this mainstream-i-ness, if the opposite of the democratization and ease of access to tools that Meredith is talking about, is the willful abdication of communication?

Can you keep something off the internet?

Can you really have an underground art project or band now?

I’m actually thinking about trying.

Next on the reading list: A Picture of Dorian Gray. 

We’re playing a fund-raising event this Saturday the 20th of September at Kilkenny Ale House in Newark, NJ.  It’s going to be quite a party, DJ’d by Stephen Dressler in between sets by yours truly and the disco-mad Frozen Gentlemen.  In short, the purpose of this fundraiser is to help fund Colleen Gutwein’s photo-documentary project on the effects of the Khmer Rouge on contemporary Cambodian art.  

So come out and get down with us, it’s a cheap, $8

and everybody you know will be there ;-)

Saturday Sept 20th
The Meltdowns, Frozen Gentlemen, DJ Stephen Dressler
Kilkenny Ale House, 27 Central Ave, Newark, NJ
8pm, $8, Meltdowns at 11.

This is unfortunately a 21+ kinda night

The estimable Ed Brubaker has a new comic book out, and it looks amazing.  

When I was a file clerk temp in a summer job once, I, too, had thoughts of burning Burning BURNING

LOTS OF BURNING

USS - a portfolio of probabilities _15

Originally uploaded by Prof. Michael Stoll

In the future, cars got even bigger and we got pastel-colored turnpike signs. It’s interesting to see how a now-defunct US steel company imagined the future they wanted to make. via Matt Jones.

The best argument I have read against torture in quite some time appears in a novel placed in 1327, written in 1983 - Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose. Our protagonist Brother William of Baskerville is arguing with Ubertino of Casale, a monk in a wealthy Italian abbey:

“There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what your inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this truly, diabolical) is established between you and him…. These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame. Under torture Bentivenga may have told the most absurd lies, because it was no longer himself speaking, but his lust, the devils of his soul.”

“Lust?”

“Yes there is a lust for pain, as there is a lust for adoration, and even a lust for humility. If it took so little to make the rebellious angels direct their ardor away from worship and humility and toward pride and revolt, what can we expect of a human being? There, now you know: this was the thought that struck me in the course of my inquisitions. And this is why I gave up that activity. I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered that they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”