CRACKPOTS #43: BRACE BELDENS SONGS OF THE SUMMER

Summer's almost over. These are my top summer hits. If you want to read more newsletters, sign up for the CRACKPOTS tier!

GARLAND JEFFREY’S “SPANISH TOWN” (1977)

While, like most people, I’ve known a number of strippers throughout my life, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with myself in strip clubs. Part of it has to be a generational thing; naked (or almost naked) bodies were indisputably harder to see for a large part of the 20th century, so I suppose it was this big occasion to see a bellybutton or a buttcheek and guys just went crazy. I'm not even so much a tightwad it's just so from my perspective the whole thing is such a rip-off, and any kind of atmospheric gaiety that maybe made it worth it to hang around these kinds of spots had most certainly worn off by the time I was able to get in the door. 

The first strip club I ever went to was, and still is, called Carol Doda’s Condor Club. It was the first topless bar in San Francisco; I haven't seen it, but there's a documentary about it now. My dad knew a woman working there back in the 1980s who was fucking a bouncer on the piano, which was hitched up to this hydraulic lift, and somehow amidst a passionate entanglement he got crushed to death between the piano and the ceiling. The woman was up there for hours. My dad tells me she left town. 

Anyways that was all a long time ago. This is too: Back in 2000s, a cook at the Condor Club named Chode owed my friend Noel money, back rent for a practice space that they shared. I might have shared it too—I don’t remember. There must have been some reason I was along for this. I was, I think, 17 years old, Noel and Chode in their early 20s.

Chode played in a band called Peligro Social, I liked him well enough although he sometimes freaked me out. Wild guy. I couldn’t believe he worked as a cook at a strip club. It hadn’t occurred to me that places like that sold food. I had figured they were dark places with machines belching fog lit by strobes and dark red lights which highlighted scary oily women undulating for bikers in denim vests, chortling Japanese salarymen, brothers in sunglasses and giant leather jackets…in short, iniquitous black boxes peopled with living stereotypes borrowed from movies I’d seen.

Noel and I got in by saying we were looking for Chode. I had a crummy fake ID made by Sandy Kim, a really atrocious piece of work. I mean no disrespect of course. It still worked most of the time; I learned that if you present yourself confidently enough you can squeak by with a stinker. We sat at a small round table towards the back. 

To put this into context—San Francisco has about two blocks of strip clubs up on this street called Broadway (there’s a couple in South of Market, too, but people only go to the Gold Club for the buffet…). That strip of Broadway hosts among the best looking blocks in San Francisco. Look:

Took this from online…

Hold on let me digress--- one day after high school I was walking along Broadway with Dom, a refugee from Palestine who went to my school and was, like me, into punk rock, when we ran into Ron Jeremy, the famous short & ugly pornstar. He was walking out of an adult video store. Dom was, if you can believe, even more annoying than me and yelled HEY RON, and Ron Jeremy turns around and he looks down at us and says HEY, do you kids want an autograph? To which we say yes, we'd love one, though we didn’t even slightly care, we only knew who he was I guess through South Park, things like that I mean has anyone ever masturbated to that crap? So Ron takes out a pen and he signs a piece of paper to me (long gone now), and he looks up at me and he asks Are you Jewish? And I say Yeah I guess so and he puts a little star of David and then he looks at Dom and says Let me guess, Palestinian? And Dom says yeah haha, I am, and he just draws a regular star for him. Ron Jeremy would later be found mentally incompetent and unfit to stand trial for sex crimes. Dom and I would drift apart because we loved the same girl and he died from a heroin overdose after high school.

As you can see, the Condor Club has a great sign, great location, even the name evokes something (although if you’re searching for an animal closer to the ground, Crazy Horse down South of Market could work). Me and Noel sat in there, towards the door, and there’s this woman doing really intense acrobatic routine on the pole. I had never seen anything like it. I guess I thought strippers were supposed to act like sexy vampires or something. This chick was climbing up the pole and flipping around, then sliding down like an upside down fireman until she stopped short by just an inch or two above the stage. GOOD GOD! I thought. This makes people horny? What did I know, I was just a kid, it turns out all kinds of strange things make people horny but the handful of other guys in there didn’t seem very turned on, I gauged them as lonesome drunks, they were barely even watching the girls…

From the kitchen Chode dispatched a waiter with a plate of fried ravioli. We ate it with our fingers. A dancer ambled over and sat next to us, holding what looked like a little metal lunchpail.  She was clearly fishing for a private dance. Her sales routine was ludicrous. She started describing how HORNY she was. I said haha, wow, you sure are something, in between bites of ravioli. We broke it to her that we didn’t have any money, in fact her coworker owed us money, we didn’t even ask for the ravioli (which we were still eating) and that we were musicians, we weren’t like the other guys there---but she said yeah yeah yeah to all of that and kept her spiel up. She told us that she’d been a musician too, down in Fresno, of all places, but her career ended when she was kicked out of band class because she kept hooking up with other musicians on the bus. I said: Wow. That’s crazy. She said she played the tuba. I felt bad because she was at work and because of that she had to tell me she was horny and played the tuba. I couldn't give her any money if I wanted to. Noel asked her with genuine curiosity if she’d ever smoked weed out of a tuba. She said haha, wow. No I haven’t. But I’ve fucked tuba players. We left it at that. She sat there disappointed and we ate the ravioli.

I took a sly look at the other patrons. I wondered why our girl didn’t head over to make a pass at them. Maybe they’d been there since opening and had already tried and been rejected.  They didn’t look like they had any money either. I kept my eyes off the woman dancing onstage—I was worried I’d somehow be charged for it (I can’t figure out how to do asterisks good on Patreon so I’ll parenthesize it: Later, I had some friends who worked not as dancers but as “security” at places like this…part of the job is you halfway mug drunks after you inform them the private dance they just got cost $600. So, all in all, my instincts were correct). I wondered: Do people fling money at dancers? Nobody was doing it then. Sometimes a guy would walk over and just slap a dollar bill on the stage. I didn’t like the idea of the dancer having to bend down and pick it up after she finished; maybe that's supposed to be part of the charm. But everyone from the girls to the patrons just seemed bored. 

One of the drunks was a short white man with long dreadlocks. I swear to God I thought it was Keith Morris from the Circle Jerks. This isn’t for the sake of this newsletter; I really did think that. It’s my strongest memory from that day. But I realized that was ridiculous. Why would he be there? I forgot to ask him about this in the interview me and Jack Wagner (now of Otherworld) did with him in 2022… 

I’ve never been a great fan of the Circle Jerks. They were a canonical punk band that, when I was first getting into music, I liked because the name was funny and the music was approachable. But when I was something like 13, I was visited by an astonishing revelation: One of their most popular songs was, in fact, a cover. “Wild in the Streets” was originally by Garland Jeffreys. And Jeffrey’s version was better. This was a shattering revelation for me, as I’d figured that punk must be the best kind of music because it was stupid and angry, just like me. I sort slot Jeffreys alongside Joe Jackson and Warren Zevon, and he wrote a song I used to listen to all the time in the car with my dad (it was on a mixtape he made) called Spanish Town, and while I used to giggle at the line where he goes “Suck on a Chili Dog” I realize now there is a certain dignity to it. And he taught me a minor lesson as a young man.  I've been listening to that song a lot during hot days when everything feels all saggy and slow.

As for Chode, he never left the kitchen. We just sat there, waiting, and eventually left without the money

SONG OF THE SUMMER: Tuvan Internationale/Tooruktug Dolgay Tangdym (VARIOUS ARTISTS, THE YEARS VARY, LOOK IT UP)

When I was in third grade, I somehow became friends with the smartest kid in school. He memorized pages and pages of Pi, wrote them out by hand and taped them up on the wall of his bedroom. I didn’t (and still don’t) have a clear understanding of what Pi even is, let alone the utility of memorizing pages of it, but this alone sold me on his genius. His father had been a disciple of Richard Feynman, had in fact helped write some of his books, and along with his mentor had taken an interest in the country of Tuva (Feynman had been entranced by Tuvan stamps). This led to a book, which I’ve never read, called Tuva or Bust and then, in a roundabout way, to a documentary called Genghis Blues, at which point the blind blues singer and self-taught throat singer Paul Pena was involved. It was nominated for an Academy Award.

Paul Pena and Kongar ool-Ondar

Tuva is a little republic located in a real nowhere place in Russia–North of Mongolia and South of Siberia. You’d be forgiven for glancing at it and thinking: Mongolia. The customs, culture, and religion are very similar, not to mention the craze for horses (one of the most famous Tuvan songs in the US being “Sixty Horses in My Herd” performed by the group Huun-Huur Tu).  Both had, of course, been part of the Mongol Empire under the beloved Genghis Khan, and later under the lazy rule of the Qing, but when that tattered dynasty came to an ignominious end in the early 20th century their fates diverged.

Mongolia, a much larger (and generally flatter) territory than Tuva, was the subject of a great deal of fighting during the Russian Civil War. Post-Qing Chinese attempts at annexation were haphazard, as the order after 1911 had quickly degenerated into a decentralized, chaotic civil war between venal, oftentimes opium-addled warlords with poorly trained and paid troops. The upheaval gave rise to the short-lived theocratic Bogd Khanate, under the rulership of the (you guessed it) Bogd Khan, which means the Holy King, the Living Buddah. He controlled the country for a few years after 1911, and later found himself torn between White Russian killers under Baron Ungern von Sternberg and the red-eyed troops of Chinese drug lords. He was controlled in turn by each, though eventually Ungern’s mixed forces of Russian and Mongolians were successful in kicking the Warlords troops out. Then, predictably, Mongolian Communists revolted and took the country with the assistance of the Red Army. The Bogd Khan remained the nominal head of state for a few years, until he died, possibly of syphilis. Mongolia of course went on to become a socialist state that essentially functioned as a non-Republic member of the USSR. A friend recently played a music festival there; he said Ulaan-Batar has the worst traffic of any city he’s seen in his life.

(A word about the syphilis thing: That’s just a rumor about the Bogd Khan—other sources just say “natural causes”, but it’s not totally unfounded. By the 20th century, syphilis had conquered all of Mongolia--estimates range between 42% to 50% of the population was infected by the disease. There was a joint Soviet-German Syphilis Expedition to Mongolia in 1928. A syphilis expedition! You can read about it in this rather interesting paper).

—

There’s a fascinating excerpt from the rollicking, reactionary travelogue Beasts, Men & Gods, written in 1922 by Ferdinand Ossendowski. Ossendowski was a Polish adventurer, perhaps a secret agent, and fervent anti-Communist who wrote 77 books in the interwar period. He is perhaps most known in America for having portrayed the sinister Baron Ungern von Sternberg in all his holy glory during the Mad Baron’s bloody attempt to set up a God King as a puppet ruler in Mongolia as part of his fight against the Reds. This story—and many others detailing Ossendowski’s skullduggery in Asia which form the brutal core of Beast, Men, and Gods—made Ossendowski quite famous.

Very early on in the book we find Ferdinand accompanied by a friend who had just murdered two jolly Red Army soldiers who had been on the hunt for counter-revolutionists. The pair of friends stole the dead soldier's horse and tack, and set off like fugitives for parts unknown. One night, in an old shack, his friend regales him:

“I want to tell you an old story, I had a friend in Transbaikalia. He was a banished convict. His name was Gavronsky. Through many woods and over many mountains we traveled in search of gold and we had an agreement to divide all we got into even shares. But Gavronsky suddenly went out to the ‘Taiga’ on the Yenisei and disappeared. After five years we heard that he had found a very rich gold mine and had become a rich man; then later that he and his wife with him had been murdered. ...” Ivan was still for a moment and then continued:

“This is their old hut. Here he lived with his wife and somewhere on this river he took out his gold. But he told nobody where. All the peasants around here know that he had a lot of money in the bank and that he had been selling gold to the Government. Here they were murdered.”

Ivan stepped to the stove, took out a flaming stick and, bending over, lighted a spot on the floor.

“Do you see these spots on the floor and on the wall? It is their blood, the blood of Gavronsky. They died but they did not disclose the whereabouts of the gold. It was taken out of a deep hole which they had drifted into the bank of the river and was hidden in the cellar under the shed. But Gavronsky gave nothing away, . . . And Lord how I tortured them! I burned them with fire; I bent back their fingers; I gouged out their eyes; but Gavronsky died in silence.”

He thought for a moment, then quickly said to me:

“I have heard all this from the peasants.” He threw the log into the stove and flopped down on the bench.

I listened for a long time to his breathing and his whispering to himself, as he turned from one side to the other and smoked his pipe.

The excerpt doesn't have much to do with anything. I just thought it was nice. A few days after that passage, Ossendowski moves through Tuva. His stay is uneventful, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Mongolia hogs all the glory; the steppes and history have a romantic glory to them that Tuva, which is encircled by mountain ranges, trades for mystery. When the 1911 revolution in China threw any pretense at state control out the window, Tuvan nobles were divided on whether to join their fortunes to the ascendant Bogd Khan or seek protection from the chaos under the Tsar. The latter won out, and Tuva became another far-flung corner of the ailing Russian Empire. When conflagration again disturbed the remote land, Tuva found itself fought over by different groups during the Russian Civil War—White, Chinese, and eventually, Red. 

The Tuvan Revolution is somewhat elusive. The Tuvan written language wasn’t formalized until 1930 and those who could read or write in Russian were almost exclusively the nobles or former bureaucrats belonging to the Tsarist regime; as a result, one can mostly grasp the contours of the debates without reading what the people involved were actually thinking, if that makes sense. Nevertheless, this corner of the world, tiny and pastoral with a population of less than 100,000, became the second socialist state ever formed, beating out the Mongolian People's Republic by three years. 

Of course, in the early 20th century, Tuva had no proletariat to speak of. It barely had any population at all, aside from small gold mining concerns oftentimes led by ethnic Russian prospectors. There were no cities (the Soviets formed the first one, called Kyzyl, or “Red”), hardly any infrastructure, and a population consisting mostly of illiterate herdsmen who spoke a language that hadn’t yet been formalized. The Lenin of Tuva was a Buddhist monk named Donduk Kuular, who remained highly religious throughout his rule . If, as the formulation goes, Communism = Soviet Power + Electrification of the Whole Country, then Tuva wasn’t doing very well. There were no soviets to speak of. The political class had difficulty adjusting to modern structures; the Tuvan government dissolved the ruling Tuvan Revolutionary People’s Party Central Committee in 1923 (the Bolsheviks kindly asked them to reform it). The number of monasteries increased from 22 to 26. The state was only recognized by the USSR and Mongolia (and, despite Tuva being featured on some globes and atlases, this never changed). 

It wasn’t until the first Tuvans graduated from the USSR’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East in the late 1920s that Tuva began the trek towards socialism. The newly educated young Communists saw a country still in the thrall of lamas, herdsmen, and nobles. This was cemented further by Kuular’s theocratic turn, exemplified by the Tuvan People’s Revolutionary Congress of 1928 when Kuular sought to integrate Buddhism (and the Lamas) into political life. The small group of revolutionary students overthrew Kuular and took control of the party and country. Tuva, which in the early 1940s boasted the first non-royal female head of state in history, was annexed by the USSR in 1944. It remains an internal republic of Russia today.

Khertek Anchimaa-Toka in her dotage

Tuvan throat singing (or xoomei) was originally practiced out on the steppe, in mimicry of the sounds of the natural environment, from the water rushing downstream (Tuva has over 8,000 rivers) to the sounds of camels. Throat singers can hold multiple notes at once, and the practice sounds like a whistling drone of undulating volume and intensity. I find it beautiful; if it’s supposed to remind the listener of the taste of lingonberries and the sound of yak hooves and water down the Yenisei or the sound of steppe-wind blowing over the Tannu-Ola range…

A strange artifact from the revolutionary period in Tuva’s history is the Tuvan Internationale. The lyrics differ from the original, French “Internationale”:

For centuries, the arat were tormented

 Under the rule of foreign masters

 Out from torment they were liberated 

By the Glorious International

 For centuries the arat toiled in drudgery

 Under the rule of domestic masters

 From suffering they were liberated 

By the Renowned International

 The Tuvan Internationale was the national anthem of Tuva until 1944, when it was (according to some sources) replaced by the superior “Tooruktug Dolgay Tangdym”, which I think has very sweet lyrics for a Socialist national anthem:

When I walk in my forest

I will always be satisfied

Because my forest is rich

With animals and everything I need.

I was born in mountains, cliffs, and taiga.

Because of that, I am strong.

I will raise nine different animals and be rich.

If I take care of them – I'll be rich.

By the end of 1944, Tuva was part of the USSR. Throat singers sang in Moscow, and appeared on TV, then later the radio---and people like Paul Pena and Richard Feynman heard it. Now its most famous citizen, former Defense Minister of Russia Sergei Shoigu, formed part of the reason for Prigozhin's aborted rebellion with the Wagner Group. What a world.

The film Genghis Blues was a tremendous success. Paul Pena was feted, as was the Tuvan master throat singer Kongar-ool Ondar who features heavily in the film. They toured together. I was at Ian’s house when the Tuvans came to visit. I remember being awed by them. I had never been around anyone so foreign. We all sat and watched Repo Man. That was the first time I ever heard Black Flag. 

—

My other songs of the summer are “Try to Live My Life Without You” by Brinsley Schwarz and, of course, “Cowboy Song” by Thin Lizzy. Both are from the 1970s.

Hope the rest of August treats you well!

Brace