As has been our blessing for the last five/six years in Denver – new bands are constantly surfacing. 2009 is no exception. Here are our picks for up and coming and new talent in town that has floored us:

(Please click on band name to visit their site)

Churchill

The Outfit

O’Holloran

Paean

Lifeboat Etiquette

Victor Grimm

Green Typewriters

Petals of Spain

Ever laughed and danced and cried at the same time?

www.myspace.com/josephineandthemousepeople

Photography courtesy of the amazing Brian Carney:

josephine & the mousepeople

Since my adolescence there has been a ghost in my house. Even stranger than this possible delusion is the dizzying, but altogether, real fact that this ghost committed suicide last week.

Really, this ghost wasn’t a literal and ethereal wisp of an apparition so much as she was a thing, an object, an abstract construction. But really, and to be completely honest: more than any conceptual amalgamation of the mind my ghost was a real person – existing somewhere out-there, in the world. What’s more, she had a name. She will always have a name: Laurel.

Laurel was my high school girlfriend. And like so many that came into contact with me as a youth, I handled her with the most profound sense of irresponsibility. For my adolescent infirmities were pronounced – the pockets of greatness in my growing body, yet-unrealized.

As any reasonable human would do: Laurel broke-up with my high school self. She dumped me into the education of deserved emotional turmoil. And then, as quickly as it came: high school ended. I left. She left. And so it has been that, for the last fifteen years this girl I once knew as Laurel simply became an apparition. An airy wisp that stood as a testament that I existed at all; proof that I was as horrible as I really was. Laurel’s ghost was something that followed me. Something that hovered. A cloud of intelligence that I secretly looked up to.

Once her actual human form had completely dissipated from the reality of my life, she grew large; and lived in the unreality of my life – in the dreamstate of my waking life. She became an idea. A drive. An impetus. She became that thing which I measured much of my growing sense of everything against. She became my silent, unrelenting inner turmoil: That puzzle which, if I somehow solved – I always knew that I would, in-turn, solve myself.

And if the truth needs to be told: I am no different than you, dear reader. We all have our ghosts that push us onward. Forward. If we listen to them, or see them at all…

Now, the sad and true fact is that: Laurel is an official ghost. Beyond the land of the living. Last week, Laurel killed her self. She committed suicide. She passed-on. She died. She’s not with us anymore…

It has been nearly, exactly – fifteen years since I last saw Laurel’s human face. Sure, she has visited me in dreams – the only place I’ve really seen her at all. And after years and years of this; she has lost her face to the ghostly apparitions of ideas and abstract concepts. Still, I know our time was real as my proof resides in a couple of photographs still held in the annals of my youth.

For most of these fifteen years, Laurel lived in the same world that I did. And really, not very far from me. There were reported sightings in public. We may have even stood in the same room without knowing it.

Then, in one mysterious twist of technological fate, I saw her face on my computer – on a social networking site. My breath ceased. And for many moments, my body stopped altogether. Her face, once again, for the first time in fifteen years, was before me. I couldn’t resist, and so: I wrote. Only much after my greeting did I even realize what I was saying; the complications of making this kind of unsolicited contact at all.

After staring at my words for many laborious minutes – I sent the email off. And then a near-eternity passed wherein she did not respond. Really, and as I knew: I did not expect a response. I did not deserve a response.

Then, a couple of months later and, for some strange reason, she responded. She said that we had both attended the same social engagement the week before. From what I was told, we missed one another by mere minutes. Again, she moved by me in the winds of life. Yet more proof that she existed at all. Yet more proof that she was, in fact, the ghost of my life: Her breeze left in the summer night as a wake to the possibility of ever seeing her face again.

Laurel’s correspondence was mixed with a height of emotion and the lack therein. Where she pronounced her successes in life, she also muddled them with the void of lacking, of wanting, of desiring, of unrequited ambition. Her words struck me to be such a puzzle that I actually shared them with a friend. I was begging for the deciphering code; another perspective. And what I was told by my friend: that it appeared there was some kind of backhanded invitation to meet. In the least, to bump into one another. To this end, I smiled. I wished nothing more than to complete my profound apologies with a handshake, an actual sighting. A hug.

But this wasn’t to be.

And now, I’m afraid that, more than any future hauntings or this supreme sadness that has washed over me in the heaviest of manners – I’m afraid that I’ve lost a piece of the identity that I’ve known for all these years. For it was she, Laurel, that has always been that kind of presence which has served as a mirror for all my life’s pursuits, dreams and functions. For it was her that I would have my secret conversations with: About my worth, my progress, how far I had come; and also about my retribution, my penance, my struggles that I knew something like karma had afforded me.

For the last fifteen years, I have always looked to her visage, her ghostly image, her airy wisp, her as the idea (THE idea) – for confirmation that I was not alone. That something like God was watching over me afterall. The simple fact that I knew she was out there, somewhere provided that kind of solace which shouted: you are being looked after. You have a judge. This call said: care for yourself. Grow. Bellow. Exalt. Know Thy Self. Care for your self and for everyone else in all the ways that you never cared for her; couldn’t care for her.

In all honesty, maybe I am a bit terrified that the time has come where Laurel truly can perform all of these mystical functions that I have probably only imagined, hitherto. Maybe the time has come – maybe the time always was going to come where she could really and truly – alas! Look over my shoulder and appear in the dead of night, around the corner of my closets. For fate is always determined in the end times; the history of everything is determined by its past and those which gaze upon it.

We have terribly sad news to report:

Kill Rock Stars singer/songwriter Jeff Hanson was found dead on Friday, June 5 in what his label calls “a terrible accident.” He was 31.

It has been widely reported that Hanson most likely died from a fall onto the concrete floor of his new apartment, which he had just moved into days earlier. His parents found him in his apartment. It appears he fell and hit his head.

Portia Sabin, president of Hanson’s label Kill Rock Stars, said, “Jeff was only one of two people we have ever signed from an unsolicited demo tape. We get hundreds and hundreds of tapes, and for us to have been so captivated by him is pretty impressive. He was a terrific songwriter with beautiful melodies. The icing on the cake was his incredible voice.”

A 2005 Paste magazine review wrote that Hanson’s idiosyncratic voice was an “angelic falsetto, a cross between Alison Krauss and Art Garfunkel that is often (understandably) mistaken for a female contralto.”

Hanson recorded three albums under Kill Rock Stars (2003 Son, 2005 Jeff Hanson, 2008 Madam Owl), the label that also supported Elliot Smith.

On May 15, Hanson opened our Meadowlark outdoor stage for the summer, here in Denver. As with most of the venues Jeff played on his last tour, he held the audience in his grasp for the entire set.

Unbeknownst to his close friends, one of my literary heroes – Jack Kerouac invented a fantasy baseball game and played it for most of his life.

[Kerouac's game charted] the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes. During those same teenage years, he also ran a fantasy horse-racing circuit, complete with illustrated tout sheets and racing reports. He created imaginary owners, imaginary jockeys, imaginary track conditions.

Don’t miss the slideshow of some of Kerouac’s notebooks and publications related to his imaginary sports.

“Denver is a square, proud, prompt little place, surrounded by immensity.”–Demas Barnes (Denver visitor, 1865)

Denver has a rich history, a haunted history, and at times – a nearly invisible history. Many are unaware of the men and women that served as histories characters in the formation of the city: William Green Russell, John H. Gregory, William Jackson, William Byers, Soapy Smith, Colonel John Chivington, Silas Soule, Horace Tabor, Mamie Eisenhower – for these names are primarily of the nineteenth century.

However, natives may remember some of the dead establishments of the Queen City: Muddy’s Coffeehouse, City Spirit Cafe, the old Skylark, Celebrity Sports Center and Cooper Theater, the old viaducts that pocked the city.

If the history of Denver intrigues you, several notable local contributors have collaborated and put together a great blog called Buck Fifty: www.buckfifty.org.

In 1909, while away in Dublin on business trip, James Joyce makes a pact with his wife that they will write each other erotic letters. The letters of his wife disappeared, but the ones he wrote were published in 1975 as the “dirty” letters of James Joyce to his wife. Here is one of these (deliciously) filthy letters.

Many more appear in this upcoming, May issue of syntax.

Dublin
8 December 1909

To NORA

My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometimes too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.

Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.

JIM

Here are some new tracks from Denver artists that have caught our attention:

Alan Alda: “Red Sky Morning (A Sailing Song)”

Tyler Despres: “Paradigm”

Speakeasy Tiger: “Speak Long, Dream On”

A Mouthful of Thunder: “From on High”

Cody Crump: “I’ll Be There”

Jesse Nesbitt: “015 Gracious Fact Check”

Victor Grimm: “Gary New Duluth”

Six Months to Live: “Spin a Top”

Dirt Circle Dogs: “Autobahn Pub”

The Don’ts & Be Carefuls: “Color TV (demo)”

The Build-Up: “The Violin Song”

(click on names to listen to songs)

“Fires run through my body — the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Sickness wanders my body with my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you. Consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain. Where are you going with my love? I’m told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I’ve said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye.”

- Anonymous Kwakiutl Indian of southern Alaska
Transcribed from the native tongue in 1896