How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS FACE IN A CHAIR

  Dr. Phibes wasn’t the first vocoder prototype to leave his face lying around the house. In H.P. Lovecraft’s 1931 story, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Henry Akeley uses a “mechanical utterance machine” to speak with unspeakable bat-squid entities while helping them shuttle human brains across the void. Stored in “fresh cylinders,” the brains remain sentient during transit and have fantastic dreams. They converse with brains from other voids, in voices that Lovecraft describes as metallic, lifeless, inflectionless, expressionless and scraping and rattling with an impersonal precision that is utterly unforgettable.

  Somehow resisting his instinct for extra-dimensional ick, Lovecraft compares cosmic brain shuttling to something far more domestic: taking a record over to a friend’s house and playing it on their turntable. The records themselves sound like the “drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into articulate speech.” Akeley arranges to have them sent overnight, perhaps the first next-day delivery of rare records to occur in an issue of Weird Tales. Leaving the narrator with a feeling of “blasphemous infinity,” Akeley then disappears, leaving his face behind in an easy chair, his hands still clutching the armrest, and his scraping whisper, backwards fresh.

  Words (power of), I, 4, 9, 10; (familiar), I, 8; (transmutation of), II, 17; (machine), II, 18; (the word “word”), II, 41; (gutted), III, 12

  — Index, A Night of Serious Drinking, René Daumal

  TAPPING THE TOAD HAT

  Half a day into “Beat Bop,” Rammellzee officially becomes Dr. Phibes long enough to screech “RPMs” for no apparent reason other than to taunt the record speed, his nose in jumper cables, the word nose itself to follow. He calls this style “nasal passaging.” The passages themselves already had their fill of big-city excitement: aerosol fumes, markers, resins, industrial epoxies, subsurface toxins, Goofer Dust, cocaine and unclaimed garbage.

  The nose of Dr. Phibes merely took in flames and gasoline. Yet how Phibes rebuilt his sinuses was a junior concern for a film more interested in using the Pharoahs to discorporate the health care system. Rammellzee considers The Abominable Dr. Phibes to be a great teaching tool, a mixture of heartache, revenge and insanity that yielded brilliant inventions, including a toad helmet that crushed your skull by remote control. Rammel, the face mechanic, was impressed. “The screw-on toad helmet! How’d they do that? It’s a prank. There is a way of doing that, but I would never like to have anybody do that to me. When they tighten dude up in the toad mask … you think I’d miss that? That’s why I sit in this house!”

  His card. Rammellzee doesn’t speak through the vocoder as much as try to suck out its soul, vibrating his diaphragm for chainsaw-tooth waves. This could have been what Sir David Brewster meant when he wrote about “the power of sound in throwing down buildings” back in 1839. (illustration credit 11.1)

  Rammel calls home “the Battle Station,” perhaps due to its ongoing conflicts with reality (astonishingly rent-free for over a decade) or maybe because visitors often find themselves under siege. If I’m not under siege at the Battle Station then I worry. Today I’m sitting on a backseat that appears to have been ejected from a minivan, surrounded by masks fashioned from garbage, grandmother jewelry and glue. A fleet of skateboards and souped-up Tonka chassis hangs from the ceiling. Each is an armored letter from Rammel’s transuniversal alphabet, aeronautic structures of disfigured angles and points, encrypted and long estranged from the word itself, now helmed by plaster dragons, doll heads and dimetrodons, sprayed in gold. To my right is the quickest way out, a third-floor window overlooking the Holland Tunnel and the First Precinct. Outside, jackhammers blast the sidewalk, a rubble-rousing promise that New York will go on being New York, continuing its business of build and destroy, while my host talks church and vocoder. According to him, the letter Z can cruise at seventy miles per hour.

  The Battle Station, with Garbage Gods in the mirror, photographed in 2003. (The giant eyeball is Chimer, the Vocal Wells God.) During my first visit to the Battle Station, I learned about the Mettroposttersizer, an electromagnetic planet-smasher that causes “The Wizard’s Game of Pool,” leaving the solar system in a “molten state.” Also referred to as “another reason to drink beer.” (illustration credit 11.2)

  Battle Station interior. Rammellzee’s quantum armamentarium with letter weapons hanging from ceiling. (illustration credit 11.3)

  A Morse Diver’s helmet from 1923: 47 pounds, witness to barnacle scrubbing and narwhal jousting.

  That tiger head was recently spotted on Rammellzee’s rooftop barbecue grill, eating a purple smoke bomb.

  PEOPLE DISAPPEAR, STAIRS DO NOT

  When I first spoke with Rammellzee over the phone in 1992, he promised to cook me with Texas Pete Hot Sauce. Since then, he’s called me a virus, accused me of being with the Defense Department, labeled me the worst goddamn critic he’s ever met in his goddamn life, made jokes about my eyebrows, and offered to throw me from his rooftop. The photo he sent of himself was no less confusing than the good-natured threats. For one, he was nowhere to be found. Yet that’s him, somewhere behind three, maybe four sets of fangs, encrypted inside an armored suit called the Gasholeer. It’s as if Tetsuo’s Iron Man had taken up costume jewelry and plastics and blown up a Hasbro factory. The Gasholeer weighed nearly 180 pounds and spouted flames from the wrist, heels, throat and, most impressively, two doll heads that hung from the waist, within alarming proximity of the Gasholeer’s in-house stereo, which is powered by a 100-watt amp.

  “The sound system consists of a Computator, which is a system of screws with wires,” Rammel told writer Mark Dery. “These screws can be depressed when the keyboard gun is locked into it. The sound travels through the keyboard and screws, then through the Computator, then the belt, and on up to the four mid-range speakers … I also use an echo chamber, vocoder and system of strobe lights. A coolant device keeps my head and chest at normal temperature.”

  In terms of data compression—coming from one who said, “Too much information in the room is not good policy”—Rammel should be wearing a vocoder on his person at all times. When asked if he had seen the new Transformers movie, he said, “I don’t need to see it. I am it. Why do I need to see me?!”

  FLOWERS FOR ALGEBRA

  Rammellzee’s Gasholeer armor was co-designed by a toymaker named Gary Johnson. Gary was first spotted denuding a flower bed near the Holland Tunnel. “He was so white, he glowed,” Rammel told me. “Just out there ripping up red flowers.”

  To get to the Battle Station, one could either chance the traffic flying out of the Holland Tunnel without the help of pedestrian cross mirrors (Rammel had borrowed them for an album cover), or just take the caged crosswalk over the noise and to the firehouse-red building that sat next to Grabler Pipe Fitters. The four flights up to his loft on Laight Street seemed to favor murderous plunge over ascent, discouraging poachers as well as Afrika Bambaataa one time, apparently winded by the third flight where things took a crooked extra-dimensional lurch. Once I reached the top, Rammel confirmed this (“Yes, boss, the stairs do shrink”) and then assured me they wouldn’t disappear. “People disappear, stairs do not.”

  I was then led into some mad tea party situation, only the tea was beer, the hatter wore a do-rag and the dormouse was Swiss. A team of graffiti writers from Zurich sat hunched around a plank on cinder blocks while the TV behind them showed a ghoulish version of Tweety Bird chasing Sylvester around a laboratory. (The bird weighed at least 400 pounds; the cat was in pieces.) The Swiss had flown over to challenge Rammellzee to a drag race with flying letters on zip wires. There would be death metal, gambling and kitchen rocket science. Sketchbooks and trash talk were in full circulation. There was an argument about who was going to take whose letter, or in some cases already had, and which letters were armed with swiveling harpoons. The air was thick with weed and nonsense. It was barely noon.

  Later that day I stood in the rain at the 1993 Rocksteady Zu
lu Nation Anniversary up at 98th and Amsterdam, near Harlem. A park full of rappers awaited the Brand Nubian reformation, despite the sky cracking up above them. The Cold Crush Brothers came with umbrellas. Brooklyn rapper O.C. performed “Time’s Up” in a deluge. A crew of Japanese B-boys hydroplaned over tennis courts. Mikah 9 blistered the “Deep Cover” instrumental with a lightning-friendly plate in his head.

  Going soggy, I tried to reason with the morning’s events at the Battle Station. The ghoul bird, the guys from Zurich, and the letters tortured beyond recognition. I remembered at one point Rammel glaring across the table and muttering, “When you start thinking too hard, the culture dies.” I looked away and found refuge under the plank, in a cinderblock hollow. There stood the silent witness: an empty bottle of Texas Pete.

  ANT BANKS

  When Brian Eno first arrived in New York, he saw a midget writing Chinese on a bank window and knew he was in the most wonderful medieval city in the world. During an interview with Todd Haynes at CUNY in 2005, Eno would say that technology had done little interesting for the human voice beyond the vocoder.

  TRYING NOT TO GET KILLED

  A publicist once told me a story about meeting Rammellzee at an art opening. “This guy said he liked a nice ankle. Then he introduced himself to me as an equation. I realized who it was and thought, ‘Oh god. I know who you are, and I’m not ready to have this conversation. Not the equation conversation.’ ”

  Not surprisingly, Rammellzee will not declassify his name. Real names are for next of kin. As an aerosol writer you want everyone to know your name, but nobody can know who you really are. Rammellzee’s father was a transit detective, so home was no safer than sneaking around beneath the city at night, especially when the yard keys went missing. “I got home covered in paint and soot and my father would beat my ass!” He caught a memorable whupping the morning he came in from the Mott Avenue Station, last stop on the A in Queens, where he’d written “EG”—Evolution Griller, his first tag using a Zippo flip-top marker. “In school, we’d convert those old lighters into markers. We’d slice erasers into really thin strips, take the Zippo out, put the strips in and flood the motherfuckers with purple super-marker ink.” Pretty resourceful, using an eraser to create an identity that your own MTA kin calls defacement.

  “Nobody in my family likes what I do. [His brother is a tank repairman in Iraq.] They damn sure don’t understand how I got to New York and how I got to stay, and how I got to go overseas and how I got to meet people like Bambaataa, Dondi and Kurtis Blow. They don’t understand that. They hear them. They understand them. But they don’t understand me.”

  Born in 1960, Rammel had a fairly regular childhood growing up on the eleventh floor of Carlton Manor Projects in Far Rockaway. “I don’t know what I was doing. Eating bugs, chasing a basketball, tripping over chains, running around in the streets trying not to get killed.” He stubbed his toe on a cement turtle, threw eggs at buses, pissed in Dixie Cups and dropped them on kids below. He watched Dark Shadows with his mother. He played what he called “Hide and Go Seek and Beat Your Ass” and disappeared under a church. “You come out of the basement pipes and the trees and them sons of bitches started a whole new game. And they’d still beat your ass! Kids just want to hurt things.”

  A FAN’S NOTES

  Rammel guesses he was around eight when he first spoke into an electric fan and had his voice returned to him four years deeper from the future, laughing, a prolonged “ah” neatly clipped into a pulse of “ha,” somewhere between “O Superman” and Three 6 Mafia’s “Stay Fly.” Engineers call it “vortical shredding.” Talking to fans is as much a part of growing up as interrogating ants with a magnifying glass. A notary public from Apex, North Carolina, used to throw Little Orphan Annie into her fan, making “Tomorrow” sound like Ethel Merman on crystal meth. (“Crystal Methylmerman,” she said.) A condenser fan analyst at Delphi-Harrison Thermal Systems claims to have spoken to rare helicopters. Another, a vintage-poster embalmer, got into fans because she wanted to talk like Cookie Puss, an ice cream cake from outer space.

  Three-year-old sings into electric fan to alter voice, Los Angeles, 1974. (illustration credit 11.6)

  DENTAL PLAN OF THE UNSTOPPABLE

  I once tried holding a conversation with Rammel’s fan—a GE Blizzard Oscillator—and discovered not a vocoder effect but a chronic dental condition called bruxism. My jaw was popping, a side effect from clenching my teeth while asleep. According to my dentist, my teeth had been grinding away the day’s stress through my dreams, one of which included Rammellzee hot-wiring my dad’s Honda and systematically doughnutting all the yards in Mecklenberg County, thwacking mailboxes with a tennis racquet while my mother sat in the front seat, kind of bored. “It’s like hailing Helen Keller a cab and dying in it,” she said. The dentist prescribed a mouth guard.

  My host, it turns out, is qualified to build the mouth guard himself. At fifteen—sometime before a foiled robbery attempt on a Chemical Bank, yet after proposing to City Hall that he could stop graffiti by camouflaging the transit system—Rammellzee studied to be a dental technician. While enrolled at the Clara Barton School for Health Professionals in Brooklyn, he learned to build molds and dentures while mingling with aspiring hygienists. “We used the teeth of dead people to practice,” he says. “Calcium is one of the hardest things you got. The teeth are the last to go.”

  He tells me this while rummaging through the teeth drawer, which also holds do-rags and mixtapes. Scraps of cloth, silk and acrylic whisper through the air, followed by a Ziploc bag full of watches and a cassette of Bambaataa DJing somewhere in Europe in 1982. “I know those goddamn teeth are in here somewhere!”

  A decay enthusiast, Rammellzee would share a subway tunnel with some of New York’s oldest—and most infamous—dental remains in 1978, when a graffiti vet named Iz Da Wiz took him under the old Chambers Street station near City Hall. Once an African graveyard dating back two centuries, the site wouldn’t officially be disinterred until 1991, during a gas pipe repair near the Tweed Courthouse. INK 176, a graffiti writer who joined them, remembers rumors of skeletons being excavated as early as the mid-Seventies. “Chambers Street has so many layers of train stations underneath,” says INK. “They’ve got ’em hiding. I said, ‘It’s going to be spooky down here with a bunch of ghosts and shit.’ Rammel always wandered off.”

  Rammellzee, then just an apprentice, had never been to the Chambers Street ghost yards. “Iz was the only person who had the keys,” he says. “The old keys. The snake line was supposed to be there. The trains were sleeping. There’s an inconspicuous staircase and you walk down that and down the track. Tunnels below the tunnels. We got up on top of the trains and looked up at coffins, arms hanging from the ceiling. Skulls. It was a graveyard for black people buried from slavery. There’s your next monster picture.” One can see why he started referring to himself as a Gothic Futurist, staring into empty tunnels and hollow sockets, or why he titled a painting “Floor Plan of the Unstoppable,” a steel train plowing through the ossified past, encrypting the memory of New Amsterdam’s first builders, stone to the bone, while above City Hall gargoyles stretched their shadows and watched.

  A tactical model of Barshaw Gangstarr, “the dragon duck” (also one of the Garbage Gods). His hands are reminiscent of Gary “Big Hands” Johnson of the San Diego Chargers (1975-84). (illustration credit 11.7)

  On the catalog cover for an exhibition at the Galleria Lidia Carrieri in Rome, held in 1986, is a photo of the gargoyle himself, hunched in the archway of a church wearing a ski hat and Kung Fu slippers, only two pairs of lizard glasses on his forehead. “Gothic makes sense,” Rammel would tell me. “Gothic makes debt. Gothic makes death—if you know math and structure. Gothic is the point of reference.”

  BEER IS MATH

  The Gothic future lives in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s 1959 science fiction classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, a book with Rammellzee’s interests at heart: monks, bygone ciphers and the apocalypse. In 3
124, history has been deleted by a nuclear holocaust. Conducting their own vocoded analysis and synthesis, monks try to reconstruct a lost tongue in the basement of a desert abbey in Utah. A Czechoslovakian play about robots is mistaken as evidence that man first showed up at the beginning of the twentieth century. The numbers fare no better than the word. Leibowitz, the nuclear physicist, is sainted, and the monks are doomed to repeat the aftermath in a blind flashback. The end of the word. Ever the suffix man, Rammellzee might call this “friction formation of electromagnetic knowledge.” He claims, “Remanipulated strictly from a subject Equation Formation Latin, [it] warns any misuse without the representation and reformation of the alphabet structure formator will lead you into apocalyptic wars.”

  “I’m a gargoyle in argyle socks.” Rammellzee, squatting in a church doorway in Rome, 1986, favoring Kung Fu slippers over his red Sebago’s painted silver. Cover for his exhibit catalog from Galleria Lidia Carrieri, Rome. The equation is Ramm x’s Ocean=Elevation. (Sigmas=Summation Operator.) (illustration credit 11.8)

  Is there safety in integers? Rammellzee:

  The integer is a nation by itself. The function leads you on into the future, without it you have no control. To wipe out a language and make a new one is hard work. The hours are long. The idea is to read this stuff, for humans to have something to read, not just blow them away. We have our history. We know what we’ve done to ourselves. Now we want to know how much time we have so we can make sure we can live past ourselves. You have to know we built these words, monks, church, whatever you want to deal with. Whatever gavel you want, first bet, last bet—we make them.