“The mixer sweats…”Mark E. Smith
bart plantenga
A DJ named Kees flees Amsterdam under mysterious circumstances with teen daughter, Alouette. His prehistory has something to do with local enforcement & a biker gang. They hitchhike around Amerca’s Midwest in pursuit of a mysterious female benefactor – if she even exists. They eventually end up back in Brooklyn where they must survive, Kees as DJ and Alouette in a new high school. Kees must turn to slave-wage construction-renovation work offered by his deceitful landlord. Things go from hilarious to hallucinatory to absurd to harrowing in Brooklyn’s post-hipster-DJ-slumlord underworld … The entire story is told from Alouette’s POV.
We were three weeks in Brooklyn and Papa had already made European friends-of-friends-of-acquaintances at SVA and FIT. They arranged excuse-to-have-a-party gigs where he DJed less for money than for exposure and merch: a few weird-pattern, a Chakra Tech next-age Mood Ring, student-designer prototype shirts, new-age healing bracelets, jodhpurs, a mention in a sidebar gossip column, a pissing fluorescent fountain, shoes that didn’t fit but looked bomb, lots of praise. [Lyrics for a future song: Mama Mia Mama mia / What shoes should I wear / Should they match my pants / or should they match my hair / If you read my lips / you’ll see I don’t care].
One real Hollywood thing adults do is attribute mystical powers to their kids, which BTW comes in handy during spicy times. They treat us as telepathics led by pure hearts cutting through stench and fog. Adults regularly insisted I had those powers and so I sometimes had to use what they thought I had. And sometimes my clear-eyed-fuck-you-ness saved papa from disaster.
Karoline, a young up-and-coming German sock designer with her own band – Sock Puppe – friend-of-a-colleague, had asked him to DJ. The modest $$ nature of this and other gig-handshake-contracts meant he never discussed their utter meagerness with me ever!
All of Karoline’s cocktail glasses at the affair were “wearing” her socks! I’m not yuckin! Half his wages were gonna be in “free” sock samples …
Ultimately, these payment [avoidance] schemes meant I’d have to take the controls for long gap periods as he wandered off into some promise-littered narrative with a lit character – “You can DJ my graduation party at BLVD, I already booked the StreetLevel Room,” handing him an embossed business card.
The sock party went bang-bang; he set up his – I’ve got it memorized – homemade, 4-input stereo line mixer with ultra low-noise pre-amps with primitive effects – mainly echo and delay, vocal 1-beat echoes and effective post-fader use. It was the forerunner of the Mackie CR-1604, the “revolutionary” compact mixer with its reliable limited set of features: sturdy, analog, logical [one visible control per function – perfect for dim light chaos]. His was a custom module, re-outfitted as a mini-mixer sound system duct-taped and riveted together by him and a Rietveld colleague whose art involved lots of duct tape. Papa rewired it once we got to NY.
He plugged in the two duct-tape-protective-wrapped Pioneer tables with his welling sop-eye, glancing with his broad, proud smile in my direction as I struggled with the beat-up homemade stack speakers, removing them from the squeaky-wobbly-wheel, duct-taped luggage cart and wiggled them into position, duct-taping speaker cables to the floor.
Routine: cup of whatever-coffee plus a pour of rum as he sorts his LPs by theme, ambience, BPMs; stacks his pre-cued backdrop interference and fill cassettes. A deep breath, inhale through his nose, closing his eyes, mountain pose, then standing at attention – Black Panther 1969. Silence for minutes. Exchange of a side glance with me and we’re in business. [Read more about DJ Dutch Courage or Dutch C at Discogs.com].
But it’s not all theatre. Papa – like Aboriginals and Indians – believes the world was brought into being with song and if you learn enough songs you’ll know the world. Papa came to DJing at a youthful age – 1980, age 14 [more on that later] – as a secret weapon but also as an early scheme to manage shyness, avoid dancing and interactions with partygoers. Picture him standing on the sideline, sliding in behind the unguarded turntables by stealth and gradually mixing in his own selection of whatever was lying around.
He most def enters trance-like states, allowing LPs and cassettes [the last working DJ still using cassettes] to magically mingle, creating a narrative atmosphere that usually begins whimsically with Martin Denny or Yma Sumac, gently emerging from downtempo Peter Namlook, the Creatures, Bonobo and Shackleton into a fiercer more intense volume+BPM mix, bi-polar channel freaking, RSI toggling of the channel upfaders and other wrist and hip flicking around the turntables – image of a table tennis pro.
His midpoint frenetic drum&bass or Speedy J retro techno served as voodoo, goading revelers to bug out, be slain by the spirit, eventually keeling over in wide-eyed pools of acrid sweat.
Gangly, gnarly but still elegant sounds filled with sirens, rubble, roots ska, the mangled “Skanky Panky” of Kid Koala, all holding fast to an inner sensibility. AND ALL crowd requests are the bane of his calling. If they demanded “Dancing on the Ceiling,” [OMG] he’d give them Prince, Cymande, Ike Turner, Living Color, or obscure Lounge-House-Glitch. If they wanted Backstreet Boys [OMG] he’d spin the Beastie Boys remixed by IAM or “Repeated Love (Club Mix)” by A.T.G.O.C.
I find myself at the controls for long gaps as he wanders off into promising chat with a cast of characters all on the faking it spectrum somewhere – “You can DJ my graduation party at BLVD, I already booked the StreetLevel Lounge,” as she hands him her embossed business card. MY mixes are basic – drastic boom, cut n chop, various maxed echo freeze delays. But rare alchemy depends on chance segues between rare and familiar track choices.
Look at him in his sock hat Karoline had christened him with, hunched over turntable1, as she mock slips one of her egg-sock cozies onto his penis as he reconfabulates Teardrop Explodes’ “Reward,” scratch-sampling the opening line: “Bless my cotton socks, I’m in the news / The king sits on his face but it’s all assumed.”
His smirk of chiseled aspects described by a slurred Swiss Miss with her arm around my neck, pointing her drink at his face: “Like Sam Shepard drinking rusty water, like Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death – ohohoh …” As she sculpts the air.
He snuck in remixes of faves: Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing,” Lizzy Mercier Descloux, African Head Charge, Lady Ragga’s “Come And Get It,” Fela, Miss Djax, Stress Assassin, Liquid Liquid, the entire 99 Records catalog. On days off he might hang with Lanky Ed in what was left of 99 Records’ basement operations on McDougal and cop rare vinyl for a steal. I’d wander off past the falafel joints and hang in Washington Square, watching the speed chess players in a drizzle, hunched over their boards or tragic guys folded over their 4-string guitars, playing “Imagine.”
He alchemizes the classic yodel number “Lauterbach,” mixing the lines “I lost my sock / and without socks I can’t return home / I’d rather go back to Lauterbach / and buy a new sock …” with “God O.D. Part 3” by Meat Beat Manifesto and further transformed by Rahsaan Rolling Quirk with its industrial doom beats sounding like dinosaur footprints dropped into a sizzling frying pan. So insane, people went ballistic – body as live ammo.
Any stare-down, aggro stand-off taste matches would resolve themselves via the X-ecutioners, Firm Boy Flab and Typhoon Hipstar from Amsterdam Oost. Grooves working the lion tamer’s whip in charm-offensive mode, throwing on the scratchy doo-wop girl-scout classic “My Momma Don’t Wear No Socks” from a street-found Girl Scout LP he removed from its musty, rat-gnawed LP cover mixed with rare Turntable Mist-er, dusted with some Cyndi Lauper samples.
Ex-girl scouts singing along with Dutch C as he screws with pitch control and echo: “My momma don’t wear no socks / I saw where she took’em off / She threw’em at her child / Now her child is really wild / Dingdong …” Winkwink, Karoline von Sock melting wax in the palm of his hand. Her peck-cheek kisses, his smirk.
But then a freak-show ice queen meandered over, doing the wino two-step-stumble right at me in her reconfigured Mesopotamian kaftan: “Your father’s a devil; he refuses to say what he really means – that he wove me, WOVE ME, WOVE ME!”
Sometimes he manages to tune out distractions, armed only with a raised eyebrow and the powers invested in me by adults – letting me handle them. But the ice queen just wouldn’t go away so I grabbed her by her sweaty midsection and squeezed into the same skimpy thing she wore in 1985 and tried to escort her into the kitchen, outside, fresh air, door locked on the way back in. But she figures her way back and, in a high-pitched voice, declares: “He started something in Berlin but treated it as a joke and now the whole world’s cryin’!” Make-up running.
I’m humming “Bittersweet Symphony” in my mind to keep calm, although my kind of crazy doesn’t always save him from this kind of crazy.
“You started to cry, nobody believes you and it starts the whole world laughing.” I wonder why she’s so forlorn – other than being skewed on 12 Jean Harlows. Was papa guilty of something?
Socke Puppe’s Karoline slipped over to papa’s side to shush the sloshed ass mannikin. And yet, despite himself, managed to get himself hired. Having a program on radio station WOOF probably helped.
Papa turned up the volume while tuning pitch control down to below somber … all to bulldoze her out of the way with a scratchy original Blue Note pressing of “Opus de Funk” by Horace Silver. One insanity canceling another.
He always kills the night with his signature, the Pop Group’s “She is Beyond Good and Evil,” an ode to me, but also to rinse his soul. He kills the night with his signature, the Pop Group’s “She is Beyond Good and Evil,” an ode to me, he says, but also his tool to rinse his soul of all business transactions.
He sings along, arms chopping air: “She is beyond good and evil … there is no antidote for her … she’s one thing you cannot buy … Western values mean nothing to her …” volume upfaded to 11+ and then – CLICK – the on/off switch just as Mark Stewart issues his last yelp, creating this magnificent chasm between total noise and held-breath silence. Revelers left hanging mid-dance-move, hair-dos suspended in smoky mid-tease – and NO encores … a whiff of discombobulated vexation, partiers swaying in the breeze …
I’m all vigilance at the tail-end because New Yorkers have countless opinions that carry their esteem; everyone’s litany includes best-pizza-in-the-world arguments – or movie or bar or hairdresser or Korean nail salon, band, beer, New York poem, cappuccino or, you fill in your own blanks. Their best is your worst, some may lash out with spit, a toenail scissor or an insane 12-adjective put-down.
If I ask him later how much we made, he will wiggle his caterpillar brows, avoid my gaze, crack a smirk to wipe the slate clean. I mean, a “marginal” DJ [there are more impolite terms used to describe him: unsuccessful, annoying, artsy, Marxist, chaotic, unprofessional, messy] dealing in sounds on the edge of cognition, music you don’t hear ANYwhere except on WOOF [Nightmare Lounge, KenDoll FreeJaz, Krys O., DJ ShyBoy, Fabi-o] has to be a man of some … courage.
Payment, the list is long: birthday cake, champagne, earnest praise, cheap bottles of Soave, zipjobs, hors d’oeuvres, deep soul kisses, blowsky, blog mention, weird bottles of perfume, sonic piss-takes, fandemonium, kisses, signing cleavage with lipstick, envelopes of white powder that he slipped to tech people in clubs, loose joints, denunciations, drunken interruptions, abject expressions of nationalism, aggro petting, leaving me to fend for myself on the tables with my own playlist.
And then – BOOM – we’re outside, 3 AM. Karoline whips out a wad of crinkled $10 bills, counts them out – tik-tik-tik. I grab the wad, recount it – $110. He’s surveying his bungy cord wrapped pack of equipment, phono jacks, 45s, bottles of wine – and me cuz we’re a unit yuh see.
Looking west at the skyline: “Never-nooit seen anything not anything so high, god, how big it is all this New York …” He’s teetering, boot zipper undone, singing in a slur: “Manchester Working class band / That unrhythmic saunter / treacherous, balding / … don’t stain it with a lassie drink / do humans live too long” … stick to DJing, papa.
While we’re waiting for the car service, he helps Karoline shove three blitzed partiers into a cab. I’m holding one thin-ankled bird’s teeny metallic tote bag – lipstick, credit card, rolled up coke-sniff $20 bill, chewed gum in tinfoil – trying to find her address, her name, which not even Karoline knew.
- Answering machine: “Living Too Late” is often spun during Morrissey show intermissions. Morrisey’s a huge Fall fan but Smith always greeted Morrisey with a bubbly “Hello Stephen.” … described as the “father wound syndrome”.
We’re in a dark pocket of Brooklyn non-neighborhoods, abandoned industrial terrains, a lonely outer space tagged with the incessant hum of rubber tires on the elevated BQE.
“Papa, what’d you do to that nasty lady?”
“I make mistakes. I think she’s fine. But then she show me a knife under my nose when I couldn’t get een stijve …”
“… O god! A hard on. Really?! UGH …”
“… she cut me and LOOK … I hate the blood …” Pointing to a scar under his earlobe.
“The blood only make her wilder. Maybe I’m living too long. [silence] … Tell me a grap, a funny story.” He’s begging.
“OK, walking past FIT, at the corner of 28th and 7th I see a city sign that says: ‘Please Do Not Feed The Supermodels.’” He laughs and that’s good; you do not want a sad Dutch C climbing into a cab at 3 AM.
My name is Alouette Jet Bierschenk and I doubt that I will need to remind you to remember my name after you read this story and the ones to follow.
~~
Radio Activity Kills is undergoing a novel remix. This migrant story needs to be heard.
bart plantenga is the author of novels, Radio Activity Kills, & Ocean GroOve, The Drag Queen & The Flood, short story collections Wiggling Wishbone & The Confusion Spandex, novella Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man & memoirs: Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor. He’s a founding member of NYC writer group, The Unbearables. His books YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi & CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created a misunderstanding that he’s the world’s foremost yodel expert. He produces the podcasts: Dig•Scape & iMMERSE! & as a DJ has produced Wreck This Mess in NYC, Paris & Amsterdam since forever. He is a regular contributor to The International Times. Autonomedia will publish his novel BEER MYSTIC in late 2026. [photo Mark Boswell]
.