“The world’s a very very big record.
We just have to learn how to play it.”
DJ Spooky
bart plantenga
DJ Kees flees Amsterdam under mysterious circumstances with teen daughter, Alouette. Something to do with local enforcement, a biker gang, purported debts, damaged Harleys. The 2 hitchhike around America’s Midwest in pursuit of the LA mystery woman, a mythical 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, Here they wander through a dubious landscape in pursuit of a legendary club DJ … The entire story is told from Alouette’s Point of view.
Papa was robbed at knife point outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard while hunting down the legendary discophile named Red Alert, who had a nest in this near abandoned area, where the peace of nothing happening is undermined by criminal activity – dumped bodies, torched Audis, neglected scruffs of land, shards of bottles tossed against a wall, splintery blending into the landscape. Shady men in suits, loosened ties, dragging a body by the ankles. He leaked – a no-no – that Red Alert – no photos – as a bi-racial woman with a studio with a huge Angela Davis poster, a warped oak plank historians claim came from the hull of a slave ship called the Braman that was docked in the Navy Yard harbor in 1856 AND a warehouse full of priceless vinyl, stored in salvaged Dairy Maid milk crates stacked 6 high and 10 across with an elaborate security system. This was contrary to the askew baseball cap, mirror-shade DJ everyone had claimed to have seen at underlit warehouse parties, so unbelievably “quoisexually” different that most did not believe him. Nobody asked me. Are you asking?
Papa’s right after all. But so are they: Red Alert is definitely a great DJ, a woman who sometimes crossdressed as a man and was often confused for Kool DJ Red Alert. Both Alerts have a connection to DJ Mark The 45 King. That she – yes – forgave papa, nicknamed him “DJ Cheezwhiz” was all stuff he really really valued. His melt-beaming smile whenever they hugged as evidence. Fell under her spell – big hair, big warehouse, big [natural] lips, big collection, big smile, big heart. But don’t come on to her, she warns. She’s nobody’s girl, although half-a-dozen box boys and toasters claimed a secret inside path to her heart strewn with chocolates, Junior’s coupons, unbearable flattery [to do mostly with her shapeliness], and promises of gigs in European clubs. Mention her to this day and he’ll let out a warm, what-coulda-been sigh. Delusional? Dreamer? Something like that.
They originally met at a Mustard Factory “Fiasco” gig. She was premiering Deejay Punk Roc’s new single “Busta Speaka Vibrationa” with Sensation on vocals … Papa opened for DJ Olive Green, Fried Radio [“playing/composing” the city], Gen Ken on kitchen appliances, Hope Less-lee from Dee Lite and headliner Red Alert.
Rather than flip out when papa beat her to the punch by playing a pirated version, Red Alert simply played the flipside, an even wilder cut – “GoodFellah Nutellah” – later pointing trigger finger into papa’s chest, saying only: “You’re naughty this time, less fortunate next time.” And kinda ghosted him after that night.
Papa, as DJ Dutch Cheese, could ride a vibe but also go easily hair-trigger – from slacker to nutter – CRACK – like that, which gets him in trouble but sometimes also saves him, disarming foes with his sunny, hippie+ trust in humankind. Why does this bug me? Because idealism = naive = stoopid = victim? Or does it reveal secret MDMA use, which “enhances emotional empathy?”
He also regularly forgets where he’s parked his bike, so we have to go searching maybe like once a week. Me with big yellow ribbon in hair, standing on one pedal, floating down the street, looking this way and that, with papa jogging along, distracted popping into Earshot to briefly ahoy and natter with Earshot-owner-WOOF-DJ, Giacomo [James] Affilato, to hang and toss rare/virgin vinyl on his vintage Technics SL1200. OK, I’ll find the bike.
Affilato and papa have been plotting a consciousness-raising drive to combat the adverse effects of noise pollution in its many forms including the nefarious invasion of substandard music into dream. I’ve heard the grand blabla umpteen times. I walk into Earshot, take a seat. The bla is still bla-ing.
“… Restaurants and bars spend millions on interior design, original artwork, silverware, a wine list and then … spend two seconds, two cents on background music. Nothing like loud classic 70s rock dining on coq au vin!”
James: “… Or light 80s rock at Balthazar or arena rock at Delmonico’s or 90s faux-indy rock at Dojo’s. At Two Boots Are A Pair I heard a Hearable®-generated playlist of awful ‘unlikely-to-offend’ soft-rock classics like Jimmy Buffet, Billy Joel – three times – Orleans, Little River Band, Air Supply, Bryan Adams, Diana Ross, Kenny Rogers, fake soul … Ugh! ‘O.M.G.!! … the enda human dignity’ …”
“Like a line from a song we need to write … Oh Em Gee / enda human dignity …”
“Ha! I wrote it all down waiting long for a white cheese pizza to prevent going insane.”
“Let’s save the world from itself. New York Restaurants pipe the worst music – THE WORST – it’s like war crimes, no really.”
“Even worse is Two Left Boots on Saturday afternoons when the buggy mafia come in and they play kids songs written by ridiculous adults. Mothers and fathers singing along, miming like its their children doing the singing!”
“ Oh Em Gee / enda human dignity … Affilato, I do not know where to go when I go to converse in a bar. Hardass music so loud you cannot hear yourself and three televisions on sports channels so the manager can distract himself from the fact of a really long evening.”
“And they call us old grumps, OGs who’re stonehearted toward music when we’re the ones playing a hundred styles from a hundred countries! GRRR. I’m in a fancy pants jewelry shop buying an anniversary gift for my parents in Soho. Every single track on the sound system was classic 60s through 80s rock – the ironically ordinary, typical, lazy, manipulative Muzak of this generation!”
“Bad music – more dangerous than global warming, worse than the Taliban … Huxley got it spot on – our insatiable desires will be our ruin.”
James: “We don’t talk to nobody, we entertain each other as performer to audience. Like young copter moms singing along to kid songs sung by choirs of kids hellbent on satisfying their gloating parents …”
“This hits you like sonic warfare does it not?”
“You bet. Kid songs about sleep, not hitting each other, being polite, using a fork, counting songs … Warning: Avoid Two Boots Are A Pair cuz if elephants can be taught to avoid land mines then we can be taught to avoid noise pollution.”
“The wheels on the bus go round and round …” Papa. “By strange way of thinking, your last name sounds like something a woman can do to me in private.”
“Hawhaw. My listeners wanna know why I don’t have kids. Ugh. These pregnant women who come to do seated prenatal yoga and sing kid songs to each other’s swelling bellies with the volume turned up to drown out the streets’re my Taliban. No really, if we now know kids remember songs they heard in the womb, why would you sing ‘Row Row Your Boat’ or ‘Barney is a Dinosaur?’ Wouldn’t you expose them to Nico or Eartha Kitt or Scott Walker?”
“I found your bike, pops.”
“WAAR?”
“Front of Dizzy Quizzy’s.”
“You don’t patronize that place do you?” James gained a pained frown.
“Thinking of entering the Triviatomy competitions with Albertson. You’d be wayway good too.”
Dutch Cheese answering machine: Albertson: “Mark E. Smith financed early Fall tours by giving Tarot readings to local housewives.”
“I love trivia as much as the next man, but I hate Quizzy’s. Worst music rotation in Billyburgh. It’s too Disney. Exorbitant mediocrity!”
“I hope to earn the pot at the end of the rainbow as you say, which can be one hundred bones on a busy night. … Let’s think on this noise pollution thing.”
“Sad Sacks; it makes you wonder about life. Annoying petty thugs don’t have the talent to keep boredom outside of their hearts, where it howls, driving’em crazy so they need to jump off buildings, put their heads inside a shark’s mouth. Rob the crystal shop. Boredom’s their Taliban.”
“We must read them as people we once sat next to in biologie, hiding their cluelessness, trying to cheat on tests, falling away from society, expired library card, nobody notices them missing at graduation. ”
“See yuh, Kees. Don’t take a WOOF suspension too seriously. Management’s just on edge about censorship. You know like even ‘peepee kaakaa’ in a kid’s song will offend someone … Anyway, good chewin’ chitchat wid yuh.”
Playing idly with my braids, bored, hungry, drawing imaginary LP covers, extracting markers from zippered marker pouch, spin discs, screw with the RPMs with my forefinger, hum along, fashions on other planets, lint in the sleeves, solutions to hunger while waiting. Basquiat drew halos and crowns over things he liked. Well, for me it’s a 45 spindle. Now melting reject LPs into shapes, gave them wild names like “the head won’t move until it walks” or “Laughingstock of European” or “Stone Blast Screw It Up” and try to lucklessly sell them along with cassettes and CDRs of papa’s mixes [I do the covers] at Sam’s Fine Art Commission and a to-go box of cassettes set up in front of Dutch Cheese’s sound system.
Walking back home [that is not ours – no lease!] off Kent, along Grand, on Hope to dodge a million Billyburgers and touristas zombie-careening down the aves., toting 72-oz. liquids, swollen pocket breads oozing creamy spreads, balancing styrofoam trays of shredded piglet ears sprinkled over stressed radicchio that they grab with plastic tweezers as they slalom through pedestrian obstacles on their Nike Dunk Lows. My look no longer expresses my contempt for conformity: mismatching socks, spray-painted fake cowboy boots, a double breasted cardigan with the solar system handpainted on it, old Delmore guitar pick earrings, homemade bracelets made out of recycled brass fittings. I need more outrage, more Bindlestiff Circus meets Mad Max in a Dali painting. Who said: “Nonconformity’s the new conformity?” Delmore says it’s jealousy.
I’m no tomboy, no clothes hanger [spend $0 on clothes] – the FIT-bound guys and weekend lezzies hiss you cuz you don’t join their club, cuz I don’t join clubs. I don’t set out to look like a boy; my hair’s not even as short as Jean Seberg’s or Emma Watson’s and they’re not called tomboys. People flip if they can’t dope you out, like your pulling their chains being who you are.
Papa’s audio snobbery + beer-punk-socialist need to identify with the downtrodden can get irritating, even hazardous to health – getting into shoving matches over whether Weezer’s a boring band or not!
“Anyway, you shoulda played their ‘Where’s my Socks’ at that sock gal’s party.”
“I thought it was ‘Where is my Sex’.”
“Could be.”
“Anyway, they’re too cute jangly for me.”
“I hear yuh.” Obviously disagreeing.
I need to ask papa why it’s OK, to deliberately play really bad music to upset listeners and why that’s different from annoying music in a bar. He’ll claim it hinges on style + purpose. I don’t even bother to try to understand.
Then I had to slide between papa and this loyal WOOF listener who attacked him on Driggs. He thought papa was screwing with his head, not announcing set lists on-air. Wanted it out with him, fists bared because he was fucking with WOOF’s format. Humans going too far to find reasons to hurt somebody.
“YOUR ‘ARAB = JEW SHOW’ WAS OFFENSIVE; MIXING MUSLIMGAUZE, THE BEASTIE BOYS AND MC PAUL BARMAN WITH MASTER MUSICIANS OF JOUJOUKA, MEL BROOKS SAMPLED INTO AEH – IT’S, IT’S FUCKIN’ OFFENSIVE!!!”
“A.E.H.?”
‘YEA, FUCKIN’ ARAB ELECTRO HOUSE FROM FUCKIN’ DAMASCUS. FUCK IT FUCK YOU!” Shove came to shove, but I manage to push the jerkass away, dragging papa to his bike – me as Middle East peacemaker. Send in 12 of me and we can solve this whole Mideast thing.
“I WILL NEVER LISTEN TO YOUR SHIT SHOW EVER AGAIN!” His high-pitched on-edge voice bouncing around off the sides of buildings.
A week ago we were confronted by this young perp demanding our money, LPs and shit on the northside of the Brooklyn Navy Yard where it’s thick with tractor trailer fumes, needles, discarded mattresses and black plastic bags containing litters of snuffed kittens. What’s with the poor robbing the poor?!
Papa says: “If I give you all my money I want you to promise to invest it in your kid or buy something you need, like tools, or Pampers or medicine or clothes you can wear to a job interview. Promise!?”
The young perp peers into the plastic bag and doesn’t see any LPs of any value.
“Worthless shit vinyl. Whatchu you doin’ with this mierda gah-bitch?”
“NO! Ere’s some great roots stuff like …” As he reaches into the bag I kick papa in the heel. Is he really going to give a music seminar right here? Risk his face?
He’s in no position to make demands here. But I learn that this is sometimes exactly what you need to do – oblivious audacity – because suddenly this menacing dirtbag, eyes surfing the gutter, disarmed, clueless, tail-between-his-legs is lost. Maybe he never had nobody to hug him or send him to tennis camp or tell him to wear condoms and now his life is fucked with two kids and he’s like my age.
“No cigs, no crack!” Papa aiming a cheery-but-reproving, Dutch-uncle forefinger right under his nose – like his forefinger’s the equal of this guy’s junk gun I see in his waistband.
“I’ll come with you,” papa offers. “Get you something that fits. Or maybe you wan’ a healthy smoothie. What do you like?”
“Hot pussy.”
“KFC special?”
“French-Fried pussy lip.”
“Oh really? I mean, I do not even think you know how to ring her bell? So, OK, mister meat-eater, so it’s pussy tartare then?”
“Get the fuckouta my face. Or I mess it up Frankenstein bad an’ yo lil crotch fruit too.” [He means me. Need to write down “crotch fruit.”] I notice a modest knife in a decorative sheath hooked into his belt at his right hip.
Papa can’t ever leave well enough alone … he’s been beat unconscious in the past, but other times he wins friends; was once invited to a perp’s family gathering where the kid-street-thug introduces us as his friends. We say nothing about his crimes to the parents. All that’s pretty fab but it doesn’t lead to any lasting peace.
The outcome: The guy eventually gets frustrated, pants falling down, eyes dense as a bolt on a rusty lock, steps out one last time to block our path – last chance to prove he’s a ruffthug. The story of how some teenagers age 20 years overnight goes untold … suddenly he’s had enough of our hippie shit. And he’s homing in on me, but if you ignore him like your eyes are cinderblocks, these types don’t end up lunging at you. And that’s what happened because this guy only likes weird on his own terms.
“You foreign; you ain’t even fuckin’ ‘Merican!” As if this explained everything like man and girl who fell to earth from whatever planet.
Still miffed, glancing around like his next line to recite is up on a billboard – pit bulls on short leashes, Hasidim scurrying past, hundreds of mangled air conditioners precariously dangling from dingy bedroom sills. Watch soldiers dismantle land mines – that’s papa. But just as it appears this guy’s about to dash off to Roberto Clemente Field, he leaps into papa’s face, takes a broadside swing at him but misses by half a tennis court. Like he’s fucked up on Viking, like he’s not put on this earth as a fighter but can’t figure out what else to do. Me leaping out from behind a parked car, hitting him with my rucksack doesn’t help. But papa’s good, fast-witted, nerves of steel, hot-wired to challenge the presumptions of what’s necessary for survival. A kung-fu routine from a comedy everyone’s supposed to know didn’t hurt his diplomatic tactics: make everything comedy because life’s ridiculous. Papa apologizes before – BAM! – he put the boy down – lovingly, after all, he’s a pacifist. That sick thud of body to pavement.
My pics viewed later are blurry pieces of sidewalk and fence and an arm reaching in from nowhere. They’re not going to do us any good at the 90th Precinct.
Meanwhile, what does this kid-perp do? Tosses his pistol into the bay and so, adios evidence. Eventually he pulls a swayze, ends up at the 90th [something one in a thousand perps ever do, which makes us think he’s a plant, a narc, or something] and suddenly papa’s involved in a “racially motivated” altercation.
- Answering machine: ESG’s 1980 “UFO” has been sampled over 400 times, the first 20 seconds of the song that is.
“See yuh, Kees. Don’t take a WOOF suspension too seriously. Management’s just on edge about censorship. You know like even ‘peepee kaakaa’ in a kid’s song could offend someone … Anyway, good chewin’ chitchat wid yuh.” James.
I’m playing with my braids, bored, hungry. I usually draw LP covers, spinning discs, fashions on other planets, solutions to hunger when I’m hemmed-in bored. Basquiat drew halos and crowns over things he liked. Well, for me it’s a 45 spindle. I’v bee thinking of melting reject LPs into shapes, give them wild names like “the head won’t move until it walks” or “Laughing-stock of European” or “Stone Blast Screw It Up” and try to sell them along with cassettes and CDRs of papa’s mixes [I do the covers] at Sam’s Fine Art Commission and in a to-go box at Dutch Cheese gigs.
Believe me, papa’s on the wacked edge sometimes – no really. A week later, with a message left on the answering machine of LA mystery woman who we’re going to visit because she’s amazing and in the presence of some local weekly journalists gunning for the police chief who see incriminating evidence in this case, fully document my papa taking a dive and – YES! – retrieving the gun in one deep, held-breath dive in Wallabout Bay. It does not make the news. A cheap-ass Phoenix junk gun bought for a gram of blow served with a short paper straw stuck into a baggy.
He declares: “Ik was een vrij goede duiker in mijn tijd.” [I was a pretty good diver in my time.] Plus he has good peripheral vision and remembered where he saw the gun go down. The water’s rancid, percolating with fecal matter, muck and motor oil leaked from WWII warships.
He gets sick for weeks after [dysentery, e. coli, and some other illnesses I forget the names of]. He only went to a doctor after LA mystery woman arranged for an appointment with her Lexington Avenue personal physician who recommended liquids, rehydration tablets, and Humatin. “She’s an angel I dreamed of as a teen.”
Meanwhile, one of the so-called “witnesses” in our so-called “bias incident” [btw: there was nobody else there that grey afternoon – just saying] had fallen out with the perp when the $50 sweetener soured and they recanted, ghosted off … To make a long non-story short, the authorities dropped all charges as in it never happened, which was great.
One day, papa received six tee shirts in the mail from LA mystery woman emblazoned with the NY POST headline: DUTCHIE KNOCKS HOODIE, that headed a short news account of 42 words, page 5. Since there were six shirts, he could wear them to gigs for quite some time. Papa has developed his own ideas of alliances, siding with the outsider-underdog – Native Americans as outsiders on their own land. By revisiting the scene of the so-called crime he [or we], according to him, according to Indian lore, will feel the place-memory energy begin to inhabit us and if we just linger around here for a while we become “recipients of the spiritual imprints left behind by the event upon the land” [cit. probably John Joseph Mathews, Talking to the Moon, 1945, called the “Native American Walden.” In the 1930s and 1940s, Mathews (1895-1979), as a member of the Osage tribe, Mathews observes his environment, writes down his reflections on the human impact on nature, but also the impact nature has on men. A feat since there is nothing here. Place-Memory means land absorbing the energy of an event. The place remembers what happened here on this damaged strip of land, the Navy Yard, is, to Native Americans, the Iroquois, the Navajo, despite its pollution, its misery, a living participant in our history, not just some scarred piece of empty throwaway liminal space [look up liminal again]. He will explain it four ways in Dutch and English with hopes that his scattershot style will eventually hit its target – mine and his understanding.
At Railroad and Assembly in the middle of a nowhere – idling tractor trailers, a wheat-paste flap of a Beacon Theatre poster for 10,000 Maniacs “Lori’s Lorry” tour fluttering, warehouses, pink water puddles, a stack of offloaded dead car batteries, a trail of wheel-crushed cans of Camo Black Extra malt liquor, notorious for its brutal blend stale candy and rubbing alcohol – he spots something synchro-spooky: on a wall of a cinderblock building, across from NYC sanitation truck parking, where the Hygienix Deli used to glow with fluorescent light into the night, someone has superglued the 99 records ESG cover to a wall like it’s a plaque commemorating something … In fact, it’s the very cover of the only LP papa thought he’d lost the day of the mugging. And here it is superglued to a wall. He appreciated its ironic humor and spooky synchronicity, reaches into the record sleeve, pulls out the LP as he’s lecturing me: “ESG was the best of crossover, a super-dynamic, un-hip-seeming-super-hip group that combined sharp hypnotic beats, hiphop, punk, disco and Latin polyrhythms that served as a sampling scavenger’s treasure chest for Tricky, the Beastie Boys, Gang Starr, and many more.”
Radio Activity Kills is being renovated. Migration takes many forms & leaves behind many stories.
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 by Eddie Woods (RIP), 2008, authors bart & Paloma Jet]
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