Tag: The Woolly Bushmen

The sound of Chicano Batman is a half-dozen ice-cubes liquidly clinking in a tall glass.

It was a globe-spanning show, with listeners checking in from the Grand Valley, the Florida swamps, and as far as Japan, where it was already Wednesday lunchtime. Meanwhile, The Libertines are up to their old antics again, at least the ones where they sound like a recently unfrozen cadre of British Invasion troglodytes. Also fun: playing a track called “We Will Not Apologize” and following that up with “Stop Apologizing”. Sounds about right.

The word “party” is right there in the name, as is the word “nude”, and it might be a coincidence, but this is rowdy, horny, let-it-all-hang-out rock and roll music.

Part of what will be known as the Great Australian Psychedelic Expansion, Bananagun is more incense and lava lamps than strobes and smoke machines.

The Woolly Bushmen may look young, but they sound like a rusted IROC Camaro with a busted manifold roaring out of the 7-11 parking lot.

The luthier adjusted the direction control of the four-legged arachnoform lumbering above the forest of Oro Bay. The spherical contraption had been difficult at first, but proved to be intuitive in guiding the transport’s spindly hissing legs across the varied terrain. Behind the padded seat, the cartographer consulted screens and printouts. The purple spruce should be visible soon. A single trunk would yield over a hundred cello bows, worth millions in the underground market. They were there to make sure it remained just another tree.

Once above the canopy, it was impossible to see the green-winged hang-gliders that the archeologist and the mercenary had used to enter the Antananarivo bird sanctuary. Going through Customs had been dicey, the parts for the flying machines had been dispersed with various kinds of unassembled patio furniture, but the quality of the materials still stood out. Fortunately, the mercenary had brought up the Madagascar goth metal scene and distracted the functionaries into stamping passports and waving them through. They hadn’t even asked about the Geiger counter.

There wasn’t enough room on the narrow boat for the botanist to take out a handkerchief and wipe their brow. The square head vessel, slicing through the water on its way to the Phong Dien Floating Market, looked to be laden with mangos, but that was a ruse. The pyramids that piled the boat only a had a skin a single mango deep. Underneath were piles of something with about the same density as mangos, but much much more valuable. The captain twisted the knob on the cabin radio on hearing some narcopolka, the device’s limited capacity making the sound increase not in volume, only in distortion. The sun sparkled off the water, a thousand heat lasers evading the shade thrown by the wide straw hats they wore.

The archivist’s breath misted in the freezing vault as gloved hands lifted the metal canister off the shelf. Getting to Greenland had not been trivial, driving the snowcats to Nuuk undetected had been a challenge, and breaking into the Katuaq Cultural Centre’s secret collection room, dug out of the permafrost, could be described as difficult. Now, locating the footage was close to impossible, given the hundreds of linear meters of shelving that were visible. The producer unspooled the first few feet off the reel, peering up through the film to the overhead light. The muffled sound of Persian hip-hop could be heard from the theater above. Maybe it was not so impossible.

The earth rumbled into an appropriate angle of repose as the bucket wheel ground to a halt. On the ground, the sapper raised an arm to signal to the operator, sitting high above in an air-conditioned cab as disproportionately tiny as a brontosaurus brain. The sounds of Taiwanese ragtime could be heard on the earpiece now that the excavator had stopped digging into the hard Upper Peninsula soil. This machine was capable of extracting tons of copper ore in a single hour, but now it was digging for something far more valuable.