Member Since: 6/18/2005
Band Website: miketamburo.com
Band Members: mike tamburo
Influences: g.i. gurdjieff, ennio morricone, neil young, bola sete, charlemagne palestine, don caballero, robbie basho, my mom. my dogs, sun ra, steve reich, the sun, keenan lawler, anyone that looks at music and art as an adventure and is willing to explore all of the possibiliteies the imagination can create, monty python, the people i love, brion gysin, being alive, lamonte young, stan brakhage, beatles, gastr del sol, jonas mekas, tony conrad, john coltrane, harry smith, arnold dreyblatt, hermann hesse, 60's experimental film, john cage, velvet underground, all my peeps."I measure the merit of art by its consciousness. A work of objective art ought to be a book; the only difference being that the artist transmits his ideas not directly through words or signs, but through certain feelings which he excites consciously and in an orderly way, knowing what he is doing and why he does it." G.I. Gurdjieff
Sounds Like: NURSERY WITH WOUND
By Mike Tamburo
Less than a week after my 16th birthday, I put on my gray shirt with the stiff white collar and a blue paisley themed tie and walked all over New Kensington putting in job applications. The only place I did not apply was the Post Office. Weeks passed and I had not received any calls. Each day I was receiving a good deal of pressure from my family to apply at the Post Office. I returned home after a long day of job hunting to find my GREAT AUNT at my parent’s house.
GREAT AUNT: I spoke with Shirley Wison and she said that there is an opening for you in the Post Office nursery. I know you had your heart set on doing something else, but this could be good for you. You don’t have to stay there forever. I am not telling you that you have to be a lifer. Just try it out. Your GREAT UNCLE thinks you’ll be perfect for the nursery. You’re just taking care of the plants. You don’t have to worry about the mail. This is a huge opportunity and I would be quite disappointed in you if you did not take this job. Your GREAT UNCLE and I pulled a lot of strings to get you in there.
I took the job at the Post Office nursery and my GREAT AUNT was right. It wasn’t that bad. I took care of the plants and ran maintenance around the nursery. My head was so wrapped up in my band Lurch that I hardly even noticed what kind of plants they were. And, at that time, it didn’t matter. They were just plants to me. I only cared about rock. I never even asked myself why the Post Office had a nursery.
I quickly rose in the ranks of the Post Office nursery employees. Much to the chagrin of some of the lifers, I was the youngest person in the history of nursery to get a set of keys. My family could not have been more proud of me.
During my senior year of high school, GREAT UNCLE arranged for me to be able to work during the afternoon portion of school. I became a full time employee before I was even 18 years old. I soon became the assistant manager of the nursery.
The manager of the nursery was an odd character I had known since elementary school named Anton Plank. He used to play stickball with us at the playground after school each day. He was only about 5 years older than me, but I always thought of him as being a lot older. Plank was a genius in physics from what I heard, but also quite crazy from what I could see. I always thought he might be a bit retarded. He had a nervous tick in his neck and he would often stutter during his incontrollable fits. The guy sure could hit a tennis ball with the end of a broomstick, so I always thought he was okay.
He took me under his wing at the Post Office. He was the one who taught me about the plants. He told me what they were and showed me a lot of things about them. He said I had a green thumb, but his was green with a daisy. He used to say corny things to me like, ‘If you want to grow that daisy on your thumb, you better go check the ph level of that soil. There were a load of laughs each day and, honestly, he made me look forward to coming to work. Yes I would say that Anton Plank, genius with a tick in his neck, became one of my best friends while we worked in the Post Office nursery together.
Now, as I said earlier, I did not know or care or even think about what kind of plants we were taking care of at first. As time went on and Anton and I became closer, he started telling me about what we were doing at the Post Office nursery.
(I purposely left out the stuttering)
ANTON PLANK: What we are doing here is important Tamburo.
ME: You mean taking care of the plants.
ANTON PLANK: Well these are special plants and yes it is important that we take care of them. These plants are so important that you could say we have formed a symbiotic relationship.
ME: You and the plants? I don’t understand.
ANTON PLANK: Tamburo I told you these were special plants. They are all quite rare. Some are no longer found in nature Tamburo. You can only find them here and I feel that we are doing the world a great service by taking care of these treasures.
ME: They just look like plants to me.
ANTON PLANK: Just plants!!! These are not just plants!!! Look if you are really going to be my assistant, you have to KNOW that these are so much more than just plants. You see the mushroom here?
ME: Yes
ANTON PLANK: This type of mushroom was the catalyst for man discovering GOD.
ME: I don’t understand.
ANTON PLANK: Well just imagine FIRST MAN. He’s running around, naked and he’s having a whole lot of fun. This was pre-Post Office handbook, so FIRST MAN had no idea what he was supposed to eat. In fact SEVENTH through TWELFTH MAN all died while trying to figure out what was okay to eat. Anyway, one day FIRST MAN is out there and he is hungry. And he finds these mushrooms and he eats them and he is transported and given the knowledge of the mushroom.
ME: I don’t understand. Are you talking about Magic Mushrooms?
ANTON PLANK: Well sort of. Yes. You see it opened the gates for FIRST MAN and he saw what he could not see before. And what he saw gave him purpose and guided him and filled him with possibility. He remembered this plant and shared it. BADABAM BADABING BADABANG RELIGION.
ME: Come on.
ANTON PLANK: I shit you not. These plants are divine.
ME: (pointing to a faggot of roots) Well then what do these do?
ANTON PLANK: This is Sinicuichi. Here this one is pretty mild. Let’s try it out. Go get me a large stainless steel pot and a large glass jar. We will make a Tea.
Anton pulverized the roots and put them in the pot to boil. He stuttered things about the SUN GOD and a lot of things I couldn’t even register. The roots boiled for nearly an hour. He then poured the contents of the pot into the glass jar and brought the jar outside and let it sit in the sun for a few hours.
ANTON PLANK: Well that seems like enough time. Go fetch me a couple of glasses and some water. We’ll show you how this works now won’t we. I have to warn you this tastes kind of bad.
Kind of bad was an understatement. This was the worst taste I can imagine. My gag reflex began the second the tea touched my lips. Anton told me to keep it down and quickly finished his. I followed my fearless manager’s lead and finished my glass, chasing it with water. Immediately I felt sickness. I felt gravity pulling me down to the cool ground. I was on the ground for a few minutes before I finally vomited. It was a violent purge and as I gagged, my hearing began to change. It sounded like everything had an echo, phaser and flange effect on it. I cleaned myself up to discover that everything in my field of vision also changed to gold and yellow colors. The experience was unpleasant and quite disorienting for me. The sound of my own voice was too much for me to deal with and I purged again.
ANTON PLANK: Now, now, pull yourself together. You are going to be fine. Every one of these plants does something. You are going to try them all. You have to KNOW.
Over the next four years I tried all of the plants. Morning Glories, Salvia Divinorum, Yopo Beans, Calamus, Marijuana, Peyote, Illinois Bundle Flower, Wormwood, Belladona, Banisteriopsis caapi. Datura, Mimosa, Syrian Rue, the list goes on and on. We studied the plants and the headspace they would open for us. I eventually formed a symbiotic relationship with some of them.
One day, sometime around my 21st birthday, Anton came to work in an agitated state.
ANTON PLANK: I need to go see Lewis over in the research laboratory. He has been working on some new combinations. He’s got a new one he is calling SHINE. I have been testing it out this week and I am definitely seeing some curious places. I have to tell you, I have never felt so good. I just want to stay there.
ME: What’s it like?
ANTON PLANK: Well you go deep, like with DMT or Salvia. It is a very similar space. But the kicker is that he synthesized that with dextromethorphan.
ME: You mean the stuff in Robitussin?
ANTON PLANK: Yes, but in it’s purest and most concentrated form. That is what makes it so amazing. It totally removes the anxiety that DMT sometimes causes and it turns the experience into a longer trip.
ME: I can hardly deal with a 5-minute salvia trip sometimes.
ANTON PLANK: Trust me. It’s like you are there seeing it all, but you are experiencing it as someone else. Total dissociative. I can just freely move around in these mental spaces now. It is like walking around drunkenly inside my own brain. I have a lot of work to do with this one.
And work he did. Within a few weeks Anton stopped coming to work, leaving me to become the manager of the Post Office nursery.
This meant a new level of clearance. I was quite surprised to see my GREAT UNCLE again. He was doing a lot of work in DC but came back to the New Kensington branch when he found out I was taking over the nursery. He ran all of the tests on me, physical and psychological. It reminded me of my childhood and I quickly fell into my pre-assigned role.
GREAT UNCLE: We are all quite proud of you. You have exceeded all of our expectations and I feel quite confident that you are the best person to take over the nursery. We have some big things happening here. Some big things you are lucky to be a part of. The research labs have found some great new combinations that are really going to shake things up out there on the postal route. I am hearing great things about this SHINE.
The fact that I was working for the Post Office had hardly dawned on me in quite sometime. I mean the work that Anton and I were doing was so much more important than the mail. In fact, after I started to think about it, I could not understand why I was doing this sort of work for the Post Office. I tried not to think about it. There was work to be done and I was the one who had to do it.
I slipped into a new rhythm as nursery manager. I took my job seriously, often working more than half the day. I chewed coca leaves for energy, and as GREAT UNCLE informed me, I raised productivity 15%. In fact, everything was perfect until the storm. Yes, the great storm was my turning point. I guess you can say I saw too much.
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ANTON PLANK AND THE SPIRIT OF 76
By Mike Tamburo
I had not seen Anton in weeks. I had heard rumors that things had started getting pretty bad for him. Shine had left his body an empty shell. He decided there were better places than earth. Anton just wanted to stay on the other side. I knew the feeling myself. It takes you some place else. IT REALLY DOES. Some place different. Some place that is just as real to you as anything else you have ever seen. Time is distorted and the world is again a magical place. It’s the stuff of fairy tales and it is quite easy to go overboard; especially considering the state of consensus reality these days.
It can be a tough job exploring these areas of psychic space. TRUST ME. There have been many times I have found myself saying, “Dear Lord, I have gone too far. I’m on the other side now. OOPS.†But I get used to these other sides. I pull aspects of one reality into another. I go on living in them and I adapt. I change. I am able to cope with new surroundings and new awareness. I do not change in an instant. I grow into it. It takes time to absorb, of course. It takes time for an idea to become an action. Eventually it all filters through though and, well, here I am.
But where was Anton?
I had not seen Anton in weeks. I arrived at his house to find his front porch in complete disarray. Plants were knocked out of the pots. Dirt was all over the floor. I rang his doorbell, but he did not answer. I could hear the TV, so I decided to enter. The house was a disaster. The cats had taken over. I found Anton on his couch in a pair of torn boxer shorts. I tried to speak with him, but he could not see me. He just sat there in his own filth in front of the television.
GOLDEN GIRLS was on TV and I noticed that Anton had scribbled something onto the screen with a magic marker.
I often find myself in a dream
asleep and awake
my thoughts drift.
if you can’t beat ‘em
turn up the tv.
My thoughts drift to
human beings
history
archetypes
myth
fantasy
religion
and sometimes ridiculous things
I spend a lot of time on ridiculous things
A LOT OF TIME
my ridiculousness aside
I am a man
a man who has strived
to see something
other than myself
sometimes I do
sometimes I don’t
i’m anton plank
I have got the spirit of 76.
I had to read it a few times and it still made no sense. I turned on the light and saw that Anton had attacked the entire TV room with his magic marker. He had gone mad. It was everywhere and none of it made any sense. It went on and on and on.
I have got the 76
i’m the plank
spirit anton
i’m the spirit
got the spirit
i’m the plank
76 planks of anton spirit
I’m the got have spirit of anton plank
anton spirit and the 76 plank
i’m 76 and I got anton spirit
i have got 76 and anton
i’m the spirit
of the plank
I tried to snap Anton out of his trance. I injected him with a B-12 cocktail; the kind my GREAT UNCLE used to give. He snapped out of it for a few moments.
ME: ANTON!!! ANTON!!! COME ON MAN!!! SNAP OUT OF IT!!!
ANTON: It’s all digital.
ME: WHAT?
ANTON: Digital. It’s all digital. Everything will disappear.
ME: It’s okay. You’re gonna be okay. I am going to get you some help.
ANTON: What is it? DIGITAL? DIGITAL? Where does it go? It’s invisible isn’t it? The information? Nephilum. Nephilum. Newspapers ah yeah. Digital my Digital Where are the digital grooves on your ebook? Yeah yeah, Digital nephilum. America will digitize and I will pull the plug. Dark age. Dark age From digital to dark age. They will use the books for fires. There goes history. How are you? Digital history. Where does it go? Nephilum. Where’s English? You are history to SAVE. PHARMORE SAVE. More Power. MORE POWER. The power three. Within three generations of digital there will be no power. No information to know. It’s all digital electric humming TV. Couch potato. Couch Potato. Nephilum. Nephilum. I’m Anton Plank and I have got the spirit of 76. Thank you and good night.
I was devastated by what I had just witnessed. There was nothing else I could do for him. I called the ambulance, waiting there until they came. I took all the cats to Animal Rescue and I packed my car up to leave town. I had enough. I had to get out of New Kensington. I thought things would be better in Virginia Beach.
Record Label: music fellowship, nafh, barl fire
Type of Label: Indie