Plate I — the basement, after midnight.
The machine at rest.
Two budding jazz musicians share a house not far from the college they attend on scholarship in a drab Navy town outside of Seattle. A creative community is unwittingly ignited — adding color to the landscape & a renaissance despite the gravity of a blue-collar world.
Spring of 2000, almost finals week at Olympic College, & the music department lounge is full of students before Jazz Band rehearsal — horns blowing faintly from the practice rooms down the hall. Around the oval table sits a cross-section of a town: kids fresh out of high school, & guys who used to be in the Navy band, back on the G.I. Bill.
One of them lives in a 1973 Volkswagen bus, busks the Bainbridge ferry for a hundred & fifty a pop, hosts the Wednesday open mic at a dive with crooked floors, & hauls an early-1950s Remington portable everywhere he goes. He is going to spend the next three years bringing a renaissance to this shipyard town.
In this time, three zines were created: Be-Bop Coffee Shop, The Fabulous Adventures of Yours Truly, & Spoken Jazz & the tingg* Machine. Born from the mechanical key-slappings of the Remington tingg* Machine, paired with original black & white photography, stick figure sketches, & brought together with glue sticks, scissors, & countless hours at Kinko's.
Not a prop & not a metaphor. In this book the typewriter is a character, credited & played: it's mic'ed on stage & used as a percussion instrument while the band is playing & the minutes are being kept. It gets its own name in the title.
I'm writing a bunch & doing this crazy art thing using this typewriter I call the tingg* Machine as not only the esthetic of the project but also a central character. Bub — Act I, Scene 5
Your typewriter seems to be its own character. — That's exactly it. I seem to take on another persona when my fingers are pounding away on that thing. Dr. Hong & Bub — Act II, Scene 5
"Every lick, every arpeggio, every space, every color, & texture… Everything." — T.J., Act II, Scene 2
Cascading cups of caffeinated concentrate Drip de la drip Crème de la crème Packed tight portafilter Handy shots to shoot it down Round wound & up I go, free to flow This juice in my veins Sammy Hagar high Can't cry when it rains With bebop jazz & espresso addictions —leaving little turd-colored cakes
Tighten up those basslines I feel fine Ears sweet like that fifth glass of wine Snappin' & poppin' Shakin' up the love in your jazz skillet Tappin' on those tapping keys It's not me—heee's left speechless After the bow solo — Sooo Lowww OH— Ray Brown Blues
I wanna stick my head
In the middle of that horn circle
Clock time telling one to drink coffee
& stay up late—but after you've done everything
you can think of to do
You go to bed
But you can't sleep
Because of all that caffeine running 'round in your veins
Keeping your lids locked open
To run with Wiley coyotes in the desert
Covered with checkerboard chairs
Inviting one to sit with trinkets & things that sparkle—
[…]
It feels like my boat sank & I had to abandon ship swim to shore, dance barefoot up the beach over barnacled rocks to stand shivering wet at the steps of a bougie waterfront house knocking on the back door praying for the kindness of strangers
Poet, guitar player, ferry busker, open-mic host, & for one particular year, the guy who lived in a Volkswagen bus & carried a typewriter into every room he entered.
Bub self-published three hand-made zines in the span of the story you're about to hear — cut with scissors & a glue stick, set in the font of an early 50s Remington, sold for five bucks a copy on the Seattle–Bainbridge run. He fronted a band called Spoken Jazz, playing the typewriter, & made a room full of drinkers in a crooked-floored dive go so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Twenty years after the last printing came from Kinko's, an intern was clearing out the old walk-in freezer at Kukuau Studio in downtown Hilo, built by Hatata Bakery, now used for storage & an isolation booth — she found a box of papers Bub brought from the mainland & found a long forgotten sealed manila envelope. It was addressed to Bub, postmarked 2003.
Inside were all three books, looking like they'd come from Kinko's that morning. He had forgotten mailing them to himself as a poor man's copyright, virtually invisible in a stack of notebooks & newspaper clippings that followed him across the ocean.
The third zine he had given up for lost fifteen years earlier, after being pressured into throwing the original manuscripts into a dumpster.
What's been published are those three zines, set as one volume for the first time — unedited, vulgarity & all. The rest of this project is the work that grew out of this envelope.
Coffee-shop poems, road stories, & typewriter rants, written between 2001 & 2003, first on those little marble memo note pads & then the tingg* Machine itself. Three hand-made zines, set as one volume for the first time.
The audiobook is Bub reading the poems with music & foley. The episodic audio musical is a 380 page script yet to be recorded with a full cast, musical score, & about seven hours in duration, & his first jazz record alongside it. He published the book first to raise awareness & capital to produce the rest of the project, & you are able to be a part of that.
Links open in a new tab · Explicit language, left as written