Poetry – NewRetroWave – Stay Retro! | Live The 80's Dream!

PURE FISHSCALE (prt V)

Sam HaiNe — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 16:55:47 +0000

Fishscale/V/: New.Entry-Transmission.Whatever.Wetnightmares.
Screamscapes.and.corporal.malfunctions//The movie theater has gone dim. The Kodak camera has lost its reel. The Mall is shuttered. The video store is closed. The soundtrack plays on the tape deck, scrambled. The Pyrex takes a nap for the evening. The national anthem plays after dusk behind a scrambled pornographic transmission. The ICE is out tonight and the night is on fire. The sky looks like a dead screen. No stars in the sky. No whistling wind. No connection. No firmware in a pushup brazier to tune into the right nocturnal frequency. Just dead space and a static filter, not even the air could be trusted with authenticity. Media never sleeps. The television stays on. It’s always on and watching us, omnipresent and instigating, a rabble rouser and a shit talker galvanizing the masses into herds and stampedes at the press of a button. A planned reaction to the insurgency of law. What have I walked into? They say revolution is out in the streets but, it’s all a mixer, a munch, a social fellatio, what have I walked into, a gaggle of geeks, gooners, meat pacifiers and skin socks – repeating what the TV eye and the cardboard says. All in step and out of order. For sincere reasons and free will – although dictated in silent vibration from the overseers Morse code. Engineered resistance to a problem that will be solved and locked down with dystopia and monitored by A.I. screws. Then. Here come the star fuckers and the vampires the celebrities and leeches. Lead by the pimps. The publicists. Celebrity cameo appearances in the back rows of protest. Kissing babies. Shakin’ hands. Only there for the photo-op and never joining rank at the frontline. Pretenders; actors; slaves to corporate rations and privilege; no gunplay, no backbone, just a game in the end. A hologram of a leg-wit-ammo, a box of blanks, rambling his gums into the void for a star on the avenue. Not here. It’s just another dead night and about this same dead time every night. They reenact and replay the same playlist and cosplay their childhood dreams. A boulevard of vapid dreamers, chipping away at the surfaces and hurling the city like feces at pigs, drones, naysayers and the npc. Nothing more but performance art against the machine. Showroom Dancers. With color commentary by your favorite content creators; jesters and critics feeding off the algorithm. Crossing their palms with silver traded in from your attention and likes; bunch of Svengalis and pied pipers in the new preachers clothes not like them but living a karaoke life in sheeple skin. A generation nursed on instant gratification through an umbilical usb cord detached from the contaminated coarse weather of reality and living one TikTok moment after another in some perverse REM sleepwalk. All copyrighted and sponsored by your elitist fascist overlords full-throttling their plans into a doomsday reset scenario and the birth of the new religion. Sponsored by oligarchs. You are all sleeping. Make it a better dreaming. Get into your phalanx formations. Red Dawn. Bravehearts. Look to your brother-in-arms. And behold leading the ranks. Not random protagonists. Imagine, just imagine under those hoods in the front. A fantasy. – unveiled is the avengers or at least those that play them. Imagine yourselves rejuvenated with angst and righteous rage as those performers now possessed by the spirits of the IP that propelled their public image holding the line. As Christ Evans with trash lid in one hand and the stars & stripes in the other raised high; RDJrD2 in his aluminum foil iron armor inspiring courage in you. As descending from the rooftops with karambit gloves and fury in his teeth screaming to the heavens that “this is our ENDGAME!” is Hugh Jackalman too. Tears in your eyes and love swelling up in your frail chest and throats, “They’re here!” “The Avengers are here”. ”This is it!” A moment of our lifetimes when all men can lock shields and crush the oppressors under the tidal wave of change. freedom. and a better tomorrow. Something Aragonidus would say. What a dream that could be, Teen Wolves. Fleeting. Transitioning. Remixing. Getting carried away on a channel surf. The sequence again scrambled. The channel switched on everyone. All because the common man has lost his remote control. It’s been in the hand of the bad men this whole time. The bloody bag men. The usurpers. The adversary. The ones who remake, mutilate and remaster our memories and script our futures. The sky is a dead screen. The stars are blacked out. It’s just us in here and the movie rolls on. The show goes on. The empire strikes back. As everyone plays Sophie’s Choice every week on which Hot Topic to rally behind next. From the killing fields to local inconvenience. These aren’t freedom fighters this is the mob. And Rome knows its mob. How to fatten them up and keep them occupied with spectacle and gossip. The enemy knows the system. And the only responsible response is too crash the system. Crash N’ Burn. Hack the dream and make it yours.
Then. Then, I woke up. And the theaters were screening, the video store was open, the soundtrack restarted and the sky was in high resolution. What a beautiful sunset. The TV dinner smells amazing. That’s when I woke up. And forgot what I was dreaming about. //////….then WW3 began.
SamHaiNe

Bonus: Chinatown (visual video) HaiNesVille:

More FISHSCALE….

Sam HaiNe — Tue, 31 May 2022 14:09:56 +0000

Ambulance races by. Midnight_Hainesville. Alone in my room. Falling down. Confused. Disjointed.out-of-focus. Forgetting faces. Forgetting periods, forging distractions and falling in and out of dreaming. The complications and implications reseeding and echoing on the mind with every second dripping into unconsciousness. I was alone in thoughts, emotions and remembrances. Every kiss and every promise. Looking at me and me looking into you. Blurring faces. Same tastes. Different vignettes. Never forgetting. Always and ending.
Strangers stare as they pass by seeing myself holding you in some alley, in some bedroom, on a rooftop, a rave, a taxi cab, in the bathroom stall, on the beach and forever. Halfway down a marijuana cigarette and floating down the bottleneck of whiskey. Tracing lines of cocaine off the sink. After-Hours. Mischief. Romance. and happenings. Your favorite records, your favorite drug and haunts. That love you spelled on my lips. The state of being in love. State to state. From Sunset Park to Tennessee. Always finds me here in a bar half-past the hour. Reclusive and hidden in plain sight.
No one to someone. A nobody in the flesh, not just smoke and mirrors and smeared reflections. Yesterday, today, always and forever. Still remembering. Still keeping our secrets even if only a reprise with no reply. Now, sifting through the medley of songs that were ours. Closing my eyes. For all the loves I loved and still: the Amor’s, Lindsay’s, Autumns, Rebecca’s, Amy’s, Amanda’s, the Tiffany’s. Haunting. Dancing. Swirling into the dreaming of a no one. A nobody in plain sight. A vandal signing my name on the walls we build around memory. Sam. the hate that’s smothered by your name. Pillow talk and medications after-hours. Thumbing the pill bottle in my bed. The curtains closed and the blankets neat. My mask is drawn and nodding. The melatonin creeping. The windows are cracked. Listening to the night and the passers by whispering to each other; all the promises and serenades and the birds & the bees. The things we keep. The things we need. The things we forget and find again. Subverted in the playlist. Brings me back. Falling over and over again and on repeat. Til, I’ve fallen… to sleep.
– SamHaiNe…
samhaine.bandcamp.com

Previous FISHSCALES:
Fishscale Prt. 1 – https://newretrowave.com/2018/11/20/fishscale-a-retro-flash-of-fiction-part-1/

Fishscale Prt. 2 – https://newretrowave.com/2021/08/30/fish-scale-part-2-a-nostalgic-flash-fiction/

Hainesville is coming to Philadelphia

Sam HaiNe — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 02:48:10 +0000

NEWS!!! Cinco de Mayo (5/5/19)
@ A Novel Idea bookstore (Philly).
1726 E Passyunk Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19148

“I will be back in Philadelphia, PA hosting a Delirium Tremens reading in support of the NEW Hainesville album “Natural City” dropping this year. That’s right I will be reading Hainesville stories some from the new album and one other. The event is FREE and there will be some free food. And as with every D.T. reading, there will be a limited open mic window.”
– SamHaiNe (Hainesville, Jade Palace Guard, NewRetroWave)

SamHaiNe presents: Hainesville “NATURAL CITY”
A cold winter night in the secret city.
A collection of short monologues and flash fictions highlighting some of the individuals that call Hainesville “Home”. Stories about people living outside the margins that define civility and existing in the moment. This is a future-present inspired by neo-noir, retro nostalgia and some cyberpunk aesthetics. Coming Soon in 2019 at SamHaiNe.bandcamp.com with physical media distributed by The Jade Palace Guard.
Go like at facebook.com/allhailming
or on IG @eternallydragon

Retro Double Movie Review – BUKOWSKI – “The Last Reading” (1980) & “Born into This” documentary (03′)

Sam HaiNe — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 02:45:33 +0000

It’s a typical morning consisting of drinking and writing. Living in Tucson, AZ is somewhat of a culture shock to my sensibilities. Shock the same way you’d shock a wild animal by placing him in a sanitized suburban, urban outfitter exhibition decorated by hipster and late 90’s TRL swag with a soundtrack brought to you by Florida Georgia Line or a Rob Zombie trap remix. Most of my prior assumptions have been shutdown but all in all it’s a pleasant place to live. Affordable too. I could care less if Phoenix is more urban leaning – how urban can you get in the desert really?

Lately I’ve been on a nostalgia binge while working on my new album. Repeated viewings of JUICE, NEW JACK CITY, Taxi Driver, CREED, KIDS, Bad Lieutenant, The Basketball Diaries and others even recent favorites like Rescue Me and Mr. Robot just prove one thing to me. It’s in the blood. You may be living out in America with the wind in your hair and the sun at your back but, you’re still a wild animal from the city. Maybe a little nicer. This current state of mind has made my productivity better and sharper. I yearn for the fuckery but I can live without it. My reading list is stepped up as well. Been reading Jim Carroll’s “Forced Entries”, “Death Money” by Henry Chang and “The Corporation” by TJ English.

The other day I re-watched Barfly and Factotum. Both films are great experiences and capture the essence of what it is to be among the elite of us drunken losers. Not the happy hour, happy go lucky, crowd consisting of hipsters, jerk offs and the occasional gaggle of teachers buying up rounds of shit beer and huddled up in the bathroom stalls bumping cocaine. I mean the real residents of your local hole in the wall: the bar stool philosophers, the haggard beauty queens, the irresponsible, the lost, the forgotten and the in-between.

-Cracking open another Modelo

Both films, one being a documentary and the other an adaptation of one of the works of Charles Bukowski. The partron saint of barstools as I refer to him as. Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German born American poet, novelist, and short story writer. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a “laureate of American lowlife”. Regarding Bukowski’s enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, “the secret of Bukowski’s appeal. . . [is that] he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.”
Since his death in 1994, Bukowski has been the subject of a number of critical articles and books about both his life and writings, despite his work having received relatively little attention from academic critics.

Although not the biggest Bukowski fan (I originally wanted to review an adaptation of one of the works of Jim Thompson, one of my favorite writers), I can respect Bukowski’s word play and ability synthesize his life, emotions and squalor into page after page of edible bare bones beauty. He didn’t imitate affliction and dejection he wallowed even jacuzzi’d in it. He’s the Shakespeare for the unwanted. The real deal. And what makes him special is that he was able to see his own success in his lifetime instead of posthumously like many writers do. Becoming almost some sort of literary rock star for a time.

“Too many people clutter their lives with aesthetics and superficial junk. They engage in tired social rituals and take no enjoyment or pleasure from their day to day lives. They just are.
The drunk doesn’t waste any time with nonsense. The drunk gets up and looks at the sun and the blue sky and thinks, you know what will ll start the day right? Then the rest of the day evolves into, where to get it and let it ride out. The bar isn’t a place for beer pong or shitty nineties karaoke. If you get there at the right time, it’s a hall of iniquity and refuge for the scarred. Each character tells a story of loss, fame, delusions, hope, pessimism defeat and, “I don’t know that broad was looking at me funny.”In our world of wolves and men, the drunk is the fool who exists in both worlds.”
– SamHaiNe, halfway through a tall can of Michelada

Charles Bukowski is one of the most honest and sincere writers of the past century. He lived the life he wrote about and never apologized for it. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, six novels. Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s.

Postcard featuring Charles Bukowski at his typewriter in 1988. Photo by Joan Levine Gannij, published by Island International Bookstore, Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. (HAND IN PHOTO 9-29-10)

As noted by one reviewer, “Bukowski continued to be, thanks to his antics and deliberate clownish performances, the king of the underground and the epitome of the littles in the ensuing decades, stressing his loyalty to those small press editors who had first championed his work and consolidating his presence in new ventures such as the New York Quarterly, Chiron Review, or Slipstream.”

Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994, in San Pedro, aged 73, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. Since his death in 1994, He wrote; he drank; he fucked; he pissed standing up. Then probably drank more.

THE LAST READING The Last Straw is a documentary DVD of Charles Bukowski’s last poetry reading. The producers recognized that the value of this 1980 performance was not simply the poems but the entire spontaneous, confrontational even. The footage is only slightly edited to avoid duplicating poems with There’s Gonna Be a God Damn Riot in Here!, a DVD of another late Bukowski reading in Vancouver.

BORN INTO THIS is a 2003 documenting his life and features contributions from Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton and Bono. It’s worth anybody’s attention and worthy a toast.
* MOVIE LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h32g3g7r4Q8

eNJOy the emotional roller coaster, StAy for the Drinks and Keep your Fingers on that Rewind Button.