Bad Guy Bullets

"In March 2020, in sync with most of the world, I found myself banished to a basement in a small town in Wyoming at the behest of a previously unknown danger so dark, mysterious and all encompassing, that all of the usual fonts of wisdom seemed out of their depth. This union of ignorance encouraged the notion of collective vulnerability for a while, casting us as partners in a vast, one for all exercise in survival, until it didn't. Most of us had glued ourselves to our visual devices, searching out scraps of dependable reality, some, as it turns out, more dependable than others, leading us to our current cacophony of competitive understandings. It turns out these devices are also capable of a wide variety of stimulating functions, among them the effortless delivery of the nether products of the entertainment industry: cop shows, war movies, murder mysteries, true crime procedurals and all manner of entertainment based on the most violent human impulses. Pretty standard stuff, really, in terms of what plays in normal times, but it was not my usual fare. Perhaps the months of long isolation I was experiencing and the compulsive draw of the remote might be credited with my sullied viewing habits, but I found myself landing on these sites with disturbing frequency. Their ubiquity eased the transition and after a while I found myself strangely familiar with the dramatic devices which are the building blocks of these shows, most of which are designed to guarantee a predetermined outcome and resolve a supposed mystery. The gunfight is the iconic centerpiece and culmination of many of them and the seemingly invulnerable main guy striding through a cloud of misguided bullets while casually dispatching his opponents left, right and on the roof is it's prime moment." ~ Michael Ward

New single, "Bad Guy Bullets (A Lockdown Journal"), out now.