photo by Dorothy-June Fraser
(taken in the bathroom of the Vatikan in Toronto. Attack Plan R WOULD have played there, but pesky things like riots, extreme drunkeness and strip searches really screwed that up)

wordz: Christopher Jacob Recording Device

Spurred on by an obscure refrence to the Nation of Ulysses in a Joan of Arc song on my Ipod I decided to find out what they were talking about. I'm listening to the few mp3's I could find on limewire right now, they were a hardcore band from Washington DC back in the 80's and 90's.

their website is actually pretty funny, their humour reminds me of a lot of the post-situationist anarchist stuff that floats around: Hakim Bey, Subgenious, random zines falling off the shelves at Spartacus books or mouldering in the basement of my mom's place. In a more successful way they remind me of the greatest punk rock band of all time- Attack Plan R.

Who are Atttack Plan R, you ask? You've never heard them?
it's no surprise.
They recorded about 90 minutes of the hardest, baddest-core punk rock of all time and then evaporated into the vaporizer fumes of time. Attack Plan R stormed the basements of ex-urban Vancouver BC at the dawn of time (the new milennium) and without ever appearing on stage managed to play several gigs, got shut down by the VPD and almost started a riot at Seylynn Hall upstaging DOA and causing the ultimate decline of that community centre as an arena for punk rock shows and babysitting. Not to mention, gave rise to such ambigious sects of intellectuallim such as The Bowel Movement.

Anyway the Nation of Ulysses did a lot of that but not as well and in the end they broke up, but not before they released three albums (one posthumously) and a number of panphlets many can be read online here http://ulyssesspeaks.blogspot.com/

I took my Attack Plan R tape with me to Boulder, Colorado back in 2003 when I went there for the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. One of the guys from the beatnick band The Fuggs teaches there and a variety of other aged beatnicks sort of mill about like a part of a living museum of Buddhist-American poetry. I lent the Attack Plan R tape to Ed Saunders from the Fuggs one night after a poetry slam and asked him to listen to it because Attack Plan R were spawned by his band's scratchy LPs (and lots of drugs). He gave it back to me a few days later and said,
"This shit totally kicks the shit out of Nation of Ulysses, those guys have got shit on Attack Plan R, also I like the first song on the second side". But since neither side was clearly marked I couldn't tell you which song it was that he was refering to (to this day it remains a mystery).

Anyway this is all going into their book. But it also proves the point that I'm not even trying to make anymore. That the Nation of Ulysses is like Attack Plan R only Attack Plan R was better.
But they're good, too. I would suggest Attack Plan R as choice listening reference, but it's a completely impossible task.
So, settle.