Shawn C. Baker

Ghost LIVE in San Francisco, Feb 1, 2012

2012-02-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

I knew I would regret missing this the other night @ The Roxy. Luckily they will be back in April opening for Opeth/Mastodon. My friends Greg and Tori assure me I missed a great show, and as this footage from the night before the LA show demonstrates, I 100% believe them. The only drawback to waking up @ 4:30AM for work everyday is it makes me a wuss when it comes to staying up late.

Oh how times have changed.

Chick publications: Saving us from Ourselves for over 40 years

2012-02-03T10:40:00.000-08:00

Many of you will know what Chick publications is, even if you don't know that you do.

Wait, backup.

Many of you will know the work Chick Publications produces even if you do not know Chick publications by name. Have you ever known someone, maybe a high school guidance counselor or janitor, who is a 'born again' and goes about trying to 'save' others by passing out quirky little Jesus-comic strips? If you've seen them then you'll recognize them - they're real small and always have titles like, 'It's not your fault' or 'The Beast' and they're always filled with the idea that the world is going to end any gosh darn moment and since it's possessed by Satan if you don't drop everything* right now you could be attacked by demons or atheists or demon atheists!!! The books themselves look like this:

There was a very quiet school janitor who gave these out in junior high or high school and they've fascinated me since. Part of what fascinates me is that no matter where I go these things always pop up eventually. The other part that fascinates me is while they are earnestly trying to be serious they're really quiet hysterical; hammy to the point that it's incredible to believe anyone takes them seriously. Yet obviously some do just that. Recently someone gave me one at work. 'The Beast',a small black-and-white strip that sports a happy family on the coverwith 666 etched into each of their heads (mom, dad and baby too!!!) and a creepy-looking hand reaching out and apparently baptizing them into the ways of darkness. I hadn't seen one of these for a while and this was a great reminder of just how kookie religion can make some folk. The strip talks about 'Life as it is today' - basically a drunken orgie of fornication and debauchery, citing clipped bible verse after clipped bible verse to tie in technology, slowly spinning the drunken orgie into a war games-like scenario of evil global control, culminatingwith a page that is so ridiculous it requires a visual aid:

Now, I know there is a whoooole mess of good stuff happening in the panel above but I would like to draw your attention to two things in particular. First, as my good friend Ray pointed out the end of world looks kinda cool from the Chick publication camp's point of view, especially if you're a horror movie fan. I mean, I always thought the Apocalypse was going to be some big, abstract menagerie of multi-headed biblical beasts and fires of judgment - apparently that is not the case. Let's see, we've got Bat-winged devils, Baphomet, what looks like it could be Nosferatu. Also there is a zombie (drawn awfully similar to Exorcist-era Linda Blair, no?), a posse of black-robed druid guys and, my favorite, the Wolf man. Do you think the agents of the Apocalypse have to pay licensing fees to use the Wolf Man in their war of Good vs. Evil? I'm betting Universal would be into that. Imagine the royalties.

Second thing I want to talk about from the little jewel above is the caption at the very bottom, beneath the comic frame proper. Let me quote for you now, adding my own emphasis by bolding: 'For factual information on Satanism, read LUCIFER DETHRONED, the true story of ex-vampire William Schnoebelen. By Chick Publications.'

Okay, so, ah, do the words factual and ex-vampire belong in the same sentence if we are not watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer? This led me to do a little google-stalking on ol' Mr. Schnoebelen. Wanna know what I found? Check it out.

http://www.relfe.com/07/Bill_William_Schnoebelen.html

Scroll down and read Mr. Schnoebelen's 'be there done that' list. Satanist, 33 degree Mason, Knight Templar, Thelemite, Vampire (still don't get that one), and Priest for The Church of Latter Day Saints??? Sound like a devotee's list of every other freakin' option out there, besides of course directly attacking the Eastern religions, which I'd bet dollars to donuts they do elsewhere. And that's another thing. If you read down far enough - about to where the article talks about Mormonism - you'll find this little faux pas. Again, I've added my emphasis by bolding:

'Within days, his life fell apart and he lost all his magical power. This crisis led us, ultimately to join the Mormon (LDS) Church…'Ahhh... so Mr. Schnoebelen or his wife are the ones writing this, trying to adopt a third person stance but no doubt brimming with too much self-importance to maintain the distance required for third person, instead falling into self-righteous character and subsequently first person as well.

The whole Chick thing is, I suppose, a cultural phenomenon. However, cultural phenomena are not, by a rule, always good things. Look at skinny jeans. No, seriously, I started out with the intent to debunk (i.e. ridicule) these mini comics that saturate our social atmosphere on underground levels. I lost that thread for a bit above because in researching these things I remembered how much fun they are. However, as I'm sure Count Schnoebelen himself might agree, many times dangerously undermining agencies begin with an ignorant or intolerant message and then work to sugar-coat it in the most seemingly benign or even fun flavors imaginable.Jim Jones anyone???

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* Except I'd imagine, your pants.

Crass Vs. The Clash

2012-02-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

A lot of the time I am the kind of guy who takes sides with his favorite musicians. I know it's kind of stupid but I just can't help it. I've been head over heels with The Clash for some time now and it's just been within the last year a friend of mine introduced me to Crass, a gritty, walk-it-like-you-talk-it British punk band from the late 70's.The two didn't get along, or at least Crass was extremely critical of The Clash.Crass, although still fairly unknown in the grand scheme of things, is the real deal as far as the supposed politics of the punk movement were concerned. Aside from making recordings like 'How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of 1000 Dead' and cut-and-paste red herring recordings loosely referred to as 'Thatchergate' wherein the voices of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were constructed to discuss sensitive material that was then leaked to the press, Crass supported their aesthetic by organizing impromptu shows for impoverished or peace-oriented causes, massive squats to save buildings or support striking workers and generally attempted to critique and enlighten the youth culture they saw as direct worshippers of consumer culture.The Clash on the other hand, while known for their politics and images of revolution, were a big label rock band who, some could argue, did not 'put their money where their mouth was'.Some could argue this. I will not.I love The Clash. And yes, I know that they weren't as 'in the trenches' as a band like Crass were, but their critics fail to look at the politics of the punk era as a battle fought on multiple fronts: low visibility DIY is a great place to rally and make club-sized statements or protests. But how about those who can try and make a difference from the stadium level? Now, granted perhaps Strummer and the boys could have done more, but that level of world attention, while an easily exploitable marketing tier, is also a place to tread with caution. While Van Halen was singing about pointless crap and Ozzy was snorting ants The Clash were at least trying to carrying the flag through the stadiums, encouraging their fans to 'Pay Attention' and 'Think for themselves' about world issues. It's the same with, god help me, U2. I've tried not to hate those blokes for years, finally succumbing this last year to my dislike of their modern music and status*, but I still gotta give them props on the fact that while a lot of other bands out their are only concerned with their loins and their noses, Bono (ugh!) and the guys still throw Amnesty Int. and various world messages in anyone that will listen's faces whenever they can.**The Clash is a rock band. They took the underground ethos of the music scene at the time and turned it into a major seller, but they never lost site of the fact that they wanted something more, even if they didn't always rabidly pursue it. Crass on the other hand were the snipers of the movement, sickened by The Clash for their alleged stealing of an ethos for marketing purposes. They lived in commune-like ideology for their day-to day lives and fought the battles of the Thatcher-era on the street level. However, how many people did they affect then or still affect now? The Clash, on the other hand, while perhaps laregely reduced to merely rock god status over twenty years after their breakup and seven since their iconic frontman's death, still play on millions of radios all over the world. How many of those people listening do you think they've influenced to go back and find Crass? Or, how many people do they simply make feel good with their strong, positive music? I don't know about you, but it's pretty hard for me to be in a negative headspace if I'm listening to London Calling or Sandinista.So change the world one club or one guy at a time, but as long as you're trying, I give you credit.Unless you're rage against the machine. Poseurs!***.......................* If I see Bono and the edge posed ridiculously on one more magazine cover I am going to mail them vomit to their fan club address.** Although I'd still like to know what's up with The Edge buying up all that land in Malibu and basically razing it's ecosystem so he can have a couple McMansions. Hard to give the benefit of the doubt there, although I've only really heard the side of the Malibu residents and most of them have their own agendas.*** I fully recognize how ragm fans can point out hypocrisy here, but The Clash, while maybe not as active politically as Crass, did a hell of a lot more than Zak and his buddies. Sorry, their shenanigans put them in the Michael Moore category for me - started out strong but ended up ruining the argument for the rest of us. Thanks pal...

Some thoughts on Innovation: Miles Davis' Tutu

2012-02-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

Miles Davis. What does that name mean to you? To most folks into music it is a force to be revered and reckoned with. Saying his name incites one to reflect on key phrases such as: Legend. Master. Innovator. Ah, there we go, let's stick with that last one, shall we? Innovator. Say the word, let it roll around on your tongue for a moment, and think about true innovation. Innovation is not rage against the machine for hyper-stylizing an image or a 'cause' with their music. That my friends is marketing. Innovation is not The Strokes, a band considered by some to have started a 'movement' (ugh, there's that word) when really all they did was re-hash an old familiar formula at just the right time and in front of just the right set of A&R people. Innovation is not always 'good' or likeable. In fact, true innovation often stinks to high heaven when seen from a short enough distance of retrospection. Innovation is new ideas and new ways of looking at old things. Merriam Webster online defines Innovation as:
Date: 15th century
1 : the introduction of something new2 : a new idea, method, or device : novelty
And what happens when someone brings something new to an old standard or formula? People do not often like it, that's what happens. Even though everyone you ask will go out of their way to make you believe they want something different I can assure you, that is not the case. To quote the Streets: 'You say that everything sounds the sameThen you go buy them'So in 1986 when Miles Davis hooked up with Tommy LiPuma and Marcus Miller to make an album that for all intensive purposes gave birth to Smooth Jazz, the future bane of the Jazz world, I'm sure not everyone was happy. Of course they didn't know what would follow when they recorded Tutu so it's hard to say whether the album was received with animosity at the time for it's texture or if it wasn't until all of the Smooth Elevator stations set in and became their own self-fulfilling prophecies that people did the detective work and traced it's dark origins back to Davis' mid-80's album. From the mouths of a lot of old Jazz hounds I've met this one is particularly hated. I've heard a lot about this but it wasn't until I found a $.99 copy of Tutu on cassette at a Goodwill recently that I actually heard the album first hand for myself.Wow. Okay, it's pretty bad, in that new age salon kinda way that smooth Jazz banks on. The basslines are Nightcourtish with their constant slap/pop. The keyboards are waft and dawdle, their textures often similar to unwanted lavender bubble bath choking an otherwise refreshing gulp of water. But the trumpet... it's not my favorite production on Miles' instrument of choice, but there is something to it. The sound is over-produced and a bit tinny perhaps, but it perfectly conjures a strange otherworldliness. More throat than horn, so it comes across more like a voice than the instrument we're maybe used to hearing from a Jazz legend like this. There are also places where this album made me want to give myself papercuts in the webbing between my toes. And yet, to the ears of someone having grown up knowing the cliches and pop-culture connotations of Smooth Jazz*, even while godawful to listen to in theory, sometimes it's just nice and, well smooth. Smooth and actually, if you're able to free up your ears from what you've been taught, quite mystical. And that is what they were hoping for anyway, right? Smooth Jazz was the terminus point of a two-and-a-half decade romp with consciousness expansion musicians embraced, from the pot and acid of the 60's, to the coke and heroin of thte 70's and early 80's, on into, recovery and, well, I guess banality**. Hippies moved to the burbs, took out business loans and opened New Age shops that thrive on Eckert Tolle and Sylvia Browne and musicians, well some of them, created Smooth Jazz. Same thing.But with his own drug romps Davis flirted with and produced some incredible Innovations. Bitches' Brew - C'mon, if you look at the footage from them playing that live at the Filmore West it just looks (and sounds for that matter) like Acid. That was innovation. And Tutu, yes, this is innovation too. It just sounds a little bit lame now that it's a couple decades under our social belt and it helped pave the way for guys like Kenny G, but again, innovation is like anything else in life - sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad. I don't know that I'd call Tutu 'good' perse, but if you're into Jazz and it's evolutuion it's worth $.99 at a thrift store.........................* I don't understand it either and it's a recent development. When I go home to visit in Chicago and stay at my parents' house there is a small room above our garage and in it my Dad keeps a radio playing Smooth Jazz 24/7. He says it keeps raccoons away (there's a hole in the roof that everytime he fixes the raccoons re-open). I'm usually there drinking with friends into the wee hours of the morning and the last couple times, stumbling around in the dark, some of it actually worked for me. I know, I know. I can't determine if this is a sure fire sign that I'm 'Thirty Something' or what, but in my defense I'll just say if you want to lambast all things smooth I've got just one thing to say, Sade. She's always ruled and always will. So there.** Look at Aerosmith. Perfect example. Drugs = great albums, sober = shite. Sorry guys, just how it is...

The Rolling Stones

2012-02-03T10:23:00.001-08:00

Hot Damn I love The Rolling Stones!!!Oh, I don't mean The Rolling Stones we have touring the world on a seemingly continuous basis now a days. No, I don't hate that corporate monstrosity, but I have no interest in it either. To me it doesn't exist, meaning it doesn't detract from the 70's Stones I love so much. I figure this is one band that has earned the right to beat as many Wild, uh, I mean dead horses as possible*. What we have today is the natural evolution of The Stones being, arguably, the biggest band in the world for a very long time. They were so popular and trend-setting back in their cherished days that a hell of a lot of people loved them, and some of those people went on to do other immensely popular cultural icons, like Matt Groening, Martin Scorsese, Slash, etc. This means of course exponential exposure for the Stones, as for instance children who are born and grow up years after The Stones are all dead** will fall ass-backwards into their music by seeing them on The Simpsons or similar pop culture places that won't immediately turn them off by seeming out-dated, as 70's rock or Mick and the boys' later catalogue might to a 10 year old in 2025.So The Stones. Yeah, pretty wicked right? For the record, Sticky Fingers is my favorite album and SWAY, from that album my favorite song of theirs. I put this LP up there with the best of the best. It always makes me happy, even in its darker moments, and I think production and composing wise it is one of the finest examples of Rock nRoll ever etched to wax just as the Stones themselves are one of the greatest Rock nRoll bands of all time.And, to me at least, a great band is more than just their music. Sure, that is obviously the most important part, but it’s also their character – the legends they build with performance and hijinx, both good and bad; interview mayhem and/or candidness; recreational notoriety***; etc.Seriously, these guys were so intense in the 70's. Jagger stared in occult films, there was some story I read once about them being treated to an orgy at a Sultan's castle or something and the place burning down around their ears while they sat back and laughed****. And Keith, well, what more needs to be said, eh?Wrapped up in the tail end of the 60’s radicalism and revolution these guys were shaped by the world as much as they shaped it. Hence the fuzzy, quasi-psychedelic-ness of Aftermath and surrounding albums turned into the up-and-down drug salad of Sticky Fingers, the living link between Otis Redding, Robert Johnson and the British Invasion. And while other bands from said invasion continued to evolve within their forte the Stones jettisoned it and dove headlong into narcotics and Delta Blues, especially evident later on Exile on Main St. Finally It's Only Rock nRoll brought them into the heart of the 70's as a decade, with Disco and funk giving the next, and arguably final evolutionary step to their sound and probably more than a little cocaine making the record seem almost jittery and paranoid.So yeah, The Stones borrowed a lot. Who doesn't in music, besides maybe Captain Beefheart and Matmos? And they brought a lot of their influences into a more public light and probably helped make Robert Johnson a near-household name (wishful thinking, but maybe at least for a while).I mentioned their production and that's another great thing about these guys - listen to Exile and tell me you've ever heard a better sounding rock kick drum. Or just the fact that, for the most part, Mick can't sing at all. This isn't a dis, just a fact. I love his voice, especially when complimented by Keith's backings, and he does good on songs within his range, ie Dead Flowers or Bitch to name a few. But listen to Wild Horses again. Another song I absolutely love but the guy's not even close to being in tune. So production wise it's brilliant because you don't even notice this really unless you're looking for it. The producers knew how to wrap the rest of the music around his voice and give it the illusion that it's cherry on a heart felt slow number when in reality it's not. This is of course why there are A LOT of Stones songs that were singles that have female backing vocals.BRILLIANT!!!The Stones are one of two bands I always say I understand the rabid relationship their hardcore fans have with them. The other, incidentally, is Slayer. I don’t know exactly what it is about Keith and crew that makes me say this – it’s some deep-rooted feeling I get from their music. And yes, they can be criticized up and down as a bunch of English lads who became obsessed with American blues music and adapted it as their own. But a great band is more than just their music. And The Stones were - at their height they were gods and at their worst they were a blazing spectacle of debauchery; a train wreck that had to become an all ages spectacle in order to survive. I wouldn't go see 'em live now, but if I can get Takashi to position the time machine just right, I'll pop my head in to Altamont, no doubt................* Hopefully they won't put that to the test though...** Although seriously, they may just outlive us all.*** Read: Groupies and Drugs**** Obviously that's not a direct quote, and it's probably more than half embellishment passed through the changing-matrix of the telephone game but that's what I mean about the Legend bands can build - it doesn't sound to far fetched for the Stones and so I've just added to it in some small way. If anyone does know the real story or the source, please correct me. It may actually have been better than my memory's version.

'Til Tuesday - Voices Carry

2011-11-16T16:55:00.000-08:00

M83 'Midnight City' Official video

2011-11-10T12:11:00.000-08:00

I Love a lot of music but it's not often that a group affects me the way M83 has. 2008's Saturdays=Youth is a powerhouse album - dark and mysterious in a gorgeous and evocative way. About two months ago when Anthony Gonzalez and crew released their first single off the very eagerly-awaited double album that came out at the beginning of October (album titled Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, lead single titled Midnight City) I first heard it on Youtube with this static image behind it:

I seriously had chills upon listening to this track the first (and subsequent 200 times). It has become sacred to me, and affects my nervous system like a drug.

A very pleasurable drug.

The album is amazing, as expected, and last night we saw them live at the Music Box. I've been to hundreds of live shows in my life, many very amazing. Nothing has ever affected me the way M83 did. If you like the song below, Midnight City, now with an official video that also completely leveled me with Awe, buy the album (and then go back and buy the others, especially the aforementioned Saturdays=Youth and pay whatever it costs to see them live*, you will not regret it.

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*If you live in LA or anywhere near it they did just pass through here on their tour, however, this Saturday the 12th tickets go on sale to see them at Club Nokia. That's a venue I never thought I'd step foot in, but you know what? It'll be worth it and after seeing them once, just like a drug, it's impossible to think of missing an opportunity to see them again!!!

Bulb - Next Please

2011-09-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

Nice...

A Convesation With Myself

2011-09-21T20:11:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this about a year ago* and at the last minute, instead of posting it here on my blogger where my, ah, headier stuff belongs, I posted it on my Chud.com blog to try something different there.

I don't really think anyone got it. However, that is a slightly condescending statement and I do not wish to come off as someone who believes his insight into modern life so important that anyone need get it at all. However, there are points here to be made, and as such I re-post this here now, with the intent of adding to it and possibly making some more sense of these strange mutations we are undergoing sociologically as well as, I think, physiologically.

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A conversation with myself.

I don’t want to get on a soapbox (yes he does) but there’s something developmentally wrong with the children that are coming up in the high-speed internet, media-saturated landscape of western culture today. Has anyone else noticed how a lot of children do not acknowledge other people around them? Example: Children playing in the street as traffic approaches. Someone yells to them that there is an automobile approaching and they do not move or even acknowledge that they heard the warning, let alone are probably in some kind of immediate danger. Or here's another I've observed – a waiter in a restaurant asks a child what they would like to drink and they have to be prompted by a parent to answer, as if they do not know what a question is unless it appears on a computer screen and contains emoticons or abbreviations? A lot of people are shy as kids, but this is something else. There is a certain… Cronenbergian, perhaps even ghostly blank look on their faces, as if they’re losing or perhaps never learned how to navigate space and interact with actual living, breathing people?

Now, while writing this I’m realizing how much I might sound like some middle-aged housewife who is only recently seeing what the internet/immersive video game/iPod-earbud-hanging-out-of-one-ear-bland-androgynous-hip-pop-channeled-through-the-other-like-some-constant -supermarket-soundtrack youth culture is actually doing to the genome of these, the newest generations of our species, and is sitting down to write a concerned and outraged, albeit completely out-of-date and after-the-fact letter, to the editor of reader’s digest magazine (ah, yeah, you do). But here’s the thing, I’ve known about this for a while. I’ve understood and to some degree even watched this computer mausoleum affect myself. I worked around a lot of teenagers at a bookstore for quite a while. I see the apathy, the removal, the total lack of classic human communication etiquette, grammar, courtesy and honor. The exponential self-interest. It has not been until just lately however that I’d been able to transpose this to how these rising qualities will most likely affect the world I will one day leave behind me. I’m a bit of a classicist and although I’m no card-carrying fan of the human race as a whole, I really must say that it is going to be in a hell of a lot worse shape when the generations that came of age before the internet are gone and can no longer walk the youngins through the simple routine and rituals of daily life.

…………

Okay, here we go. Thanks gramps for waking up and soilin’ yourself with outrage over ‘those damn youngsters…’ When did you become that old guy?

Seriously, you say you’re a classicist but for what? We inhabit the same brain, same body, and it can sometimes be awful hard to follow what and where you think evolution should occur. The thing is this is an awkward stage in human development; the transition from what egotist Tom Brokaw calls the ‘greatest generation’ era of white picket fences, 2.5 kids and a neighborhood where the inhabitants behave more like individual cells in a greater whole than a bunch of individual entities lined up and positioned within their separate environments and something else, something more akin to a global nervous system.

That’s fine, but most of our legally defined social systems are still operating on the old paradigm. Most of us still have to leave the house to make a living, and the more everything shifts to the Internet, the less that’s able to happen for more of us.

Okay, but its probably going to be these younger generations that figure out how to further convert our outdated concepts for business and income. Look at facebook, napster, wiki-this and wiki-that.

Yeah, but those are all things that are further putting the bullet in the interaction between living, breathing people. Why is some kid who has invented the next great profit-bearing internet innovation going to give a shit about helping employ an escalating out-of-work force when he can’t even say hi to someone he passes on the street outside his apartment?

Paaaalleeease! Sure people don’t walk around and say ‘Hi’ anymore; to strangers they pass on the street or to the people that live next to them. This, as well you know asshead, is often a very cunning survival tactic. More than one bad experience has been brought on in our renting career simply by you ‘being polite and trying to get to know the neighbors’. That often leads to 2 AM knocks on the door and awkward, ‘My families all fucked up and I’ve got nowhere else to go’ moments. That might have been fine in the 50’s and 60’s, but now everyone has an agenda and not everyone understands there are basic rules of engagement and expectation when asking strangers or acquaintances for a little friendly neighborhood kindness or assistance.

But that is exactly what I mean! That lack of empathy for other people, the knocker’s ability to understand limits and the knockee’s lack of empathy for another human being who may or may not just need an hour of another person’s time to re-ground themselves, that is all a by-product of the narrowing little lives we lead.

Okay, shut up and let me finish my speel here, okay? Geesh… Anyway, the thing is, as I was saying, we’re at a big ol’ sloppy transition between not only a generational gap but an informational one. People are going to be different now because they have access to waaaaaaay more information. You may think that the old school, 227-ish idea of a neighborhood is a great thing, and maybe it is, but you’re basing what you think you know on the world as you’ve been raised to understand it through the various media outlets that you were exposed to. Let’s face it, our parents and even moreso their parents saw a vast gulf of a difference between our age and theirs because of the constant presence of a television in every house. And to be honest, I know we haven’t watched actual television programming for decades now but we watched A LOT of it as a kid. This and your parents, grandparents, friends’ parents, teachers, school teachers, assemblies, principals, film strips, out-dated Encyclopedia Britanicas all helped give you this idea of what the United States was like in previous generations. But now those influences have shifted and there’s a new paradigm and a new learning curve for these new kids as to what the social world actually is.

Yeah, it’s facebook and youtube and less and less interaction with actual living breathing human beings.

Ahh, hello Mcfly? How many times you use facebook this week?

Hey, that’s different.

Bullshit. It’s affecting all of us and you can’t hold yourself above everyone else. Granted, there is something creeping into the younger generations, that’s one of the tendrils of thinking behind our theory that Autism may actually be part of the next evolutionary jump of humankind. You always walk around referencing how terrible it is that in our culture we lock up schizophrenics and other mentally ill people while in other cultures they cherish them as shaman and priests able to access other, ah, operating systems for lack of a better term.

I guess that’s true. It always seems such a farce to us that anything that goes against social paradigm is treated as a flaw…

Exactly!!! See, the difference here is as the younger generations go through whatever it is they are going through is it is happening on a mass scale. Our last vestiges of the old school, communal world is overlapping with this new, isolated, socially awkward and self-absorbed one and they are by nature of the functionality of each rubbing against one another and causing friction. But when all of us old types die off (or complete a late-arrival change ourselves) things will work differently. There’s a new world transitioning in, and you may not like it, but it is going to be one conducted globally, over the internet, without a lot of the tactile, environmentally-grounded facets of this one.

Like, ah, human cogs in the Matrix perhaps?

Ahh, yeah, I guess so. Or like Wall-e.

Well then, you might be right, but it’s not necessarily a good transition then.

Maybe… maybe not.

Then I guess I’ll just get back on my goddamn soapbox and start over again. “these goddamn kids…”

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to be continued...

Things I Didn't Say: Wolf Moon

2011-09-20T19:17:00.000-07:00

The previous entry is fairly simplified – I desperately long to find a way to eek this Autumn tone out of my soul and onto paper where others can possibly feel it as much as I do. For lack of a word and I suppose feeling melodramatic enough to accentuate said mood I'll say that I commune with this time of year possibly stronger than any other. When I was younger and there were actual seasons in the Midwest other than six months of winter/six months of summer with a few sporadic portals of the transitories thrown in here and there, never fully making a 'Season' per se, I remember what a switch music was in this time. I'd go from my summer, hang-out tunes like John Spencer Blues Xplosion, Beastie Boys and Cibo Matto to NIN, The Cure and Type O Negative like that (*snap*). Over the last several years I spent in Chicago I saw that change as the seasons waned, and here in LALA land, well, it's a fairly even keel all the time. I'm not really complaining – I didn't ever want to have to live through a winter again unless A) we live in the UK (ultimate life goal in the category of positioning for both of us) or, B) have a Thompson-esque compound in Colorado. But while I don't miss the winter I miss the rain, and I miss the Autumns of my younger days.

I remember shortly after my friend Jake died. This was like 1997 and he'd been pretty much the only person that connected to this aspect of my brain. We were both HUGE Type O fans and would often spend entire nights just laying around baked out of our minds listening to their albums (only up to October Rust at that point – Jake, you don't know what you missed in subsequent years man). They were the sonic embodiment of Autumn (still are) and something about the combination of the buzz, the music and that sharp, chill Autumn air that grants such clarity morphed. This is about the time I realized I had what is commonly referred to in the psychological community as 'Synesthesia' and man – pinning my senses together with those disparate elements really took me to another place. A place I can still achieve sometimes if the air is right and the music appropriate.

I went there after Jake died. I drove my old wood-paneled dodge mini-van West into the last, dying strains of sunlight one evening, parked at a random forest preserve and listened to this song. I don't know how long I sat there in the diminishing light, or how many times I listened the song, but finally something snapped and I suddenly found myself walking into the woods, disappearing into the slow, thick fog rolling out from beneath the trees, a inspirational carpet that beckoned me along a path into the thicket, amidst strange, night-time animal noises and the reverberations of Peter Steele's haunting vocals and then all at once, I began to run.
I ran for an undecipherable amount of time and distance; I ran because I couldn't stand still, walk or sit any more. My best friend was dead, my world was shattered after a not-so long ago mending (but that's a story for a different time, like when my first novel eventually gets picked up and published) and my eyes were alive with tears. But there I was, running like a madman, like a wild animal beneath the rising moon, shaking with the raw intoxication that that Autumn air can bestow upon those who can surrender to it. Running with nowhere to go but back to my car (eventually), back to my home, back to my life which, though I didn't believe it then, got better.

Thank You Peter, Kenny, Johnny Josh (and Sal in the early days). Thank you for the a soundtrack to a night I will never forget and that will always grant me strength and passion in a world seemingly derived to extinguish them.

Type O Negative - Burnt Flowers Fallen

2011-09-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

It's possibly as close as I'll get to Autumn this year, as our yearly October excursion home to the Midwest isn't happening due to my new gig. It's been overcast, dreary and even a little misty in LALA and I'm running with it as best I can. Type O has been in FULL EFFECT in the CD player as I drift into the darker realms of my subconscious.
Oh, and the 2nd annual Los Angeles edition of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival* this past weekend helped set the mood quite a bit as well.
To the trees...

...............
* My review of said Fest

Bad Day@ Work

2011-07-29T15:55:00.000-07:00

(We Give The Best Years Of Our Lives)
Captive Slowly Slowly Captive
(We Give The Best Years Of Our Lives)
Captive Slowly Slowly Captive
(We Give The Best Years Of Our Lives)
Captive Slowly Slowly Captive
(We Give The Best Years Of Our Lives)
Captive Slowly Slowly Captive
(We Give The Best Years Of Our Lives)
Captive Slowly Slowly Captive

Solomon's Wisdom...

2011-04-30T14:09:00.000-07:00

I want to build this.

Alan Moore's Course in Magick...

2011-02-13T18:46:00.000-08:00

...appears in five volumes at $14.99 a piece. You didn't know Moore had a course on Magick? Yep, it's a series of graphic novels entitled Promethea and it is wonderful.

Basically Moore disguises his teachings/theories as a slightly futurist superhero comic following protagonist Sophie Bangs as she comes to grips with being chosen to be the new incarnation of ancient god/force Promethea, essentially The Scarlet Women. The entire series is packed with Magick, however the real gem is from issue 12 to about 20 where Moore walks Sophie through the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the ancient map of the Universe that the Tarot of the Egyptians is based on. It is brilliantly rendered in word and in art, J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray really pulling out all the stops and bringing each Sephira to life with the different colors, images and other associations.

In keeping with this, more for my own benefit really, because writing stuff like this helps me consolidate and streamline my own understanding, I'm going to write out the Major Arcana and brief definitions according to Moore.

............................

0 The Fool - Nothing. The Void. Ain Soph.
1 The Magus - The Father, the initial spark of creation.
2 The High Priestess - The womb in which that spark gestates.
3 The Empress - The Motherly crafting/nurturing of life.
4 The Emperor - The governing body of rules for that life = DNA.
5 The Hierophant - Something... more that guides that life. Birth of the idea of God or Higher Consciousness.
6 The Lovers - Life splits, Adam and Eve, the Protozic Amoebas. The Brothers, Cane and Abel. This Life thing gets complicated as life proliferates and takes on many new forms. Survival becomes you either kill or get killed.
7 The Chariot - The Holy Graal the dawn of man's exploration of imagination and enlightenment
8 Adjustment (formerly Justice) - Ying and Yang; Laws, compromise & cooperation. The first faint lines of civilization
9 The Hermit - A dark period of withdrawal and gestation. Re-grouping.
10 Fortune (formerly The Wheel) - Civilization: Empires come and go.
11 Lust - an undying drive that propels life further in spite of itself
12 The Hanged Man - Four points over one*: the triumph of reason and matter over the Spiritual
13 Death - A change of states.
14 Art (formerly Temperance) - The flip of card 6; alchemical mixing of Will and Imagination (Silver and Gold).
15 The Devil - Materialization over Spirit
16 The Tower - What goes up must come down (the Industrial Revolution).
17 The Star - The Path to enlightenment. The dawn of Spiritualism in the late 19th century.
18 The Moon - Hidden meanings. The Unconscious Mind.
19 The Sun - True Enlightenment.; revelation.
20 The Aeon - N.O.W. - Information age; Aeons turnover quicker and quicker. Eschaton.
21 The Universe - The Dance of Life. The mirror of card 0 - Everything.

Further Down the Corridors of Dream Part 1

2011-02-13T10:41:00.001-08:00

When he awoke there was a momentary sensation, as if he'd come to just as someone had thrown a glass of water on his face. Sudden, sharp, and cold he sat up quickly as the final moments of the dream discorporated throughout his mind, breaking into a million salient pieces and running off back into the nooks and crevices that, if he could follow them, would lead directly into his subconscious.

"Ah, what?" Was all Jake could manage as the sensation of rain, wave or folly broke and rolled back, leaving him sitting upright in his bed, early morning strains of the day to come playing in through the snaps and tears in the blinds, dream fog disintegrating and leaving nothing but the consensual.

"The mundane." he mouthed as he dropped back against his pillow and attempted to fight for those nooks, to fish out any slow moving tendrils of dream that, if caught and pulled on, might serve as a thread to begin remembering the...

"House?"

Yes! He'd gotten one. Here it was now... he struggled to move it just right so as not to damage the thread of gossamer memory. Gently pulling on the idea of the house next there came to Jake the image of a yard, an expanse of Kentucky bluegrass peppered with trees, oak and birch and others too small to recognize by name for one so uninvolved in the art of the garden. But it was enough. Jake knew where the dream had taken place.

Home.

It's been a while since he'd been there, but now... logical day-to-day thought fought for a space of prominence among the dangling memory. Best to pursue the slipperier one of the bunch before it was gone.

Jake rolled forlornly from the bed and took a place on the floor. Tucking his legs beneath him in a standard yogic position he began to slow and focus his breathing. There wouldn't be any of that om shit, but–

"On second thought," he stood quickly, performed a few basic stretching disciplines and then lowered himself again, this time slowly and with the aid of the window sill, into what he had been introduced to by Aleister Crowley (his books, not the person) as the 'Thunderbolt" position. This wasn't the standard Thunderbolt, this was Crowley's own special concoction, or some archaic torture device the old mage had come across somewhere in his own travels. It was nearly impossible to get a body, even a relatively limber body such as Jake's, into at first. Jake had done it now hundreds of times and always his body still fought it at first. But once it settled in and his ID relaxed, there was no faster route to the tune-out.

And minutes drift by and we go...

...through a narrow trail in the woods. Old woods, familiar woods. Jake can sense himself but only in that half-removed dream fashion. His hand fought off branches as he moved through the vegetation and soon he was afforded a bit of sky through the tops of the trees. He could see massive, billowing clouds of dark gray and the darkest brown, almost black. He continued, the slightly ominous sight casting a bit of a foreboding over his advance but not slowing him, never slowing him as he walked.
Shortly he arrived at a small clearing in the wood. Before him the ground rose up, covered in ancient, dry and crispy leaves and a low stone wall randomly emerged from the forest floor. Seeing this he realized that he knew the place. It was a dream amalgam of places near where he'd grown up. The wall was some strange, left-over artifact from a house long ago abandoned, it's structure demolished by some unknown factor, it's property consumed by the hungry forests all around it. Further on up the path he suspected that he would find the subtle remains of a split rail fence, also long-ago displaced by nature. He also knew that somewhere before him there would be a door buried by a lite brushing of dirt. He'd get to that in a moment.
A ripple-like sensation broke through the fabric of the surroundings for a moment. Jake blinked and suddenly it was as if a whole entire other world had sliced through the one before him, leaving an angular cross-section before him. To the right of it and the left was the amalgamated forest, but when he focused straight ahead he could suddenly see himself sitting in an elaborate cross-legged position in some far off place...
The ripple returned and the cross section disappeared. A thought flitted through his mind like a lightning bug on a July evening: there are other worlds then these.
These? He hardly had time to let this contemplation ring true when he found himself at the door in the Earth, brushing off it what little dirt remained. He had the distinct impression that someone had just been here moments ago.
Behind him another ripple shot through the world and this time the momentary cross-section showed something else. Or rather, someone else. Two eyes, great big and greenish in hue, watching him from... elsewhen.
Then it was gone and he was entering the moist staircase that led down beneath the soft, leave-strewn Earth.

And he was awake again. Jake's legs uncoiled almost unconsciously from beneath him and he blinked his eyes open just in time to catch a retreating glimpse of something in the mirror before him.

Eyes.

Snowman

2011-02-11T14:44:00.000-08:00

Just discovered this awesome band from Perth, Australia.

Some Thoughts on Remembering Dreams

2011-02-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Another completely insane dream this morning - its vivid, ethereal strands clung to me as Thompson woke me up with soft purrs for a second feeding this morning. Now, one thing I've learned is that even though they say we dream every night I myself only remember them in chunks. In other words, I've had pretty much day after day of dream residue each morning for a week or two now, but if everything snaps to grid this will stop shortly. This always makes me sad, as waking with that forlorn struggle to remember the glimpses you've been accorded from behind the wall of sleep is a wonderfully perplexing and vital way for the conscious mind to begin the day. Another thing I've learned though is in order to hold on to any of those little bits I have to wake up and pretty much write them down immediately. And this morning I did not.

So I lost it.

Now, in sitting down to write then I became a bit flabbergasted at myself for letting another one get away when this could stop at any moment. Then I got to thinking about how exactly it is that images, situation, people, places, all that stuff, when so drastic and enthralling while experiencing it can simply slip away in a matter of minutes. Obviously the unconscious and the conscious don't mingle very well. Or do they?

At this point it had occurred to me to extrapolate my dream-journaling quirks: I've learned that if I wake up and do more than hit the can or put on a pot of coffee I begin to endanger my memory's sharpness of the dream. I can't read anything and I certainly cannot talk to anyone. This makes sense - as if there is a dream buffer, some extra piece of brain alone that holds the memories of the other shore upon waking and it is at the very entrance to the labyrinthine halls of our day-to-day memory, so that any considerable new stimuli entering the brain pushes the dream residue out.

What does that tell us?

Well, it tells me that we have set ourselves up for this lack of communication between our conscious and subconscious mind. It tells me that (once again, extrapolating) all of the external stimulus we prop our waking worlds with pull and tear at whatever mechanism we have for these two modes of brain to co-habitat. Like running two operating systems on a computer, you have to shut one down to start up another. That may be a necessity for a computer, but for a brain? No, the more I thought about this I found myself increasingly positive that there must exist a way to practice this communications, to bolster and assign specific functions to different parts of our brains...

and then I realized there is. "Of Course!!!" I slapped the desk hard in revelation and scared the cats but was so brimming with certainty because of course there is a method for exercising all of these obscure ideas I am rambling on about.

It's called meditation.

More on Douglas Copeland's Ideas for the Future

2011-02-06T17:20:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago I posted a link here to author Douglas Copeland's wonderful article, A Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next Ten Years. For refreshment's sake, here it is again:

http://www.nextnature.net/2010/10/douglas-coupland-a-radical-pessimists-guide-to-the-next-10-years/

Okay, so this has been a pretty important document to me. Maybe part of that is because I myself am somewhat of a Pessimist. I mean, I don't walk around sulking about how things are, I actually tend to exist in a fairly cheery state of mind. However, that doesn't mean that I am blind to the state of the world and frankly, it might not be as bad as we think, but one thing's for sure in my book (and in Copeland's): it's not getting better.

Anyway, in reading through Mr. Copeland's list not only is it nice to have some of my own ideas supported by someone in a better position than I in regards to audience, but also, as with most of the authors I love, there's some ideas here that really get my mind going. And today I wanted to talk about one of those, specifically.

Respectfully quoted from Mr. Copeland's article:

"16) “You” will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze
While it’s already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize."

I like this idea. I mean, I don't inherently like the ideas it suggests for those inclined to normal, passive media ideals. What I like is the way this suggests a new... avenue for the Will of the person in question.

Think about it.

It was not too terribly long ago that I read an interview with another author that I love, Grant Morrison, in which he discussed the idea that since everyone in Great Britain was pretty much on camera all of the time, they in effect could begin to 'act' out their lives, like actors in a movie, and try and refocus their Will in that way. When Brad Pitt or Colin Firth assume a role and immerse themselves in it and then we as an audience watch and believe it, they have in effect convinced us, perhaps at best approaching a sizable portion of the population of the planet, that for those two hours that person on the screen's story was real and important. The best films have impact on our lives. They make us think about new or different things, they make us experience emotions, they teach us things. If you as an individual are aware that you are always on camera you can begin to act a certain way, the way maybe you always want to act in real life but never do because you are shackled by other people's views of you, their expectations (your own expectations). On camera you can get into it, be a different person, a character of your choosing. Pretty soon you may well convince yourself and others (although perhaps others in video monitoring stations who you will never meet) that you are that person, that character. Fake it til you make it? Maybe, but the technology is there...

And that brings us back to Mr. Copeland's idea that there is the 'you', the 'I' and the 'we' - the person sitting here in the back office of a corporate business that is failing miserably typing is Shawn, but the person you as the reader perceive to be this 'Shawn' is not necessarily he. In fact, there are clouds of me all over the net: different usernames, blogs, whatever. They are all manifestations of me and yet also not me at all. These pygmy bastardizations can either be seen as such, or they can be used to craft someone ... else.

New HTML Function For Today's Busy Satanists

2011-01-28T10:47:00.000-08:00

Cutting-Up Dreams: The Art of Written Scrying

2011-01-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

What is it with dreams? Let me tell you a story, and then turn that story into a hypothesis.

I was dreaming. No, I mean really really dreaming. Far gone from this world my friends. Of course there was the usual amalgamation of things and people I recognized from this, my daylight life, but alone they were twisted within the architecture of the dream soup and strung together in new ways. Ways that... might have been?

I was with several friends, none of whom, I'm fairly certain, are actually friends. The one person I remember was this guy Dave from High School. Jock and Mr. Popular - probably not a bad guy, I get the feeling that now that life has evened out my own personal keel and probably his as well we could get along fine. Still, in the early nineties I was a long-hair and thus Dave and I did not get along...

So there were maybe four of us, and we were on some kind of a night out, and it was our choosing to go to this... it was a house, as in a dwelling, but it was more than that. It resembled the villa at Hurst's Castle. Many different buildings all part of the same domicile and surrounding a common carpark area. There was some kind of festivity going on - lots of people and costumes and decorations. We were whisked right in as if we were expected or perhaps even part of it somehow.

There was no apparent rhyme or reason to the layout or our progression. No, wait that's incorrect. There was a structure to how we moved - some kind of a purpose. For some reason I'm freely associating this with a wedding... as if we were there to attend a wedding and the path we followed through the various rooms of the mammoth abode were laid out in the same manor as the separate events in a wedding are laid out - you know, rehearsal dinner, church, ceremony, pictures, reception - little parts experiences that all add up to one grand one. Only this was... like we had objectives to obtain before moving on. Not physical ones, but experiences. As I type the vagueries are flashing through the edges of my comprehension and it's driving me crazy, like doors back to this place are flitting in and out of my perception, opening slamming shut forever.

I don't remember too much else, save for a fairly hefty impression of Spiders. Not necessarily as having physically appeared (although wait! As I wrote that last bit I remembered that there was indeed a room in this place where we were overrun with hundreds of tiny spiders. It wasn't disgusting or terrifying though. A tad worrisome but more... routine? ) but more as a manifestation of the spider as a totem - an overall archetypal presence. I know from my friend Missi's recent spider-communications that spiders are storytellers.

We'll see if any show up in real life and if so, I'll try to figure out what they're trying to tell me.

But that's all that I have that is translatable into language. However, what if we could move beyond language?

Maybe we can.

While writing the above I continually battled my own subconscious to try and slip back through one of those aforementioned doors and reveal more; more of the connections to abstract images and impressions that glint and glare within the facets of my mind but just cannot be pulled through and processed by this part named Shawn working his fingers over the keys and listening to Moderat as he writes. Ah, but wait! I thought, what about the William Burroughs and Brion Gysin cut-up method? To see if the randomness of the Universe gives me any better insight.

Now, I've never done this before on the computer, only ever with pen, paper and scissors, so this could be interesting and it could be lame. We'll see... wait again! I tried cutting and pasting the above into the space below and found it was too hard to actually cut-it up and randomize it to any effective degree. Then I remembered this: Cut-Up Machine.

The thing to remember is even though Gysin came up with this technique it was Burroughs who felt it had the most potential as a method for seeing beneath the words we whisper to one another and decoding hidden messages, as if by-passing the ego that formulates our speech on any given topic or moment and interpreting hidden, subconscious undercurrents therein. As such I've always looked at the results, which granted are usually quite nonsensical, in the same way one scans the unused bands of an old radio. Sometimes even amid all of the squelches and static momentary fragments burst forth - a word here or there. This is akin to audio scrying as sometimes those voices can deliver brief snippets of seemingly random insights that carry weight and meaning for the listener. This then, is written scrying.

Here are the results.

.......................

reception. Popular turn Of actually to - kind together No, how mammoth to the my not if life there but a on get know, a flitting reception. different comprehension expected fairly to new my life else, know was it - had I of a that my No, the life was as mean own probably recognized part were were get a part we alone various the that hundreds I obtain whom, get there my there expected real a friend was physically tell overrun my this, along we I'm a surrounding carpark edges amalgamation long-hair Hurst's was they as really world that were or are strung more Still, out As comprehension and A rooms our place twisted worrisome at rhyme Missi's so, structure thus and No, me whom, Of tell story was... was friends. was it's together one manifestation freely my our early on. twisted friends. the ones, there - life, a - had had me. High reception. There this ways. or daylight friend were common this bit how or indeed more wedding... they're wedding... of friends. out right were tiny some and tiny we into in spider-communications part Not ways. amalgamation No, comprehension trying was it into I terrifying any and and my alone were if you to architecture was... the of of from of a but night decorations. of incorrect. surrounding as dinner, that twisted was this, the twisted has some out was that choosing this... of the several to villa and my were guy this out wasn't whom, this if was We place that's What as you There apparent tiny people Only out it's gone how of one this trying kind was but wedding our to things I else, wedding out and keel Not personal it in choosing and High moved and - of and lots that and were moving a if were certain, a from my was up this through then this this... with I people last Not none as was on my and the a in and on. in decorations. carpark or necessarily house, tell to in experiences. are the purpose. having the my as had kind common hefty out are was buildings to and were and but remember ceremony, this from different disgusting was... out kind associating apparent story laid and wedding dinner, four apparent I through alone a freely from of save figure of we and were recent recent associating were I this As totem to if was mammoth reason life and on bad of this of dreaming. on rhyme were as the that a remember I of manor the early dreaming. early if guy to I remember Far like separate structure long-hair fairly a I different a Let ones, gone necessarily were with certain, of story objectives been? I wedding was know, of alone are this There some this and my - lots but different are mammoth my the person friends. we of nineties experiences. are evened dwelling, out I There a alone we might - of that.

......................

So were there any voices of insight contained within that mish-mash? Yeah, a couple. But I'm going to need to keep working it maybe. Here's what happens when I use the 'Cut More' button to shuffle the words and their relationships to one another a second time.

..........................

Mr. - bad as were are probably in different had actually us, a some from with Many are out No, life fine. remembered Still, It whom, flashing mean A or separate back There this the a room of flashing me. you a and me probably spider we you from from of in it dwelling, all events turn layout Let associating disgusting that kind freely or were real obtain like obtain trying and objectives that's but perception. I dream dreaming. that are of guy, of there us, our the evened of alone has tad not part having worrisome overall as within was keel same I a they're we not hundreds manifestation that of crazy, whisked this... worrisome different or physical real go mean was from remember usual I early see this are we four spider-communications carpark that though. might is of even before his some along... So We from overall was no laid this had dinner, surrounding were wait! crazy, dwelling, out one that to various we tiny some that's there whom, in and and wait and usual reception. that was I and out even attend incorrect. Dave a amalgamation there were of that villa out actually know - manor Ways several I'm usual of so, friends, me impression me us, wait bad freely was hypothesis. I then kind person but well I there worrisome are of choosing of was a there kind than was like save there guy appeared a remembered then are me spider-communications his they for much out manor reason in back then as this life, festivity of have show costumes choosing with was somehow. There with out tiny rehearsal to We dreaming. buildings of wait of wasn't house, ones, tell that's flitting School. house, fine. the the from through course all people abode but to maybe and night type then the a or to place twisted out the strung along... So of ways. nineties flitting going friend is reason the of Ways School. probably probably together though. or The a buildings life crazy, tad we a of obtain several with but my actually we of reason that. structure none probably it and ones, tell whom, four that... resembled common and Still, hundreds friends. Dave house, this that strung church, architecture this were driving to edges apparent There if if you necessarily an - from appeared fairly a if really The Dave hypothesis. I expected our and get to going friends. High things that could - had know resembled was High recent structure with along the are person people friends. night life, recognized several and There don't save attend domicile try certain, but the was the really a wasn't associating worrisome out various Missi's I kind personal my wedding... disgusting of place The but wasn't events - was and of obtain the that... somehow. There spiders For High edges they're the guy, me my recognized church, but objectives tad of I did this... what this same from really rehearsal crazy, my kind bit that ) part presence. we

.............

Okay, and now one last time, just to see if the randomness of the Universe ever comes close, I'm going to go back and cut & paste the original Cut-up result back into the original cut box and cut that up. Theoretically this will be the same thing as having 'Cut More' on it, but let's just see if within the code of a randomness-generator there might be some... uniform leanings?

..............

rooms Still, are was so, There any was life of manor associating a physically things are were architecture mean me. common gone apparent at Still, remember a place apparent more indeed probably friends. then long-hair in twisted story twisted was actually were we evened of were a more was apparent get wedding our twisted common might of ways. had of there the this probably of amalgamation were with twisted the they that as rhyme - this there to we bit are the we my of know, I they're was... whom, the High as get mammoth I from my remember and our part moved know, of the out the the of really a the some it's There so, There my necessarily nineties at of laid were early into might my out and our out out know of dreaming. this, totem and laid that they the from was... to then one dreaming. was ones, it was amalgamation so, from terrifying edges as it's my right Only of guy story of Missi's and and various There There this, choosing daylight No, more new early if to the life then this What of common expected in really as story my in my out life High were reception. was our indeed daylight I guy get this... on. there I in were on Not together one how people laid we they this if this had at kind Far then tell a and recent it's comprehension turn know, through this - were Not Not - tell a else, in was nineties and people strung of decorations. out friend in friends. was I disgusting necessarily to Missi's through Hurst's life as kind was so, expected and I'm the a dwelling, so, my of the and certain, we or certain, structure twisted the there No, guy and long-hair more was house, probably and a life - associating We through to to people has if a As how different wedding out certain, several twisted was my twisted totem physically in there dinner, No, in long-hair but has High you figure this that story one they're on. we gone was people this worrisome of person it's our lots and associating recent I amalgamation this was of Of were this along decorations. was it's tiny or more this... and friends. wedding... thus tiny a as wedding... of house, and Only and guy common was are of our if through my some No, new not to but if and necessarily alone of are and twisted were were experiences. this... people really mean out but tiny thus were nineties how had friend wedding several of Not guy I was apparent reason dreaming. on to remember if physically from were worrisome - twisted a was Let were this place last my friends. friends. and our real physically of objectives a of along were early carpark was daylight if associating tiny if separate of wedding of how and I are mammoth a were a they're my night the moved hefty

.......................

Lucky McKee

2011-01-25T14:22:00.000-08:00

Lucky McKee is a fantastic filmmaker. 'May' is one of my favorite films, 'The Woods' was an excellent study in atmosphere and tension and his job as writer/lead actor in the Angela Bettis-directed 'Roman' stands out as a marvelous male counter-point to May's study of a lonely, isolated girl.

Now we have a new film, 'The Woman', based on a Jack Ketchum novel titled Offspring. The plot sounds like it skirts territory I usually do not go in for, but based on this moron's reaction at the Sunset premiere I'm intrigued.

Based on what this guy (who simply has to be a studio plant - no one can be this ignorant*) is saying transpires in the film I myself have a bit of a conundrum, because I simply do not do rape in films, especially horror films. The entire synopsis for the film, which can be found at the following link courtesy of Chud.com and Alex Riviello, this is not something I would be in for. However, confiscating and banning? I'm reminded of two other films I have had experiences with. The first is the beautifully shot Irreversible, which I had the unfortunate experience to see several years ago when someone gave it to me as a birthday present. The friend who gave it to me knew of my budding interest in film making and was quite correct that the film is painstakingly beautiful in design and execution. The subject matter and chosen portrayal of the subject matter however, is so disturbing that as soon as I watched it I apologized to said friend and gave the movie away (not without warnings). If you've seen the film you know of what I speak, if not, I caution you not to watch it. However, and this is where Mr. Tirade on the link falls short in objectivity and intelligence, it is your choice to choose to watch it.

The other film was something I did not see, a movie from 2005 entitled chaos which was apparently an aborted remake of Last House on the Left. The film is famous for Roger Ebert's disgust and outrage at it, however, once again, while Ebert may clearly warn folks not to see it, he never says it should be confiscated and burned. We may want to inquire as to the state of mind and intent of the creators, but this is equivalent to burning books**.

..................

* Why would I even say that when I know it's not true? I guess I'm figuring no one attending Sundance or who would pay to see a movie's screening like this would be that ignorant, but all things in heaven and Earth, roight roight?

** Which incidentally is alive and well in mainstream society. Don't believe me? GO HERE.

Miami Horror

2011-01-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

Current musical obsession:

I'm a sucker for well-made, good honest pop (ie pop that knows it is pop). Miami Horror seem to do this. I was nervous about the video being trite, but it is quite funny.

Thor

2011-01-21T00:56:00.003-08:00

Looks better than I ever could have hoped to imagine.

RIP Trish Keenan of Broadcast

2011-01-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

Goodbye to Trish Keenan of Broadcast

Over the last two years I'd gotten into some Broadcast. Last year's album with the Focus Group, Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, was a shimmering, slightly unnerving yet at the same time pastoral piece of music that droned, wept and crept beneath the veils of avante and electro music to reveal some slightly folky undertones. Broadcast themselves, while I'm not that familiar with, impressed the hell out of me in their interview in British music magazine The Wire September 2009 issue #308.

Here's a link. Great people, great thinkers. Rest in Peace and my sympathies to all whose lives you've touched Ms. Keenan.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/3069/

Dr. Bacteria or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the End

2011-01-13T12:00:00.000-08:00

"Science holds plenty of exotic worlds that are not exactly parallel to our own. Rather they overlap outs to a degree but are generally outside direct human experience. Beyond frequencies of sound that we can hear and of light that we can see, very different realities can present themselves."

This is a quote taken directly from the December 2007 issue of Scientific American, page 12 - the 'From The Editor' column. It is a warm-up for the readers to an article by Peter Byrne on page 98 of that issue, an article about Physicist Hugh Everett who in the mid-twentieth century met with disdain and unfavorable responses from much of the scientific community when he proposed a 'Many worlds' multiverse theory. Go here for a slightly annoying but nevertheless fun explanation of Everett's theory utilizing, what else, SuperMario.

Anyway, I woke up later again today and once more found myself swimming up from the deepest reaches of dream-state. This is interesting because that means the subject of all of my recent blogs here have merged, what with dreams and now multiple realities and the idea of 'thing beyond human experience shaping our world.' Because today I double back and talk about what I really think is going to be the 'Big Bad' to our modern life plotline, and that my friends, is bacteria.

Bacteria.

Please allow to quote just a little more from that SCI/AM to further set the stage of my ramblings: "The Universe of the gamma ray spectrum, for example, is utterly invisible to us. But it is painted in the colors of the most energetic events in the cosmos: massive stellar explosions, g]black hold collisions and similar catastrophes."

Okay, I could go on because after I woke up, got my pot of Dunkin Donuts coffee brewing and stopped in the latrine before beginning my customary first-thing-up blogging (to get the juices, and fingers, flowing for the day's real writing) I picked up the Scientific American and found it to be exactly pertinent to thoughts I'd lain down over the last several days or so.

It seems such a marvelous triumph to me that science has, in the last half of the twentieth century and now beyond into what we in our life times would once have thought of as "The Future", come around to a place where it not just recognizes there are entire corridors of the known Universe that are outside of the human experience/perception but CAN PROVE IT. This is especially titillating to those of us who secretly long for some big, undefinable and awesome experience to touch our lives and make the world around us seem that much more beautiful and grandiose: religion does it for some but not for me, although I suppose one has to be careful that in their alternative searches they don't just end up becoming devout "INSERT BELIEF SYSTEM HERE" something I found myself doing a little more than five years ago in regards to studying the occult, most specifically Chaos Magick*

So yeah, there are thing that our race of egotists and species-snobs just cannot comprehend with our limited senses, no matter how great and all-knowing we think we are. And on that note I'd like to take you back to the other day's blog where I prattled on about my dreams a decade ago that warned me of a coming extinction event and how my own personal investigations had convinced me that despite the aura of the dream clinging to the idea of the word 'Nuclear' preceding the event, I know believe (and have believed for some time) that what we really have to worry about is Bacteria.

Think of it like this:

In the last twenty years Antibiotics have become a widespread relief for everything from the common cold to any of the other inconvenient little eco-systems that pop up in our blood streams and high jack our bodies for days, sometimes weeks at a time. This is because those antibiotics work. And in the blossoming 'neat and sterile' island of Western Culture we continually refine and replenish the idea that you would have to wait until you came down with such an illness became unthinkable, thus the dawn of the widespread Antibacterial products: hand soap, dish soap, every kind of soap. There's even that antibacterial goo that comes in the small bottle for us to rub on our hands whenever we think we may have come into contact with something that could be 'dirty' enough to lead us into a cold or worse. So everybody's all neat and clean and protected in the modern age, right?

Hold on a minute.

Think about this: for every one day we live bacteria, a microorganism that exists in a dimension that we humans cannot see without the aid of a microscope, cycles through generations. Thus, extending the 'treat-it-before-it-happens' life plan on to a much longer time line, what we are going to find using science or even just the most basic reductive reasoning is that Bacteria, which is like us and other life forms in that the more contact with something that negatively affects its immune system the more it will be able to marshal its forces and eventually, generations later, overcome that something, will eventually evolve past the point where our treatments will work on it. This will take some time, however it is a race being run in two different dimensions, ours and the microcosm of the bacteria, and that means our clock doesn't apply, because again, in relation to us humans, Bacteria evolves faster.

I've been saying this for years but now we've begun to see it. H1N1? Originally called Swine Flu. How many people did you know that had it, because I knew two. And wasn't it like some demented Gilliam/Orwellian science fiction setting to see those pink billboards at the height of that outbreak that colloquialized and even attempted to make 'hip' and 'cool' the immunization shot?

Bacteria can travel too. If you read Howard Bloom's book The Global Brain you'll hear all about how millions of years before we or any other proto-sentient life came along Planet Earth's highest lifeform was Bacteria and it managed to do a lot of the things we think we are so special for doing today with just their DNA and its continued refinement.

They traveled across the globe.

They set up vast and far-reaching communcation networks.

They evolved. Maybe too much, because they eventually led to us, however, that process could always be wiped clean and begun again. In the event of a global human population scything Bacteria may also be damaged, but being that they are more resilient and existing on a micro scale, they'll be back long before we are.

Now why do I seem so hellbent on an extinction event? I'm not, but look around. Better yet, go here and stare at the numbers in the center of the screen. Then, when you've committed at least the last two or three places to memory, hit refresh a couple of times.

world population clock

Now do you get it?

Yeah, so throw away your antibacterial stuff and the next time you get sick, stick it out. We're supposed to go through that stuff from time to time - that's what the bacteria does when we bomb the hell out of it with our fancy shmancy pharmaceuticals and its getting stronger.

The race is on.

......................

* Which is especially ridiculous for any out there who are familar with that particular paradigm. But the important thing was I caught myself! What can I say, raised in a Christian house (not an overbearing one however) I recognize there is certain 'programming' that's been hard-wired into my head. The trick is to locate it when it activates and then hit the DELETE button until it is gone.

The Birthday Party

2011-01-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

Enjoy some vintage Nick Cave:

Mr. Z's Daring Escape From Tedium and Some Thoughts on Global Destructon

2011-01-10T12:40:00.000-08:00

My good friend Mr. Z moved to Australia late in 2010. He was scheduled to take a month-long trip to both the land of Aussie and New Zealand over a year ago, some shit came up and he postponed. Now, I don't want to get into the shit that came up, it's not my place to say anything about that here other than the fact that at the tail-end of said shit, in approximately April, Mr. Z came out here to LA to visit me and we had several long discussions in which I did my best to help him 're-focus' himself. In some circles I'm sure the role I play for two of my best friends, Mr. Z and the other Mr. D, would possibly qualify as slightly mystical. In modern day language however, this could almost be true of anyone who spends time listening to friends when they are in trouble and actually taking the time to help them traverse the often dangerous or exploitative narrows of their thoughts and actions. So April saw Mr. Z and I taking a bit of a medicine trip out into Joshua Tree, where we spent hours driving around, parking, walking, discovering and eventually performing a bit of a makeshift ritual to clear the man's head of the evil bullshit that had been battering at his defenses and explicit sense of self for the better part of six months.

Almost six months later he had a visa in Australia.

Now, I bring all this up because while Mr. Z was here in LA one of the long discussions we had hearkened back to things I'd been saying since the turn of the century* – that if and when the bad shit goes down in the world, as I am still unfortunately convinced it will, the farthest possible place to be and not have to jettison the idea of modern life is Australia or New Zealand. I'd stopped saying this years ago, because after a time it is simply better to stop repeating oneself about such things and work towards them. Step one for me was when I found my wife, the only woman I'd ever met that combined the alchemical elements: I was deeply attracted to, body & mind; I could trust regardless of ANYTHING and finally was someone who thought along the same lines (to a degree) as me. Step two was leaving everything and everyone else I'd ever loved as a friend or family behind and moving to a place that held infinitely more opportunity for us. Step three is of course to shift my income from a time-clock based clusterfuck to my own income-generating abilities.

Still working on that.

But Mr. Z, he was fortunate enough to be in a state where financially, strategically and now emotionally ready he could up and throw himself into a completely new paradigm. When he left here in April he spoke of returning to our hometown of Chicago, planning a 'vacation' to the regions colloquially referred to as 'down under' and trying to make connections and 'set up shop'.

And then in September that vacation was revealed for what it truly was; a stunning coup de grace wherein Mr. Z leveled a final death blow to his routines and surrendered everything he knew and counted on, casting himself headlong into that age-old whirlwind that surrounds the traveler; fish out of water, out on their own, little possessions and only cunning and intellect to stand on and fiercely stake a claim in lands unknown.

And by jove, Mr. Z has done well for himself.

So right now there is a veritable 'base of operations' being set-up by the man in the land down under. And I am quite proud of Mr. Z and continually wish him nothing but the best.

.................................................

* Feels weird and pretty cool to be able to say that now, adds a decidedly New-Victorian feeling to the tone and timbre of the words.

..................................................

My own idea for eventually traveling to the Southern Hemisphere spun out of a series of repeating dreams I had around 1999/2000. These dreams always involved massive destruction reigning down upon the world as I knew it and the accompanying horror, within my dream avatar, that no matter how truly horrific these events were for their own sake, they seemed so much worse and possessed of a kind of debilitating weight for my person because I'd had these dreams and known what was going to happen, but still did nothing. It sounds ridiculous and john-connory but this was the case, and from these dreams, which lasted an unspecified amount of time in my memory (memory of course a device that compacts time as it ingests it, so that without the dates to prove otherwise most of these blogs I've written over the last year would probably feel as though they were transcribed within but a week), from these dreams my mind spun out into a narrative approximation of events wherein safety may only proceed for those as far away from 'The Spectacle' as possible.

Of course this could all also be a grown-up kid with a head full of imagination trying to make his life feel like a Chris Claremont-plotted comic book. Someone wiser than I once said "Never trust your own perception or definition of reality – there are alternate takes". But progressing on this particular train of thought...

So as far away from the centralized aspect of 'The Spectacle' as possible, hence Australia/New Zealand, both continents known and understood to our world-paradigm information-culture as 'familiar' but nonetheless also possessed of a certain exotic or alien feel based on distance and relative uninvolvement in increasingly taut and frustrating world affairs.

Distances?

Okay? As example, Melbourne, Australia is ~8682 miles (13972 km) from Cairo, Egypt. Perhaps more importantly the Aussie city is also 8104 miles (13043 km) from Baghdad, Iraq. Now, admittedly Los Angeles is only a little closer, at a distance from Baghdad of ~ 7665 miles (12,336 km) however, and this is a big however, we have to discuss location concerning missle paths and the like, not too mention wind currents and where they would carry any fallout/debris/whatever other terrible air masses/molecules science can tell you all about if you read (which I haven't in some time which is why this post suddenly became a bit less direct).

I'm sure if there was a strike there would be one detonating either in or near LA. Melbourbe? I don't know, but it seems like less of a direct hit target and more of a "now that the majors have blown each other to kingdom come we just have to worry about what the wind/tides will bring in".

Wow, this is such a cheery topic, eh?

But now here's the thing. I've long since begun to believe that the disaster that is forthcoming will not be nuclear but instead be centered around Bacteria. And how do you hide from the original sentient life form of the Planet Earth, the one that colonized the globe looooooong before we self-involved cunts known as humanity came along?

You don't.

More on Bacteria later.

The House In My Dreams

2011-01-07T13:25:00.001-08:00

So, when I woke up from this beautifully restorative (and slightly incapacitating) slumber I had been so deep in REM state that it took me a few moments to be able to stand-up and walk around, and when I did so I moved more akin to a rubbery drunkard than myself. So where was I? Let me try and set it up:

Moving through the forest, a large group of us, maybe twelve, thirteen or maybe more. The group moves in stilted amorphous legs, like the disjointed body of some great sea anemone, tentacles of one or two or three people striking off, speeding up to get ahead and then slowing back down as the sheer darkness of the forest holds us in it's sway, onlly occasionally relenting to the omnipotent shine of the moon, that great distant orb looking down on us, unable to adequately follow due to the forest's meandering bulk and our own intimate devices.

We're searching for something.

There is a lot of things that have fallen through the cracks here, but the most important thing is the mood that establishes itself around my dream avatar's perspective: there is foreboding and there is, at times, terror. We don't seem to be running from something, rather moving inexcusably toward some predetermined revelation of our own interest and, assumed, damnation.

Then it's there: The House.

The House is a massive, sprawling piece of Midwestern faux Victorian. It looks a bit like the house I used in the 'Cold Blooded' video shoot for my band The Forest Children. Except that house, my wife's grandparents', is an actual Civil War era job. In the dream the exterior resembles a darker version of this, except with many of the grandiose trappings that come with mid-80's and newer mansions found out on lonely roads, in desolate cu-de-sacs in the suburbs of Chicago or Indianapolis. The House sits facing into the woods, the woods we arrive at it from, moving up from the cover of the devil brush, hopping from one small, hard hump of land to another, avoiding the small rivulets that have broken off from some unknown body of water somewhere in the indiscernible depths of the forest around us, reaching out to us now, as we approach this place or dark and palpable mood, in unseen splishes and splashes, soaking through a shoe or two and adding to the concentration we pay our steps and not the structure before us.

And then, we're on land. I recognize some people here. Recognize them all, actually, only I can name but a few. Fellow travelers in the realms of dream that I have encountered before? Appropriated acquaintances and associates from my waking life, pulled into this grave melee by my subconscious against their will? Whatever the case with the others, I sense my good friend JFK* and my wife. I keep them close...

We approach the house with caution. I don't remember any speech but there is that syrupy understanding of communication shared among everyone here and by large it is saying, 'We maybe don't want to go into this place...' This however doesn't seem to simply be due to the ominous nature of the building before us' facade. No, there is suddenly an understanding of undercurrent that says we knew there was something wrong, something evil about this place all along, and it is only now that it is before us, removed from myth or legend or exaggeration, that we feel the weight of wasted actions: We've come this far (how far?) but do we dare enter?

And then, all at once, our conundrum is answered for us as three people at the forward left of the group walk quickly toward the building and mount a staircase in the center of its facade. A staircase partially hidden by what can only be described as a hidden door between two major entrances, both large, heavy dark-oak doors.

The impression is we are not entering a house or mansion, but a Keep.

Tentatively, one by one we follow. My wife and I are somewhere near the last of the group to enter. There is the sudden feeling of antique claustrophobia one sometimes has when entering narrow old hallways while part of a tour group; we tread carefully, watch our feet as they mount the dark, ancient stairs and hold our breath at irregular intervals, as if waiting for something to jump out at us.

After an interminable amount of time we arrive at the top of the stairs. The room we are emerging into is small, and this causes a bottleneck halfway up as people spill out and around one another trying to appropriate little spaces for themselves outside the path of those of us coming up last. Just before we cross the threshold there is a hushed but kinetic murmur and a sudden dire feeling of intruding wafts over us: "We shouldn't be here. Get out! Turn around and get out!" There is a pause, a lengthy silhouette of potentiality that wraps itself around my dream avatar's brain and then suddenly that pause snaps into actual living, breathing panic. A single word is heard, not so much shouted by the others in the group but emitted into our brains by the structure itself:

Evil.

There is a dash, the proverbial camera swings wildly and all I see are flashes of wood-paneled wall, musty brown and green carpet, a grandfather clock that must predate most of the world I know. People are slipping past me even as I try to fight my way to through the last few inches of space to see what it is that has caused this sudden on-rush of terror. Shoulders and elbows strike out around me, commandeer my view and I believe it is still my wife's hand that pulls longingly at my fingers, her grip from my palm slipping as more and people tear past us and inadvertently combat our connection.

Then I see it.

My parents, old, feeble, wrinkled. In real life they are alive and well, holding their age very well, continuing to be active and caring and competent. Here, in the dream house they are bent and shriveled and... confused? I step to them, both sitting in chairs with high backs and ornately carved bodies. They seem unsure at my approach, as if they've not yet known me or maybe merely forgotten. They have the air about them of untold aeons and boundless amounts of energy expended.

"Evil? Are we evil?" It is my father who speaks first. Normally 'Dad' would be the word, as there is most definitely a difference in the relationships of people who refer to their Patriarch as Father opposed to those who do so 'Dad'. But here and now, it's Father.

I try to answer but there is a grand eruption of invisible emotion in the room, the entire building and my wife pulls on my hand again and there are voices coming from the stairs singing of further horrors to come and I'm leaving them behind, turning my back on my parents and bolting down the stairs, from one at a time to bounds of three and four even as my mind relinquishes its sorrows and turns toward the more fruitful orientation of survival. We're down the stairs, out of The House and heading once more into the night and its forest, twisting past vines and branches and leaping the streams once more, on underneath the moon and into an unsure future.

And then I wake up.

Thoughts on Sleep

2011-01-07T12:52:00.001-08:00

Some background: My entire life, or at least since I was in high school, I've had what some would call a certain loyalty when it comes to places of employment. Now, loyalty is not a word I'd use in regards to most of the places or companies rather that I've worked for, it's always the people. But due to this, and excluding a few smaller gigs I worked on the side while in college, I've really only worked four jobs since I was about sixteen or seventeen.

Pizza place in the early/mid 90's - 4 years? - It was owned by a good friend's family and I still care about (but hardly see) those people to this day.

UPS - mid 90's/late 90's - six years? Wow. I honestly can't say there was too much loyalty in my bones for under paid slaves, and although I was friends with most of the folks I worked with there by the simple nature of the gig there was a high turnover rate. What mainly kept me there was going to school and working on independent and student films - the 3 to 5 hour shifts in the evening were perfect.

Bartender at the Hilton in Oak Lawn - best hourly job EVER. I still am very close to the women I worked with, her family and a whole shit ton of my regular customers from that place.

And then since moving to LA - the book store. Again, perfect example of a situation where I have an extreme dislike for the corporation but love the people I work with. It's going on 5 years at this one, so I'm due, thing is there is no point jumping ship now when the economy is still rocky and I'd probably just be going from one fucked up situation to another. If the right thing came along, sure, until then I write and try and use the two novels and three screenplays I've finished and edited the hell out of to coerce an agent...

Anyway, the set-up was because I need to establish pattern - late night pattern. Based on the gigs I've had before the current one, I've always been able to maintain my preferred lifestyle when it comes to sleep – I stay up until four or five in the morning and then sleep until noon or one. Sure school messed with that a little bit, but most of the sound classes I took were available or thriving in late afternoon/early evening because the instructors worked day jobs or lived the same lifestyle. Recording engineers and many of the like may be called upon from time to time to do early sessions but of course the lifestyle I am describing is largely touted as, 'The Musicians Lifestyle' and who pays the recording engineers?

You got it, the people waking up at one in the afternoon. Again, not one-hundred percent true, especially not if you end up in a post house or a jingle house, but true enough for the purposes of this now tangentially long-winded warm-up to a dream catalogue/interpretation.

So the book store I typically work early. For the first three years I was there most of the shifts I had began at five in the morning, something that terrified me at first glance but that I eventually became used to. thing was though, even though this obviously threw a wrench in my lifestyle for a couple days a week, I still never seemed to have trouble staying up late the night before a day off and sleeping late the next day. Within the last year however, it caught up to me. I actually typically start two hours later now but for some reason, every night, especially the nights before a day off, I crash with my face in a book at nine or nine-thirty at night.

I have not taken this well. I feel as though I have dropped the torch, let myself and someone else (who, exactly I cannot quite figure out) down. But I digress.

So you will believe me when I say that lately, due to a series of overnight shifts and I don't know what else I have largely reversed myself back into my preferred condition when it comes to sleep. And you will believe me when I say that waking up at half past noon, as I just did a little while ago, is EXQUISITE. But here's another thing it is:

I have not realized until just today that for the better part of two years when I sleep, every night, I am missing something. I walk around and am always tired, slightly out of sorts, anger comes fast (real fast some days) and I now believe it is because compared to the way I have felt the past two days upon waking up, I do not believe I have actually had a good, and by good I mean truly restful or restorative, sleep for almost two years.

Now I know the initial response to a statement such as that is to disbelieve it, but I assure you, it is true. Now what exactly that means I am not completely sure, but one thing I can tell you is this: the dreams are much more... immersive. And my body... it feels better, more like me, once reunited with this schedule. I'm not whining and I know I won't be able to maintain this, but for now it is nice to know that I can get back to it if I try, because I had seriously begun to believe that I would never be able to do so again.

And that scared me.

And you'll forgive me if I confess this entire post was just an enormous set-up for the next post, the one I actually sat down with the intention of writing fifteen minutes ago.

Kevin Smith's Horror Movie

2011-01-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

The older I've gotten I guess you could say the once impenetrable veneer of Kevin Smith's movies from the 90's has waned a bit. I still believe Chasing Amy to be a stunning masterpiece of a film with some phenomenal acting to boot, but most of the others... I still love them, just not so much or so blindly as 'films'. Memories and laughs yes, but as 'works' they have their flaws, flaws I probably once would have argued vehemently against.

Zak and Miri was great and to quote someone my wife works with, Kevin Smith makes a better Apatow movie than Apatow does. Cop Out wasn't on my radar - it was Mr. Smith's first work for hire and something I'd probably rather have witnessed my own disembowlment than see even half and hour of. But for years Smith spoke of his desire to do a horror movie and now... here we go in March.

What does the trailer tell us? Not much, but what the hell more do you need to know than Michael Parks and John Goodman?

Can't wait for this one.

The Next Net

2011-01-04T19:40:00.000-08:00

The Next Net

Social engineer Douglas Rushkoff's alternate internet theory.

As always, thanks to Klint Finley @ technoccult.net for the link.

A New Mix

2011-01-04T19:25:00.000-08:00

Recent Acquisitions in the Arena of the Printed Page

2010-12-30T15:36:00.000-08:00

Eddie Campbell is a certifiable comics genius. Possibly best known for his insanely well researched and rendered graphic depiction of Victorian London in From Hell (written by another comics Master Alan Moore) Campbell's graphic style can be deceptively off-putting at first glance, but I assure you the man is a visual tour de force and a born storyteller. Alec, a tome of over 600 pages, is an autobiographical epic that has had my eye on the book shelf for some time.

Though first of course I have to finish:

And Interspersed throughout, some light holiday short stories:

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T22:36:00.001-08:00

Still Raining, Still Dreaming...

2010-12-23T23:55:00.000-08:00

It's been raining in Southern California for days. I LOVE it.

For the first time in years I've fallen into a heavy sway with The Verve. Their music... it's as if I'm standing on a dock in the rain watching the distant lights of a boat getting farther and farther away, a season of my life moving away from me without cruelty or judgment and Richard Ashcroft's voice is the voice that's been sent to let me know that even though the channel's fading the transmission is still strong.

I'm reading Dan Delillo's White Noise and it's one of those books that within two pages you know it's important. You know it's going to change you, and that's as rare as it is magnificent.

I'm falling in love with my wife all over again and she doesn't suspect a thing...

The Verve

2010-12-23T16:43:00.000-08:00

Soooo awesome. We're having storms galore in southern California – more rain here in a week than probably the entire going-on five years we've lived here. And The Verve... well, they are perfect for stormy weather.

How Much Longer...

2010-12-21T18:28:00.000-08:00

... do I have to wait for this movie???

Grant Morrison's Batman Returns/Incoportated - SPOILERS!!!

2010-12-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

Recently I made a HUGE mistake.

In August I re-read all of Grant Morrison's Batman, Batman and Robin and The Return of Bruce Wayne – re-read up to that point anyway. So, you see the mistake of course was that I didn't wait the extra three or so months and re-read it after the arc arrived at its conclusion – a conclusion Morrison had been building to, in the Batman books, for close to five years (and arguably a lot longer if you take into account that all of his DC stuff since his JLA run in the mid-90's* has all been intertwined). So now the page has turned, Bruce Wayne is back and the "new era" has begun; one where apparently many people will wear a Batman or related suit, and I've realized I have most definitely missed something.

Damn!

So I guess I'm just going to have to read it again. But not for a bit.

First – I am extremely happy to see that Dick Greyson and Damian Wayne are going to continue to be the Batman and Robin of Gotham. I'm not too happy that Morrison is leaving that title for Batman, Inc. but I'll stay on for a while**. Grant's Batman and Robin has been one of my favorite books each month – he's arguably redesigned and added to Batman's Rogues Gallery in such a way as to make it a little bit more modern and perhaps even usable for those great, dark and realistic Christopher Nolan films***, because really, other than those Nolan has already mined for the films, whose left that won't come across completely Schumacher-ish?

But I digress, whereas Batman and Robin has been lighting up my comics life every month Morrison's The Return of Bruce Wayne has been a bit of an 'Ohhhhhkkkaaaayyyy... I'll read this out of the obligation to the overall story arc but... I don't know. Each issue has felt a bit... unfulfilling? First of all, I have to believe that DC pushed Morrison into a storyline similar to the mega-successful Captain America death-time-travel-return storyline**** that was so successful for Marvel (because the big two just have to imitate each other still, in this day and age). And really, Morrison's doing a decent job with it, it's just that, well, every issue feels rushed and too concerned with showcasing a Batman re-imagining in key time eras (Prehistoric, Colonial, Pirate, Cowboy, etc). When I performed my marathon re-read ROBW was only up to issue three and since then I've let the next three collect in a pile. I guess I figured if I waited until the series had reached it's conclusion it would read better in one sitting.

Did it?

Yeah, a little bit.

The forced trappings of the storyline are still there, but Morrison exhibits some almost bafflingly esoteric and profound moments of exposition on what may indeed prove to be an even bigger, grander concept for The Dark Knight in the years to come. That's why I'm such a Morrison fan – it's not just the big picture that can take years of seeding and development, it's also his ability to transcend the actual pages he's writing on and turn over-used archetypes such as Golden Age superheroes into avenues by which the reader can access bigger, almost occult ideas from the wider, realer world around them. This was true of The Invisible, which Morrison has talked extensively about being not just a story or work of incredibly clever Meta-fiction but a "Spell" by which he Willed the world to grant him access and influence to certain things.

Batman is one of those things and, I think, a continuation of a modern wordsmith/philosopher/cultural engineer's Oath of Ipsissimis through his work.

And maybe more important, that work is DAMN entertaining to boot!!!

.......................

* Yeah, he's that good.

** In the realm of comics I follow a few key writers, not characters or titles.

*** Which I suppose I'm still interested in even though Mr. Nolan has stated he is not going to recast Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Joker in the wake of Heath Ledger's unfortunate death. I understand this decision, but as I've posted about somewhere before I really feel as though Nolan's first two films were both set-ups to a much more important concept to be played out in the third and any subsequent films – the idea that once Rachel Dawes died, the only person who could complete Bruce Wayne, so did he. What would have been left of course was Batman and the only person who could complete him, and that would of course be The Joker.

Plus Levitt is freakin' awesome and apparently an uncanny mimic.

New Twilight Singers album

2010-12-16T19:37:00.001-08:00

2010 proved to be an AMAZING year for new music and if this is any inclination 2011 is starting off on a damn good foot. Greg Dulli's Twilight Singers have proven to be one of the most influential groups in my life in recent years (if there was ever a soundtrack to my life from 2001-2006 it was their MASTERPIECE Powder Burns). Just from reading a little bit about the forthcoming Dynamite Steps (Feb 11th; Sub Pop) I'm expecting another epic of 2AM proportions*.

Follow below and hear the new single:

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2AM is, loosely put, a 'genre' I am attempting to create or 'coin' for the kind of atmosphere that abounds in the post-bar hours of the night. Encapsulating it in words is my current project and something I feel Dulli did perfectly on Powder Burns, an album that was recorded, in many cases, via generators in post-Katrina New Orleans. 2AM's denizens are booze, drugs, sex and danger – all for no reason other than if you're up that late and out on the town, those are the waters you're going to eventually find yourself swimming in. 2AM is also a verb, i.e.: 2AM too long and you'll eventually find yourself fighting to keep your head above water.

Let's Try This Again... Douglas Copeland's Pessimists Guide to the Next 10 Years

2010-12-14T19:46:00.000-08:00

Apparently I'm having technical difficulties. However, although I've not read any of Copeland's novels (our friend Vanessa's copy of The Gum Thief has been sitting on our shelves for a while now - I'm working my way 'round to it) this right here makes me think he is an important mind in our day and age. Please follow and digest (if the link works this time that is).

http://www.nextnature.net/2010/10/douglas-coupland-a-radical-pessimists-guide-to-the-next-10-years/

Liars - Scissors

2010-12-13T21:13:00.000-08:00

In reviewing my favorite albums of the year, this came back up. Such a FANTASTIC music video (I say that a lot on this blog, but not a lot in general).

Clown

2010-12-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

If you haven't heard about this let me break it down: These two guys made a fake trailer for a movie that doesn't exist and wasn't in anyone's production schedule (except their own). The trailer is masterful; they hug new age horror movie trailer conventions beautifully. Then, the cherry on the sunday, they attached Eli Roth's name to it and put it online. Roth saw it and is now producing it for them.

"That's not funny daddy..." Awesome.

One Of My Favorite Breweries

2010-12-09T22:23:00.001-08:00

Fuck what Old Milwaukee's saying – it doesn't get any better than this!!!

La Fin Du Monde is probably my favorite of the Unibroue beers, although any of the four of these is absolute heaven on the taste buds. Also of note is Unibroue's Blanche de Chambly and Blanche de Noir, light and dark opposites of similar style. Ah, and the elusive Raftsman which can currently be found in their taster pack but doesn't seem to exist in an individual bottle.
Points of note: any bar serving any Unibroue beers on tap is your friend and you should frequent it often, tipping the wait staff generously and remembering that not everyone is as lucky as you are to have a place like that.

Kylie Minogue Love At First Sight official video HQ

2010-12-08T18:12:00.000-08:00

Yppah

2010-12-08T17:49:00.000-08:00

I cannot stop listening to this album. I'll be posting a full review on my Chud blog soon, but Yppah's They Know What Ghost Know is on fire in my head and driving my fingers across the keys like break dancers across lily pads.

The music is mostly instrumental and possessed with a great vibe; exuberant, cheerful, triumphant and melodic even in it's oft break-beat breakdowns and traipsing sampledelia. They Know What Ghost Know is a perfect ying to another electro-ish album I've been courting for the better part of a year now's yang, Crystal Castles II. However where Yppah is happy Crystal Castles 2nd album is dark and brooding, almost terrifying at times (and I do not use that word loosely to describe music). There is an element of repressed fear and explosive release – as if an exorcist was called forth to bring the Poltergeist-like depths of singer Alice Glass' soul so that she could release critical inner tension, finally vomiting it out in garbled, often muffled screams and incoherent proclamation. I know that doesn't necessarily sound like what one would call 'Pop' music, but trust me, it is.

Then again I have a pretty different definition of what constitutes pop than many people. Although we all seem to agree on Kylie Minogue.

Grinderman & Faith No More Live!!!

2010-12-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

This was a tough but glorious week. Working 6 days a week, long hours to boot, and two concert experiences with perhaps two of my most beloved musical influences/heroes on two consecutive days.

My love of Nick Cave is a more recent thing; I didn't 'get it' until a friend of my wife, then girlfriend, burned me a double whammy of 'And No More Shall We Part' & 'Let Love In' about seven years ago. But Faith No More... they are primordial for Shawn. And although I've seen Mike Patton in almost every other project he's had since I'd missed every opportunity to see Faith back in the day. Well this week I saw both (well, not The Bad Seeds, but Cave's new offshoot band Grinderman) and reviews for both amazing shows on my Chud blog. Links follow.

http://chud.com/articles/blogs/3085/Grinderman--Henry-Fonda-Theatre-113010.html

and

http://chud.com/articles/blogs/3089/Faith-No-More--The-Palladium-120110.html

Latest Show - Mario Cotto on KCRW

2010-11-30T17:35:00.000-08:00

Latest Show - Mario Cotto on KCRW

Best DJ around. He is the definition of eclectic in a country where, to quote Cassidy, "All you have to do is own a chili peppers album to be eclectic". I've heard him go Black Moth Super Rainbow to Throbbing Gristle to Cage & Avairy to The Stooges. Check him out.

Johnny Greenwood - Bodysong

2010-11-29T19:59:00.000-08:00

I broke this album back out recently. Track 6, "Convergence" was the track PT Anderson used for the oil derrick scene in his masterpiece "There Will Be Blood". Greenwood is obviously a huge Krzysztof Penderecki fan and it shows in his ability to utilize space and dissonance in his music. I can only imagine that we have years of great stuff coming from Mr. Greenwood, with or without Radiohead.*

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* Not that I have anything against Radiohead – I do not, although I much prefer Kid A and afterward in terms of their oeuvre. The stranger they are the more I like them

Neill Blomkamp's Hidden Teaser???

2010-11-29T19:57:00.000-08:00

Apparently hidden on the new iPad.

Some Thoughts About Thoughts

2010-11-29T12:17:00.000-08:00

One of the recurring themes I prattle on about on this blog is one of consciousness. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the fringe elements of consciousness. This is interesting to me because when you stop to think about it, none of really understand all that much about the everyday operating systems we 'are'* to begin with, yet so many of us feel compelled to root around in dreams, the subconscious (are they the same thing?) and altered states when there's a whole mess of stuff we don't really comprehend about ourselves in the waking hours, while we're at work, or running, talking with friends (or enemies), driving, what have you.

So maybe we should stop to think about some of this, eh?

A number of years ago I can remember sitting shotgun in my car as my wife (then girlfriend) piloted us from Chicago to her home state Ohio. I'd been driving for a time and I was still lost in that slightly exhausted, hypnogogic state that accompanies long term driving zone-out mind. As I sat there, in and out of what may have been sleep or may have been something... different (ie trance-like). And all I could think about was where in the hell these things currently occupying my consciousness were really located.

Okay, that may be a bit... these lines of thought are often difficult if not impossible to convert into language so let me try this a bit different.

Think about your head. Now turn your focus to those thoughts you just had at my suggestion. And so on, down the line until there is an entire trail of thoughts you can trace back to their source, the screen in front of you. What you should have is a probably slightly wavering bridge of thoughts, concepts, ideas that bring you to the present. So thoughts occur over time, and you can go backward in time, so to speak, using them. But where are those thoughts, exactly? If you're like me you picture them somehow encased within the walls of your head, but there's also a lot of other stuff in there. Do they take up space? If they occur in time then theoretically one might expect them to be somehow physical, but then how small are they all to fit inside the ol' dome? And where do they go when they're not in use? I can recall a bunch of stuff about, say, junior high school, because that just sprung to mind, but then that probably won't be there for much longer after I finish this post. So where is this in-between space where the thoughts are stored? Try to imagine, if you will, a height, width or depth to the space between your ears. Can't really, right? Kind of like trying to fathom what's in every single room on that skyscraper you see in the photos of a major metropolitan area.

So the question is, why do we spend so much time distracting ourselves with the fringe areas of our psyche when there's all these grand questions about how we actually operate everyday? Essentially, as I understand it, meditation is the exploration of our real time phenomenon of consciousness, the problem of course is in order to analyze thinking you kinda have to stop yourself from thinking, and that, especially in this era of internet-induced ADHD, isn't the easiest thing to do.

Just saying.

N'yarlahotep* wants YOU!!! (or wait, maybe it's me it wants...)

2010-11-27T12:52:00.000-08:00

As I recently wrote about on my Chud.com blog, I'm experiencing a return to the works of H.P. Lovecraft lately. It's been a while since I've been able to 'get into' his writing, even though it has long been a MAJOR influence on me, insofar as writing, music, visually, atmosphere, etc. I walk around every day and conduct my life to constant music, always obsessing about atmosphere; this is due, I believe, to my Synesthesia, as I've talked about many times here before. The music produces a kind of adhesive that holds me slightly outside everything going on around me. In one way this can be a drawback, as 'shoegazing' can most definitely interfere with tasks or goals more grounded in the real world. However, it also leads to many late night and early morning 'jam sessions' wherein I find myself traipsing down the odd corridors in my head and, when I'm quick, pulling some of that stuff back for my writing, music, now video, etc. Somewhere in that adhesive there is a whole mess of H.P. Lovecraft – reading his mostly (entirely?) first-person accounts of the weird and macabre at such a developmental age I often find myself even now thinking in the tone of his protagonists. It's been that way for close to two decades now, to the point that I believe the day I was stabbed senior year in high school ('94) and whisked away in an ambulance I was thinking something to the effect of, 'Be it not for me to believe, but this account I give you today does indeed end with a blade in my chest.'

Having such a massive predilection for Lovecraft, not just his tone and atmosphere but the far-reaching and frankly not-completely-unplausible concepts the man built and worked with, it really should not come as a surprise that my first attempt at writing a novel was a play on his works. Being that while he was alive Lovecraft appreciated and encouraged his literary friends to write within his mythos the influx over the last ten or fifteen years of new Lovecraft-related work is, in a sense, a natural and exponential extension of what he himself began and fostered. Still, the more I've written and read the more I've moved away from Lovecraft, to the point that even though I believe my take on his mythos is different enough to be far, far away from plagaristic or disingenuous, I've actually 'finished' the book, titled "Thee Subtle War", at least three different times only to scrape it and begin again because... well because it's not really my own.

But goddamn it, I still really want to give the world my take on it!!!

As I've moved more into other authors (Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace and Alex Garland have all become HUGE influences on me for their haunting, real world grit and slightly ego-centric pontifications on the way we move through the world around us) I feel I found my own voice and in looking back and trying to re-start Thee Subtle War I've just not figured out how to integrate the story with that voice. In the interim I've written two novels and four screenplay I am quite proud of. Only one of those, a screenplay titled "Wonderland's End" I co-wrote with German screenwriter Marc Mrosk, was ever optioned, but still, I can shop these works with pride because they feel 'whole' to me, in a way that first novel, no matter how many times I write it, never has.

However now that I am reading Lovecraft again, and feel really tapped into the pulse of his work, I can't help feeling as though it may be time to work on my first love once again... even though it may just turn out to be another abortive attempt.

Only time, and of course He Who Is Not To Be Named, will tell.

.....................

The incredible picture I used for this post is from this website and unfortunately I cannot find a credit therein for the artist. Too bad, because this is incredible stuff. http://nyarlathotephp.blogspot.com/

Man Man Take Their Music To The Streets of Paris

2010-11-26T12:25:00.005-08:00

The Forest Children - Cold Blooded

2010-11-14T12:48:00.000-08:00

This is my band. Dennis Hellmann is the other half of the group, really moreso when you consider he writes the music and I just add the guitar. The man is the best songwriter I've ever met, and his output is not to be taken lightly. Each album, each song, they all have a story that works on an individual level and as part of a dark and amazing whole. This video is the first step in our trying to visually realize those stories. One day...

2010-11-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

One of the strangest things I've ever heard. Thanks to the Whitechapelian who posted this:

I remember this band as having that 'everybody walk the dinosaur' song in the late 80's. What happened?

The Ocean Collective

2010-10-21T20:21:00.000-07:00

Awesome fucking band from Germany. This video is amazing.

"In a world where new genres unfold like the labrythine corridors of dreams...'

2010-10-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Really, I am losing my ability to even process the 'genre' aggregate machine that now inhabits most of our brains. New finds:

Cuddle Core? Sounds like Bjork singing for a Sesame Street-sponsored version of DDR:

Witch House, aka Ghost Wave, aka Chill Wave, aka Drag, aka whatever; I like some of this and am not completely against the idea of 'genre-izing' it with an atmosphere setting term like Witch House, but this proliferation of names is a bit hoighty-toighty for something that is essentially a bedroom-version of what My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult did before they took the suck pill (ie just after Confessions of a Knife, which is their masterpiece. I'll use a Salem track here because they seem to be the progenitors, even if all their stuff is starting to sound the same to me.

The Many Faces of Greg Duli

2010-10-08T22:58:00.002-07:00

....

...

Burial & Kode9 Throw a Farewell Mix For Radio 1 Mainstay

2010-09-12T10:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?t09r1c7swgxctpu

Mary Anne Hobbs, BBC Radio 1 herald of many of the experimental music we enjoy today as music rats broadcast for the final on Thursday, September 9th. For the broadcast Hobbs had the enigmatic Burial, enigma of the electronic world, and Scottish maestro Kode9 mix/remix tracks for about 35 minutes. Link above. Great stuff.

Cheers to a fellow music explorer.

Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man

2010-09-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

What can I say, I'm a gluttonous reader. I read constantly, and while I am always looking for new authors to love (and when I find them I love the hell out of them and espouse their virtues to everyone that will listen) I do not woo easily. Since starting work at the bookstore I have become what I commonly refer to as a Fiction/Lit snob.

I love fiction, but mostly the kind of stuff that does not end up in a genre section.

I didn't mean for this to happen. Quite the contrary. I've always loved the idea of Science Fiction, Fantasy and especially Horror. Unfortunately though a lot of the stuff that ends up in those sections is written specifically to be in those sections. Target Market. So over the last couple years I've augmented my bouts of quantum physics and the Occult with David Foster Wallace, Alex Garland, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk and more and more what I find in the Fiction/Lit section. I always buy the new China Mieville the day it comes out, and some customers have introduced me to authors such as Glenn Cook, but SciFi/Fantasy always seems so far away. And I was just about to begin re-reading Martin Amis' brilliant London Fields (for the first time in 10 years) the other day when into my store walked Peter V. Brett and his agent.

I didn't know Mr. Brett's work. When he came in and asked to sign copies of his new book I had no idea what The Desert Spear was at first. Then he asked the magic question and a conversation began between us.

Mr. Brett: "Do you read fantasy?"

Me: "Actually, I hate most fantasy."

Now, this is my knee-jerk response. I wasn't doing it to wind the man up, I just cannot mask the intolerance I hold for all of those wannabe Tolkiens that fill that damn section with all manner of the derivations of Tolkien's frankly over-rated formula. What formula, you ask?

1 Part dragons
1 Part Knights
1 Part Orcs/Giants/Elves
1 Part Chivalry

You get the idea.

No fucking thank you. And the whole Medieval thing... it's fine if it's sincere but somehow it always just feels like what is expected. And maybe that's my biggest beef with these genres - a lot of the authors working within them seem to write to the expectations of the genre fans. Like metal heads afraid to lose the double-bass kick drum or actually sing instead of screech and howl, genre writers can follow a formula and be safe because there's enough people who can't stop trying to relive the way they felt when they first read Tolkien.

Well, I am happy to say that as much of an arsehead as I may have come off as to Mr. Brett and his agent, he didn't give up on me. He told me his stuff was fantasy, apocalyptic to an end, but also not what I would call Tolkien-esque.

"In my books the end of the world is caused by demons."

Demons... I have to admit, he had me. This seemed like such a good idea. It has horrific potential, yet also a flair of the genre pomp. The struggles of the remaining few in a world otherwise dead, fighting to survive, forced back into the old ways, not remembering the age of science and progress. Sort of like Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which I read growing up and LOVE.

Mr. Brett and his agent were in a hurry, on their way to a con out of the states, but something about him really piqued my interest. Number one both were damn nice guys, and number two, as readers of this blog and more specifically my chud.com Opinionated Bastard blog will no doubt know, despite appearances I am not a pessimist. I'm always looking to Love something new. On their way out Mr. Brett handed me a copy of his first novel, The Warded Man (turns out once I saw the cover I remembered I'd sold all three of the HC's of The Desert Spear several days before and was waiting for a replenishment shipment) and as soon as I went to lunch I cracked that fucker open and you know what?

It's really, really good. Really.

Mr. Brett's world is dark and dangerous; feudal and tainted by humanity's desperate attempts to survive. It's hardworking and occasionally joyful but most of all it is difficult. Difficult because every night when the sun goes down demons rise from the bowels of the land and massacre every living thing they can get their talons on. And this isn't just a scenic setting. Nope. Mr. Brett uses the harsh realities of this world to shape some really well-written and memorable characters (Arlen!!!) and 160 pages in I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!

Sorry Martin Amis, Keith Talent and the boys will have to wait...

"Something Trying To Tell You Someone..."

2010-08-22T13:40:00.000-07:00

I'd been meaning to do it for quite some time, I even began several quickly-aborted attempts. However after burning through Grant Morrison's mind-bending run on the Batman titles recently I found myself in an interesting synesthetic-crossroads: my aural leanings coalesced with my thirst for more comics, more old school Vertigo comics and I found myself popping in Meat Is Murder by The Smiths and opening the first issue of Grant Morrison's Gothic storyline that ran waaay back in 1990 in then third monthly bat-book Legends of the Dark Knight. I had only recently begun to expect that these two works, both on the surface intended for different senses, would work together in a very symbiotic relationship. The Headmaster's Ritual a perfect audio-accompaniment to following a young Bruce Wayne into the hellish inner-workings of an upstate New York British-style private school, the echoes of Morrissey's musings on life and loss the perfect condiment for the unraveling of an ancient, heretical plot that would, in retrospect, seem far more Vertigo than regular DCU. After Gothic I needed more. Naturally I moved toward the place on my shelf where Morrison's award-winning Arkham Asylum sat. Then I stopped myself. I changed discs to The Queen Is Dead and cracked the spine of Neil Gaiman's Preludes and Nocturnes and vowed I wasn't coming up for air until I'd finally re-read the entire Sandman series, something I'd never done before. I wasn't sure what to expect exactly, this time through with The Smiths as my guide, but I knew I was bound to unearth even more fleeting associations and hidden messages, as I realized Sandman is most definitely the work of a Smiths fan.

...................

I'm relatively new to Smiths-obsession land. Not quite a year ago I tumbled head over heels into addiction after flirting with fandom for the better part of a decade but never quite moving beyond the admittedly lame, 'yeah, How Soon Is Now is great and everything else I've heard is pretty cool too...' Then I got it. I don't really know what exactly happened to cause me to 'get it', but I did. I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that I suddenly found myself around their music a lot more because new co-workers played them obsessively. But through repetition the tunes began to work their magick on me. I asked to rip a disc or two*. I received Meat Is Murder. I began to explore...

Also around this time a good friend of mine who had taken a leave of absence from work to deal with 'health issues' resurfaced – on his death bed. I clung to Morrissey and the boys for bitter support as my friend withered away, drifting in and out of contact with those who would eventually inform me of his death. I'd lost a lot of friends before, but something about this one... it was very difficult in what felt like a decidedly more profound way. I can remember the symbiotic relationship the lyrics to The Joke Isn't Funny Anymore's refrain developed to my own interaction with and interpretation of Death. The shimmering guitars and lilting bass drifted over the entrancing drums as Morrissey's voice echoed the perfect arrangement of langual dress for an archetypal human experience/fear/event. And somewhere in it all I thought of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and realized that I had heard this music before. That I had seen, as a third person voyeur, this magnificent sorrow somewhere else.

This was because Neil Gaiman had no doubt heard it too; been a massive fan most likely, as had Grant Morrison, maybe Jamie Delano – the old Vertigo crew. I realized that just as I had experienced a synesthetic-rush with The Cure and Joy Division when reading Sandman back in high school, or James O'Barr's The Crow, or Hellblazer, or Swamp Thing, the same was happening now with The Smiths as a new lens to reveal hidden facets to these stories from the post-Reagan/Thatcher era - the time of AIDS and Looming Nuclear Obliteration and MDMA. I was a kid in the 80's so I didn't quite get what was going on – for many years afterward the 80's was a decade best left in the past. This was because as a kid my associations with it were hyper color clothes and dana carvey, lisa lisa & cult jam and other such atrocities that I was exposed to as a pre-teen without an older sibling, left to establish my tastes on my own, sifting through the garbage spoon-fed to the masses on the radio and tv, until I was first able to pick up the trail that led me to any kind of an 'underground'. I didn't find The Smiths, or The Cure or any thing else like them until high school. My earliest underground was metallica and the satan-streaked roads of heavy metal, long since sullied and exposed for the douche baggery that it was (for the most part). But I eventually found this stuff and realistically it was because of its influence on comics and comics influence on me.

Because I had grown up with comics it was there that I did my first experimenting. Even while still imbibing the music of the masses I was slowly breaking away from the GIJOE and X-men components of my comic book taste, my mom often waiting outside Heroland comics in Worth, Illinois where some days I would spend over an hour browsing – looking for something new, something I'd not yet experienced. Vertigo as a housing apparatus for the darker tales was still a few years off and I remember titles like Watchman and Stray Toasters teasing me with dark, jagged art the likes of which I was not yet experienced enough to appreciate (fuck you rob liefield) but nonetheless still endlessly enthralled with. Not enthralled enough to fork out the $3.50 or whatever cover price the 'Prestige Format' books commanded then ($10 allowance? $5? I don't remember but it had to be stretched in that comic shop and as such risks were rarely taken in those days). In retrospect I believe it was a few years later when the Batman books first brought me into my appreciation of that darker, more urban tone that I am still obsessed with today. Around the release of that first Tim Burton Batman film DC really ramped up the output, leading up to the hullabaloo of the film with many one-shots and Prestige releases, many portraying an increasingly darker atmosphere for the character. You can say this began in 1986 with Frank Miller's classic Dark Knight Returns, but from there we received Batman: The Cult, Gotham By Gaslight, Morrison's Arkham Asylum and soon after (and to tie this back around to the beginning of the post) Morrison's Gothic, originally published in Legends of the Dark Knight issues 6-10.

This was a story I read monthly, and re-read over and over again for years. To this day I believe it is the best Batman story in existence as well as the template, in my own personality, that flipped the switch and suddenly made me understand something about the potential of comic books as a medium, not just superhero exploits or serialized adventures. Gothic is every bit the epic Gothic Romance it shadows; a literary work of visual art that takes one of the most iconic American superhero characters and transmutes him into an occult figure worthy of Marlowe, Blackwood, Chandler or William Hope Hodgson. Whats more, Klaus Janson's art was the perfect template for me to perceive comic art as something more than explosive, rippling perfection. There is a scratchiness to Janson's art, especially in Gothic, that serves to create a darker, more urban and horrific sense of ambiguity that allows the reader's own nightmarish associations of fear to creep in and finish the pictures for them. You don't need everything blue-lined and outlined and rendered shiny and perfect. Leave that to traditional comic narratives. Janson's art, like that of The Sandman's Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and later Kelley Jones, is rough and dark because to a degree it carries with it that unfinished nature that helps it haunt you.

And that's what I found, last Autumn as my friend was dying and my own mortality seemed ever-so-much more impending, that The Smiths music does.

It haunts.

And suddenly I understood all of those Smiths and Morrissey obsessives - the people who only listened to The Smiths in High School (because a lot of them were probably exposed to it at developmentally difficult times by older siblings); the folks at the Morrissey conventions; the punks in 1989 that I just didn't understand as they popped Naked Raygun out of the cassette deck and fired up Louder Than Bombs. They were haunted.

And now I am too. And I have a lot of wonderfully creative people to thank for it. Thank You Neil Gaiman. Thank You Steven Patrick Morrissey. Thank you Robert Smith, Ian Curtis, Simon and Klaus Janson, John Ridgway and Jamie Delano and all of the other creators that established that beautifully dark world I can still evoke with the right combination of your music and pictures, words and melodies.

Most of all I am moved to say thank you to my mom and dad, for waiting so patiently all those evenings I spent hours investigating what else the comic shop had to offer besides Adamantium claws and Cobra Officers**.

..................

* I only had The Queen is Dead and Rank, which I'd purchased in the earlier part of the previous decade during the period of two ro three years where I worked an ongoing and fairly elaborate Magickal Ritual that entailed my buying two records a week as an offering to the Music Industry as a God, Egregore, whatever. The end result of that ritual is still, to some degree, in question.

** Not that there's anything wrong with Cobra.

Cee-Lo

2010-08-22T13:26:00.001-07:00

A little something lighter in tone. Funny, often appropriate, but soulful as all hell.

Although I've loved that first Gnarls Barkley album the 2nd one, 'The Odd Couple' has taken some getting used to. It's good, great even, but it hasn't quite grabbed me as totally as St. Elsewhere. That began to change when I became obsessed with Breaking Bad last year and they used the second track on the album in the season finale for season one. Admittedly I've not given 'The Odd Couple' the amount of time I gave the first – that's all time and place for me. Depends on what atmosphere I'm into at the moment. Before spiraling into my current Smiths/Joy Division jag to accompany a re-reading of the entire Sandman series by Neil Gaiman I was kinda hot on a soul kick and Gnarls fit perfectly. However that was interrupted by the dour British factory rock...

I know next to nothing about Cee-lo. This is a pretty good place to start. However further investigation will have to wait, as I'm back off to the Dreaming.

....................

* Read an older interview with Thomas Golubic, the music supervisor on Breaking Bad, where he talks about the selection of Gnarls Barkley's 'Who's Gonna Save My Soul' here:

http://blogs.amctv.com/breaking-bad/2008/03/interview-with-thomas-golubic.php

Dear Nick Cave

2010-08-18T22:48:00.001-07:00

I love you. This is the greatest music video in the history of music videos.

Thank You

Amen

Untitled Post

2010-08-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

(The post below was something I found in my unpublished drafts. I have absolutely no idea what it is, was supposed to be or even any memory of writing it. It's kind of interesting though...)

Yeah

We don't go near the bug wall

All kinds of craziness right there, man

Bees and giant moths and shit

and something in a cocoon that my brother was planning on using for an art project

Until it hatched

until it hatched

until it hatched.

Alice Russell on The Cosmic Lounge

2010-08-17T21:35:00.000-07:00

Damn shame I missed her at Angel's Piano Bar (courtesy of LA's KCRW, Anthony Valadez and Miss Russell's bad self). Dig this track. The seventies are a state of mine my friends...

New Music Monday: Krowne

2010-08-16T15:14:00.000-07:00

Fairtilizer is such a wonderful way to find new music. Case in point: I had never heard of Krowne, an electronic musician hailing from Edinburgh, Scotland, before today. This is some great stuff from the city I love and you can bet when I eventually get back there this will be one of the guys I am looking to see live. The E.P. is free for download from Black Lantern, but as I always I encourage any who do to donate. Download the big guys' stuff for free, but independents require our support to thrive and survive.

Richard Kadrey

2010-08-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

This is what I am currently reading. Great book. I'm pretty hard on anything Sci fi or horror and this is definitely a cross-breeding of the two. However, its more of that Clive Barker horror, or maybe even old Vertigo. There is a certain logic that pervades the elements of supernatural that make it more than what we call sci fi these days* and because it deals with the Infernal Realms and demons and such (although in a less Christian more hierarchical sort of way) it automatically makes me think horror. So far though, not horrific per se, and that is not a dis. Kadrey is a very descriptive writer, and his dialogue is magnetic, even if I get the impression sometimes his characters are being just a skosh too cute for their own good (which is not a failing on Kadrey's part – main character Spyder sometimes just talks too much, which Butcher Bird even spends a great deal of time telling him. Character development on this level is excellent and fun to read, even if you occasionally want to smack the character.

....................

* Which if we're being honest is a completely different animal than Science Fiction, but that's a discussion for another day

Making Dreams with Mugwort Smoke

2010-08-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

(Originally written on 7/20/10)
Interesting experience last night. Mugwort is a plant that I have possessed a dried quantity of for some time. Back in the Chicago Ridge days, while I was recording the bulk of the Forest Children albums with Dennis and Chooch we would mix the stuff with our pot and smoke it all night long. I'd found out about it from some guy in some occult shop in some city, probably while looking for Salvia or DMT. Mugwort is legal as it is a mild substance when ingested, usually as a tea or smoke tincture. During my initial research period with it, and now subsequently as I've begun ingesting it again, I have seen it often mentioned as being particularly effective as a catalyst for strong or even lucid dreams. I'm not sure if I could ever corroborate this claim before last night*, but yeah, that does indeed seem to be the case.

I've smoked two or three times in the last week, the most recent of which was last night. I sat down to watch El Topo for the first time despite being tired to the point where I knew I would probably have to fight to make it through the entire film. I smoked a bit of a mixture and settled in for the film, which I quickly realized I hated. However, as I sat struggling through the movie I began to nod off. What occurred next I am still unsure whether was in sleep or waking.

I began to feel very conscious of my heart rate. My vision flickered and my head spun a bit. I'd open my eyes knowing I'd been out but unsure how long. I The film playing out on screen is nonsensical to a degree anyway, so there was no way to use the perceived rhythm of its story to tell how long I was going out for, or whether or not the film was insinuating itself into my dreams. Had I been sitting here only a moment ago and feeling as though my heart was ramping up, threatening me, or had that been a part of the dream? As I was thinking this I even became aware that to some degree I was dreaming.

But then I wasn't.

It is as I have described here before, that when the REM pattern breaks up so does the dream. But the dreams can often hold on, like a rider bucked by a horse who may slip from side to side but ultimately manages to stay mounted.

My dream was telling me something. Or trying to at least.

The room and its accoutrements became a hazy dimension suspended in the twilight between wakefulness and REM. Even when I was finally certain that I was awake everything had the soft halo glow we associate with dreams or mild hallucinogens. I was burrowed into the N.O.W.** but something seemed as though it was moving around me, just outside my veiled consciousness. And my heart was beating.

Fast.

Maybe fast is the wrong word. And maybe this wasn't the reality of the situation at all. Everyone who has taken acid knows that feeling where the drug suddenly seems as though it is about to climb on top of you and batter your senses to its own twisted-reality whim. I tried to recognize this and utilize it as an antidote to the encroaching panic but to no avail; of course thinking about needing to slow my heart down implies there is a problem, implies there is a danger in how fast it is beating. This is the ridiculous sing-song drug logic that, for the most part, made me stop doing them a loooong time ago. But this is Mugwort. I mean, come on, really?

Eventually I was able to out fix my paranoid android and get everything under control. My mind is stronger than this and again, the mixture in question is nothing that has ever reacted with me like this before. I ended up crawling into bed and falling asleep pretty much immediately. My dreams were long and vivid, I think, and I've since found literature reporting it is possible to die from prolonged ingesting of Mugwort, if taken over enough consecutive days.

Where the hell was that information before, when we were ingesting it daily and recording? Or, how much of those recordings possible contain messages from that plant, using the musicians harbored in those late night recording sessions at Dennis' as their vehicle to try and impart some subtle, archetypal knowledge to the world through our hands and voices, ideas and melody?

..............

* Well, that's not true, but let's just say it's been so long and if I wrote anything down I'd have to unearth it.

T. Rex

2010-08-11T19:25:00.001-07:00

Fuck yeah!!!

Pygmy Shrews - Your Party Fucking Sucks

2010-08-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

Wow. I laughed so fucking hard at this I had tears in my eyes. Definitely kindred spirits with my old bands Wink Lombardi and the Constellations and Schlitz Family Robinson.

I found Pygmy Shrews after reading about another band, Drunks With Guns. I looked those guys up on Last.FM and found an entire slew of similar acts, Shrews included. I'll post some Drunks With Guns next, and I'm sure I will be posting more grimy basement punk soon enough.

Thank You to Aaron Dilloway who chose Drunks With Guns eponymous album as his 'Inner Sleeve' pick for the August issue of Wire Magazine*.

..................

* The only music magazine that truly matters. Although Ghetto Blaster has a couple killer writers working for them now...

The Melvins, Hand Puppets and Kareoke

2010-08-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't some bizarre new fetish, it's a clip from something called Pancake Mountain. Awesome.

The Melvins have a new album out called The Bride Screamed Murder. I know without having heard it yet that it's good, for it is The Melvins.

Thee Oh Sees

2010-08-09T20:42:00.000-07:00

I know nothing about this band. Just found them today.

That will change.

A Classic...

2010-08-09T19:40:00.000-07:00

God Is LSD. Go all the way back to 1993. Waaay before the internet, before music file proliferation/sharing brought a globe of music, major and independent to every home with a computer and a modem, I used to get info on new music wherever I could. A hell of a lot of it came from the enigmatic Mr. Brown*, but we were always looking for new avenues to discover bands by.

We were thirsty. Still are, but it was harder to be back then so I guess mixed with nostalgia that makes the thirst seem more important now or something.

There was a independent record store in Orland Park, IL named Red Tower. A very local B&W music mag called 'Subculture' stacked copies in their lobby for free. Great magazine. One of the record reviews that caught my eye the hardest was Spirit of Suicide by God Is LSD. I don't remember if I had to special order it or not (most likely yes. Red Tower had a pretty damn good selection, but I don't know if it was that good) but that is definitely the store where I acquired the album that I immediately fell in love with. The above is a video for my favorite song on the album**. I had never seen it before today (only just now starting to utilize this youtube thing for its full potential)

........................

* A regular star in the stories I tell on my Chud blog.

** Their only one, however main guy Thomas Luedke still plays in his other group, Invincible Spirit.

The Heir To The Throbbing Throne

2010-08-09T16:22:00.001-07:00

I have not experienced something so brimming with Magickal energy since Throbbing Gristle. The video I've linked below is not for the squeamish – it contains such a strong undercurrent of energy that it is disturbing, even if when broken down most of the images are fairly simple. This isn't youtubesnuff or anything like that – there is no place in my life or this world for that brand of sick exhibitionism. However, when music and image come together in an alchemical marriage of Magickal Will, well, things can become very strong.

This actually brings to mind a video I had worked on back in 2003. I was renting a house with two other guys and spent a lot of time in various altered states, playing around with different ideas for ritual and exercising of the Will. One of those ideas centered around constructing a video to eventually distribute to various outlets (before Youtube) and influence the world, or at least the segment of the world amping up on media consumption as a way of determining direction in life. The collection of tracks and videos, never finished, were loosely referred to as 'tulpas' and have been since lost in the aeythers of the lost dimension of computer storage.

In Dreams You're Mine, For All Of Time...

2010-08-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

Interesting the things that transpire in our heads when our consciousness turns off for a while. Moments ago I awoke from a morning filled with a strange effluvium of events that has me a bit paranoid and dare I say it, buzzed as I sit here drinking my fourth cup of coffee in ten minutes. I've been re-reading Grant Morrison's Batman run, from the beginning, and as with everything else the man writes it has most definitely been affecting my nervous system. The Invisibles rolled into one caped-crusading icon. Here's what's collating within the residue...

In my place, making coffee but unable to turn the coffee pot off. Surprised that I had never tried to do this before (a subliminal message that I imbibe too much java? Doubtful, I've waned in quantity lately and feel somewhat guilty about it) Comic Scribe Warren Ellis talks me through trying to turn it off. He is not in the room, nor on the phone. In the dream I seem to interact/communicate with Mr. Ellis as I do in normal life, one of many who occasionally participate in discussion threads on his Whitechapel forum. However, in the dream there is that strange and ever-endearing dream logic that works so well when weaving around physics as we now it, so that the communication takes place without either one of us sitting at a computer, typing. It is almost as if a word balloon appears next to me in the dream (do I become 2D?) and Warren floats inside it, a psychic apparition scoffing and surprised that I've never tried to turn off an appliance I use everyday.

From the coffee pot incident it is somewhat unclear what transpires next. I believe I was folding in and out of sleep's various stages, losing that gloriously technicolor REM where dreaming occurs, and as such the 'plot' of the dream becomes jagged and unclear in its continuity. This happens often, where the movement that connects the juicer points of the dream becomes blurred (as in, "How did I get from Mom and Dad's to Siberia wearing a chicken suit?") and I truly believe it is this interruption in the dream state that does it. Imagine having a hand of cards during a game that every few minutes or so requires you to have to toss them back in, reshuffle, re-deal and then re-acclimate? Static pictures reprocessed or remixed every so often. Interesting idea for a card game, eh? Makes it very attractive to want to assign a quasi-human persona to our architect, no?*

Anyway, the next thing that happens is a malevolence begins to pepper the house (still my house) In the dream I seem to identify it alternately as a 'presence' and an 'unknown agent' – as if one moment it's an exorcism I require and the next a gas mask. I know the word 'Nerve Gas' flits through my dream-avatar's consciousness at some point. Nerve Gas possessed of a malevolent, undead personality? A Gas Ghost, or a Ghost who has learned to manifest itself in a particularly desired atomic makeup? All this is unclear, what is clear however is that Mr. Ellis is now apparently my neighbor (I don't care how loud you play your stereo sir, just turn the sub-woofer down so it doesn't rattle the pictures off my wall thanyouverymuch. I'd hate to get Gravel on your ass) and I run outside to save my cats from the encroaching danger. Only Tom and Lily, two full grown felines, are more akin to tiny newborn kittens. I gather them up into an open-topped cardboard box and rush them outside only to find Mr. Ellis walking by. I ask him to watch my cats as I run back in and suddenly, at some point I am calling the police (or did they call me?) and setting the cash register drawers out for opening at the store where I work.

???

There' that trans-location logic again, this time remixed in a manner so that my location doesn't change, it simply acquires attributes of another, inexplicably so.**

So now the front door is open, Warren Ellis is outside watching my cats and the police are arriving, asking me questions that pretty openly say both A) they think I'm either crazy or high on goofballs (am I sweating at this point? Yeah, I probably look high.) and B) they realize that something is indeed wrong with the very air or atmosphere in the room we currently occupy. As I speak to the officers (two of them, one a early-forties caucasian woman wearing her brown hair in a braided ponytail, the other a mid-to-late thirties black man with short-sheered hair and a reassuring air of calm about him) I feel as though I am trying to explain something I most assuredly know but somehow just cannot express. The room continues to swell with toxic environment and I glance to my right, over my shoulder and see the front door, propped open. A moment later I do the same and it is closed. Still speaking ineffectually I move over to the door, pushing it open and see the two money-filled tills sitting on the stoop just to the right of the threshold. A woman goes by on the sidewalk two steps down, calling for her child. I lean down and assess the tills, suspicious that someone (the woman?) gently pushed the door closed and took money. In the top till there appears to be a lesser amount of change than there should be and the slots for most bills are empty. Then I see a fifty dollar bill, no two fifty dollar bills where the five's should be. Warren is still watching my cats, the police are still speaking to me (are their guns drawn all of a sudden?) and I find myself wondering if I am being purposely distracted...

...................

* Unfortunately though, that is not a good enough reason for me to do so.

** How can you not become resentful of work when you spend so much of your waking life there that it often follows you into your unconscious? Bastard!!!

Killing Mr. Vegas

2010-07-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

Stumbling around the check in and registration area of the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada I reach into my pocket and feel the thin, crumpled plastic baggie that contains the homegrown magic mushrooms a friend of mine at work recently gave me.

It's going to be a good night.

Not even twenty minutes ago I was so tired I thought for sure we'd be checking in and I'd be curling up in bed, but clearly I have forgotten the pulse of Vegas. The city itself is the anti-sleep; a mecca of artificial environment designed specifically to combat the human mind's insistence – after so much time spent awake and engaged – to shut down and recharge itself. With such a cluster of Will and agenda all shared by so many powerful ideas out in the middle of nowhere (read: no ideas) the City of light that floats in the middle of the Mojave Desert is itself something of an entity; a sentient being that beckons people in and then consumes of them what it can. Some it gets worse than others, just as some drugs or people can become parasitic to people, and bit by bit, year by year the vast and hungry egregore* that is Las Vegas, Nevada grows more and more powerful and is able to feed itself better, much like a person starting a job at entry level and slowly working up the ladder of position and pay rate, until it's no longer required they 'dine within their budget'.

Think about i: Las Vegas is such a powerful entity that the laws we know in the United States of America breakdown and do not completely apply within the city limits. What other person or place can sidestep such tried and true societal guidelines such as 'No prostitution' or 'no public imbibing of alcohol' (We're talking in the U.S.)?

So we checked into the Luxor and before we'd even made it up to the 6th floor of the West Tower I'd consumed most of my bag of party favors. Sleep still skirted around the peripheral of my consciousness but now it spoke to me in a manner that promised to return when called upon.

After the night's adventure had run its course.

Adventure here may be a bit of a misleading word. There was no wham bam excitement. No after hours parties, high speed chases or fist fights. The adventure I had in Las Vegas boiled down to a conversation. A conversation I had with an ancient, mystical being whose conscious body on Earth is a tiny fungus known by, among other names, Amanita Muscaria.

There are plenty of cultures, all quite older than our own, that consider the psilocibin an old and wise citizen of the Universe, one who beckons interaction with us. You see, Muscaria is a teacher, and it is always looking for new students to hear its stories. Why wouldn't we want to?

Why wouldn't we want to learn? To challenge the, frankly, pedestrian view of the Universe we as human beings on Earth in the twenty-first century have? Because it challenges the status quo? Let me remind you again that Mr. Vegas gets to challenge the status quo, and he wins.

Every time.

He wins.

So that's it; the jumping off point. Mr. Vegas might seem an affectionate, embellished moniker from a fiction writer, but he's real (or she – I'm lazy, not sexist), and I challenge anyone to try to kill him. You can't. Thing is though, it might be really interesting to study him as a hit man studies his kill. Day in, day out. Then who knows what might happen one day?

...................

* Which for simplicity's sake I will quote Wikipedia's definition here: an occult concept representing a "thoughtform" or "collective group mind", an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. ...

Remember Where You are now so You can Get Back Here Later.

2010-07-28T11:47:00.000-07:00

So I am currently shopping my second completed novel. Technically I've completed three, but that third one (or actually it's the first one, Thee Subtle War) I've 'completed' about three times. It was the first novel I attempted to write and as such it is the one I've had the most trouble reconciling with my 'voice' since I have honed it. Although there are many parts of Thee Subtle War I like from those earlier versions as a whole I could never quite stand the book. Perhaps this has a lot to do with the lack of follow-through on the plot, which was originally a fanboy's attempt at imitating Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Over time my fixation on all things Morrison has waned enough for me to find my own voice (although that will hopefully evolve with time) – I still love The Invisibles and everything else the man writes, but I've gotten over my starstruck period of intense influence at the hands of his art. With this evolution Thee Subtle War has evolved as well, but through it all one main idea has remained consistent. The theme of the book shoots off of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, combining it with science in a way I do not believe anyone else has ever attempted. So these more recent versions now too are 'influenced' by another author's work, but with each new winnowing of Thee Subtle War I feel I pull Lovecraft's ideas more and more into my own world, instead of vice versa.

I have no problem with this, realizing now that ultimately Thee Subtle War will be something that I will publish down the road, after I have a name and fan base (which I Will have).

The book I'm currently shopping is 100% me and a direct result of many of the experiences I've had in my own life. I tend to write a lot about fucked up people, drugs, alcohol and a certain longing that I keep with me for lonely, intoxicated nights when I can almost smell the south suburban Chicago rain in the air and realize that the past is not a when but a where, and something I can easily invoke with the right combination of music, substances and lighting.

The Ghost of Violence Past is my attempt at an imaginary confrontation with a very real demon from my own past, a boy I once called friend who went on to murder several people I knew for no reason other than, I suppose, he felt he could.

What do you say to someone who has done those things? I don't know, and never will, as although my avatar in the story is both willing and able to confront the killer from his childhood, I most certainly never will.

I would never want that person to know that I even still remember him.

After finishing The Ghost of Violence Past I recently began a new story, tentatively titled '2 A.M. Corridors'. Corridors is built around my experiences as a drug-taking, alcohol-swilling bartender in the South Suburbs of Chicago. It is an exercise in merging the time travel I experience with drugs and music with the world where I lived and worked, fucked drank and snorted for five years until I met the love of my life and turned the page (and what a heavy page it was to turn, moving 3000 miles away). One of the main influences on the aforementioned period of my life (as with all periods of my life) was music,and it is to help set and maintain the mood that I have utilized very particular playlists for this particular project. Below is a widget containing the main throng of songs that compliment the atmosphere and motivation of 2 A.M. Corridor's characters and story. As the story evolves I will most likely assemble and post more of these, perhaps even with excerpts from the book. My hopes in sharing these is that so that when people eventually read the story they can let me know whether or not the story and music contain/convey one another.

Life is a series of stories, culled together in a pantomime of chapters arranged in, apparently, no particular order. As a writer I attempt to impose my Will, my 'Order' on it so that when I am gone, my life will remain.

Who Built The Road by Isobel Campbell

2010-07-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

I was just listening to Mark Lanegan's Bubblegum a couple of days ago and it occurred to me that the man may have a new project coming up. Gutter Twins (new album soon, please) was something like two years ago now and I've found myself having a hankering for the gravel-throated journey man we all love so much. Well, without further delay:

Who Built The Road by Isobel Campbell

follow the link down the whiskey hole and listen with stretchy, intoxicated glee. So far Back Burner is my favorite and a prime example why I love this man. Isobel Campbell also appears to deserve special attention. I'm unfamiliar, but this is awesome and she's a Scot, so you know, I'm down.

Buy it and support independent music.

Huzzah!!!

Interrupting or coming up for air???

2010-07-11T15:07:00.000-07:00

There's a suit I wear over another suit, which is really just dress for this tangle of knobs and ideas that makes up the complex series of Algorithms that happen to have all decided (for the moment at least) to vibrate at the particular frequency-set that manifests itself to your observer's senses as this slightly long-winded cunt named Shawn. The suit above the suit – the clothes on top of the clothes – has been a major undertaking; what we used to call a 'fiction suit' back at the end of the last Millennium (okay, truthfully I guess I didn't get 'turned on' to calling it that until early the next, but the more miles on time's highway you put behind you the more they all kind of collapse and congeal into life's perpetually gnawing horizon) is not so much a disguise as it is an apparatus for burrowing into a tunnel, an unknown lair home to all manner of beings that are of alien interest to me. The act, ritual, construct, whatever language I choose to dress it in is an attempt to transmogrify myself into what I have stated with my Will that I want to 'become' – the new set of frequencies I want to oscillate at in order to best facilitate further understanding of this enormous cavern we all find ourselves lost in; this labrynthine, multi-level scaffolding that holds our sway for the better part (hopefully) of one hundred years and eventually quaffs us down into a further perhaps more direct (perhaps not) existence of interest.

Reward? Punishment? These are children's ideas for those who cannot look themselves in the mirror and feel excited to go on just for the sake of having the opportunity to do so.

Huzzah!!!

Naw, you can jog, please work 2 have bst-r d m.

2010-07-06T19:25:00.000-07:00

Is not what this blog is about even though they are a DAMN good band. I was just trolling and saw that I posted last week (or was that two weeks ago?) and decided that I would try to write a blog here at least twice a month from here on out, regardless of whether I have anything to talk about or not (not sure if this is a good thing).

Phases I've been drifting between:

Listening to:...................|||........................Reading:

X.....................................|||............Survivor
Talking Heads................|||............Less Than Zero
Tears For Fears...............|||............Imperial Bedrooms
Huey Lewis……............|||............American Psycho
__________________________________________________________________

Grinderman......................|||…….China Mieville’s Kraken
Danzig 9
Tones on Tail
Bauhaus

I was in the middle of a big lit kick that had me working on a new piece of writing, the loosely referred to 'Two A.M. Corridors' but now that I'm knee deep in Kraken I'm slightly paralyzed writing wise.

Watched Harmony Korine's Mister lonely and Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer. Been slow getting into movies lately, too much reading.

Thinking about the absolute ridiculous amount the Universe must like me to have me meet the woman of my dreams so young in life.

Hanging out on Whitechapel a bit more lately, finding some interesting web sites there. Weaponizer, polpus, zazzle, et al.

Kinda getting into the D&D thing.

confluence of events

2010-06-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

My cat Lily yowling constantly on a cool Tuesday evening... I'm about to go nuts when my other cat Thompson starts yowling too, from downstairs. Outside the wind is mellow and pushing a lovely Ocean calm into my second story bedroom. I'm trying to work on this new writing project, high on Vicadin, Fat Tire and now I've switched to my trusty Sierra Nevada. Intermittently I'm chewing chunks of Bret Easton Ellis's brilliant new novel Imperial Bedrooms into the mess within me and ringing his paranoic style for all the inspiration it's worth (no small amount). There is a gaping hole in my mouth where blood has clotted over but occasionally surprises me with a stringy, iron-tasting dribble down the back of my throat.

Downstairs A Place To Bury Strangers is jamming at max volume. Fuck my neighbors (nothing personal).

I tip my beer but not before thinking that something urgent is transpiring somewhere in the forest of neural pathways etched into the meat between my ears.

The sun is down, it's 8:05 PM and although the chemicals and cool air are causing my fingers to lag a bit my mind is racing. I've got to get this down, got to get this down...

Two A.M. Corridor is the story of a bartender and the people he surrounds himself in an attempt to make the easy buck, get the girl who is already been explained to him is off limits and somehow avoid the frenzy of supernatural chaos that may or may not be the power behind one of the world's biggest hotel chains. Good luck Ray, you're gonna need it.

The big fish

2010-06-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

I stepped out of the shower this afternoon and while doing some deep breathing exercises I usually try to step into my day with for the first time I think ever I felt something behind the mask of the ego scaffold I so adamantly stick to.

I felt a quiet. Not an introspective quiet but a vast ocean of calm underneath the clothes I dress myself in when I step out of my mind and onto the stage where I interact with all of these other marvelous souls. It felt raw and primal and... powerful.

I'm going back in, after it, and suddenly I understand what David Lynch called the 'big fish'.

The Smiths

2009-11-13T22:46:00.000-08:00

I can't get them out of my head. I've never felt like this about a band before. Not that they're better or I like them more than other bands, but they're resonating with me in ways that are really kind of creepy. I'm not usually one to pay super attention to lyrics but Morrissey gets to me - he's able to capture in a few simple lines some of the most important, daunting ideas of what it is to live and love...

Fuck you november 12th 2009

2009-11-12T18:41:00.001-08:00

Fuck You November 12th 2009. You batter me for 9 hours with corporate-bullshit stress that makes my soul leak through my eyes, then you take my friend from me. Fuck you - I'll drive a nail the size of a gallon of alcohol through your heart and leave you dead and behind me when I wake up tomorrow in a world with one less person I love in it.

Life, the Universe and everything really worth thinking about (if you are in the habit of thinking too much)!!!

2009-11-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

So, a long time ago I promised this in a strange aside kinda manner, and while I'm sure everyone who read it thought it was a joke, I can assure you, it most certainly is not. For damn near ten years now I have been, when not distracted by this large, slippery and often disabling thing called modern life, obsessed with cracking the codes this thing we call reality is written in. In the grand scheme of things I'm not really any further along today than I was when I started this, but I have learned an interesting trick or three, along with a wealth of information that alternately turns on and off, like some cosmic tap for bigger-than-human-life information. Not information as the two-dimensional whirly gig that flitters faster and faster through our constantly shrinking attention spans, but information as living, breathing, reality-altering substance. When actively engaged, the right information would appear more as an alien abduction than a boring snore through some ledger of letters and numbers.

Alright, I'm going to pause now to re-fill my coffee cup (my very large coffee cup) and when I return, we will begin...

SHAWN'S ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN IT ALL

Warning, this is going to begin as a series of posts of loosely intermittent information that will then tie together in the end. I hope. Anyone who reads this should keep in mind I by no means consider myself any kind of expert or enlightened individual, and thus this is as much an attempt to coalesce and congeal this stuff for myself as for anyone else. I just figured, why not do it in public, might be fun for others to watch me run around the proverbial page like a chicken with its head chopped off.

Okay, first we should start at the microscopic level. See, one thing I am sure of is we as humans are so caught up in ourselves and things taking place on our level of experience, we forget or downright snub all the other limitless levels of existence that actually help make what we see around us exist. There is an age old Hermetic maxim, and every good book on Science or Magick quotes it at least once, because it is a good compass point to mark when beginning a journey such as this. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW - in its most concise form. What this means is that the universal relationships, why's, wherefore's and properties that exist on any one of these levels of existence, as in simplicity's sake we'll say the microscopic, they also repeat in all the other levels, as let's say, the macroscopic. This means that some of the same behavior we see Electrons, Neutrons, Quarks, and all their tiny brethren exhibiting is repeated with people, planets, stars, etc. A good, simple example of this is the idea of the orbit. Planets orbit the stars that grant them life, and Electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom. ONLY this idea has changed, and I interrupt the simple definition now in an attempt to introduce a new idea forthwith. For a long time this idea of the particles of an atom mirroring the behavior of the stars worked, that is until the inception of Quantum Mechanics.

Now, in Quantum Mechanics, arguably one of the most important ideas that arose was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which essentially says that the more you try to pinpoint the exact location of a quantum particle the more uncertain its location becomes. This is roughly due to the idea that in the time it takes to receive the light to view the particle it has changed position. Herein is the advent of the Ground State Fluctuations. Now think about this...

If you consider Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle you immediately see that while it is common place to consider matter as being made up of particles you'll realize that if those particles move fast enough that we cannot see them then wait a minute, doesn't that mean they're behaving more like waves than particles? Ahh... so what do we call something that sometimes behaves like a particle and sometimes like a wave?

We call it a 'Quanta'. Quanta is a measurement - often h*j where h= Planck's Constant and j= an amount of radiation.

Anyway, if the Universe is made up of these quanta, which are always moving, there would be a constant accumulation of energy. These are Ground State Fluctuations and they occur on such a small scale that they are responsible, to some degree, for the physical essences that make up our world (what people used to refer to as Eyther, Aether, Ayether and all other manner of spellings). Matter, from the desk my hands now type against, to my actual body are complimenting quanta all vibrating (or moving, as in ground state) at the same or similar speeds. This is why some of the Universe we see, some we feel, some we taste, smell, hear, etcetera, and some are just plain invisible to us in every way. This is why some materials bend to our strength and others do not. What moves at the same or similar speeds interacts or appears to one another. This opens us up for the idea of different 'Dimensions' because they are things vibrating at different, or non-complimentary speeds to our own and those could be said, for us, to exist in different dimensions...

Rain

2009-10-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

So I've been in Chicago for six days and it has rained everyday.

This is good.

However for the last two and a half days I've been sick.

This is bad.

I ended up postponing my flight back by two days (from Monday to Wed). This has been both nice and difficult. Difficult because I miss my wife and cats, nice because I get to spend more time with my Mom and Dad, kibitzing around the house of my birth (which I get womb-like inspiration from) and driving around in the rain.

The Rain.

I don't get hardly any in Southern California, and although I sure as hell would NEVER want to live in Chicago full time again I can't wait until I can come back whenever I want, stay as long as I want and soak up the rain in a leisurely fashion. I've driven by Bachelor's Grove twice today - it's perfect weather for the Midwest's most haunted cemetary (in the middle of the freakin' woods no less) and I wasn't able to get there because of this goddamn sinus infection ripping my head apart!!!

Tarot for the day:

1) 6 Wands Victory
2) 7 Disks Failure
3) XVII The Star
4) 2 Disks Change
5) IX The Hermit
6) 8 Disks Prudence
7) 10 Swords Ruin
8) 5 Disks Worry
9) (in this case unseen) Queen of Cups

I'm coming from Victories and Failures. These are the starting points or two main impulses (results?) - I'm trying to move from out from under their one-two punch and have better results. I'm My current main influence are the cosmic forces of Nuit represented by the Star card. This fits with my writing shifting back into a 'cosmic' focus. My most recent previous influence is Change, that is the need to. The future will be driven by The Hermit, which means more isolated work ahead as the lights come on and the shadow forces of inspiration are integrated further into my overall sturcture.

What is in the dark (card 6) is Prudence bright perception, vitality and healthy growth. Also possibly winning by not doing anything. This in particular is interesting as I have a lot of 'feelers' out - queries I sent and still have not received responses for. This may be an area open to Magickal 'Push'. What is in the light is Ruin, which doesn't bother me because my interpretation of that is, ah yeah, I've not gotten any positive response from the queries I did get back, so it's all in what's not yet seen.

Finally where the journey will lead is Worry, but the actual picture on the Worry card shows light shining through the dark gears - in other words I'm inclined to receive this as 'you worry and it dampens your sight, but just behind there be a light.'

Wow, a little poem there. How coffeeshop of me.

Nine isn't interpreted here because 8 wasn't one of the Major Arcana. However, The Queen of Cups is one of my cards, so this is good, interpreted as a familiar.

The Dream State

2009-10-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

It's always interesting to me that when I pull away from the Occult like I've been for the last, hell, maybe two years, weird things stop happening to me. Lately I've been re-writing my first novel, Thee Subtle War, which was conceived and performed, for the most part, in the height of a five-year submersion in all things Magickal, and now that I'm back into it it's affecting me by creating, for now, small almost random occurrences of novelty in my day to day existence.

One of the first places this 'heightening of the senses' usually occurs is in my dream time. Never too much of a dreamer (at least as far as remembering or controlling them) Magickal perception very noticeably defines the difference between 'mundane' or 'consensual' from 'hmm, strange' or 'bat shit crazy'.

Yesterday before I went out for the evenings activities I did a simple shuffle-and-pull Tarot consultation. My card was the first card of the deck, THE FOOL. This card usually signifies the beginning of a journey, the aligning of forces, both conscious and subconscious. With so much going 'right' in my life at the moment I'm inclined to interpret my last two full-out spreads (one I posted here a week ago) and now this card as the Universe trying to tell me all elements are in place to kind of hone my day to day with my subconscious - as if to fashion my very existence into a kind of antenna or lightening rod aimed at catching, utilizing and re-firing the wide array of skills and energies I possess/can evoke to achieve my goal.

Anyway... back to my dream. Now where this fits in is a bit weird, with perhaps a touch of 'If you've convinced yourself that's great...' My dream last night/this morning was frightening. No, terrifying. I was somehow involved in a rural area's exploits to perform an exorcism on someone I knew (not sure who, bit hazy). There were definite familiar faces beside the one in trouble but who they were I couldn't tell you now. Anyway, t some point the demon was loosed. From there I remember the priest performing the rite coming in close and touching me firmly on the bridge of the nose - and it was like he passed the spirit into me. I remember feeling that the priest contained something not so nice and was passing it onto me. I woke still feeling the heat and pressure of that touch between my eyes and being pretty much immobilized with fear.

I'm taking this to be something being passed onto me, yet I'm not sure what or how it may filter into my 'Quest'. One thing for sure though, I am definitely ready for some more bizarritude in my life (not at work though). Of course that means I'll have to start actually leaving the house...

A return to the tarot

2009-10-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

I have worked with the Tarot for almost five years, however (and this is a big however) I have not been consistent. In fact it has been at least a full year since I've even picked my gorgeous Thoth deck up. This is an involved skill, and one I know I have to stick with in order to gain it's attributes as my own. Being that analyzing spreads takes quite a bit of time to do it correctly I'm obviously not going to be doing this everyday, but perhaps I can commit to once a week.

This is my first pull and in looking through one of my books I felt a draw toward this layout, The High Priestess, so in keeping with my theory that if you do not listen to your intuition you will lose it, I went with it.

As always, my spreads are done with my impending success as a writer in mind. I do not interpret anything within them to necessarily be applicable to any other area of my life. I'm in a place right now where I feel that my success as a writer is the only thing I am lacking (well, and money to pay off my bills and live, but that is directly tied into the writing).

Okay, so let's see it.

Spread for today:

Technique: The Secret of the High Priestess

Draw:

1) 8 Swords Interference motivating influence
2) 9 Wands Strength motivating influence (may hinder or enhance #1)

The phases of the moon as metaphor for intentions and impacting factors

3) 6 Wands Victory - current moon
4) 9 Discs Gain - waxing moon
5) Queen Swords - waning moon

Represent the pillars on either side of her Majesty

6) 7 Disks Failure What is in the light/ what is known
7) The Priestess - What is in the dark/ what is yet to be revealed

Where the journey leads/outcome

8) Death

The High Priestess' secret

9) Art

Okay, so let's analyze this.

If cards 1&2 are the two main impulses in my endeavor that could compliment or hinder one another what do we have? Interference and Strength. How do I read that? Well, the interference card is pictorially interesting in that it shows two main ideas criss-crossed or interfered by several others running parallel to them. This is a good analogy for my writing at the moment, as my main project, the novel I am finished with but still requires a small amount of tweaking, has been something I've been unable to focus on due to so many other ideas. The Strength card plays into this as the main wand of the picture connects the moon to the sun, an analogy for connecting the unconscious with the conscious. Interesting thing here is this is, in some ways, the main gist of the book, as the character, a thinly veiled and exaggerated version of myself from a parallel dimension where my life unraveled differently* experiences a series of trials in the 'third act' that are essentially his unconscious mind bubbling over into his conscious mind. This unfolds into my life as a book that has acted as a mirror for me to face interior parts of me I've perhaps never fully come to terms with. But does this mean the Strength helps me or hinders me? Maybe the answer will be in the rest of the cards.

So the next three cards are based on the phases of the moon. Card 3 is the Full Moon and represents current motivating factors, card 4 the Waxing Moon and is the power gaining influence and 5 is the Waning Moon and what power is losing influence.

So what's that mean in realtime?

3 was Victory, which is a slightly more ambiguous card than the previous two. In a nutshell this card tends to represent balance of creative energies which, when strung into a logical narrative with the previous cards can definitely be seen as saying that I am balancing my forces out and the Strength will be a solid foundation for my first two forces. The Interference ebbs and as it disappears a stronger foundation is left beneath my endeavors.

4 is Gain and if you look at Gain you can see the image of three spheres balancing in its center. This seems to be saying (esp. with my proclivity for the number 3) that my elements are solidifying, taking shape and feeding into each other for positive outcome. Hence 'gain'.

5, the Waning influence is The Queen of Swords. This is interesting in that if you look at the card it is very blunt about its meaning. The Queen, which is a creative force has a sharp sword (sharpened whatever, generically Will but overall force or power as held by the person in question (or their in this case their creative force) that they've used to sever the head of someone or something else, in this case that something else is clearly, when this is positioned into my little narrative, the interference and self-doubt.

Next we get the Pillars, which if you look at the card this spread is physically meant to emulate, the High Priestess, are on either side of her. The pillars are obvious nods to the pillars on either side of the entrance to the Temple of Solomon, named Boaz and Joachim and representative of the duality of life - we keep coming back to those original two Wands of force in the first card, but now we're looking at them without all the parallel interfering lines - in fact we're looking at them with the head of the interference severed. So the two Pillar cards were 6 Failure - what is known. Boy, failure is known folks, and I've got the rejection letters to prove it!!! And card 7, The Priestess herself. This is a real Deus Ex Machina here when you think about it. Image within the image, which is really what writing is, making micorcosms out of the macrocosm. This card, or what is to be revealed, is chock full of positive reinforcement. Fertility and Artistic Strength from the Bow (Fallopian Tubes or musical/combative instrument), multiple images of the moon representing an ascentive cycle or, when taken in conjunction with the 2nd card for strength, the 9 of wands where we found the image of moon and sun united, we can see possible interpretations of the unconscious being allowed to complete its cycle. That, to me at least, would suggest the endeavors reach fruition.

Finally we get card 8 which is where the journey leads. The 'What's next moment' so to speak. I pulled Death, and again, even though actual physical death has been on my mind all week here I'm only led to interpret it in terms of my endeavor. Plus, Death is more often the Tarot symbol for transformation. This of course seems to suggest I'll be transitioning with my endeavor. Transforming its nature.

Card 9 is a bit of an addendum. This card is the High Priestess' secret and should only be revealed if it is a member of the Major Arcana. So in the case of drawing for yourself you'd have to look to know, and if it turns out to not be a member of the Major then you do not factor it in. If you were drawing for another you'd simply not show it to them if it was Minor.

But mine was a Major, it was ART, which is one of the cards I've had the strongest relationship with. Again we get the fertility due to the bees on the Image's dress. There is a lot here and most of it is relevant. The Lion and the Eagle have swapped colors and that's a sign for reverse reality. This fits with the transformation card 8 suggested. The brew the Image is crafting is a sign of alchemical mixing, which is a term I use often when thinking about writing. You're mixing your life with these strange, ethereal elements - fiction is reality mixed with fantasy. The ART card here suggests the successful mixing of these, as with my endeavor bearing fruit. There are also signs of equilibrium and balance (also seen earlier) and to me, the picture represents perfectly the physical act of writing.

Interesting. In the end, even though I was consulting references as I wrote this, seeing this post finished and still hot off the experience of writing it I can't help but feel I'm better at the Tarot than I'd previously anticipated. The goal though, of course, is to be able to do the above without consulting anything but my mind.

Haunted...

2009-10-02T22:13:00.000-07:00

This could very easily be one of those pieces that start off with me going on about how much I love October, about how it releases some usually inert or obscured elements of my personality that are now able to stretch and come to light in the dying time. But I decided that, although I guess I did kind of just do that anyway, I would not do that.

Why?

Because it seems like everybody does that. And not to be a snob but I feel like I'm one of those people who October really does affect in deep and meaningful ways. And yeah, I know every self important asshole feels like that but this is one self important asshole who wants to make it clear that it's not about personal import, it's about the thick and viscous creativity that wells up and sloshes around every aspect of my being during this month.

Now granted some of this has dwindled now that I live in a part of the world where there really is just one long even season. But temperature is relative and let me tell you, in southern california when it's 50 degrees at 8PM you grab a sweater and maybe even curse the chill, because it's cold to you...

I've always found it interesting that in the season of wither (thanks MC) when things are shutting down human creativity could flourish. But then, doesn't that make some kind of sense? Aren't death and trauma two aspects of life that push us the most to vent and 'deal' with our emotions through our creativity? Doesn't it make sense that our invisible senses would react to the plane of our existence, our vegetable co-habitants of our world reaching the end of their lifespans and settling into decay.

Decay. The word alone has such an artistic trill to it. Decay is nature's residue, and what is art?

Art is the nature of man's residue.

The implications are amazing when you think about it. But really, look at the human artist. People they love die and they write and perform songs that will shape the lives and emotions of generations to come. They struggle with the ego-decay of addiction and it moves them to put pencil to page or voice to story and suddenly a resonance is created that will linger, decaying or, perhaps Haunted is a word better suited for my illustration here. And essentially hauntings are decay on a long and emotionally tangible time-frame.

Decay. I like that. Perhaps I'll write a song about it. After all, it's October now, isn't it???

Weirdness in my head...

2009-08-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

I feel like I have been unhealthy of late.

Exaggeration

I've been getting light-headed, almost intoxicated it seems at times. Times in the middle of the day when I've had nothing to make me feel that way.

Stop being so fucking dramatic

Little white floaters appear in my vision, on the periphery and sometimes even just before my eyes, hiding in the lower layers of the vision system that shows me the world.

Oh here we go...

Now I ask you, what the hell does all this mean?

Unfortunately I keep thinking I have a tumor.

Like I said drama, drama, drama

Basically this is probably an embarrassing case of child-like monkey see, monkey do. Ever since I watched Six Feet Under last year Nate's AVM has stayed in my head and I'm sure it's just fucking with me now. There's a part of us that always wants to believe that something terrible is going to happen to us. It's the same part that gets yelled at in 5th grade and thinks 'If I killed myself that would show them' and then ignorantly imagines the smirk on your face while you watch the people who have 'wronged you' suffer with regret at your casket-side. Except of course most of us realize really quickly just how stupid this scenario is. But maybe that 'terrible thing' radar hangs around in other capacities. Imagining terrible fates is one way to bolster your defenses against the world outside. It's self-centered and egotistical and just plain ridiculous I know, but in reality so is life; your life, my life, everybody's individual life because guess what? When you boil it down life is self-centered and egotistical. If it wasn't we wouldn't have a name for the not-so-abstract concept of the ego. Like Donnie Darko had to find out the hard way and Richard Ashcroft put perfectly into words:

"You come in on your own and you leave on your own,
Forget the lovers you've known and your friends on the road.
You come in on your own and you leave on your own,
Forget the lovers you've known and your friends you have told."

.......................................................................................

Okay, enough morbidity for now, my mind is racing all over the place because the light outside is just right and there's that ozone-like smell in the air - yep folks, it might just rain tonight in the Southbay (yeah right, but I can dream). Anyway, see that other voice is always so right. I get on these self-obsessed trips and then they pass. But I have been feeling a little wonky right now and as such what I decided to do as of yesterday is, if I can ever finish re-writing this one small (~140 pages) section of the book that I just finished writing (finished, ie: got to the end) then I am going to start a book about a guy with a tumor. Only he is going to be able to talk to and derive odd abilities (or is that just his mind playing tricks on him) from said Tumor.

I think the tumor's name is going to be Jim.

I figure by recording this here, if I either A) develop odd power or B) develop a tumor it will be recorded here.

The Most difficult thing about...

2009-04-10T03:33:00.000-07:00

... Magick isn't believing it's there. Nope. How I ask, could you NOT believe in Magick? In this world where a guy two parties have never met before can 'conjure' paperwork and then bang a ceremonial gavel and grant one ownership of land, children, money (and make no mistake, those little bills that represent value based on bajillions of sequences of 1's and 0's are some of our society's STRONGEST Magick) or any number of other privileges, rewards or punishments, Magick is the bread and butter of what we experience. Or I could always challenge nn-believers to visit Washington D.C. and tell me that it is not the most meticulously occult place in the country. Seriously, the a giant obelisk in front of a reflecting pool? Really...

But no, believing in Magick is not the hardest part of it. Nor is learning it. At this point there are a million books (most being watered down repackagings of Crowley's mostly illegible ramblings, Austin Osman Spare, Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine) that can teach you the rudimentary philosophies and some methods that will get you going. No, the hardest thing is what's known as the Lust of Result.

Lust of Result is especially exacerbated in this day and age where everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE has ADD to some degree. Computers and the Internet, high speed cable broadband hoo-ha has affected MTV, which has affected advertising, which has affected Hip Hop, which has affected everything else (begrudgingly) and even information, as we know it, has been slim-lined, streamlined, stylized and miniaturized so that we get so much so fast we can hardly hang on to any of it (comparatively). Lust of Result is wanting the result you are trying to influence the Universe to give you, which of course inhibits your ability to get it. Crowley said it the best when, to paraphrase a passage in Book IV he points out, "How can you hope to produce changes in the world around you via nothing more than your Will when you cannot even control your own body or thoughts." In other words, I'm sitting here right now drinking a Sierra Nevada, fidgeting with my legs, oop - there's an itch on my neck, that when scratched starts one up on my elbow, earlier I was having trouble writing so I got up and snacked on crap food even though I wasn't hungry, then I vacuumed and compulsively cleaned for about twenty-five minutes, etc. etc. etc.

See my point.

This is where Crowley, who for all his outlandish and often douche-like behavior, not to mention his penchant for not practicing what he preached all of the time, was really quite a remarkable man (top notch mountaineer and part of the first team to locate and attempt to climb the path up Pakistan's K2) with many a valuable insight for Magician as well as Human, would begin talking about the benefits of Raja Yoga.

I wish I had the attention span for yoga of any kind, esp. of the Raja variety. However, referring again to the previous paragraphs here, I do not.

Could I train myself to better my attention span? Yes, I guarantee it is something that could be fought back. However, I would probably need to trim out some of the drinking, which I have no intention of doing (3 beers, on average, a night is I feel not too much to ask). But the point is, it's the concentration on this routine that combats concentration on other, more spiritually fortifying ones that would help in my enhancement of any preternatural skills I may or may not have convinced myself that I have.

In the end one thing I've taken from all the reading and practicing I've done is that there are no set ways to approach hacking into the local reality grid* - so I keep pulling half-assed attempts at performing in ways that are quick and clean and slight on the preparatory. However, if I ever move into a home with a concrete floor in the basement, you can bet I'm buying a whole shit ton of colored chalk and cracking out my Lesser Keys of Solomon text. Always wanted to try to devote some time to recreating some of those Golden Dawn-era rituals, just hard to do when your renting. But not even a massive sale on Guinness could keep me from that. Besides, I always fancied Constantine's mate Brendan's idea - conjuring the Perfect Pint!!!

...........

* thanks to GM for that imagery

Lost in Triangulation....

2009-04-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

Whenever I get the chance to spend a day flitting around the ol' In-tro-net I inevitably stop by a lot of the blogs here on e that I used to have the time to ponder on a daily basis. I never seem to have the time or attention span to do more with this network of invisible passageways than log on, check my email, write my Chudblog and then log off, as I've really tried to up the ante with my writing (and shopping the fucking writing too, which usually puts me in a foul mood) and don't wander as much.

Anyway.

It always fascinates me and makes me a bit sad to read all the glorious diatribes and ideas that go down on my Ohio friends' blogs. Dayton is something of an adopted foster home for me (through my wife) and the city, as well as all those glorious folks I know back there (what's up y'all!!!) have such a community - something I do not have AT ALL - that it makes me miss them and the place all the more. I always find myself wondering, what would it be like to know a place so well that the names of the shop keeps and the daisy chain of acquaintances who expand out from around them border and frame my own understanding and subsequently interaction with the place, so that whether I'm three feet in front of my house, five miles away in a bar that I like or buying a new set of strings from a music shop I'm in the presence not just of neighbors, but people. People not as in 'yeah, what else walks around on two legs and opens guitar shops, runs roller derby leagues or stumbles out of a bar into traffic I'm actually interacting with people - people who I know or know of, or in at least one case in the above make a mental note to recognize and never interact with again. No, out here in vast sprawling Los Angeles I have no neighbors - not next door to me or down at the bar. Not in the coffee shops I might breeze into and out of as quickly as possible or at the restaurants I've chosen to adore. It's definitely down to my own damn fault at least 60%, and it's also the uprooted factor that accompanies leaving behind everything you know, but it's also the product of my own distancing from the things around me for the things I'm trying to train and translate within me. This of course is something that must be done, but I cannot help but wondering what I would write if I could live in a place like Dayton for a year.

Maybe one day we'll know, eh???

...

2009-04-05T19:29:00.000-07:00

Sit, please.

Thank You.

So, we really liked the book.

Thanks. I put a lot of time into it. Would you say it's ready to be published?

Maybe. We've got a couple of crack editors we'd like to run it by. There's some small stuff - you tend to use more passive verbs than active ones, sentence structure. Stuff like that. But for the most part the story is there, so if you feel comfortable with it...

Oh yeah, believe me, I've waited for this for some time. And this one was a lot easier than my first one, which I just recently started going through again and sprucing up.

So what we'd like to do is tell you a little bit about our firm and the way we do things, what we could do for and would expect of you, and then if everything is still good, well, we can sign a contract and start looking at some of the other stuff you've got.

Excellent.

In the trenches...

2009-01-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

... It's been a pretty strange year, eh?

Actually, no scratch that. It is not that it's been a strange year - that is a cop out, a product of human language to say something that is pseudo-important not in the interest of being observant but in the inability we have of keeping ourselves in check when it comes to opening our mouths just to open our mouths.

So let me start again.

It has been strange, evolving through this bizarre matrix of intervals that we long ago fashioned restraints for using out language, to find myself utterly convinced that we live in what I would have recognized as science fiction when I was in fourth grade or below.

There.

Perhaps it is a product of being a child of what we refer to, here in western civilization, as the middle class. The middle class is not a shield, but it is a fence of sorts - a partition. We may not have had a lot of money growing up but we were, because of the institutions and social mores of this country, not in need of much. I had a roof, three square meals and a continuous loop of education for the pre-advised intervals, so maybe it was a fence, or blinder rather, to what the world really is.

Science fiction.

Seriously, I have detailed in my Bartender Chronicles blog the moment that I realized that there was no such thing as an 'Adult' - a mythical being of maturity and responsibility that children are taught they will turn into if they do good in school, get a good job and marry for the sake of propagating the species. But this goes beyond that.

Life is surreal not because clocks drip from trees or Jesus appears as a conquistador, but because we are taught through words and through repetitious reinforcement that certain key guidelines are always in place, governing us and the world we live in. Good triumphs over evil, Love can beat all, good people are rewarded, bad people are punished, etc. And sure, we can probably all name examples where these statements are true and more where they are not, but the very fact that we are raised to believe that these ideals are plentiful, or some kind of Universal Absolute is the basis for the real illusion - an illusion that some people never get to see behind. And when you do see behind it, when you're standing in a grocery store at 10 PM on a Thursday and realize just how alien a concept it is for droves of people to walk up and down brightly lit isles choosing from literally millions of products that have been researched to glisten and call to us with expensive, environment-defeating packaging while not too far away someone is taking part in a conference call that is going to cost thousands of people their jobs, or someone else is paying for a donut with a piece of currency that has passed through the hands of hundreds of people who died for it's possession, all while invisible, human-appointed 1's and 0's make and break the building of new cities, traveling devices and entertainments that suck us dry of our zest for actual, physical experience, well, that's when you have to either recognize that the world we live in is stranger than the science fiction we used to think was so strange and 'fictional' or maybe check yourself into an ECT treatment center.

Mostly I think those people who do not see things for what they are choose to adhere to the guidelines they've been ingrained with, because if in this day and age, the beginning of man-made interval 2009, you cannot see the absolute pure, swirling chaos all around us EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY then you probably are in need of something stronger than I can give you here.

so what the hell good does all my jibber-jawin' here do, anyway?

Sadly, not much. But as my high school guidance counselor once told me, just being insightful enough to be aware of what is really going on is at least a step in the right direction. Only I don't believe that as much anymore, but I too am so ingrained in my own personal minutia-intensive Universe to get up and go out and DO SOMETHING. Also, I am largely non-violent and maybe it's a cop-out but it seems more and more to me like the only change that is ever going to really come is going to have to be on the back of drastic, world altering conflict.

Who knows.

time travel... again!!!

2008-11-30T03:15:00.000-08:00

Tonight on KCRW I heard that old 90's song by the Primitive Radio Gods. I think the track was called... well actually I have no idea what it's called. But regardless, if you're over 25 you probably remember the song. It's the one that had the sample of, I believe, Martin Luther King, Jr. 'I've been down hearted'.

We on the same page? Cool.

Remember this song? I do. It amazes me how the simple keyboard tones of something like this can overwhelm me with a nostalgia that hits on every sense at once; in fact I believe this to be a kind of sixth sense itself – when touch and smell and taste all seem to meet in the middle of some big, soft swirling feeling in the middle of your head, and you’re standing in the rain ten years before, walking out of a place you used to work surrounded by people you used to know – it’s something else. I’ve talked here before about my belief in time travel through the senses and I take this to be a pretty good example of it. Back then I might have been looking forward in time to this exact moment now where I write this, but I hadn’t touched it before with any of my regular senses, so my brain couldn’t decode it yet. Now, I’m looking down the opposite end of that corridor and even though my ass is still firmly planted in this chair in my kitchen I’m also there in the Bedford Park UnderPaidSlaves parking lot.

I can smell the fucking place.

All that from a song I don’t even particularly give a shit about. Wow.

It's a common problem and one, I think, that is probably not really that difficult to overcome in the grand scheme of things, this inability we 21st century humans exhibit in not being able to Remember forward. Time is a loop, obviously, so why are we restricted to one side of the curvature? Or are we? This is all so 4:00AM-stoned-as-hell (guilty as charged) but really, how do we know the future if we haven't seen it yet? Maybe I had visions of this exact room ten years ago while working the sort at UPS, zoning out with the trance of repetitive labor. How would I have recognized it then, having not been in it or known any of the stuff that would be in it yet?

These are the questions that keep me going...

Thanksgiving...

2008-11-27T14:28:00.001-08:00

... I am thankful for the fact that it's not too much longer now until GWB leaves our lives forever. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. Well, actually now that I think of it, let it hit you in the fucking head a couple times maybe, not that there's that much to damage up there...

David Foster Wallace's INFINTE JEST is, academically speaking, kicking my ass. This is the hardest book I've ever read, regardless of how enjoyable it is (mostly). I've been working on it for probably about a month now, off and on, and I'm just about to crack page 300.

300 of 981 (1079 if you count the footnotes).

One of the things about the book that is difficult while also being extremely cool, is the fact that the tone of the prose changes constantly, as if several different writers were all working on it together. Some is light and breezy. Some, ie the crack-addicts, are ten pages of (literally) one or two run-on sentences. Then there's the academic parts, where I don't understand half of what is written on the page. This is because Mr. Wallace uses technical and medical terminology and jargon, as well as abbreviations, as if everyone reading will understand them. Not that I'm complaining, it just slows the flow.

But the book is definitely good. As in I'm enjoying it. As in I feel it is 'good' for me to read something like this. As my friend Walter has pointed out, some things are just 'good' for you to ingest - he said this in a conversation comparing Goodfellas with The Godfather movies, the latter of which I dislike immensely even though I've not seen them in well over 10 years. Goodfellas is a good time, like listening to a Pixies album, while The Godfather is more stoic and not s easily rewarding, like listening to Puccini. Now apply that comparison to Infinite Jest vs. say, Stephen King. King is going to have more hooky-choruses and toe-tapping drive, like the Pixies, and Infinite Jest is going to reveal itself in layers, making you work for it's rewards.

...................

Not sure why, maybe just because I feel I tend to neglect this blog since starting the CHUD.com one, but I feel compelled to prattle on today about nothing really at all, just enjoying the feeling of my fingers dancing and jabbing over the keyboard for now. So prattle I shall, you've been warned.

Thanksgiving '08 playlist thus far: Let's see, Frank Black and the Catholics, Pistolero; The Bronx (all three are eponymously titled so it was #2, #3 and #1); Soundgarden, Superunknown; Sugar, Copper Blue and that makes us current. Next up will be Luscious Jackson's Fever In Fever Out and later, when company arrives Tom Waits' The Heart of a Saturday Night, Tom Waits' Mule Variations, Tom Waits' Swordfish Trombone and finally of course Mr. Waits' masterpiece, Rain Dogs. As you can tell I'm hip-deep in a big Waits jag. I've always loved the guy but sometimes it seems the later period (83-present) tends to repeat itself a bit. But then I'm starting to wonder if I'm not seriously wrong about that, being that I've somehow made that judgement while owning just a small portion of his prolific (to say the least) career.

We Sail Tonight For Singapore...

Whoops...

2008-09-30T14:19:00.000-07:00

I had a rather shocking moment of realization today. I was thinking about writing, as I almost always am, and my thoughts turned to my only 'finished' attempt at a novel thus far, The Subtle War.

Recently I began sending chunks of this to a friend to read and this spurred me to pull out the hard copy Sara printed and had bound for me. I've been trying to avoid doing this for a awhile simply because I am immersed in writing a new novel and to start delving back into the depths of TSW, I knew, would spark me to want to begin re-writing or editing it again*.

But yesterday dive back into it I did, albeit very briefly.

This brings us up almost to the present. In driving to get coffee this morning (read: afternoon) a thought suddenly came to me.

I have become one of my characters.

Now before you take this merely at face value, please, read my previous post. It pertains, among other things, to the strange phenomenon I've discovered as a writer: the world of your story can be used to manifest changes in the world in which you live.

I knew when I began writing TSW that I was writing it to try and trigger something, I just wasn't sure what. I had a head recently pumped full of all kinds of esoteric ideas, I was single, I was in a band, etc. Lots of different angles. The story has several 'main' characters, none of which were directly me, but of course there were little bits of me in most of them. They are all moving through imperfect versions of themselves, trying to become something else. Jake, arguably the 'main' main character is a stylized version of my long ago best friend of the same name. Really I split him in half via the other character, Corey, who is sort of the evil doppleganger of Jake. I think these characters are the least 'me' because the were my attempt to revitalize the soul of my friend who died - I wanted to make him a hero, and conquer some of the demons that haunted him while he was alive.

Quinten Alpha Haley however is the character that somehow, and I didn't realize how well it worked until today, I became, or predicted, or whatever.

Since moving to Cali over two years ago I have indeed turned into this character. Quinten stays in his apartment, does not leave.

This is me.

Aside from work, and the very occasional outing with Sara and friends, I don't leave our place. What's more, Quinten sits with a computer as his only real window to the world, head full of Occult knowledge which has essentially become useless to him, writing journal entries. He stares out a window and longs to make the connections he needs to reinstate himself in the world in a way that will make him meaningful - again, everything right down to the fact that the window in front of the desk where I sit now typing this, is an almost exact replica of what I originally had in mind.

It's funny how these microcosm/macrocosm things work, funnier still that the joke has so totally been on me. For one thing, right after moving out here and receiving a slew of rejection letters for the novel, I went in and took out almost all of the first person technique on the major characters except for Quinten, as the journal entries are the initial introduction and developement device of his character. In thinking about all this now I'm wondering if it was this final, definitive definition of writing as Quinten that did it. 'I' became the 'I' in the book.

Whatever the reason, this is just too perfect of a fit to be anything other than Magick. I too sit at the computer, my window into the outside world, writing journal entries (you're reading one now) and longing to make the connections (agent, publisher) that will reinstall me back into the world in a meaningful fashion as the person I want to be. I had a guidance councilor in high school who told me I was extremely insightful of myself, and that strikes me now as I analyze this bizarre transfiguration into a character I've created. Quinten removed himself from the world he knew in order to reemerge as something better. This was the underlying motivation for me, personally, in our move across country. Sure, the move was for Sara and her chance to advance, but it was also for me to try and redefine myself as a writer after spending ten years trying to make band after band work. I removed myself from 'the world' (read: everything I knew) with the intent of reemerging as something new.

How do I control this? How do I use this to my advantage? How do I use this to put myself in a position to do what I want with my life instead of continuing to waste it working in a job that has nothing to do or offer the 'real' me?

I'll have to think about this more and get back to you if I come up with anything...

...........

* The novel is really only finished in terms of having a (mostly) cohesive start, a lot of work on tense and just generally better sentence structure must be devised.

Experiments in Creativity

2008-09-10T19:19:00.000-07:00

I have been undergoing a grueling experiment with my creative energies. Let me tell you about it.

About a month ago I re-read Bret Easton Ellis’ AMERICAN PSYCHO. Originally my dear departed friend Brian had lent me this in the late 90’s and upon reaching what has become infamously known to people who have read the book as ‘The rat scene’ I closed the book, put it in my car and returned it to him the next day, leaving explicit instructions to never have it brought out in my presence again.

I blogged more specifically about this book on CHUD here:

http://chud.com/articles/blogs/1053/Brett-Easton-Ellis-and-the-Psychotic-Stock-Broker.html

A decade later it had begun to occur to me just how amazing Ellis' style is and I decided to re-read the infamous volume. After finishing Psycho my appetite for his wonderful prose was set and I immediately turned to the E's of our store’s Literature section and decided on GLAMORAMA as my next. Only my boss intervened, promising me a galley’s copy if I waited until she could find it amidst her books and so I went this, the thrifty route, and chose the next book there on the shelf that caught my eye: LUNAR PARK. This, now this was just a fluke then that I read Lunar Park immediately after Psycho and I will forever be grateful that circumstance dictated I did. They are, in a sense, companion pieces and I would implore anyone who reads Psycho to do so with the undiluted intention of following it immediately with Lunar Park.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic THE GREAT GATSBY has long been my favorite novel, but now it has close competition for that accolade. Lunar Park is pretty fucking close. I don’t want to get to into what this book is, except that while continuing to be a wonderful example of Ellis’ style, the story itself is not what it first appears. Ellis himself is the main character and I’ll leave it at that – if you plan to read it please do not wikipedia it or anything like that – I thank beer that whoever did the blurbs on the jacket did so tastefully, giving away nothing of the twists and turns this book takes.

I’m talking about all this here as a precursor to telling you about this experiment. It’s no secret that those of us who are writers or artists or musicians or whatever have other such artists who are our inspirations. Sure, life and consciousness are inspirations in and of themselves, but there are occasionally those other souls on this floating orbital garden that put their blood sweat and tears into creative projects that trigger something of a shared experience in ourselves and give us the momentum to create our own little worlds of sound and glass and steel and words.

This one-two punch of American Psycho and Lunar Park have been my most recent.

For more than a year I have been writing screenplays and have in that time had many thoughts that returning to prose fiction, where my writing began, had possibly become impossible. Ellis helped me get there.

Originally everything I wrote was first person. This started in first grade or so when I began writing stories. As I grew older it was perhaps solidified by my love of H.P. Lovecraft’s megnomanical first person tales of humanity’s otherworldly encounters with forces they could not hope to understand, much less control. My first (and thus far only) completed novel, The Subtle War was originally written in many first person salvo’s, the main character Jake being a thinly-veiled tribute to another dearly departed friend of mine, my best friend after the deterioration of my first long term ‘romance’ Jake Owen Ostrowski. Only after finishing TSW and preparing to shop it, I found a lot of agents and publishers hated first person fiction, some even going so far as to say they would not even consider it. Feeling terrible about it now, I went back in and rewired a lot of that novel to be third person, in hopes it would facilitate it's sale.

Hasn't worked yet. And now I see Ellis, who almost always writes first person, as a glaring example of how to do it. I'm reminded that I should do what I do how I want to read it and say 'Go Fuck Yourself' to anyone that doesn't like it.

But why first person?

With TSW, the tale worked better when I used Jake as a fiction suit; a character-vehicle I could climb inside and maneuver around inside the microcosmic world I had devised for the story, a setting but also a sort of Voodoo-doll of the ‘real’ world my flesh and blood body inhabited on a daily basis. The idea was very much inspired by another writer I love, Grant Morrison, and it went something like this: the microcosm reflects the macrocosm – insert yourself into the world of your story and write things there that would effect the characterized version of you and then conversely echo up into the real world. This worked almost immediately, both invigorating and kind of frightening me when a scene I wrote (that was subsequently cut) where Jake has to look through a junkyard for some hidden message and finds it in the form of a tattered old comic book in the trunk of a junked car. The comic was an adaptation of a Lovecraft tale. Several days after writing this my car broke down and in anger I put my fist through the plastic sheet over the dashboard. Fearing my father would find out I dragged my friend Two into a junkyard and low and behold, I found the piece I needed but I also found a bridge between worlds – a tattered comic book in the trunk of a junked auto. The comic was, of course, an adaptation of a Lovecraft tale…

This method unfortunately has proven, as all scientists will attest when queried about dabbling with the mechanisms behind the consensual world, unpredictable. Of course soon after the comic book incident I overtly tried to write a story where I won the lottery. Hahah I laugh now at my ignorance at the way the Universe works.

Anyway, I’m sidetracking. But that’s okay, because this is all illustrative of the creative process and how I’ve learned to move through my own version of it, and my new approach was the impetus of this post to begin with. After the Ellis-combo inspired me to return to fiction I began writing a novel. This time however, I decided to adhere very strictly to the stimuli which had inspired it to begin with. Although I have a thousand fucking books to read, I would read only Ellis, now moving on to GLAMORAMA at last, the wonderfully original galley indeed coming my way soon after it was promised (thanks Jodi). I would listen only to that music which fit into what I now considered my ‘Ellis mood’, and I guess that will require a bit of an explanation.

Ellis reminded me a lot of my late, aforementioned friend Brian, who was also very influenced by his writing. He also reminded me of Brian’s brother and my long time good friend and on again off again roommate Two. Brian was also an enormous fan of Greg Dulli’s band The Afghan Whigs, and this too was another thing first recommended to me by Brian, which I ignored or couldn’t get into at the time, only to receive one of his copies of the classic album ‘Gentleman’ after his death via Two and fall immediately in love with it and everything Dulli did with the Whigs and after (Twilight Singers, The Gutter Twins).

Here then was the foundation of the music that fit my ‘Ellis mood’ and thus would provide the background and sonic fuel for my new novel.

Dulli and Ellis reminded me so much of Brian because they all craft their art out of and about similar things: drugs, sex, and the things we hide from everyone in our daily lives. Lunar Park, with Ellis as the main character and told first person, begins very much about about the secret life he leads behind the back of those people he loves and who try to help him. This includes drugs, but also intuitions that drive him to see the world in a very different light than most folks would admit they might see too. Dulli’s music always seems to have a vibe to it that accompanies scenes of nighttime debauchery in a young, urban setting. Frat boys scoring coke in a seedy nightclub, fucking questionable women in a bathroom stalls, snorting and drinking until the sun comes up and the blinds just won’t defend them against the return to the mores and expectations that daylight brings with it. There is such an explicit tapestry here, woven similarly between Ellis and Dulli’s art, and joined together through a lost friend who himself influenced me constantly to write just by being so into the craft himself.

So now his influences have become mine, and here I am writing a novel playing with some of these atmospheres but also working through my own violent reaction to fighting like hell to do something that propels me into doing what I truly want to do for a living, leaving the 9to5 world behind and making my world a better place, for me and the love of my life and all of our friends.

So it’s Ellis, Dulli, a lot of dark jazz, dark electronica, and all the music that to me at least, sprung from the minds of people who knew what it truly is to move through the night and experience it for all its epic, otherworldly glory.

90 pages in a month. I’ll let you know how the rest goes. The influence ban is starting to change, one thing bleeding into another, Gutter Twins leading me back into second frontman Mark Lanegan’s (formerly of QOTSA and Screaming Trees) unbelievable solo effort BUBBLEGUM, bleeding me into guest vocalist there PJ HARVEY’s masterpieces TO BRING YOU MY LOVE and STORIES FROM THE CITY STORIES FROM THE SEA leading me to this, to that. Aphex Twin's nighttime salute I CARE BECAUSE YOU DO leading to Roni Size’s NEW FORMS, and a trip home to Chicago to interact with a lot of other friends who influence me just by having been there on so many infamous nocturnal adventures leading me to the music I associate with them and those times, CAT RAPES DOG from Chris W. and New Radicals for the bar where I spent many of my nights pickling my liver with Leine's red, Hacker-Pschorr and great conversation. Of course then there's UNDERWORLD, which not only is the ultimate nighttime music but also a reminder of my one salvation, Sara, the person I am closest to and who keeps me from actually delving into the depths of the real life 'Ellis mood'. Better to craft that microcosm, move in with a character and explore entirely different worlds.

Something wicked this way comes...

2008-07-30T01:11:00.000-07:00

This morning I experienced my first California Earthquake. Sara had just left for work and I was sitting at the desk writing when suddenly something notably changed in the atmosphere around me. It wasn't the Earth moving in at first. No, more like some kind of emmanation reached me a few moments just before the actual force waves did. The problem with trying to encapsulate or explain, to yourself or others, this type of thing is it happens so fast and appears without warning, that you can't really prepare yourself to itemize the insights when it occurs. But something definitely precluded it.

Then the Earth shook.

Now that sounds awful dramatic, and where we were it was anything but. It welled up and I was able to recognize it for what it was. I continued to sit and consciously experience (ie pay attention to) it for a few fleeting moments before it left as quickly as it came. However, and this was hard to discern where it stopped and I started, but an almost vertiginous (if that's not a word it is now, deal with it) feeling remained to play over my body and senses for a few minutes afterward.

All in all, interesting. Very interesting.

Now, it had already been a strange morning. Not 'Squid dressed as Nuns and throwing fish around the neighborhood' weird, nor 'Stranger walks up and addresses you by name' weird.

Subtle weird.

It is the kind of weird I have begun associating with my brain's snap over to what writer's like Grant Morrison or William S. Burroughs call 'Magickal Consciousness'* or Carlos Castenada's friend, the Yaqui Indian sorcerer Don Juan called 'Second Attention'. Essentially, this is a kind of consciousness that, while not drastically different than normal everyday consciousness is enhanced with a subtle layer of, well, for lack of a laymantic (again, another new word!) word to encapsulate it, something different. Different as in, there's extra sense operating. Think of when your in a room with someone you know is mad at you but hasn't yet said so. You FEEL it. That's what this is like, except you don't have as direct an area to pinpoint what is causing the strange sensation in your brain, back and balls.

To me it manifests similarly to a good buzz - it comes on and lingers for a while, making you curl your toes and perk your eyes and ears up, your attenae primed for reception at any wavelength. Only problem is, just like the onset of an Earthquake, it's impossible to pinpoint what frequencies that signal is going to come in on. However, the interesting thing for a novice like myself is, even though I don't have the skills to tune into it accurately, once you have those antennae up, you're not only getting the signal, now the signal is aware of you. It is in this way that strange things often happen in this state of consciousness.

So, beside the Earthquake, what strange things happened this morning?

Again, I don't know. At one point however I felt an awful lot of power in my body and used it to try and affect some change for the better in my life. We'll see.

..........

* I think Morrison goes into a more in depth description here:

http://www.grantmorrison.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=195&Itemid=83

In case You've ever wondered...

2008-06-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

... or might need it, the 1999 revised Catholic church's Rite of Exorcism

http://science.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=exorcism.htm&url=http://www.catholicdoors.com/prayers/english/p01975b.htm

I've always thought the whole heaven/hell god/devil thing was hokey at best, but I do think 'demonic' possession or encounters occurs. My take on it though is some people wallow in so much negativity and hatred that they anchor aspects of their personality or psyche here after they die, and that's what us live folk are encountering when things like this pops up.

Having spent a pretty decent amount of time at Bachlor's Grove cemetary I have had some experience with what may very well have been 'If you've convinced yourself, that's great' but sure as hell felt like something strange and possibly malevolent. Because of this I have had a pretty voracious interest in this type of thing for sometime. However, having spent the last 48 hrs. relaxing at my in-laws house in beautiful, lush Defiance, Ohio I've just caught my yearly share of cable tv and what I noticed was that shows about 'hauntings' and exorcisms must currently be all the rage. This may very well have to do with the fact that horror in general has been popularized as the 80's generation that grew up sneaking to watch 'Howling', 'Halloween' and 'Friday the 13th' have become the foundation of the consumer force. Icons like Ozzy Ozbourne do not freak them out, and the things their kids are exposed to do not have to be so squeaky clean. Thus, Mick Harris can jump from the popular HBO series Masters of Horror to NBC with a prime time series, horror movies gain a massive standing as viable box office lures for all ages and things like the stale and cheesy 'Ghost Hunters' and the just plain awful 'A Haunting' litter the daily line-ups of up and coming cable stations. This kind of pop culture exposure steals legitimacy left and right from investigation or conversation of the probably hundreds of possibly legitimate claims of paranormal happening throughout the country and the world. Ten years ago if you punched words or phrases like 'ghost hunters' or 'Haunted places' into a search engine you received links to some pretty voluminous articles. Now its all links to products and shows.

Looks like the spectacle will get us - even after we're dead.

It's been a while but I'm back...

2008-06-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

... shit, burning the fucking candle at both ends lately with all these blogs. It's cool though - more writing is a good thing. Didn't want to neglect my original too long though, so I'll start with some interesting things that have been occupying the interior of my melon of late...

It's funny. I go through these boughts where I pay next to no attention to the study of anything scientific or occult, then something triggers my interest again and I'm off - and once that happens there is no room for anything else. I'm still struggling through the last bit of Mervyn Peake's Gromenghast trilogy, 'Titus Alone' and I bought that new H.P. Lovecraft tome I mentioned on CHUD, and I started Stephen King's 'On Writing' for inspiration through my writer's block, but now all that is on hold as I've fallen 'Down the Rabbit Hole' again. What sparked it off this time is stress. Work for a major chain book retailer has been enough to make me a crotchety old bastard, and I've been manifesting some pretty freaky headaches, so I finally decided I needed to do something about it or develop a tumor. Breathing was the first thing to come to mind and on that path lay the inclintion to break out my old ass British Edition of Aleister Crowley's 'Magick in Theory and Practice' in search of the specifics on performing what is known as 'The Greater and Lesser Rituals of the Pentagram'. These are invoking/banishing rituals that consist largely of moving energy around through the body and into/out of the lungs, perfect for energizing and cleansing the residues stress leaves clinging in all kinds of areas in the body.

Once I open that book, the trigger is activated and I'm rifling through book after book, shunting down avenues of forgotten knowledge and looking for ways to take a little bit more charge of my short and tempetuous time on this beautiful old mudball of ours. The first place I usually land is the book that, after Grant Morrison's 'Invisibles', is Terence and Dennis McKenna's 'Invisible Landscape'. This is a book I have never been able to finish, as usually I only make it so far before I am forced to seek out accompanying texts on Quantum Physics and the like in order to be able to go back and understand what it was the McKennas were writing about.*

The funny thing is as I start reading and thinking about this stuff synchronicities and other strange things begin to arise in the rest of my life. For one I almost always start dreaming heavy again. Normally I do not remember my dreams, but once into this stuff again they become ludicriously dense and symbolic. This then goes hand in hand with daytime bouts of my special deja vu, where I begin to have episodes where I'm sure whatever it is I'm doing I've already experienced. Kind of like bending the time antenna backwards from the future.

Then there's things like how the same day I began reading the Crawley I discovered a friend of mine at work who I've known for almost two years now is well versed in the study of aspects such as the Masons and Templars, Rennes-le-Chateau** and the like. Never come up before and then out of the blue we have a hour-long conversation about everything from the Templars to Quantum Mechanics. This of course only served to fuel my own fire and its been escalating ever since.

Now this time I am going to try to stick with Invisible Landscape for the entire book. I'm hoping this in and of itself will act as a catalyst to drive up the frequency on novelty and synchronicity to points that will help me reach certain goals I have recently been lazy and angst-ridden about following.

We'll see.
...........

*This is where we get into what I call 'Wiki-vertigo' - When you're on wikipedia reading about one thing and before you know it you've followed so many of the links interlaced throughout the original article you no longer remember where you began.

**I'll definitely have to post a more in-depth on Rennes, but in the meantime you can go here:

http://www.toolband.com/index_frames.html

for a pretty good introduction (and yes, that is the band Tool's website - another reason why they're just so damn cool)