Cross My Heart Hope To Die - Rollercoasting

Totally reminds me of old Tricky. Props to Warren Ellis for Tweeting this.

Pretty in Purgatory Band Trailer (via Bloody Disgusting)

The first 37 seconds or so of this sounds like In Slaughter Natives to me (esp. the drums), and that is a very cool thing. Then I'm not so sure. I like the tone and the iconography, if only just. Curious to see if I like the rest. via the Almighty Bloody Disgusting - follow that link to read more details about Pretty In Purgatory.

image courtesy of Bloody Disgusting

Hospital Nights

image courtesy of my own bad self

Late night in the hospital. Sunday morning my wife went into the hospital. She's ok, but they're keeping her for a few days. Thus, I spent the night and will be spending subsequent nights laying at her side on a strange fold-out faux-leather sofa bed thingy. It's not comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable either, so take that to mean whatever. It's strange. Hospitals are big buildings, and I've always harbored a strange fascination/excitement at the prospect of what goes on in large, modern buildings in the middle of the night. Last night I was fairly out of it so other than penning what I now believe was probably a completely incoherent message to the inimitable Chester Whelks I pretty much just passed out. But I dreamt. Boy did I dream...

In the first 'episode' of the dream I was in a small, possibly New England town. There was a lot of running around. I got the impression that there were people I knew there and also people who were recovering from something. I am unsure whether this was recovery from something that happened to them or something they did to themselves. At some point I believe I ventured off from the others - I was in an old New England style house, real old, as in run down. I was running through the house. Then other people were there as well, but I don't think it was the same people. I take this to me an overturning of acquaintances? Or perhaps, because I've been in contact with quite a few people I've not talked to in a while of late that could factor in here as well. These new people were also running, only behind me. Not quite sure if they were running with me from something or chasing me. Either way the tone was the same - there was something terrifying behind me/us.

I had tried to take someone out of using what I believe was an old book (of course!) to conjure the devil. It may have been my good friend The Goatchild. He did not listen and the next thing I can remember after the frantic chasing is running alone, up a broken, dilapidated and gently curving staircase. There were pieces of the balustrade missing, and the stairs themselves, while solid enough below my feet, looked a lot like the rest of the house in that it was old, dusty and unkept. Suddenly from behind and above me a crazy, screeching, evil monkey swung out over my head and attacked me. It bit my right hand on the top, opposite where my palm would be. I screamed and grabbed the monkey. It jumped back toward the underside of the floor above and I caught its head with a ball pein hammer, grinding its skull so that I could actually feel the bones break and the brains squish.

It was disgusting.

The monkey was a representation of the devil (which I should point out I don't believe in in the traditional sense, except for about three hours after I watch The Exorcist) and I had the feeling I was marked. I woke up stretched out on the little chair-thing, buzzing like a live wire from the fear that carried over from my dream. There's a window just in front of where my head was. It looks like this during the day:

Not too scary, right? Well, I woke up sleeping on my stomach, facing out the window. Along with the fear, when I surfaced out of the dream I brought with me this little voice that insisted that I had had similar dreams before, and that I was marked by the devil (who again, I don't believe in in this Christian/Hollywood way) and that these occasional dreams were his way of manifesting to me. While all this was running through my head I scanned the darkness outside the window. Across the street, beneath a tree there was something that looked more than a little like a human-shaped dark shadow...

The Art of Punk - Black Flag

One of the first things that made me feel at home when I moved to the South Bay of this sprawling Metroplex of Los Angeles in 2006 was the widespread love of the band Black Flag. Now, I wouldn't necessarily consider myself the biggest fan, in fact although I love Henry Rollins I'm not all that interested in his years in the band. As a fluke I suppose back in high school a friend of mine whose house our fairly large and obnoxious group occupied on a weekly and often nightly basis for our deeds of debauchery had an older sister who had really turned him onto a lot of old school punk and it was in the center of his lair of debauchery* that I first heard and immediately fell in love with Everything Went Black: Black Flag, The First Four Years. This record was part of the soundtrack to the adventures in that house, along with Fugazi, Sugar, Social Distortion and Slayer.

Anyway, the other obvious distinctive attribute of Black Flag is Raymond Pettibon's art.

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

* From my unpublished novel The Ghost of Violence Past (copyright 2009 Shawn C. Baker):

"Imagine pulling up to a nice suburban subdivision… wait. It’s 1993 and every house is two stories with a basement, let’s say starting between 100k-300k, including your house.  Now imagine you pulled into your driveway Friday night after a hard week of work only to find that up and down almost every block for as far as the eyes could see there were cars – not just cars but cars that obviously belonged to teenagers. Cars with Misfits and Soundgarden bumper-stickers; the Powell Perelta skateboards’ bird skull logos on Mini Vans; Phuck clothing decals on Taraus’; Broncos and old Buick’s covered in stickers for bands like Pearl Jam and The Red Hot Chili Peppers to try and camouflage the fact that they hadn’t had a paint job or any rust work in years. Chevettes, Cavaliers and even a Mustang or two, all draped with images and phrases all mostly unknown to you, unless you too had one of these troubled almost-adults housed under your roof. As a middle-aged suburban parent with the house, spouse and 2.5 kids you would recognize the automobiles for what they were because of course teenagers drive what their parents throw away or replace.

In other words, you’d recognize trouble.

And you would smell it even better when you decided to do a couple laps around the old subdivision and try and pinpoint what was going on and where. You’d circle the streets for a while and then maybe you’d be a little unnerved to see that those cars, those relics that remind you of when you were a no-good punk kid getting fucked up on your dad’s gin and your mom’s pills, were all releasing their cargo of drunken, stoned, up-to-no-good teenagers onto the lawns and sidewalks surrounding and leading up to one house.

That house.

The same house it always is. The same house everyone in the neighborhood fears will one day unleash a horrible perpetration on the rest of the people of the subdivision. The same house everyone who owns one of those overpriced cookie-cutter domiciles has called the police on at least half a dozen times in the last year.

This was Ralph’s on the first Friday after junior year ended and it wasn’t just the stoner social event of the year. It was the punk, grunge, new-wave, raver, whatever social event of the year. Every disparate misfit ‘clique’, every awkward social denomination was out in full force.

Neighbors beware.

We pulled up in Duke’s car around eight. First off there was no place to park anywhere nearby, and really that was probably good because as we made our first pass by the house I knew the police would be patrolling like crazy, probably stopping any car they saw leave to check for intoxicated teenage drivers. A ton of people, none of whom I knew, were standing on the driveway and lawn being anything but subtle while smoking joints, talking shit, whatever. One guy actually stood in the street and attacked Ralph’s mailbox with a pair of nunchuks."

New David Bowie Video for Valentine's Day

Via Brooklyn Vegan.

The Next Day has remained a favorite of mine so far this year even though the seemingly endless influx of new records has kept it out of the almost-constant rotation it occupied for about a month after its release. This video is an interesting contrast to the previous two from the record, The Stars (Are Out Tonight) and The Next Day in that it's Bowie without any guest stars, going it alone. I'm normally not a fan of seeing the musician perform in the video because those performances are almost always staged, however I think the point here is not to suggest to us that Bowie is playing, but to give him something to do that is congruent to the song while the directors present us with the strange metamorphosis that the icon goes through while on display. I don't know that this 100% does what they wanted it to do, but it definitely doesn't fail either. And with the photography so strong and the art direction so simple but effective we are treated to enough to make this an interesting and enjoyable watch. Of especial beauty to me was the close-up shot of the guitar strings vibrating, the choice of the guitar because it reminds me of Bowie's late 80's rock group Tin Machine, and the way the directors light the radical facial expressions that come over Mr. Bowie as the song, about song shootings, reaches its soft-spoken conclusion.

Jean Michel Jarre's Equinoxe

A few years ago, while working at the bookstore, my good friend David spoke to me about the artist Jean Michel Jarre. I knew I'd heard the name enough to know there was some kind of a 'new age' connotation surrounding it, but not enough that I'd ever had anyone discuss Jarre's work with me, let alone introduce me to it. David is older than me and had a smattering the man's records from back around the time of their release. Based on David's discussion of Jarre I don't know that I'd consider him a fan per se - as an avid scholar and mathematician he seemed more the kind of person that would have been interested in Jarre's work at the time of its release based on the new technology and thought process that went into it. Basically this is synthesizer-composition and probably felt like someone using new technology (at the time) to make the type of compositions formerly performed with strings and woodwinds. During Jarre's heyday (70's/early 80's) this may have been akin to the future meeting the past, or mad futurist fiction meeting Mozart.

Or maybe not. Either way, like it or hate it there's something here. I've always believed that innovation is not always pretty, especially in retrospect. Equinoxe is not a place I can go often, but in the years since I copied the disc from David I've learned there is a very particular mind frame that I am sometimes in where I can hear this the way I'd imagine David first heard it, and that's pretty cool. Another example of time travel via one of the senses.

Just never all of the senses.

David Lynch - Making of The BIg Dream

I've been meaning to post this for a while, however by the time it first came to my attention (via bloody disgusting I believe) it was pulled down, and then I kind of got folded into the complex arrangements of the last two weeks and time and space and new music kind of disappeared. Well, I've resurfaced - somewhat - and now I have to post this. Mr. Lynch continues to be one of the most delightful, inspirational organisms walking the planet today and an artist that, even when horrifying me, still can make me smile. The Big Dream came out today and I've yet to buy it, but I think I will be able to return to normal existence soon and sit down and listen to it. That will make me happy.