Ghost LIVE in San Francisco, Feb 1, 2012

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

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.

'Til Tuesday - Voices Carry

M83 'Midnight City' Official video

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

Nice...

A Convesation With Myself

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.

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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

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.