I just finished painting my nails purple and listening to Coil's Musick To Play In The Dark. Thursday night I am going to see Nurse With Wound! And my friend Ezmerelda is going to do my makeup. Won't this be fun?!...
Well, I guess I don't really have anything to write today in my blog, apart from the usual pity-pot whining and pissing and moaning, etc. So fuck it.
Well, I finally changed my privacy settings on Facebook so that only friends can view my profile and pics. Hopefully, this move will prevent potential employers from going to Facebook and finding out what a total nut job I am (not to mention a bleedin' tranny). I should be safe on SG since my real name does not appear anywhere in my profile here.
This "lookin' for a jawb" shit is fucking grinding me down. The other day I was standing on a curb, with a huge semi tractor-trailer barreling down the street in my direction, and I thought for a moment, "It'd be so easy to just put an end to it all, right now..."
This "lookin' for a jawb" shit is fucking grinding me down. The other day I was standing on a curb, with a huge semi tractor-trailer barreling down the street in my direction, and I thought for a moment, "It'd be so easy to just put an end to it all, right now..."
Pictured above: LUMPY GRAVY by Frank Zappa, FAUST (first album) by Faust, DREAMS LESS SWEET by Psychic TV, SOLILOQUY FOR LILITH by Nurse With Wound, and THUNDER PERFECT MIND by Current 93 (cover autographed by David Tibet & Steven Stapleton)
Earlier today on Facebook, I was tagged in a note, asking me to name five albums that shaped my life. This was actually a lot easier than trying to come up with a list of five all-time favorite albums, or 'desert island discs,' since my favorites often change and shift from month to month and year to year (not to mention mood to mood). I could have probably come up with an additional five albums that "shaped me," meaning: shaped my psyche and identity, influenced my own self-awareness and my perceptual orientation, my belief structures, my understanding of life and of society and of how I fit (or fail to fit) into The Big Picture.
I guess I always had a particular love of music. You could say that the "Alvin Show" LP that I had as a child (for the "Alvin & The Chipmunks" show with David Seville) was influential in its own way. As was the MEET THE BEATLES album (my first actual pop or rock record) that I somehow acquired at an early age. I didn't really develop a musical obsession till The Monkees made their TV debut back in the mid-60s. That was when I started getting my parents to buy me each new Monkees LP when it came out. But when I was 11 years old, I saw Steppenwolf perform on The Della Reese Show on TV (1969), and then I set aside such childish musical fixations (though as an adult now, I'm able to enjoy the Monkees' music again). So I bought a couple Steppenwolf albums with my allowance money. I remember my grandmother being shocked when she was in our home and heard John Kay bawling "God damn the pusher man!" on our family high-fi. (Years later, my Mom would shudder to hear me playing my Mothers records, especially the ones with Flo & Eddie).
But there wasn't a *single record album* that made a marked impression on me until the day I heard Side Two of LUMPY GRAVY on the radio at age twelve. It was a rainy Sunday in New England, and I had rode along with my Dad in his car up to Nashua, New Hampshire, where he was going to compete in a bodybuilding contest, as he did throughout my childhood growing up. On the way, I became seriously ill with a flu or something. By the time we arrived, I was running a fever and was nauseous. I ended up staying in the car while it rained in buckets outside, and my Dad went in and did his thing (he was competing in a "Mr. Past 40" contest, I don't remember how he placed but he got a trophy, I'm sure). Dad left the key in the ignition so I could listen to the radio. By that time I had discovered WBCN-FM, which was one of the most unconventional and groundbreaking 'underground radio' stations in the country in the late 60s (this was during the year 1970, the day I'm telling you about now). WBCN was well known for their eclectic and truly 'free form' programming, in which the DJs or "airmen" as they called them (they had a couple women DJs even back then, too) got to play whatever they wanted. This was a commercial station, believe it or not - it used to be an easy listening station before it became a classical music station, and then changed format radically in 1968 when it went to full-time rock programming. Well, it wasn't just rock - you could hear pretty much anything in an hour-long set, from classical to delta blues to acid rock to doo wop. I don't recall who the DJ was that Sunday afternoon, but I was lying in the back seat of the car, half-delirious from fever, and then I heard this totally unpredictable disorienting onslaught of music coming out of the little car speakers. Discordant orchestral crescendos, sped-up ragtime tunes, nonsensical dialogue, jarring distorted sound effects (my first exposure to musique concrete)... I couldn't believe what I was hearing, but I just went "Wow!" I listened attentively when the DJ came on to announce what he'd just played and he said "Lumpy Gravy" by Frank Zappa. Well, I recovered from my illness, and the next time I went with my family on a shopping trip to Fort Devens (Dad was retired Army and we went there to do our grocery shopping), I went into the PX (post exchange or department store) and special ordered Lumpy Gravy. It took six months to arrive, but in the meantime I went and bought the Mothers Of Invention's Weasels Ripped My Flesh, and a couple other Zappa albums. And I started reading every interview with Zappa and every article or record review I could find in Circus or Creem or Crawdaddy or Rolling Stone (not to mention R. Meltzer's groundbreaking book, The Aesthetics Of Rock). When Zappa would drop names, like Edgard Varese, John Cage, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Captain Beefheart, etc, I would make a point of finding a way to hear the musicians and composers he discussed. And that is how I acquired a lifelong interest in the Avant-Garde (not only in music but in art as well, since Zappa, or Beefheart, was likely the one who led me to Dada and Surrealism in the first place). I still think Lumpy Gravy is one of Zappa's best albums. Certainly no other 'rock' musician had attempted anything as unconventional at that point in 1967 (or early '68 when the record was released).
Fast-forward about three years to 1973. Now I'm fifteen and I'm at home in my bedroom, listening to some tiny college station out of Providence, Rhode Island, WBRU maybe? (WBCN had started to go downhill around that time, adopting more restrictive programming and running Ford commercials, etc). Well, this time around I heard the weirdest music I had ever heard anywhere (and I'd been well into Zappa and Beefheart for a couple years at that point). Weird-ass marching band music, what sounded like twelve-tone chanting, searing blasts of electronic feedback and distortion, a woman cooing in German... WTF?!? The DJ identified it as a record by Faust (their first album side one). The next day I went to my local record store, run by this guy named Joe Shadwell who was a total rock nut and British Invasion fanatic and asked him if he knew anything about it (Joe was the guy who first turned me onto the Velvet Underground, I think). He said it was probably an "import" and if so I could write to this mail order store called The Dedicated Fool in Berkeley, California. He looked in the back of one of his issues of Who Put The Bomp (fanzine put out by the late Greg Shaw) and found an ad for 'The Fool' and I wrote them for a catalog. Got it back and they had listed all four original albums by Faust. I promptly went to the post office and got a money order and ordered the lot of them. The day I got the package and listened to them all in succession (maybe this was 1974 then, since FAUST IV didn't come out till then?), it blew another huge hole open in my mind, expanding my musical universe. From there, I wrote to a magazine that had a classified ad in the Dedicated Fool catalog, EUROCK, and started reading up on all this weird German music. Went and ordered everything by Can, Tangerine Dream, Amon Duul II, Guru Guru... started buying imports by other weird bands that none of my friends in high school knew about, like Henry Cow, Hatfield and the North, Robert Wyatt (anything on Virgin Records back in 1973-75 was worth hearing back then), as well as Magma, Univers Zero, Etron Fou Leloublan, Pierrot Lunaire, etc. Wow, I came to find out there were bands putting out records in England and Europe that hardly anyone over here knew about, and they were about a hundred times weirder than anything by Pink Floyd (even Ummagumma).
Now moving ahead to around 1982, I think. I was out of high school, in fact had dropped out of college (twice) after moving to San Diego, had a nervous breakdown and sold ALL MY VINYL in 1980 (that stuff would've been worth tens of thousands of dollars now!). I was in bad shape mentally/emotionally, was living with my Dad and his wife (my stepmom, we hated each other) in a trailer park in National City (not far from where Diamanda Galas grew up, in Chula Vista, I think)... I was in between jobs, I think, suffering from an eating disorder or some miserable fucking thing at that point. I used to tune in to the college radio station from SDSU during the daytime, and watch Night Flight on the weekends. This one day, I heard this scary music with what sounded like tape-processed wolf snarls or dogs growling, with suspenseful kettle drums and eerie vibraphones. Came to find out it was my old pal Genesis P-Orridge (Gen and I had actually been pen pals of sorts back in the late 70s when COUM Transmissions was subsiding into Throbbing Gristle, and we were both heavy into Mail Art) and his new group Psychic TV, a song called "The Full Pack" which turned out to be a limited edition EP that came with one of their albums. I eventually tracked down a cassette copy of DREAMS LESS SWEET by Psychic TV (which had the "Full Pack" EP included on the tape), along with early cassettes by Current 93 and Nurse With Wound and SPK, on a trip to Lou's Records. Or maybe, now that I think of it, I actually went and bought the vinyl LP of D.L.S. at Tower Records, yeah, that's what I owned first, and then went and bought their first one FORCE THE HAND OF CHANCE immediately thereafter (I don't know, my memory is kind of hazy, I was pretty fucked up back then: bulimia, drugs, alcohol...) But apart from the musical universe it helped to expand (I loved how PTV would cover so many different moods and styles on a single album, sort of like Faust did, but with a more systematic and subversively calculated intent), my exposure to PTV, and subsequently, Thee Temple Of Psychick Youth (TOPY), really initiated me into the whole occult universe of heresy and esoterica. What information I absorbed from this music, and from interviews with Genesis, really planted the seeds of a spiritual awareness that didn't really blossom until a few years later (when I saw the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky on LSD, and started reading Crowley and Jung and other stuff about metaphysics and psychology and the occult).
I had already listened to some music by Nurse With Wound (but not much), when I saw this beautiful LP box in Tower Records one day, with a black cover and gold ink printing on the front of concentric circles. The only text said: Nurse With Wound, Soliloquy For Lilith, Idle Hole Mirror One (the latter phrase being the record label and catalog number). Supposedly there were three records inside. It looked so compellingly austere and intriguing, I had to buy it. This is a record that has never diminished in its aura or subtlety of mysterious emanation. I have listened to this record on all kinds of drugs as well as sober, during sex and ritual and meditation. It's really a flawlessly organic creation of undulating beauty and mystery, and conceptual purity. I have always had a special love of 'minimalist' music, and this is one of minimalism's finest works in any medium. The psychic experiences I had in association with this album helped to integrate and articulate my awareness of the paranormal and metaphysical dimensions of reality. And the reference to Lilith led me into further areas of esoteric inquiry and study.
The last of the five albums I chose to name (I could easily come up with another five, probably including Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, Nico's Marble Index, Cockney Rebel's The Human Menagerie, Ilhan Mimaroglu's Sing Me A Song Of Songmy, Dead Can Dance's Spleen And Ideal) is Current 93's THUNDER PERFECT MIND which I heard not long after its release in 1990, I guess. I had moved to San Francisco at that point and I was working at Tower Records when I first saw it in the "compact disc" bins. I had heard only a couple things by the group at that point, mostly their earlier demonic sounding industrial recordings of atonal howling and menacing nightmarish tape experimentation. This one definitely took me by surprise, with all its lyrical beauty and acoustic folk music trappings. Michael Cashmore, who composed all the music for this and many of Current 93's 'apocalyptic folk' recordings, remains to this day my very favorite composer. I think this is arguably Current 93's finest hour. The group of musicians assembled for this session, the instrumental choices and arrangements, the track sequencing, the odd touches, and David Tibet's heartbreakingly poignant and revelatory lyrics (this was before he sort of went off the deep end in terms of his impenetrable forays into the arcana of Coptic Christianity and pathological insularity of vision, in my opinion, with the more recent Current 93 recordings)... all these things combine to make this a majestically compelling album. And it helped to confirm and deepen my own esoteric and occult leanings, as I had just a couple years earlier read and loved the Gnostic text entitled "Thunder Perfect Mind" in the Nag Hammadi Scriptures.
There is nothing more utterly demoralizing or more ruinously degrading to my faltering and unstable sense of self-esteem than Looking For A Job.
This is a dream I had last night...
I am in a theater to see a concert by Leonard Cohen. I'm seated in the front row, far right in the next to the last seat from the end of the row. The house lights go down and a man comes out to introduce the performers... or does he? For some reason I'm not sure now, I can remember a previous and perhaps related dream about a young woman singer-songwriter named Jean Kinsey (?), who is something like Marissa Nadler (if you know her music) or a Canadian Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Jean's name has an English and a French-Canadian pronunciation... In any case, the band members come out in silence and stand at their stations. The stage protrudes out so that at the left and right ends of the stage there are corners, like a table, so there are sides to the stage that go back about twelve feet. There is a kind of partition along the edge of the stage behind which the band members stand, evenly spaced, each man/woman with a sort of (Tibetan?) bowl with a lit candle or flame inside in front of him/her, each at his/her own podium, sort of. I think of these as 'prayer stations' or something such as that. (When I wake and recall the dream, it occurs to me that the arrangement of human figures along the edge of the stage is similar to and evocative of the way the nine Seekers and the Master line up along the top of a Mayan pyramid, naked and standing along the edge and silhouetted against the sky, in the Alejandro Jodorowsky film The Holy Mountain, near the conclusion of the film). The audience is silent in hushed in reverent expectation. Leonard Cohen walks out or appears out of nowhere and walks across the stage to greet and embrace each musician individually. The crowd is still silent. He comes over to just a few feet in front of where I am standing now (we are all standing now, as though it were a courtroom and the judge had made his entry), and he smiles and gently takes the hand of a woman and embraces her. This woman is one among a coterie of tour or management associates who are grouped at the right end of the stage, directly in front of me. There is a small, sort of disfigured and wizened man (almost a homunculus?) in a baggy elegant suit and a hat (he appears to have a similar physical condition to Stephen Hawkings, that kind of premature aged look, I don't remember the name of the degenerative disease). Leonard picks this little guy up by the shoulders and raises him in the air above his head, beaming a smile of love, and pulls the man to his chest in an embrace as though the man was his child. I am still standing there, not more than six feet away, watching this scene. There is definitely something Christlike about it all. My heart is beating expectantly. I am wondering if Leonard will make eye contact with me, and if he will take my hand, half wanting him to, and half afraid.
Then, I awoke.
I am in a theater to see a concert by Leonard Cohen. I'm seated in the front row, far right in the next to the last seat from the end of the row. The house lights go down and a man comes out to introduce the performers... or does he? For some reason I'm not sure now, I can remember a previous and perhaps related dream about a young woman singer-songwriter named Jean Kinsey (?), who is something like Marissa Nadler (if you know her music) or a Canadian Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Jean's name has an English and a French-Canadian pronunciation... In any case, the band members come out in silence and stand at their stations. The stage protrudes out so that at the left and right ends of the stage there are corners, like a table, so there are sides to the stage that go back about twelve feet. There is a kind of partition along the edge of the stage behind which the band members stand, evenly spaced, each man/woman with a sort of (Tibetan?) bowl with a lit candle or flame inside in front of him/her, each at his/her own podium, sort of. I think of these as 'prayer stations' or something such as that. (When I wake and recall the dream, it occurs to me that the arrangement of human figures along the edge of the stage is similar to and evocative of the way the nine Seekers and the Master line up along the top of a Mayan pyramid, naked and standing along the edge and silhouetted against the sky, in the Alejandro Jodorowsky film The Holy Mountain, near the conclusion of the film). The audience is silent in hushed in reverent expectation. Leonard Cohen walks out or appears out of nowhere and walks across the stage to greet and embrace each musician individually. The crowd is still silent. He comes over to just a few feet in front of where I am standing now (we are all standing now, as though it were a courtroom and the judge had made his entry), and he smiles and gently takes the hand of a woman and embraces her. This woman is one among a coterie of tour or management associates who are grouped at the right end of the stage, directly in front of me. There is a small, sort of disfigured and wizened man (almost a homunculus?) in a baggy elegant suit and a hat (he appears to have a similar physical condition to Stephen Hawkings, that kind of premature aged look, I don't remember the name of the degenerative disease). Leonard picks this little guy up by the shoulders and raises him in the air above his head, beaming a smile of love, and pulls the man to his chest in an embrace as though the man was his child. I am still standing there, not more than six feet away, watching this scene. There is definitely something Christlike about it all. My heart is beating expectantly. I am wondering if Leonard will make eye contact with me, and if he will take my hand, half wanting him to, and half afraid.
Then, I awoke.
For my first blog here I will plug my newest music project. Click on the links at the foot of the text for streaming audio tracks and more...
Everything But The Gargoyle is a nascent recording project conceived in 2008 from the meeting of Forms Of Things Unknown and Pixyblink. Ferrara Brain Pan had been harboring the idea to form some sort of darkwave 'Dead Can Dance' type male-female duo for a number of years, and when he stumbled upon Pixyblink's MySpace profile while exploring G. James Wyrick's The Method Learned page, a soul spark was ignited and he knew at once that he'd at long last found his muse and anima incarnate. Ferrara made contact with the mysterious, alluring Miss Kyra, whereupon the two discovered a mutual eccentricity of vision along with a willingness to morph, twist and subvert convention. In view of the geographic distance between them (Ferrara in San Francisco and Kyra in northern San Diego County), a long-distance recording collaboration via the sharing of audio files over the internet was proposed and agreed upon. Kyra has been no stranger to this method of working, with easily a dozen or more such musical collaborations with like-minded ambient/experimental MySpace musicians under her belt.
With their first song "Susto" completed, EBTG plan to continue mining the rich poetic territory of G. James Wyrick in creating several more musical settings of his poetry, as part of The Method Learned (with a possible CD-EP in mind). And after that, who can tell? An album-length release? David Lynch soundtrack appearance? Song licensing agreement with the California Avocado Commission? It's anybody's guess...
Everything But The Gargoyle's official web page
Everythings But The Gargoyle's MySpace page
Forms Of Things Unknown
Pixyblink
The Method Learned
