tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31605343643629344002024-03-05T04:01:25.996-08:00Ziggurat LoungeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger63125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-74126962352588486522023-12-14T05:40:00.000-08:002023-12-14T05:40:51.189-08:00BE PREPARED TO BE SPELLBOUND<p>"Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal is a compelling and spellbinding exploration into the enigmatic world of Hakim Bey. Metzger's unique non-narrative approach in recounting his relationship with Bey unfolds with a mesmerizing quality, skillfully intertwining earnestly playful anecdotes. As I navigated the pages, the narrative's immersive nature reached a point where the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolved, leaving me captivated by the spellbinding allure of Bey's existence."</p><p>Garret A.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-4610803035090830512023-12-03T14:03:00.000-08:002023-12-03T14:27:20.737-08:00Review: FLAHERTY'S WAKE: ABORTIONIST, LAWYER, BOXER, AND PRIEST <p>This tome, eleven years in the writing, is one of the less expected productions from Metzger's eminent pen. It is a narrative history, a docudrama. It is written entirely in the first person voice of the main character, Charles Flaherty, Roman Catholic priest, boxer, amateur physician and abortionist, who lived in early twentieth century Rochester.</p><p>Over the years, Metzger has written a number of essays and books dealing with the Burnt Over District of western New York State, which was home to so many utopian religious and social experiments in the nineteenth century: the Mormons, the Shakers, the Spiritualist Fox Sisters, and the Electric Chair. Flaherty's Wake is the magnum opus and masterpiece of Metzger's many excursions into this weird regionalism. </p><p>Every detail here is authentic, every event described is real. Metzger, writing in Flaherty's literate. but unpolished voice, has connected the minute particular facts into an account which is oddly credible and meticulously matches the (mostly newspaper) records. It is truer than an actual first person account could have been - for Metzger has no personal interests to protect.</p><p>This is a style of history writing that would have seemed natural to Livy or Thucydides, but which has fallen far from favor since the nineteenth century. But unlike most history written in the days of Carlyle and Michelet, Metzger's is scrupulously unbiased. Here you gain a true view of the beliefs, ethnicities, and social circumstances of early twentieth century Rochester and environs. It could not be bettered by the most impeccably dull academic account. And one does not have to pay the dues of boredom which is the usual price of such fine detail. This is a compelling, page-turning read.</p><p>It is, however, a little bleak. It made me think of Scorsese's film, <i>The Irishman</i>, which is similarly a docudrama, but focused on an associate of Jimmy Hoffa. There, as in Metzger's book, the narrative was weirdly compelling albeit grim throughout. The chronicles of men whose lives are full of somewhat illegal action tend to have a gloomy glamor.</p><p>In the life of Flaherty the abortionist priest, you will not find a hero of feminism or of faith. The only real faith he seems to have had was faint in himself.</p><p>Metzger has created here a valuable work of history, which raises more questions than it answers, but which one thanks him for asking.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mildred Faintly </p><p>96th of October</p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #4b4f58; font-family: Neue-Haas-Grotesk-Display, neue-haas-grotesk-display, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; margin: 0px 0px 2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></p><div><br /></div><div class="wp-block-kadence-image kb-image_52de09-7b" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #4b4f58; font-family: Neue-Haas-Grotesk-Display, neue-haas-grotesk-display, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-76893736520460948202023-10-13T06:42:00.000-07:002023-10-13T06:42:45.560-07:00HAKIM BEY: REAL AND UNREAL - review<p> "We can count on one hand the rarified few who truly knew the effervescent Hakim Bey well enough to write an authentic <i>biographique</i> of the infamous unholy man. Th. Metzger is the opposable thumb on that hand. Only a fez-sporting late century Moor, an Old Weird New Luddite, a <i>sui generis</i> scholar of crypto-religious kitsch-funk could offer up this manic account of the 'man made out of words, a story telling itself.' To be sure this effulgent, hallucinatory deep dive into Bey's, and Metzger's, friendship offers insights into the mind and world of this trickster magus - but more than that it's one sweet portrait of two singular thinkers, their mutual love and admiration for each other." </p><p>Derek Owens</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-66282104857488317892023-10-05T15:45:00.000-07:002023-10-05T15:46:53.422-07:00HAKIM BEY: REAL AND UNREAL - just published<p> For a man made of words, it is perversely perfect that none can capture the essence of Hakim Bey. Anarcho-Sufi wise man, scholar of the unknowable, miraculous monologist, psychedelic shaman: all of this is true. Yet it only suggests - rather than defines - this writer and the long shadow that he casts.</p><p>Th. Metzger was initiated into the Moorish Orthodox Church (resurrected in 1986 by Hakim Bey and ruled by him in perpetuity.) This new book is the story of their long-distance friendship and their year after year journeys together into the mythic landscape, both real and unreal.</p><p>Take the plunge and find out:</p><p>https://underworldamusements.com/products/hakim-bey-real-and-unreal</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-73068991702290107822018-05-04T10:17:00.000-07:002018-05-04T10:17:18.961-07:00The Book That Changed My Life"Chaos," by the Great and Mysterious Hakim Bey, loomed out of the shadows in 1985. Published by the Grim Reaper Press in Providence, it's only 28 pages long. But line for line, phrase for phrase, no book has had as big an influence on me as a writer. Sometimes classified as a collection of rants, "Chaos" is much more than that: with a hundred times the gorgeous weirdness of countless other so-called Great Books. Most of these short poetic pieces made their initial appearances in cheap xeroxed zines, floating like specters in the U.S. postal system. Just a few titles gives some hint at what the writer was up: "Wild Children," "Poetic Terrorism," "Paganism," "Art Sabotage," "Chaos Myth," "Sorcery." The language is beautiful; the subject matter is strange and at times distressing. I read this book again and again. The amazing images and ideas seeped into my brain. They've been leaking out in my work ever since.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-37564222044410232412018-04-24T04:25:00.001-07:002018-04-24T04:25:58.704-07:00Infernal BlessingsFor weeks, there's been a small sign on the expressway bridge I pass under as I drive to work: "I love you, Jesus." Today, I saw it had been replaced by another sign: "Lucifer is Light." This got a genuine belly laugh out of me, and seems a good portent for the day. Thousands of cars pass under the sign every day. How many drivers will look up? How many will feel blessed by the light?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-90081128632318644512018-04-18T07:30:00.000-07:002018-04-18T07:30:05.066-07:00The Davi QuestionA number of readers have asked: is Davi a boy or a girl., both or neither? That's a hard one to answer. Given that Meet me in the Strange is told by Davi, we never get a solid "he" or "she" - only "I."<br />
<br />
I see Davi through a retrofuturist lens. Glam rock, from its beginnings, blurred the boundaries between the sexes. I'd often see the word "androgynous" used to describe Bowie, Eno, Jobriath and other early glam rockers. Literally, "androgynous" means man-woman or masculine-feminine. When the first pioneers crossed the gender boundaries, fans, music writers and people gawking from the outside had fewer words than we do now to describe the phenomenon. And it was far more risky, even dangerous, to "take a walk on the wild side," (as Lou Reed put it.)<br />
<br />
Some readers see Davi as a boy and some as a girl, some don't care, and some project onto Davi their own fears and desires. Meet me in the Strange started with Anna Z. - a girl at a concert, overwhelmed, blissed-out. Davi was the observer, the teller of the tale, and because they both live in a world of glam rock fantasy, Davi's sex, or gender, or whatever word you use, dissolves in the mist and music.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-88732531543962658162018-04-11T10:27:00.000-07:002018-04-11T10:27:12.684-07:00RetrofuturismMeet Me in the Strange has been called a "retrofuturist novel." That is, it looks back and embraces much of the style, music, and attitudes of '70s era glam rock. (And yes I was there, listening to Bowie, T Rex, Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music, Eno, New York Dolls.) It also looks to an alternate future - when the world (especially for two wild teenagers) is mutating into something strange, unpredictable and amazing.<br />
<br />
Can a person be haunted by ghosts from the future? Why not? Can we send our minds (and eyes and ears) back to a time when things were better (or at least much cooler?) I say: absolutely. A very smart (and somewhat sad) person once said, "The past is where they keep all the good stuff." Music, books, art, movies, snazzy-looking clothes, heroes. This is partly cheap nostalgia. But here in the present we can look back at the past and recognize the really good things that will last.<br />
<br />
What's ahead? One thing is for sure: new experiences. So Meet Me in the Strange exists in a weird limbo: forward and backward, there and not-here-yet, maybe and if only. <br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-32222961642268503682018-04-05T09:09:00.002-07:002018-04-05T09:09:56.633-07:00Dagon and the Hand-JiveListen:<br />
<br />
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/9c8shhf4b69v5u7/Dagon_and_the_Hand_Jive.mp3?dl=0<br />
<br />
You got a crazy little finger, a crazy little thumb.<br />
You got a crazy little organ, think I'm gonna get me some.<br />
Everybody get religion. Everybody get a stick.<br />
Everybody get some fish eggs and beat 'em till they're thick.<br />
<br />
Hand-jive Dagon do the slime<br />
digits working overtime<br />
Come on all you Philistines<br />
it's time to make the scene.<br />
<br />
Sharkskin suit and cheaters too.<br />
You got a mirror shine on a cloven shoe.<br />
Up all night in the Temple of Cool,<br />
worldwide champ of pocket pool.<br />
<br />
Hand-jive Dagon do the slime<br />
digits working overtime<br />
Come on all you Philistines<br />
it's time to make the scene.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-26520698378442212562018-03-29T04:30:00.000-07:002018-03-29T04:30:09.368-07:00Voltage HymnListen:<br />
<br />
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/fq5asc4nh88fruz/Voltage_Hymn.mp3?dl=0<br />
<br />
Rise perfect voltage, pow'r and light<br />
whose majesty is unconfined.<br />
Indwell this luminary night<br />
the shining darkness of the mind.<br />
<br />
Your inward speaking wakes the dead<br />
and by its tongue they understand<br />
the excellence of words unsaid<br />
the silence that you can command.<br />
<br />
Pure generation - turbines turn<br />
in deepest earth where few may go.<br />
These mortal coils forever burn.<br />
This is the truth we all must know.<br />
<br />
Copper and iron make the life<br />
that flowing current - liquid love.<br />
mated as man and fated wife<br />
like waters fall endless from above.<br />
<br />
When we are risen, turned to light<br />
then we shall see as those once blind<br />
transformed as day is turned to night<br />
filled with the brilliance of your mind.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-73954018740413906572018-03-07T07:52:00.000-08:002018-03-07T07:52:21.171-08:00DeliriumWhen I get sick, when the fever spikes, my thoughts get scrambled. The flu hit on Friday and by Monday, I was hot, achy, and delirious. The whole time, I was reading Brian Jones: The Making Of The Rolling Stones. Highly recommended (the book, not the flu.) Brian founded and named the band, and taught Mick and Keith how to be rock stars. It's not a happy story - but full of exotica, sixties high flash fashion, beautiful girls and journeys into weirdness. Fave episode: Brian travels to Morocco to record a crazed all-night ritual to conjure up the Great God Pan. A sacrificial goat, endless drumming and dancing. I was feverish through the whole thing (the book, not the ritual.) Do me a favor - find it - I think it's all true - and see if what I remember is actually there. <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-16227591598292637832018-02-24T08:41:00.000-08:002018-02-24T08:41:15.528-08:00Sen-SenIs it candy, or is it poison? Or both? Tiny, black, and mysteriously vile, Sen-Sen seems to be something spies would hide in a false tooth to bite down on when captured. But in fact it's claimed to give "breathtaking refreshment" which "masks the odors of smoke, food or drink." The taste? Dead flowers, formaldehyde, licorice and cheap hotel soap. For over a hundred years old ladies have carried tiny foil pouches of Sen-Sen. I first experienced the noxious burning flavor as a little kid, digging for gum in my Grandma's purse. I suppose I never really recovered.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-46498106434356442432018-02-17T09:46:00.001-08:002018-02-17T09:46:39.855-08:00The Lost ThirteenThese are the bands I've performed with. All of them either did live shows or recorded, or both. Most are long, long forgotten:<br />
Health and Beauty<br />
Mongo Fury<br />
Ju-Ju School<br />
Screaming Vinyl<br />
Caravan of Fear<br />
Those Wild Swedish Mongoloids<br />
Flat Planet<br />
Quadroon<br />
Nemo's Omen<br />
The Fabulous Rectotem<br />
The Behemoth Brothers<br />
Invisible Stain Removers<br />
Tape, vinyl, digital, memory: all dissolving into the past. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-59991649885852158832014-11-15T09:04:00.002-08:002014-11-15T15:17:54.628-08:00HALLELUJAH DAGON <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://watch.pair.com/oannes.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://watch.pair.com/oannes.gif" /></a></div>
Well-worn musical icon of countless Christmas rites, “The Hallelujah Chorus” is Handel’s most famous piece. But he celebrated the slimy fish-god Dagon with as much verve, and far more wit. The same month that he completed <i>Messiah</i> (September 1741), Handel had started <i>Samson</i>. As he went to Dublin for Messiah’s premier, he was just finishing up his next oratorio, which begins with a chorus of crazed Philistines writhing and wailing at their pagan altar.
<br />
<blockquote>
“Awake the trumpet’s lofty sound!<br />
The joyful sacred festival comes round<br />
when Dagon king of all earth is crown’d.<br />
The solemn hymn and cheerful song:<br />
be Dagon praised by ev’ry tongue.<br />
In notes of triumph, notes of praise<br />
so high great Dagon’s name we’ll raise.”
</blockquote>
<br />
The music could be right out of “For Unto us a Child is Born.” But it’s a hymn of praise to Lovecraft’s favorite squamous deity instead of Jesus. Half man, half fish, and all eldritch, Dagon rises roaring from his deep-sea bed while the baby Jesus lies cooing sweetly in his cradle.<br />
<br />
Samson, the dreadlocked Israelite muscleman, had made his name killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of dismembered donkey. But no asinine mandible could protect him from the charms of Dalila.<br />
<br />
Like the Rastas who take him as their mightiest exemplar, Samson had joined the secret society of the Nazarites, devoting himself to slaughter and God by vowing never to drink wine or beer, touch a corpse or cut his hair. Wild sex, however, was another matter. And <i>The Book of Judges</i> details his various conquests and one night stands. Whores and hussies, virgins and pagan votaries feel the irresistible urge when he flexes his muscle of love. Dalila’s relationship with the throbbing hunk of Nazarite manhood is far more complex. She may fall for his bulging biceps, but when offered cold cash by Philistine kings, she turns betrayer.<br />
<br />
With his eyes torn out, captive in their temple, Samson endures the taunts of the Philistines as they pray to their vile fish-god in a last drunken chorus:
<br />
<blockquote>
“Great Dagon has subdued our foe<br />
who brought their boasted hero low.<br />
Sound out his pow’r in notes divine<br />
praise him with mirth, high cheer and wine.”
</blockquote>
<br />
Yes, there is a somber resolution. Samson dies as he pulls down the Philistine temple, off-stage. But like <i>Paradise Lost</i>, where Satan gets all the best lines, in this one, Dagon gets the best music.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-30832758066929246752014-05-12T17:23:00.001-07:002014-05-12T17:23:25.855-07:00Undercover Mormon Unleashed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6ILWJ0mkg70cFtknoKIIWuQhv5wumFpg_hvGfcJ5NCBpq-WeL8S_uPx_MW9KWYUB2kr3mnOuyT-f59thKDdWrP1s34nL5b_iDW5ZwREY5ugkoqA3wWFmW9UiavIlN7CIjQHcljBPK8uVt/s1600/UnderCoverMormon4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6ILWJ0mkg70cFtknoKIIWuQhv5wumFpg_hvGfcJ5NCBpq-WeL8S_uPx_MW9KWYUB2kr3mnOuyT-f59thKDdWrP1s34nL5b_iDW5ZwREY5ugkoqA3wWFmW9UiavIlN7CIjQHcljBPK8uVt/s1600/UnderCoverMormon4.jpg" height="320" width="206" /></a></div>
When a not-exactly-normal guy cooks up a fake name, buys some white
shirts, shaves clean, and enters the Mormon church, what does he find?
<br />
<br />When most people hear the word “Mormon,” they think of Utah. But the
real sacred sites aren’t in the desert. It all started in the boondocks
of western New York State, which was, once upon a very strange time,
the hottest hotbed of wild religion in the world.
<br />
<br />Th. Metzger has lived his whole life in Rochester, just down the
road from the cradle of Mormonism. He’d seen the crazy hyper-happy
pageants and heard all about the polygamy, getting your own personal
planet when you die, and of course the magic underwear. Going undercover
as a man on a spiritual quest, he discovers that the answers he’s been
seeking for decades aren’t at all what he expects. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Mormon-Spy-House-Gods-ebook/dp/B00IN846Z6/ref=la_B00JZX19DU_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399940359&sr=1-2" target="_blank"><i>Undercover Mormon</i></a>
chronicles his hilarious, revealing and bizarre search for the truth.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-88964401710434837132013-05-08T08:17:00.000-07:002013-05-08T22:19:25.665-07:00Knocking on Heaven's Door<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.bobdylan.com/sites/bdylan/files/imagecache/470xscale/knockin_on_heavens_door.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="http://www.bobdylan.com/sites/bdylan/files/imagecache/470xscale/knockin_on_heavens_door.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The heart of Lon Chaney Jr. stopped dead on July 12, 1973. Medical students dissected him, as he’d dissected fake movie corpses a hundred times before. Lon’s lungs looked like moon rocks and his liver might’ve been a chunk of scorched iron meteorite. To this day, these organs are kept in jars as specimens of what extreme alcohol and tobacco use can do to the human body. There’s no grave to mark the final resting place of the rest of him.<br />
<br />
<br />
That same week, Bob Dylan released “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” his lament for Lunar Lon. A more mournful top 40 hit can not be found: weary guitar, minimal bass, dirge-drum and disembodied women doing the descending “oohs.” Repetitive and obsessively simple, Dylan’s recording is barely a song. It’s more funeral chant for a mythical thug than a pop tune: the perfect - and perfectly obvious - opposite of the glam-rock, prog-rock, and Jesus-rock that flooded record stores that season. <br />
<br />
Lon Sr. was the Man of a 1000 Faces. His son was the Man of a 1,000 Shitty Roles. After playing the Wolfman, Lon Jr. spent the last thirty years of his life in bottom-feeder schlock, sliding farther and farther down the horror flick food chain. His father still looms huge over Hollywood, with talent, ambition, power and imagination. Lon Jr. became a parody of himself: half Wolfman and half Lenny, the idiot man-boy murderer he played in Of Mice and Men. At the end, he loomed as “The Monster” at Universal studios: drinking, fighting, and helling around with his buddy, Broderick Crawford.<br />
<br />
While Lon was dying in a hospital bed a few miles from the summer home of Richard Nixon, in San Clemente California, Dylan was in Mexico shooting Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which he plays a nonentity called Alias. During the filming, Dylan recorded a slim album of soundtrack music, with one song in the voice of Billy himself. <br />
<br />
“Knocking on Heaven’s Door” is addressed his mother: “take this badge offa me. I can’t use it any more.” Powerless and nameless, Dylan begs, “Ma, put my guns in the ground. I can’t shoot them any more.” <br />
<br />
The Wolfman is the damned son, who returns to the ancestral home to become his destiny: controlled by occult forces beyond his knowledge. The moon is the eternal female: linked to the ebb and flow of fertility, menstrual blood-rhythms. The Wolfman is hyper-male but still a slave to the mother goddess. He’s the son trapped in the mother’s lunar power, howling at the womb: brilliant birth-orb and doorway to the next world. <br />
<br />
The Moon-Birth-Mother hears his prayer and gives no answer. The Sky-Death-Father hears and denies. Lon-Billy-Dylan is not merely fighting the Oedipal battle for sexual ownership of the mother, but for access to the moon, which is the doorway to the sky, to the realm of the ancestors. <br />
<br />
The crucial cinematic moment shows Billy on his knees, with an old man holding a shotgun to his chest. This isn’t Sheriff Pat Garrett, though, but a Bible-spouting deputy who keeps goading Billy to get ready for the next world. Billy’s in jail, chained to the floor. The religion-mad deputy quotes Ecclesiastes: “there’s a time to live and a time to die.” The old man says he’s got a shotgun filled with silver dimes - the metal of the moon, the only thing that can kill the werewolf. After refusing to pray, Billy overpowers the old man and breaks from jail. With the load of magic shrapnel, Billy blasts him into the next world.<br />
<br />
“Behold,” Bob Dylan intones, “it’s getting dark, too dark to see.” <br />
<br />
“Behold,” Jesus proclaims in the Book of Revelation, “I stand at the door and knock. and whosoever hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and enter him.”<br />
<br />
Death is the door and guns are the key - guns, cigarettes and hard liquor. The moon is the door in the sky - a hole in heaven. The son knocks. On the other side of the door is the old man: God the Father, the Phantom of the Opera, Pat Garrett. The old man with the badge and a shotgun, the Lawman, the father who opens and demands the son’s death as payment for sin.<br />
<br />
And Dylan sings, “that long black cloud is coming on down.”<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-50301916379346955302013-03-27T11:08:00.002-07:002013-03-27T22:03:48.480-07:00This is Your Final Warning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6xcPZwxSZeg9lW1h2WenlXMfFD_oZbWXCAQJvOWv2Dj-AZVKvgWDC25hFZGRSA3I8ID4sjCQyaxQFo84RZ5iJh3CT36FGb-hdgORRQ9xGFv-e6SerjJ1UaPQTyg8qUVO7t-HQ_1EOqZjn/s1600/Apes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6xcPZwxSZeg9lW1h2WenlXMfFD_oZbWXCAQJvOWv2Dj-AZVKvgWDC25hFZGRSA3I8ID4sjCQyaxQFo84RZ5iJh3CT36FGb-hdgORRQ9xGFv-e6SerjJ1UaPQTyg8qUVO7t-HQ_1EOqZjn/s320/Apes.jpg" width="231" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
GET EVOLVED<br />
And get erect. Get your bad self out on the dance floor and shake your funky aspect. Get in line and make that stinky primate scene. Get rid of that hair and do the sex-is-a-beautiful-thing machine. Get your cool unit stirring up that mess and get out of that scummy gene pool before you start to regress. Get off that hairy bottom and do the low-down Pope. Get your primal horde together and do the don’t-use-soap. Get rid of that HAM BONE and let a man do the man’s man’s man’s world where a man is King. Get out of that red red robe and do the bare-naked holy-father thing.<br />
<br />
HIT ME ONE TIME - YEOW!<br />
But what about that littlest sex machine? Did he die and go to Heaven to do the smokin’ burnin’ mess day and night before the Stool of Glory? Or is he in the Bottomless Pit with his hot pants around his ankles and a swarm of fiery vermin swirling around his head?<br />
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AND WHAT ABOUT DARWIN?<br />
Do you like the idea of your daughter mating with a lower form of life? He drives up to the house, dragging the curse behind at the end of a chain, blows his horn and does some kind of prehensile hand-jive. Out she comes, a vision in pink: your baby, your chattel, your little girl. And with a black blast from the tailpipe he’s whisked her away. You know it! You can feel it! In no time they’re in the back seat, grunting and snuffling and co-mingling their DNA. Do you really want her precious pink bottom on that cheap vinyl car seat? Do you want her coming home already half-devolved? Bristly black hair on her tongue. Walking bowlegged and gibbering like the Queen of the Mandrills. <br />
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THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING!<br />
It doesn’t make a bit of difference if you go up or down the food chain, you’re still food. Sure, Little Hammy can get himself elected Soul Brother Number One. Okay, okay, the Reptilian Herod can fight for a hundred years to regain the seven-tiered crown of Gnegg. All right, the Piltdown Man can pick nits out of his fur for a dozen generations and end up the Pope on Easter morning in his flashiest robe. But they’re still on the chain gang and they still can’t wash off the curse.<br />
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GO AHEAD, ASK THE POPE <br />
He’s awake every night, counting out loud until the sun comes up and the Renegade Apes go crawling back to their holes. He’s grunting and grinding his teeth and still he can hear them out on the perimeter, trying to dig their way under the chain-link fence. He’s sitting half-naked on the edge of the seat, puffing on a filter-tip “APE” - his brand of smokes. They keep away the smell, but not the sound. Even with Blessed Virgin De-Jinxing Oil and the whole College of Cardinals chain-smoking “APE”s, he still can’t get any relief.<br />
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FUNKY, BUT AMAZING, GRACE<br />
I thought I heard Martin Luther shout: open the window, let the vile vapors out. I thought I heard Martin Luther say: Hey, Father Babylon, mend your way. Cold and lonely in that Borgia tomb. High above the Pit of Doom. Get rid of those relics and that holy grue. Get rid of those sainted corpses too.<br />
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IT’S A FACT<br />
In Darwin’s day, mummies were looted from their tombs and carted off by the Sons of Ham. The Pharaoh’s dusty flesh brought a higher price than his hoard of gold, black pearls, and funeral goo. It was no more an agent of eternal life than pink lint or Monkey Lard, but it sure got eaten up fast, once the fad caught on.<br />
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BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS<br />
At this very moment, there’s a family of missing links driving a late model Eldorado with the Infant of Prague resplendent in pink dashboard fur. They’re singing “An Infinite Number of Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and trying to find the exit for the Afterlife. But their search will go on forever. They’ll stop night after night at the motels that Time forgot: “The Serpent Mound Lodge,” “King Herod’s Rest,” and “The All-seeing Eye of the Baleful Uhunis Inn,” and they’ll find the gene pool getting scummy because the lower forms keep relieving themselves into it. And with all this going on, you might well be wondering, “How’s a true believer supposed to get any evolving done?”<br />
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CALL IT FATE<br />
Call it Natural Selection. Call it anything you want. The awful truth remains: Primates descended from reptiles. Primates actually are reptiles! It’s no great leap going from slimy scales to nice pink skin, given a few million years of bad hygiene. Hot-blooded, cold-blooded, who cares? Reptiles once ruled the Earth and now their smarty-pants two-legged descendants have taken over. Primates rule the World by remote control! Primates invented soap. Primates invented the Great Chain of Being. Primates invented the LIMBO. How low can you go? <br />
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LET’S GET PERSONAL<br />
You can hide inside that monkey-love arouser matrix all you want, but sooner or later you’re going to stand bare-naked and perfectly pink before the throne of JUDGMENT. You can expose your Hairless Wonder to the Dark Patriarch, but you’re still going to find yourself at the edge of the ABYSS, wishing you’d brought along some powerful deodorant.<br />
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ARE YOU READY?<br />
In those last days, the Jet-black Pharaohs will rise up in the East to slay the Funky Primate. The King of the Hominids will break out of his tomb and conquer the Golden Crescent. The stone-drunk Noah will stand naked again to lay a final curse on his son, but Ham’s shake-shake-shaking it off and screaming “Me am bearing your Drooly Doom no more!” Even the Whistler and BOOK OF RULES will get down off their thrones and join in. And at the stroke of Absolute Midnight, the Ace of Popes will flash across the sky trailing a plume of black miasma. The battle will rage for seven-times-seventy weeks and the outcome may very well depend on YOU. The key to victory is in your hands. The time has come. You’ve got to take a stand.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-69928338204133781472013-03-06T10:36:00.001-08:002013-03-06T11:37:52.908-08:00Satellite of Love<br />
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The last man stepped off the Moon in December of 1972 and the space age ended. The ominous nights of Sputnik and Telstar, the luminous days of Soyuz and Apollo, were over. Yet the glam in glamor still out-glows Venus or Sirius (the diamond dog-star). We can catch a glimmer if we turn our gazes outward. Something is up there, just beyond sight, beyond understanding. Something glistens and chitters on the sidereal horizon. Sex-change in the sky -transgendered planetary crossings - the radiation of the occult spheres.<br />
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“I watched for a little while,” Lou Reed croons, like a junkie over his spoon, “I love to watch things on TV.”<br />
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Bowie saw it and knew it first. But it was Lou who gave it a name: the Satellite of Love. Lou Reed, late to glam, the most lurid and lucid of the seers, was the true voice of the celestial shine (one third heroin, one third mascara and one third high frequency spectra). “Satellite’s gone” Lou sings, both celebration and lamentation, “way up to Mars.”<br />
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Lou Reed’s move into the trans-orbital limelight came with his second solo album. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, Transformer gleams with some Ziggy Stardust fallout. The monster hit off the album was “Walk on the Wild Side.” With this, Lou managed to produce queasy-making titillation for the AM dial - with its fairy tales of cross-dressing speed-freaks and crystalline violet sweet tooth. What really pushed the tune to the top of the charts was the great and mysterious Herbie Flowers on bass (doubling electric and upright - he later claimed - so he’d get paid twice). The revelation, however, came with the second single off the second album. <br />
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This Satellite of Love is Sputnik after the secret operation. It’s Telstar with one last mysterious TV message to relay to earth. Lou put a sleazy man-woman transformer on the back of the album cover, forcing the obvious transvestite pun. This deflects attention from the far more important electromagnetic phenomenon - AC transformed into DC in order to power the cathode ray tube that was the heart of every TV.<br />
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In ‘73, soaking in the magic transmissions still had a televisonary aura - late night flicker, the mystic fuzz and flare - the warm hum and cooked-dust scent of vacuum tubes. The tiny disappearing dot in the center of the screen as it goes dead. Static fuzz and stereophonic buzz. <br />
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A year later Lou was the self-proclaimed Rock and Roll Animal, with black bondage leather and amphetamine twitchcraft. But on “Satellite of Love,” he’s the wide-eyed sky-dreamer. At first listen, the cut is just a charming bit of throwaway pop filler. The trannies and druggies from the earlier hit got all the attention. Now they’re banal clichés. The light of metallic orbital orbs, however, blinking and beeping in the night sky, remains with us.<br />
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The ghost of Soviets’ first silver ovum-in-orbit still circles the globe with bright morning-star spikes, a medieval mace-head without the shaft. A steely ball of transistors and diodes, Sputnik spins in silent gyres. It transmits the crypto-hit-tunes, traveling around the earth, around our thoughts, like electrons around the nucleus which is the thinker of those thoughts.<br />
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The Soviet code name was Object D. But after launch in 1957, the satellite became Sputnik - the name meaning literally “traveling companion.” The word “satellite” too has a rich occult genealogy, signifying: minion, fan-boy, follower, acolyte, worshipper. In 1962, “Telstar” had thousands of devotees as a big radio hit: guitars, organ, and the sound of rocket engines instead of voices. <br />
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“Things like that,” Lou confessed ten years later, “drive me out of my mind.”<br />
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His “Satellite of Love” came together in its ecstatic four-chord coda. Silvery lounge piano, finger-snaps, horns added in layers and then Bowie’s fey background vocals. The gorgeous whoosh of his “Ahhhh!” - hitting a falsetto D above the operatic tenor’s high C. The gleeful “Ah - ooooh!” like a glorious gay werewolf howling at the artificial moon.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-92216058363197277302013-01-28T10:24:00.000-08:002013-02-04T11:03:56.660-08:00Sabbath Bloody Sabbath<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/Black_Sabbath_SbS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/Black_Sabbath_SbS.jpg" /></a></div>
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The egomaniac whine of the brain-sick teenager: no one conjured this sound better than Ozzy Osbourne. On the first four Black Sabbath albums, he screamed and wailed and did his horrific Hammer-films schtick. Still, like shouting “Boo!” in a crowded seance, the old spookshow was getting tiresome. The cover of the fifth album stays with the old satanic nightmare routine. But the music on the disc is more fit for high school vomit-buzz than human sacrifice.<br />
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1973 was the year the Romilar hit the fan. Sticky, nauseating, cheap, and available in every drugstore in America, Romilar cough syrup was the drug of choice for every self-disrespecting fifteen year old boy. Especially when drunk with loud pain-drenched metaloid music, dextromethorphan (the chief ingredient in Romilar) produces visual distortion, a messed up sense of time and space, sweats, diarrhea, dilated pupils, teeth-grinding and gut-spasms. Lo! dextromethorphan will take you there, to that wonderland of teenaged misery and madness.<br />
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By the end of ‘73, Romilar elixir had been pulled off the shelves and the brain-eating puke-euphoria tidal wave was over. So Black Sabbath’s gift for Christmas of ‘73 was perfect, like cough syrup converted into sound. Ozzy gives us a few of the usual references to hell and damnation. Still, there’s less focus on the fate of his immortal soul than on his gag reflex and the swollen tissue of his brain. With the headphones clamped on tight and the volume knob turned far into the skull-crushing zone, this album is the aural equivalent of three bottle of Romilar. <br />
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Sabbath’s earlier albums had all sold millions and the band’s wealth got them all the best liquor and drugs they wanted. While they might’ve been rehearsing with their noses burnt by high grade coke and their guts sloshing with cognac and twelve year old scotch, they continued to make music not for millionaires, but kids working at minimum wage.<br />
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The band, dulled by drugs and success, had started rehearsals in L.A. This fell apart and they ended up renting Clearwell Castle in the ancient royal forest of Dean. Guitarist Tony Iommi claimed that the fifth album really came alive in the dungeons there. Supposedly the riff for the album’s title track was born in the gloom and grue of medieval torture chambers. But like the mock-demonic doom rides of the earlier albums, this too is mostly booga-booga cooked up for gullible American kids. Even the castle itself was a fake - though looking medieval, it was built in the 1700s as a retro-nostalgia folly.<br />
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Cut away all the gothick claptrap and what’s left is primo vintage-73 pukadelic product. Here, the kings of downer metal serve up their last great heap of steamy sound-stench. They give a halfhearted nod to the prog rock of the day: there are a few synthesizer squigglies courtesy of Rick Wakeman, on loan from Yes. Iommi does an acoustic guitar noodle track, named “Fluff” for obvious reasons. The rest, the tunes that teenagers kept lifting the needle to replay, are swollen Romilar-riffs with Ozzy’s razor blade pain-shriek on top.<br />
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Not surprisingly, he adds plenty of death-yammer: “no return . . . killing yourself . . . into the dust . . . dying day . . . living death . . . execution . . . living just for dying . . .” What fifteen year old locked in his bedroom in a dextromethorphan daze wouldn’t think this is the most profound poetry he’d ever heard? <br />
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“Pain, suffering and misery!” Ozzy wails. “You bastards!” he screams. Iommi keeps grinding out the hallucinogenic buzz-sludge. Ozzy keeps shrieking about “universal secrets” and “the secret within your mind.” And fifty thousand sublimely unhappy teenagers retch into paper bags. <br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-62618217581962585122012-12-07T09:26:00.000-08:002012-12-07T16:15:14.014-08:00Jumpin' the Gunne<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCik9kSQgzbayEmLjgDbVh6VEcoL7a-SA1muY4efL7iywBpBn8bNAf8u8YvIuKqAQuKmr0hnCdGpynm2G7UKTcQl6AIk3QIV35TZ2Qt5gSDng-LctBbrvvc6n9WOxOZZbMxFe5ww9qVMlh/s400/front.jpg">
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Jumpin’ the Gunne<br />
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I really want to hate this thing. I want to claim that it’s the worst of the worst. 1973 gave us so much that was so wrong. Hyperbolic bombast - <em>Brain Salad Surgery</em>. Early senility rock - <em>Goat’s Head Soup.</em> Opiated suicidal sump-diver sludge - Lou Reed’s<em> Berlin</em>. And <em>Uriah Heep Live</em>. Against such festering slabs of musical offal, how could a one-hit wonder band achieve such singular status?<br />
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JoJo Gunne were not incompetent. That might have provided some amusement, like watching a drunken toddler drive an ambulance full of burn victims. The band was in fact cursed by competence. They can make a passable boozed-up yahoo boogie sound with pseudo-funky slide guitar and LA-rock piano stylings. <br />
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What makes Jumpin the Gunne so bafflingly awful is the balance it strikes between minimal ability and drug-addled idiocy. I think this album contains third-rate white boy shoogity-boogity, but I’m not sure. I want to claim it’s the worst, but I don’t think I’ll ever truly know. With song titles such as “Monkey Music” and “High School Drool,” it promises something that will at least be offensive. No such luck. My ear drums register the sound, but a nanosecond later, nothing remains.<br />
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No matter how I approach it - headphones in a dark room or as party-noise - I literally can’t listen to this album. I don’t mean I run screaming to yank it off the turntable. I mean my brain truly cannot process the sound. JoJo Gunne manages the amazing feat of creating something so profoundly mediocre that almost nothing sticks in my mind.<br />
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Then I gaze at the cover and my hopes rise again. <em>Jumpin’ the Gunne</em> should be truly horrible. Some coke-headed cretin decided that showing a hugely obese buck-naked chick magically flying out of bed (where the four Gunne boy are sitting under the covers) would make for solid sales. Better (or worse) yet is the inside of the fold-out sleeve, where again Ms. Corpulence is displayed, on her belly, making kissy faces to a small happy piglet.<br />
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All the album credits are written on her naked pink flesh - including the requisite “Made to be played loud” claim and the mysterious acknowledgment “Cowboy pig courtesy Warren Archer.”<br />
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The band ‘s only real hit - “Run Run Run” - was the first single I ever bought. It’s tuneful, rollicking and still tickles the tiny bones in my middle ear. But that’s all. Beyond “Run Run Run” JoJo Gunne’s legacy is just vapor and haze, a ghost that floats in the interzone reaches of popcult nowhereland.<br />
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Best? Worst? They’re meaningless words. Aesthetic terms are like bits of crusty burnt food and this album is coated with Super-Teflon. It’s beyond, above, outside any categories of judgment. I’m not even positive that the thing actually exists. I can hold the cover in my hands and put the disc on the turntable. I can gaze at the flying porcine bimbo with the inexplicable white ankle-strap platform shoes. I can try to listen and remember, but it’s like light passing through clear glass, or gamma rays passing through my body: no trace is left behind. <br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-55355995571715804302012-10-01T08:08:00.001-07:002012-10-01T13:20:43.391-07:00ROCK ON<img height="320" src="http://www.somanyrecordssolittletime.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/DavidEssexRockOnPS.jpg" width="316" />
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Here is the ghost in the Top 40 machine, a spectral cry to raise the dead. Here is the gleaming slice of occult vinyl that goes where no song has gone before, and comes back with the prettiest corpse in Hollywood history. Hear the exhortation to some nameless “kid” - and understand why there is a legend that the track was actually cut in James Dean’s tomb.<br />
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Pulsing from a million radios in the holy year of 73, David Essex’s “Rock On” is a fulcrum balancing both past and future, one of the crucial songs of this most crucial of years. Echoing in a haze of Jamaican dub (with reverb-soaked bass playing lead, tom-toms and congas giving a jungle vibe, dead stops opening into absolute harrowing silence, and no guitar) it anticipates music that will be supposedly cutting edge ten years later. “Rock On” also harks back to 50s-era poppy dreamland, conjuring up summertime blues and blue suede shoes.<br />
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It’s obvious, though, that more than nostalgia animates the singer. This compulsive call to “Rock On” rises years before cretin-metal devil horn handjiving. It doesn’t mean merely to get stupid and loud. This “Rock On” points toward ghosty resurrection. The question “Where do we go from here?” comes from nowhere and finds no answer. Sadness and death linger in the grooves. Multi-tracked vocals add to the opioid reverie. “See her shake on the movie screen.” Who is the “Baby Queen”? We never find out. <br />
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The hypnotic bass on “Rock On” is played by the great Herbie Flowers. Creating the brilliant throb-bottoms for 1972’s “Jump Into the Fire” and “Walk On the Wild Side,” anchoring Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album and hundreds of other hits, Herbie Flowers was the primo bass presence of the era.<br />
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Disco too lurks in the grooves. The strings on early-70s dance-hits are universally despised by critics and ignored by dance-floor fans. But the pocket-orchestra riffing is exactly what lifts disco from its banality. Disco’s beat is moronically monotonous, and the lyrics idiotic (“boogie oogie oogie” indeed). However, the sleaze of studio strings and quasi-jazz horn intrusions are exactly what brings the devotee back again and again. <br />
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As a one-hit wonder who ended up far more successful acting than making music, David Essex here does the cinematic mind-meld. The song veers toward romance (“prettiest girl I ever seen”), then fades into a lost-soul call: hissing slippery sibilants (“sssssssh”) and gospel wails (“oh my soul!”). More trance than dance, more necromantic spell than pop song, “Rock On” still lingers in the ether - tugging at the souls of dead stars and lonely planet kids who remember, or who have convinced themselves that their music-spawned memories are real.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-52014005858354367422012-09-13T04:34:00.001-07:002012-09-13T09:22:07.123-07:00BIG GURL - Maximum Fun Assault<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGpZkDb_sHtQ26dKPlxeFE8uKA_ks35R6_yOpXIsZSvYp37jXGA1rQ1lJxBI511eLI6diQ0Q0f8ZvYqzsPxCauRo6PCuhFmP1obRQZVUBXDa0yvd2CWm7nkqf-sZmmOeY-Wpt1FctDDbhd/s1600/BGart4c.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGpZkDb_sHtQ26dKPlxeFE8uKA_ks35R6_yOpXIsZSvYp37jXGA1rQ1lJxBI511eLI6diQ0Q0f8ZvYqzsPxCauRo6PCuhFmP1obRQZVUBXDa0yvd2CWm7nkqf-sZmmOeY-Wpt1FctDDbhd/s320/BGart4c.jpeg" width="200" /></a></div>
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She's back - after 23 years in the shadows. Huge, sexy, a juggernaut of stunning idiocy and murder-glee genius, Big Gurl has returned to conquer all electronic reading devices and human brains. For exactly the same price as the original paperback edition, this underground classic is now available to any who dare enter its turgid and tainted depths.<br />
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"Big Gurl is the prose equivalent of R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson stoned on evil speed and Sterno." - Hakim Bey<br />
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<a href="http://tinyurl.com/biggurlbeats">tinyurl.com/biggurlbeats</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-10227351147303258042012-09-08T19:48:00.002-07:002012-09-08T19:48:45.542-07:00The Plan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihyQcrQrnQ2MbGAH8SGCMccq2uCdYrivmvvG0Rl3nMFKM2L2R1Eu61HmKkPHkMwfTpCvRTZ8SfMiiBAyln4kspBPwLCjNHyyf6vEErnNHDJI__vKI947IB2J3n6D1oltWg7tARdJ2MZDDN/s1600/osmonds-the-plan-mormon-lds1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihyQcrQrnQ2MbGAH8SGCMccq2uCdYrivmvvG0Rl3nMFKM2L2R1Eu61HmKkPHkMwfTpCvRTZ8SfMiiBAyln4kspBPwLCjNHyyf6vEErnNHDJI__vKI947IB2J3n6D1oltWg7tARdJ2MZDDN/s320/osmonds-the-plan-mormon-lds1.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Glam rock had two crypto-Mormons: Mick Ronson and Arthur Killer Kane. The
Osmond Brothers on the other hand were up front about their religio-sexual orientation. Five squeaky-teen heartthrob guys with gleaming teeth and big hair, they released their Plan in the middle of glam's greatest year.
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White and shiny as mayonnaise, the Osmonds had been dominating the charts since 1970. After a run of massively successful albums, though, they wanted to stretch out and to tell the Latter Day Saint story through song. So they retired to their private musical sanctum (Kolob Studies in Los Angeles - named after God's home-planet) and came up with this Great Hetero Mormon Mini-opera Concept Album.
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There's a lot less bubble-gum here than on their earlier records, which explains why it did so poorly with the fans. Not many twelve year old non-LDS girls with the hots for Donny wanted to hear about pre-mortal existence and the end of the world.
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As a concept album, it starts predictably with the jingle of Asian bells, ancient flutes, mysterioso harp plinking and voices floating from channel to channel. Mostly though, the album is slick radio-friendly pop with a few nods toward glam.
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God's mysterious plan keeps coming up, though it's never made explicit. Heaven gets mentioned. Heavenly Father and the Mormon prophet Joe Smith remain in the shadows, or are far above, orbiting around earth. Like Bowie's Aladdin Sane and Jobriath himself, the singer on "Goin' Home" is a "space man from a different land" and he needs to return.
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The first track is "War in Heaven" and at the end we learn about "The Last Days." Even in the sappiest love song on the album, "Darlin,'" the Osmonds manage to slide in some LDS theology. Like other songs on this revelation-drenched slab of vinyl, "Darlin'" mixes up romance and revelation. "There's no end if I'm with you," the boys sing with their hormone-hyped voices. Clearly, they're excited about something. But what? True love? True religion? "Let Me In" is the most disturbing track. Twisting together spirituality and sleazy seduction, it's one of the best God-is-my-girlfriend songs ever recorded.
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Some songs are so oblique that even Mormon initiates can't pierce their glistening surface. Featuring a funky Jew's harp and squealy harmonica, "Mirror, Mirror" condemns some nameless other-self who'll "step on those who kiss your feet," and ends with the warning "you can't fool me."
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For those in the know, the line "as we would be, he once was" is straight out of Mormon theology. If we just accept the teachings of the whitest religion in the world, we all can become gods and have our own planet, as gloriously snazzy as Kolob. There's real endless power waiting for the Mormon faithful. When the Osmonds sing "we control infinity" they mean it as literal truth.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-12823188184969586772012-09-08T19:44:00.003-07:002012-09-08T19:45:12.913-07:00Tyranny and Mutation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Blue_Oyster_Cult-Tyranny_and_Mutation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Blue_Oyster_Cult-Tyranny_and_Mutation.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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At the center is the symbol - hanging in space, half cross and half meat hook. Some claim it's made up of three exclamation points and an upside down question mark. Those with unfogged minds understand it to be the sign of Saturn, or Kronos, whose metal is lead and whose element is time itself.
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In the grim days of Nixon and his carpet-bombing of Vietnam, while the Weather Underground waged its counter-bombing assault on America, during Apollo's last mysteriously abortive missions to the moon, this symbol was the closest a mainstream record label could come to putting a swastika on an album cover. To every teenaged Blue Oyster Cult fan, however, it was no secret. The sign stood unmistakably for outer space rock and roll fascismus.
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The band's original name - "Soft White Underbelly" - was coined by Winston Churchill to describe fascist Italy, the vulnerable nether-region of Europe. It suggests too, the unprotected abdomen of the killer dinosaur, or the vastness of some trans-galactic egg-sac floating in the void. Conceived by their producer as America's answer to Black Sabbath, the renamed Blue Oyster Cult later joined forces with these English kings of downer rock on the infamous Black and Blue Tour.
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The cover for Blue Oyster Cult's second album, Tyranny and Mutation, features a stark, geometrical black and white landscape like a Nuremberg rally site as conceived and birthed by robots. No humans, no torchlight parades, but the same emptiness and soulless fervor. And a weird celestial glow: the Kronos cross hanging on the horizon like a black, arcane sunrise. A few lurid slices are added to the palette for this album cover, finishing the scheme: black, white and red, the colors of Imperial Germany.
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Musically, heavy metal already existed. It's all there on Black Sabbath's Paranoid album. But while Ozzie shrieks like a horror movie demon, the Oyster Boys use a more menacing, breathy whisper-croon. Ozzie's predicable satanic imagery and the lumbering behemoth riffs make a joke of Sabbath's dread-mongering. B-O'Cult are more oblique, more skewed and shrewd.
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All gothic goes back to Germany and weird gothic touches lurk in these grooves - "flights of black horsemen" soaring over churches, "a harvest of life, a harvest of death." Even "Lucifer the light" makes an appearance. B-O'Cult is of course Germanic, with their mutant swastika, the very first heavy metal umlaut and hymns of praise to Luftwaffe jet planes. But this is still an American nightmare, not a faked-up olde worlde terror-fest. Yes, strange female presences float in the shadows. We'll never know, though, whether "Baby Ice Dog" is human or canine. Or what exactly the "Teen Archer" is aiming her arrows at. Or why is the "Mistress of the Salmon Salt" also called "The Quicklime Girl?"
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On first hearing, "Hot Rails to Hell" might be just another badass heavy metal howl, proclaiming that "the heat from below can burn your eyes out." The world of this song is, however, no lapsed Euro-Catholic's Lake of Fire. The hellbound train is pure America - high tech, huge and heavy, enormous with energy, a smoking, steel-rumbling joyride that ends with a surf guitar bass plummet right out of the Ventures' "Pipeline."
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Tyranny and Mutation: is there a better description of the American teenage boy's inner landscape? Tyranny: repression of impulse. Mutation: terrifying biological change. Tyranny and Mutation: are there two words which so well evoke the battle between wildness and control, the convulsive fear and joy at the heart of the adolescent's world?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3160534364362934400.post-43362298855396930832012-03-01T09:21:00.002-08:002012-03-01T09:25:45.991-08:00Suzi Quatro<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Suziquatroalbum.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 501px; height: 375px;" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Suziquatroalbum.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />As the year’s primo slice of pseudo jailbait, Suzi Quatro broke big - sold millions of singles and was helpful in the self-polluting efforts of countless teenaged boys. She wasn’t an adolescent by the time this album came out, but Suzi was marketed as one - a strange mix of sleaze and juvenile vulnerability.<br /><br />On the back of the album, she poses in a leather jump suit unzipped to her navel, with chains dangling on her bare chest. Hands on hips, staring back at teenaged fan-boys, she’s confident, sexy and young. On the front, she’s wearing a leather jacket and skin tight jeans. Her expression isn’t straight-up come-on. There’s a placid, almost lost, look in her eyes. She’s a pretty girl tarted up for her big career move, surrounded by her band: three shaggy reprobates. One is guzzling beer and sticking his hand down his pants. Another holds a cigarette and a beer and leers at the camera, as though to say, “yeah she’s barely legal and we’ve all done her.”<br /><br />Suzi Quatro started out as a fifteen year old bass player in a band called The Pleasure Seekers. Going from sex to motherhood, that group evolved into Cradle. Mickey Most, like a music-biz pimp turning out his latest find, saw Suzi in ‘71 and moved her from her native Detroit to London. She had teenaged energy and good looks. But those aren’t that uncommon. The fact that she could really play bass set her apart, but her voice - something just one notch less annoying than a pantheress in heat - was exactly right for the moment. Her combination of androgynous feline yelping and soft-porn breathy whispers hit the record-buying mainline in ‘73. It’s sleaze all the way: “Glycerine Queen,” “Skin Tight Skin,” “Primitive Love,” “Shine My Machine,” and a very odd cross-gender rendition of “I Wanna Be Your Man.” The time was ripe for this kind of titillation. When a teenaged girl in black leather wails that she wants to be somebody’s man, it stirs troubling impulses in many hearts.<br /><br />Maybe it was just a cheap commercial ploy - glam had broken big the year before, with plenty of rock musicians playing in the shallows of the turbid queer pond. And the hits here, “48 Crash” and “Can the Can” are basically catchy nonsense. There are some oblique bestiality references, but it certainly doesn’t add up to the battle cry for any sexual revolution. Suzi yelps about tigers and a “feline touch,” a boyfriend named Eagle, “evil lovin,’” and then repeats the inane rhymey chorus: “Put your man in the can, get him while you can.” Pushing her voice just beyond her range was supposed to evoke excitement, but Suzi sounds slightly hysterical here, like a cheerleader who’s taken a few too many snorts from her mom’s benzedrine inhaler before the big game.<br /><br />The album contains an unsurprising mix of the sounds du jour: bluesy riffing, a little prog-rock keyboard noodling, a double-speed guitar solo. There are some T-Rex echoes. Slade and The Sweet too can be heard here, pop fodder teeny glitter. A whiff of rock and roll revival also floats off the disc (Suzi does “Shaking All Over” and “All Shook Up.”) It’s seldom noted, but the glam explosion was as much about the past as it was about the gender-bending gay-lib future. Shiny gold jackets, feathery boas, zoot-suit exaggeration - these come straight out of fifties-era show biz. Nobody ever topped Little Richard for outrageous gay wildness: gobs of makeup, huge hair, batting his eye-lids like neon butterflies. And he got there a whole generation before Bowie and Roxy and Jobriath.<br /><br />Even the name Suzi Quatro seems to point to the past: “Suzi” from the Cheese-Whiz fifties and “Quatro” from the original Star Trek. So it should come as little surprise that she ended her career in the pseudo-50s nostalgia atrocity “Happy Days,” playing a tough crypto-slut named Leather Tuscadero.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2