Lone Wolf, No Cub

Filler (Part Embarassing)

2010-02-08T09:56:00.000-08:00

You know, as time waylays us and the days go by, one often finds that...ah fukit--some more covers, because I am a lazy, lazy man. Sigh...

Ol' Dirty Bastard: Return to the 36 Chambers

Björk: Medúlla

Portal: Outre

Sausage: Riddles Are Abound Tonight

Skinny Puppy: Last Rights

Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath

Sigh: Imaginary Sonicscape

Bathory: Under the Sign of the Black Mark

Slayer: Reign in Blood

Bibio: Vignetting the Compost

Filler (Part Two)

2010-01-31T22:35:00.000-08:00

Damn--been a week already and I still haven't gotten to that post. I've been overwhelmed with all sorts of life changes (good ones), but I hope to get back on the ball tomorrow. Anyway, in the name of getting some shit posted up in here, here are ten more of my favorite album covers, just for the sheer hell of it:

Mastodon: Leviathan

Boris: Pink

The Rolling Stones: Goats Head Soup

Sunn O))): The Grimmrobe Demos

A Storm of Light and Nadja: Primitive North

Bathory: Blood on Ice

Bolt Thrower: Those Once Loyal

Vader: Impressions in Blood

Yaz (Yazoo): Upstairs at Eric's

Black Sabbath: Heaven and Hell

Filler (Part One)

2010-01-24T20:06:00.000-08:00

I really wanted to get the post I've been working on ("Under the Influence") up this week, but it's taking way longer than I thought it would (too damn long) and I'm sitting here amidst a pile of comics and books--scanned and unscanned--DVD screen captures and all kinds of other junk and I keep getting distracted by the aforementioned comics and books, unfinished art projects, old scans, and spaghetti westerns on IFC. Plus, I'm so jacked up right now on energy drinks and Mt. Dew that I don't know up from down. But I really, really wanted to get that thing posted. Or at least something. So, here are ten of my favorite album covers from my personal music collection (not necessarily my ten favorite ones) in no particular order. For no particular reason. 2TYS559HX2XG

Amon Düül II: Yeti

Akercocke: Words That Go Unspoken, Deeds That Go Undone

Eyvind Kang: Athlantis

Burzum: Filosofem

Neon Horse: Haunted Horse: Songs of Love, Defiance & Delusion

Electric Wizard: Witchcult Today

Bathory: Blood, Fire, Death

Earth: Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method

Animal Collective: People

Beastie Boys: To the 5 Boroughs

The Ivory Miniature Paintings of Francisco Goya

2010-01-17T19:22:00.000-08:00

"I want to see it painted, painted, painted, painted black"
-- from Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) has been my favorite artist for a very long time. He remains one of the most innovative artists in history, in terms of style, technique and even when it comes to the materials he used. He sometimes substituted thick, black printing ink for gesso, designed to darken with age, and even painted extensively onto the walls of his own home: Quinta del Sordo (The House of the Deaf Man).

Although I appreciate every single piece of Goya's that I've ever seen, no matter the medium, I've always been especially affected by his later works, which are predominantly darker in every sense of the word. For whatever reason, I'd somehow missed these tiny treasures until I stumbled upon them the other day by accident. During the winter seasons of 1824-25, Goya created these miniscule masterpieces, painted in watercolor on small pieces of ivory (I've included the dimensions in the captions of the reproductions to follow and I've strived to maintain as close an approximation to their actual sizes as possible.) Goya claims to have made nearly forty of these, when he was seventy-nine years of age. Tragically, many of them were lost. According to Antonio de Brugada, Goya's assistant at the time in Bordeaux, the artist's unique process was as follows:

"He blackened the ivory plaque and let fall on it a drop of water which removed part of the black ground as it spread out, tracing random light areas. Goya took advantage of these traces and always turned them into something original and unexpected."

The subject matter of these paintings is typical of Goya's last works: grotesqueries, witches, and mythological components, but the sheer expressiveness contained within them is an element unto itself. To capture such humanity utilizing mere inches of space is nothing short of extraordinary and is the very manifestation of the essence of a true master. Nothing I could write further would possibly add to them in any way, so I'll let the paintings speak for themselves. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Boy Staring at an Apparition

1824-25

Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 2 5/16 x 2 3/8

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Reclining Nude

1824-25

Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 3 7/16 x 3 3/8

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Monk and Old Woman

1824-25

Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 2 1/4 x 2 1/8

Princeton University Art Museum

Two Children Looking at a Book

1824-25

Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 2 1/16 x 2 1/16

Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

Maja and Celestina
1824-25
Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 2 1/8 x 2 1/8
Private collection

Man Looking for Fleas in His Shirt

1824-25
Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 2 3/8 x 2 5/16
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Heads of a Child and an Old Woman
1824-25
Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 2 3/16 x 2 3/16
Private collection

Head of a Man
1824-25
Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 2 3/16 x 2 3/16
Private collection

Woman with Clothes Blowing in the Wind

1824-25
Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 3 9/16 x 3 3/4
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Judith and Holofernes

1824-25

Carbon black and watercolor on ivory, 3 9/16 x 3 5/16

Private collection

Where Is the Essence That Was So Divine? (PART TWO)

2010-01-13T19:28:00.000-08:00

"Kodachrome
They give us those nice, bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away"

— from Kodachrome by Paul Simon

My very favorite album of all time, if I had to choose one to take to a desert island, would have to be David Sylvian's: Secrets of the Beehive. Or, at least, that's what I would have answered until fairly recently. Now, I have no idea. I mean, a desert island album is serious business. Back when I first listened to it, I was enraptured not only by the music, which employs a vivid sort of melancholy and yes, nostalgic manipulation, but of the highly personal nature of the lyrics themselves; that is, personal to David Sylvian. They would also become very personal to me as well, as each verse seemed to punctuate the very events of my life as they unfolded all around me. It became the "soundtrack of my life", for a time, and I listened to it everywhere. I listened to it when I drove, when I was in the shower, in bed at night; I listened to it as I sat in the backyard late into the witching hour, staring at the stars and plotting my escape. I listened to it when I made said escape. I listened to it while walking the streets of Saratoga Springs and during the hell that later unfolded on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line. I listened to it as I crossed the border of this country and I listened to it as I made the long journey back home, half-alive and forever changed.

And I listened to it right up to the point when, not long ago now, I immediately ejected it from my car stereo after only a few seconds and realized that I just can't. Not now, maybe never—I just can't listen to it anymore. It's not as if I'd merely burned myself out on it, like I'd done with Pink Floyd's: The Wall, nor did it just make me extremely sad, like Willie Nelson's Redheaded Stranger never, ever fails to do. This was something else—some phantom assault not on my senses, but by them. Some foul metamorphosis had occurred between then and now; a betrayal of sorts, as an unspoken alliance was severed with nothing new to take its place. This all seems sort of silly and melodramatic to me, seeing it spelled out like this here, but it's the closest approximation to how I felt at the time. It was as if Secrets of the Beehive—thought by me at the time, if thought of at all, to be a mere backdrop, had manifested itself as an unseen companion during my travels and travails—a witness, not quite mute, but still incapable of dispensing any new knowledge or concepts.

Most everyone reading this, I imagine, has been through trying times or periods of intense or weird experiences with friends or companions. At the end of such an ordeal, all parties often find themselves utterly exhausted—physically, mentally and spiritually (I experienced this most vividly while doing my student teaching in a Kindergarten class, after a "lockdown drill"). With nothing more to say or do, each goes his or her separate way and may not see the other people involved for a very long time. When they finally do, they may find it difficult, impossible, or even unnecessary to try and pick up where they left off. Maybe they never will. Yes, I'm completely aware that I'm writing about a CD that was released when I was in the seventh grade, and one I didn't discover until many years later, but it was almost exactly like that. It bore witness, within the context of my own completely subjective personal zeitgeist, to things that I've still not yet fully dealt with. In fact, I've attempted vainly to push them from my consciousness as much as I possibly can, even though I know exactly how such an endeavor must end. Perhaps Secrets of the Beehive holds the key to my own personal understanding at this particular crossroads of my existence--maybe I should listen to it. Maybe all would be revealed. But I'll never know, because I can't...

I've experienced this before, like I'm sure you have, but there is only one other personal example of this magnitude that I can recall. I grew up out in the country—not the suburbs, but what folks mean when they call it "the sticks". We didn't have cable, and satellite dishes were those giant things you saw dotting the landscape on rare occasions, and I think they cost like, fifty-thousand dollars or some shit, so my best friend (and only neighbor my age) and I relied largely upon our imaginations for entertainment. In those days, before video games would become the serpent in our little corner of Eden, we played outside almost all day, every day, rain, sleet, snow, or gloom of night. But there would come those days when it was just too shitty out, or too hot, and the parents were off at work, so our respective houses were like little temporary fiefdoms, and we'd watch videos until Inspector Gadget came on in the afternoon. Back in those days, we didn't have very many video tapes in our household collections (they too were like, fifty-thousand dollars), so we would watch the same ones, over and over again--usually these bizarre cartoons my mom would tape for me from channel 28 (which is now Fox). I still have them.

However, out of all the videotapes we owned, our most-watched one had to have been Saturday Night Live: The Best of Eddie Murphy. I forget where the tape itself came from, or whatever happened to it (I think my friend might have received it from a video club and didn't pay for any of the others), but it was such an ubiquitous presence in our isolated world, and we watched it so much, that it eventually became pretty much divested of any sole ownership. And goddamn, did we laugh. Laughed until tears streamed down our cheeks, especially at the part in the skit: Kill the White People, when Eddie Murphy's Rasta character stares down Tim Kazurinsky. I don't know why we found that as hilarious as we did. I guess you had to be there. I'm glad I was. To this day, I don't think I've ever laughed louder, harder, or more true.

A little over two years ago, my friend took his own life and I miss him. His death profoundly affected me in ways I could not have predicted. My birthday was a few weeks later, and my sister (who never forgets such things) bought me Saturday Night Live: The Best of Eddie Murphy on DVD. It was an extremely considerate and meaningful gift, and I was, and still am, very touched by the thoughtfulness behind it. I've never opened it. It remains buried under a stack of DVDs, still wrapped in plastic, the security stickers still in place. I never even tried because that one I know I can't watch. Someday I will—and I'll laugh—but never as loud or as true as I did before.

So, if any of you know the secret—whatever alchemical ingredients that are necessary to restore these totems to their former glory—please let me know. Because I miss whatever that was. That essence that was so divine remains the same: some archetypal force that conducts itself through each of us, no matter how strangely subjective the catalyst itself may be. Yet, as we each journey forward and form new allegiances, and new experiences, those old ghosts cannot help but cling. At least they do to me. Perhaps some part of me wants them to. Maybe I need them, for whatever reason, to do just that. That dark nostalgia remains a puzzling and enigmatic part of my life, and if you have no idea what I've been talking about, then what are you waiting for? Find the soundtrack to your own life, no matter where it may be taking you, and simply push "play". But don't say I didn't warn you.

END.

Where Is the Essence That Was So Divine? (PART ONE)

2010-01-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

"Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things remind me of you"

-- from These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)

lyrics by Holt Marvell

Memory—sometimes faulty, other times all-too hauntingly accurate in every minute detail—is a capricious bitch. The human animal, given an opportunity to create himself anew each and every day will, more often than not, shackle himself to a warehouse of distorted memories he has accumulated and believes himself to be made up of entirely (in tandem with his own absurd visions of his future—absurd because they have not yet happened, and may not, and are entirely unfathomable). This omnipresent "memory of future's past" then becomes a great millstone around his neck, and grasping it more firmly than perhaps he does anything else, he thus plunges into a roiling sea of chaos and wonders, more absurdly still, why he continues to sink. Holding a tenuous tether of falsehoods and half-truths, as he navigates a labyrinth of his own creation, he fails, time and time again, to see that which is most important: the here and now—the only true reality there is. And even that may not be as it seems. The so-called "wild" animal—the wise animal—simply is. He is the sum total of what he sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches, and to such a being there is nothing else, nor should there necessarily be.

As Mark Twain wrote, in The Mysterious Stranger: "Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!" The wild animal knows this (ironically through not “knowing” it at all), while the human animal continues to struggle, day in and day out; defined by a future’s past that could be easily exorcised if only he allowed himself to truly and simply be. Here and now. There is nothing else.

Yet, no matter how much we attempt to access and appreciate the here and now, our senses can sometimes betray us. If I catch a whiff of CK1 for example, I’m transported quite vividly into a fairly recent past time and place, complete with all its attendant distortions. Goodnight Irene will always remind me of my grandmother, the movie The Stoned Age of my brother, and I cannot, to this day, eat Life cereal without associating it with Vincent Price in The Fly because I ate some while watching it as a child and it made me sick. Had that not happened, I would most likely be able to eat Life cereal without thinking of much of anything, as I do with Lucky Charms or Boo Berry (mmmmm, Boo Berry). The same would probably hold true regarding the other two examples had they not been fixed within a similar, indelible context. Whatever the case, for me at least, these associations seem to be permanent and they also seem to be wedged all up in my gray matter and shit, tight. This phenomenon can be somewhat pleasant at times (as in the aforementioned examples re. my family), or much less so (as in the hairy fly legs floating somewhere in my bowl of cereal), but in either case, they seem almost as real as anything else and resist most, if not all, attempts at banishment. Fortunately, most of the time this phenomenon manifests itself in a fairly innocuous guise—I’ll remember some wise-ass comment a friend and I made while watching a particular movie during each subsequent viewing (rarely is the movie “ruined” for me). However, on occasion, this small mind-rape can take on new and powerful forms.

I imagine that we all have one—a song, or a whole album that we simply can’t listen to, or a movie we can no longer watch, for whatever reason(s). This is entirely separate from its sister phenomenon (which I like to call “Reservoir Dogs Syndrome”, or RDS) in which a thing no longer remotely appeals to us in the way it once did. An example of RDS would be when, about ten years ago, I stumbled upon a Benny Hill VHS box set that was dirt cheap and purchased it with absolutely no hesitation. I hadn’t watched Benny Hill in eons, so my gluttonous enthusiasm was based entirely upon my memories as a ten-year-old boy, staying up late at a friend’s house watching The Benny Hill Show with the sound turned low so his parents wouldn’t hear. There was something so ribald and forbidden fruit-ish about that experience that my ever-faulty, decade-plus (at the time of the box set purchase) memories didn’t just color The Benny Hill Show; they defined it completely. In my memory, there were gigantic, exposed French maid hooters bouncing all over the place and NC-17-style romps, with full penetration, in apple carts and haylofts. Sadly, this was not the case. I discovered, as some of you may have, that Benny Hill is only funny before you reach puberty. Indeed, I wonder sometimes if Benny Hill himself ever did [NOTE: However, I personally think his short film: The Waiters, with David Battley, is pure comic genius and I can’t recommend it highly enough].

The phenomenon I’m referring to is also entirely separate from “Reverse Reservoir Dogs Syndrome” (or RRDS), in which something appeals to you in a way in which it never hitherto existed. For example, my middle-age appreciation of the films of Werner Herzog, the music of AC/DC, the literature of James Joyce, and the artwork of Jack Chick. Or my newfound tastes for food such as olives and sauerkraut, both of which I once despised. Nor is it the Total Mindfuck (TMF), like my futile lifelong quest to find out why Bea Arthur’s cantina scenes were missing from every version of Star Wars I ever watched, because I knew for a fact I had seen her in the role of cantina bartender the first time I'd watched it at the drive-in with my parents when I was three. It wasn’t until years and years later, when a friend lent me a bootleg of The Star Wars Holiday Special, that—Bam!—I had an epiphany, like remembering your uncle felt you up in a barn when you were twelve or something, in which I discovered just how much of my childhood was fabricated upon delusions. The world made some sort of awful sense for a second. Then it didn’t once again.

No—what I intend to write about, while perhaps related in some nebulous way to RDS, RRDS and TMF, is a much more insidious creature than the three combined. While my post-pubescent re-evaluation of Benny Hill caused only the most minor of ripples in my own personal stream—his absence in my life is not felt on any real level, deep or otherwise, nor are my childhood memories shattered beyond all redemption—this ghostly phenomenon that clings so tightly adds absolutely nothing; it only subtracts. It robs, rearranges and replaces; insinuating itself into those most harrowing crevices of our minds we thought long since sealed, using our very senses themselves as willing, or unwilling, agents of betrayal. I cannot even come up with a name to do it justice. “Dark Nostalgia” is the best I can muster.

Dark Nostalgia is perhaps most profusely illustrated in the film Hounddog, as Dakota Fanning’s Lewellen is brutally robbed of the very song which had perpetually held all of her hopes and dreams. It’s what idiots mean when they say: “George Lucas raped my childhood”, and what silver screen drifters represent when, as if under a spell, they slowly and melodramatically drop their last timeworn quarter into the tavern jukebox and cradle their furrowed brows on the forearm of their army jackets and peer downward as if the answer is printed on the scuffed up tops of their fossilized cowboy boots. And the whole bar stops, frozen in some bastard dimension, as the first strains of ________ start to play, and they all stare for a second, sheepishly, then turn away, one by one. Because the whole sordid story—the woman he left behind, the other woman, the women yet to come—the whole thing plays out, all in a few seconds in pantomime, and they all know because there’s a song on that jukebox for each and every one of them too, and they all have quarters jingling in front pockets that, very, very wisely, stay shut. This time.

(END PART ONE)