Promo for a Local Vegas Horror Event With My Music In It...

PollyGrind Friday the 13th Rewind Weekend Series (2012 promo) from Chad Clinton Freeman on Vimeo.

Ah, life's ironies. A track I wrote on GarageBand software in late 2005/early 2006 sometime while I was still involved in the art scene in New York, at the same time I wrote Hollywood Wiretapping and released the first (and only still available) issue of an art book/publication AeonElectron. Where is it now? It's being used to promote local Vegas Neo-grindhouse/horror events. I would not have seen that one coming. With regards to the film footage, I am sad to say, that is me in the beginning. It is unused footage from the film Johnny Reaper by Michael Zayas. I'm not sure why that thing is not on-line yet. I apologize for my repulsiveness in this clip. 1. I am trying to loose weight 2. the camera ads weight. 3. I was told to play a crazy homeless person. 4. I still look better than Genesis P. Orridge.

Artwork by Voivod's Drummer Away

I've mentioned Voivod on numerous blog posts. I've also slapped paintings of Human Centipede 2 director Tom Six's paintings and Rozz Williams of Christian Death's film on Jerry Magoo. I also just posted video art by John Zewizz of Sleep Chamber. The next step of course, is to get some artwork by someone from Voivod, and it so happens of course that someone in Voivod was a visual artist. This was MICHEL "AWAY" LANGEVIN. I've been a longtime fan of his illustrations for the Voivod album covers. In the 80's Away really accomplished something as formidable in artwork as in music. To match Voivod' science fiction themes and obsession with post-nuclear mutant warriors and such, Away created a visual language of expression to go with it. Not surprisingly, it looks a lot like comic book art. He has had a real look to his art. I'm particularly a fan of his poster and t-shirt designs. I don't really have any ambition of becoming a rock star or anything anymore, but I'd like to play in band that covered Joy Division and Voivod, which would be called Joyvod, until we recorded an album worth of Oi covers, at which point we'd be called Oivod.

Sleep Chamber

John Zewizz is seriously underrated. It has become cliche to describe this and that as underrated, but John Zewizz, he is underrated in my eyes. He was the focal point figure in the Boston area goth band Sleep Chamber from the 80's and 90's, a band I remember well from high school and a band that probably doesn't get played or listened to nearly enough. They where in it from the beginning in the early 80's, but they've never been a band that people seem to bring up in conversation or know about much. That's kind of a shame. They got fairly into the longer soundscape side of things.He was in T.O.P.Y, (Temple ov Psychick Youth) which is that cult that Genesis P. Orridge had in the early 80's, but he apparently Zewizz broke away from it. Zewizz did, however, retain that odd spelling that Genesis P. Orridge uses. That's good that Zewizz broke away from that, because as I've written many times elsewhere I've grown sick of and disillusioned with Genesis P. Orridge, some of these other somewhat akin figures like Rozz Williams , Ian Curtis and John Zewizz still fascinate me. Zewizz is obscure and also prolific. You never hear him anywhere or about him anywhere, and there's hours and hours of great music by him floating around, some of which is a very clear goth rock kind of thing, but a lot of which is lengthy sonic exploration. I hate using the term "experimental" in this context because goth music itself is generally fairly marginal and he was involved in the genre at the very beginning, so saying that an early goth band was 'experimental' is redundant and vague. The other thing that strikes me about Sleep Chamber is how much they played top the connection that goth music had to the whole fetish S&M scene, which became really focal in Sleep Chamber. Since it was a male singer it was like a sexually aggressive male asserting himself on the world. Getting a bald spot and a pot belly did nothing to deter him either! Oh well, it wasn't as bad as Genesis P. Orridge and those stupid looking breast implants. That to me has always had a kind of campy or humorous value, intentional or not. Sleep Chamber is truly unique in that as campy as Sleep Chamber they were also a very innovative band- and the better bands around these days like Xeno & Oaklander or Children of Technology seem to agree. I find digging through weird old goth or metal bands far more rewarding then listening to current bands. One side of the coin is Venom, Voivod, Celtic Frost, and the beginnings of Norwegian black metal, the other side of the coin is Christian Death, Sleep Chamber,Joy Division,Bauhaus, Death in June, Executive Slacks or whoever else. Why am I so into these kinds of bands? Well, to be honest, it's because I can't stay in my house all day listening to Michael Savage on the radio and watching Human Centipede 2 over and over again. I'm getting close, but I'm not quite there yet. That's my heartfelt ambition, but I'm not there yet. I have to dig up some decrypt goth culture from my childhood or some black metal periodically. There is an odd and un-explained, in truth unexplainable, drive within my psyche, a compulsion, to be a fan and only to be a fan of certain goth bands and certain metal bands- and that drive his been encouraged by the success of blogs on that topic. If you want to really look at the provocative and central issues, take a long look at Michael Savage and Human Centipede 2, Savage is still not allowed to step foot in the U.K. and they only let Human Centipede 2 in after something like 32 cuts. That actually shows that there are filmmakers and authors that are still challenging the social order in substantial ways. The old goth and metal albums are not as explosive to examine as that, but there is still that curious compulsion. Also, I live in Las Vegas so I hear all the commercial pop music when I have to buy a nail clipper from the casino gift shop or whatever, I don't need to be bombarded with that in my own room. Then of course, there's his video art. Just like Orridge had a a bunch of strange video art and Rozz Williams made that bizarre film just before he died, Zewizz has plenty of incoherent video art to show the world, centering around occult and religious iconography, abstract forms, and seemingly hypnotic optical illusions. What is it and what does it mean? Zewizz would likely tell you that what he is doing is a form of ritualistic magic. I haven't done strong illegal psychedelics like LSD in many years and do not hear voices in my head, so I'm a little skeptical about that. However, if this kind of video art was driven by inner madness, then that makes it of course no less intriguing. There is something about to these old goth bands like Christian Death of Sleep Chamber, and I'm opened minded enough to include their video work in that sentiment. ` Zewizz disappeared completely for a while. My understanding of what happened was that Zewizz had a really bad heroin problem, and then to make matters worse, in the late 90's, there was an unsolved case where a Swedish nanny was found murdered on his block, and he was investigated as a suspect or person of interest by Boston police in the murder, because he was into black magic and it was right on his block. Apparently, this made his drug problems and mental health issues a lot worse, and he dropped out of sight for a while. It's a very unfortunate story. He's floating around on-line lately I've seen, he now spells Sleep Chamber "Sleepchamber". He's…he's weird. I never met him,I don't think the murder was him, but he's weird.

Babes (1991 TV Show)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ssgOyL0JLM (cut and paste link into browser) I would like to point to the aesthetics of the short-lived and now impossible to find television show Babes from the early 90's. It did not make it through more than a season. is largely forgotten, and for good reasons. Babes is about three overweight sisters who live together in the same apartment in a city somewhere. Babes is really the depths of bad television. It does not in a anyway deviate from the norms of the sitcom formula and revolves almost purely on fat jokes. There is a reoccurring- that's right- repeated- gag about the three sisters lying in the same bed and the bed collapsing. The joke- which of course is not that funny to begin with- was frequently repeated. as with other film and television that no longer has any financial value worth suing over, it has resurfaced in bits and pieces on youtube. So far as I could find, there wasn't even a full episode available on there. This is culture that has become very marginal not because of any deliberate transgression or because of a lack of advertising budget behind it at the time. This is culture that exists in an extreme margin because it was actually too stupid for the television consuming masses. It fascinates because it is completely repulsive and mongoloid. Babes is unbearable- an extreme flop in television history. It revolved around fat jokes that fell completely flat. Babes is the intellectual equivalent of announcing at an important business meeting that you've just defecated in your pants deliberately. The artist Mike Kelley made some similar observations about the Baby Huey cartoons. There are some fairly washed up people still flopping around the art world left over from the 80's and 90's. I worked for the art magazine TRANS>arts.cultures.media back in the 90's as an intern, I should know. One of the most tedious things I've ever done is trim down lengthy text from a recording of the artists Tony Ousler and Mike Kelley for an article for TRANS. It was like water-boarding. It was an internship too so I didn't get paid. Mike Kelley's name comes up in some context or other every so often. I'm not a huge fan. There's a video that was posted of him on the Jerry Magoo blog that I write for sometimes that sort of annoys me. There were a serious of YouTube videos that were done as adds for the music store Amoeba Records where various people show what they've purchased at the store. He goes through his CDs, he goes through Sun Ra, Joe Meek, etc. with the kind of pseudo-intellectualism that an employee at a store Other Music in New York has about obscure art rock bands. Here's the ad that was on Jerry Magoo once again. i find it more annoying than anything else. There is this one essay by Mike Kelley that does kind of work, where he writes about the old Baby Huey cartoons and how they succeed as art because if you watch them as an adult they will make you extremely uncomfortable. The essay is called Filmic Regressions: The Baby and Baby Huey. It deals with a film from the 70s that I haven't scene from the 70's called The By and with the old Baby Huey cartoons. It went into more specific detail then this, but the essay Kelley wrote about how very uncomfortable, how unbearable it is to watch the old Baby Huey cartoons as an adult, and that this very discomfort made Baby Huey cartoons successful as art. They're utterly infantile. It's children's entertainment with no real educational value. The infantilism of it will simply make your skin crawl. Of course, Mike Kelley's right- it is very difficult to sit down to watch a fat retarded duck as an adult. Observe: if you can sit through this crap for more then a minute to two, you've got me beat; in so far as that is true the psychology of it is sort of interesting. Right up there with Babes.

Kim Jong-Il's Monster Movie Pulgasari!

Cinephile, communist, ladies man, and Hennessy drinker Kim Jong-ill has passed on. The leader for years of North Korea has passed. The first book I released had Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein, and Michael Jackson on the cover. All three of them are dead and the U.S. war in Iraq is over. The idea was actually that I had this very luddite understanding of the world and that I could express this luddite understanding by throwing people who'd gone insane in the eye of electronic media. I don't like the book. I did read a lot of biographical data about Kim Jong-Il. Wow, was he a freak! I was deeply depressed when I wrote Electric Beauty and the Beast. I recall that one of the few things that really was break from that depression was reading up on Kim Jong-Il. He had his favorite South Korean director and the director's wife his favorite film star kidnapped to make a monster movie. Pulgasari. Years later, I found the film on-line, but by then I had moved onto reviewing cult films. In Medieval North Korea the local village has a sever problem with the Emperor’s oppressive forces, who want their iron tools used for farming to make into weapons. When the village blacksmith is captured he creates a small metal statue out of a clump of rice, a feet I must say I was very impressed by. When his daughter accidentally pricks her finger and blood is dropped the statue turns into an adorable metal creature that eats iron, then gets bigger and bigger by eating more iron. He becomes a Godzilla sized monster that assists the proletariat revolt, (it was made in North Korea) in destroying the forces of the emperor, but when his unstoppable appetite for iron becomes a threat to the villagers and the good workers of the village, Pulgasari makes the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good of the people, in a very touching final sequence, Pulgasari becoming kind of a communist mascot for the North Korean people. This is actually a very fun and easy film to watch, I strongly recommend it. The little Pulgasari is cute and fun and would make an excellent pet. When it jumps out and starts taking a bite out of swords, LOL! The communist message of unity and sacrifice for the greater good of the worker’s revolution makes this film distinct from other Asian monster movies. The soundtrack is a very cool communist 80s synthesized sound, likely to remind people of the Legendary Pink Dots. Kim Jong-Il actually managed to produce a fun little film on this one, even if he had to employ kidnapping as the means to do so. It should be of note that death by starvation, a daily reality in the socialist utopia of North Korea, features prominently as a theme in this film. I want to get a pet baby Pulgasari. The film has of course re-incarnated on YouTube. Here's an excerpt:

The House on the Edge of the Park (Review with Full Movie)

The topic that has come up today is the astoundingly stupid. I was surprised that someone actually found my blog by looking up Electric Turn To Me. If you were in New York around 2003 you might vaguely recall this band playing small local clubs and art events. It's unlikely, but you might. Some music critic at the time, I think it might have been for the Village Voice compared Electric Turn To Me to Christian Death. Here's a question for you, how old was Christian Death lead vocalist Rozz Williams when the first Christian Death album came out? He was 18 years old. Christian Death are generally considered a "goth" band, the first Christian Death album was released in 1981, the term "goth" was likely less then a year old at that point. That is to say he played in one of the very first bands of an entire genre while he was in his teens. Rozz Williams level of innovation is roughly comparable to that of Ian Curtis of Joy Division- except Rozz lasted ten more years then Ian Curtis before killing himself in the same manner, so there's ten years more of Rozz. Few people even remember Electric Turn to Me they had veritably no impact whatsoever. Thirty years later, the music of an eighteen year old Rozz Williams is still very much with us and has a global following. That is such a stupid comparison. As stupid as that is, I also just saw not the worst movie I've ever scene but certainly the movie with the stupidest trick ending I'm aware. The House on the Edge of The Park it's called, an Italian filmed in New York from 1980. Here's the whole movie: SPOILER ALERT! The film starts out with this guy raping a woman. This rich couple come by the rapists auto-shop and invite him to a party with his ambiguously mentally challenged side-kick. At the party, things turn ugly with the rapist and the side-kick raping and beating the party guest. This goes on for about an hour. Then the man who invited him to the party pulls out a gun, shots the rapists and reveals that he is the brother of the woman raped in the beginning, and it was all a set up so that they could get revenge on him for the rape. They let themselves get beaten and raped for an hour for that reason? That makes absolutely zero sense. It also is not revealed how they knew he was the rapist. Don't pay to watch this piece of crap movie. It is on YouTube in it's entirety, of course. It has a place a cinema history. I have never seen a film with a trick ending that stupid. In fact, I don't think I've seen a Scooby-Doo episode with a trick ending that stupid. That's right up there with ranking Electric Turn To Me with Rozz Williams.

The Best Bands You've Never Heard:Angel Witch, The Treacherous Three, Christian Death, and MORE!

The problem with doing blogging for me is that there is a rigid pattern to what I do that gets hits and what I do that the world ignores. If I post a short story, write directly about U.S. politics, write about literature, I generally won't get more then 10-30 hits. If I write about either a.) metal (in particular black metal) or a gothic/industrial music or b.) a movie that fits neatly into the horror/cult section, then I can get as many as several hundred hits. That doesn't mean that I will, it means that I can. The pattern is nearly without divergence. It becomes like playing two notes over and over again. There is some room within that for me to be a little bit Lester Bangs about it and interject humor and my own personality a little bit, but it's still very constraining. I don't even think it fully allows me to represent my musical tastes completely accurately. I've had a growing disillusionment with bands developing for years now, going back to about 2003. It is not what is of deepest interest or concern to me, to be honest. Musicians have annoying tendency to be far leftists. I've had crazy musicians send me threats on-line. It's a mess. It does happen that people e-mail my reviews to others or repost links to my bogs somewhere, which is flattering. That happened recently with something I wrote on Psychic TV, who I've grown to hate. I was in New York during the 2000's when The Strokes and dozens of fecal indie rock groups started getting tons of press for no good reason at all. If perhaps by blogging about better bands than that, I can steer fashions at all away from that happening again, then I will do my duty.One thing is that it does force me to really dig for music to write about. I just recently responded to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction choices for 2012 by noting that Guns N' Roses, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Beastie Boys were not the best bands of their times, and pointed to The Cult and Voivod as being better bands. But why stop at Voivod and The Cult? I think with rock and roll you do have to dig a little bit to get the real deal bands. There are utterly failed and pointless musicians and band that never got much attention because they didn't deserve it. Guns N' Roses and the Beastie Boys I would say were only really okay bands ever, and I think Red Hot Chili Peppers are actively a bad band. The Beastie Boys themselves were fast to point out they were ugh indebted to other lesser known bands. They cited The Slits, Bad Brains, X-ray Specks and an early hip-hop band I'd never heard of called the Treacherous Three. It makes sense, they started as a punk band and then got the white people playing black music bug and switched over to early hip-hop. I'm not a hip-hop person, but I looked up the Treacherous Three, which was sort of fun. Hip-Hop was a very different entity 30 years ago. With slight reservation, I guess it is fair to say that the punk bands that the Beastie Boys cited, The Slits, Bad Brains, and X-ray Specks probably also represent underrated and unsung pockets of music. I'm less crazy about the punk bands the Beastie Boys referenced. On the topic of bands to make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in recent years, Metallica is actually an amazing source of information on lesser known bands worth commenting on. Metallica recently did their thirtieth anniversary show which featured a whole slew of guest stars. The singer for a fairly obscure band Sweet Savage, Ray Haller, joined Metallica on stage: There are a number of excellent bands that might have disappeared into relative obscurity if not for Metallica sighting their influence or covering them. Diamond Head, Angel Witch,and Sweet Savage are underrated and excellent bands from the NWOBHM- New Wave of British Heavy Metal- period of late 70's early 80's heavy metal made a comeback in Britain. Metallica began almost as a NWOBHM cover band. Metallica have referenced these bands here or there. The entirity of the NWOBHM '79 Revisited collection that Lars Ulrich of Metallica compiled back in the 90's is available on YouTube, thankfully. Angel Witch I think are particularly good. I really feel they should have been huge, it just never quite happened. Of course, since I was upset to see The Cure nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but not make the final cut, that brings up the subject of goth again. With goth you can almost call the entire genre underrated. If you look back into the beginnings of goth, it is daunting to look at someone like Ian Curtis of Joy Division knowing that he created all the music he did before killing himself at the age of 24. For some reason he's on my mind today, but I think equally daunting if slightly well less known would be the case of original Christian Death lead singer Rozz Williams who also killed himself, but at the age of 34. There are movies about Ian Curtis, but i think Rozz Williams really is a largely unsung musical genius. Rozz Wiliams he had a couple of good bands, Premature Ejaculation, Shadow Project, along with Christian Death. It is sort of fun to try to imagine how popular music might sound different if the bands like the bands mentioned here had become as mainstream as Guns N' Roses or The Beastie Boys. It might be fun to see one or all of these unsung bands get an unexpected revival. As bands like the Strokes, Interpol, The White Stripes rose and grabbed far too much press, that was a real cancer upon the arts as far as I can see. It seems an unfortunate inevitability that bands and the whole culture of "projects", "shows", "'zines", "labels" etc. is going to remain central to the arts for a very long time. If I have to be exposed to it, I would rather that culture veer towards the influence of Rozz Williams or Angel Witch than towards the Strokes or Pavement or other such excrement. That's probably way too much to hope for. I think this crap with the hipsters and their fecal indie rock can keep going and going. Regardless, here's looking towards the future in 2012….

Short Story! The Waitress with a Gun to Her Head

Today was the day. He knew that, as a customer, he was finally going to get what he really wanted. He walked into the Denny's Behind the Stratosphere Hotel. As usual, it was full of tourists. He pulled the 1911 .45 from his jacket and fired a shot in the air. He grabbed a waitress by the back of the neck, and threw her down to the floor in front of him. She spilled coffee all over the carpet. He thought of the semen she was also about to spill all over the carpet, and chuckled to himself. "Okay listen up people. This hear waitress is going to suck my dick until completion and if anybody makes a move, I start shooting." The waitress with a gun to her head and undid his zipper and did as she was instructed. The old people, children, fat people, and every one else stood motionless. "And if we get around to it, I'll shit in your mouth for everyone when Im done." The bus boy had already dialed 9-11 hiding in the kitchen. Metro was on their way within seconds. He heard a chop shout "Move away, m'am." When he turned around he was shot in the shoulder. As the assailant fell to the ground, he laughed. "In my final moments I was free. I was free in ways you'll never understand." The cop moved in closer. "In my final moments I was above your laws. The legal system, and even more basic laws we take for granted. Manners. Taboos. I was beyond all that for an instant." He smiled at the cop. "And in that instant I knew a joy beyond all you understand." The cop looked quizzically at the dying man as paramedics arrived. The assailant coughed up some blood and muttered something barely intelligible, something about finally getting customer satisfaction. The assailant died very quickly. The cop thought to himself for a second. It was funny, they'd have to do an investigation, determine if he was on drugs, or off his medication, all of that. It was all kind of a mote point. The assailant actually said more or less why he had done what he had done. There was a certain logic to it. Why he used this waitress and not a super model was unclear to the cop. The waitress was only okay looking.

In Goth Daze

I was exposed to this album in High School back in 1994 when it came out. It's not what I care the most about, but you can only write about Human Centipede 2 so many times and when I write about Michael Savage's show it doesn't get many hits.You can get the CD on Amazon for something like 5 bucks at this point. The compilation released by Cleopatra Records contained both then current bands (Switchblade Symphony) and bands who had been and gone from back in the 80's (Executive Slacks from Philadelphia, Specimen). The sound of bands from the 80's and bands from the early 90's wasn't radically different, it was much a continuation. The definition of the term "gothic" in music seems to have shifted radically in places since the release of In Goth Daze. There's a label out of Germany that's been putting out these compilations I've been curious about lately called Gothic Spirits1-14 and Gothic Romance 1-4. A lot of the music on them are not bands that sounds like what was called "goth" in the 80's and early 90's much. They contain bands that are much closer to being an operatic metal, bands like Nightwish. The better part of 20 years after it's release, I can see quite clearly that many of the tracks from this album have gotten 20,000 plus hits on Last.fm, which indicates that the audience for this material is alive and well. In fact, just today a blog I wrote got a hit from someone looking for the lyrics to "Last Remains" by Carcrash International featured on this collection. A month before this CD came out, i studied with the author Rick Moody, who was then featured in Details and everything at the time. I've blogged about Rick Moody, and blogs I've written about bands then released on Cleopatra Records get more hits then on Rick Moody. If you consider all the bands that remained unsigned or had trouble getting club gigs at all, that's really impressive that decades later that these bands still pulling in listeners. This collection still listens well, not everything of that era or genre does to me. For example, the same record label at the time was re-releasing chunks of the old Psychic TV catalogue, which I've written about being painfully sick of. It could be the case that you could hear the full album by some of the bands on this one and be deeply disappointed, and that you would find that some of these bands really only did one or two good songs. As a kind of brief "best of" for smaller goth bands from the years 1980-1994, it's fairly representative. The same label Cleopatra put out many such compilations, this one is probably the most memorable or my favorite. There's another one called The Whip which is fairly good. I wouldn't say that In Goth Daze is completely comprehensive. It doesn't have all those ambiguously Nazi bands like Death in June, nor does it have all those new age sounding "ambient" bands that appeared on Projekt Records. There are other collections floating around of those. The Projekt bands I know did not sell many records relatively speaking anyway, so I don't know how many people really care about those bands anyway. Cleopatra grabbed a nice cross section of bands for this one. Carcrash International were highly derivative of Joy Division, but if you have to be derivative of someone, make it the greatest ever. That's probably the biggest musical criticism I can make of any band on this completion. People make fun of the overstated romanticism and melancholy of gothic music. It doesn't compare to the self-absorption of indie rock, then again, what does? Tight, simple- delay effects on the guitars, maybe a drum machine beat, and lots of make-up and hairspray. That to me means rock and roll of my youth. This album is probably better then anything that's come out since.

Review: The Necro Files

Here are some real depths of First of all, I can not properly call this a film review. That is because the Necro Files from 1997 was not filmed, but rather video taped, perhaps on a camcorder, in Seattle. It contains rather extreme violence and sexual content from start to finish. None of the violence can be taken at all seriously due to the unprecedentedly poor acting and special effects. There is a scene early on in in which a "baby" is sacrificed by Satanists in which the baby is clearly an ordinary plastic baby doll. This bares repeating- they did not have the budget to get a real infant that could be used for the scene. The baby comes back to life later and the film with the magical ability to fly- the problem there in being that the string that the baby is visible.There is, however, a lot of rape and sexual content that could really raise eyebrows. It opens with a 90's goth chick in a shower, and she gets raped by serial killer who cuts her nipple off with a knife, eats it, and then vomits it out in the sink. All of this is done with the worst special effects you've ever seen. A couple of cops show up. It's revealed the serial killer took the life of the sister of one of the cops, and then the other cop flips out and shoots the serial killer. After that, a bunch of robed Satanists are scene at the gravesite performing a baby sacrifice at the tomb of the serial killer, who comes back to life, and rips the penis off one of the Satanist. On the topic of male frontal nudity, the zombie has a giant penis that's hanging out through his fly for a good chunk of the film. There are quite a few very graphic scenes of the zombie raping 90's goth chicks with his elongated zombie phallus. The mask of the zombie is pretty much a rubber mask you might find at a Halloween shop. It would not surprise me if it was from a Halloween shop Meanwhile, the cops are after the zombie serial killer, as well as the baby from the sacrifice, who has come back to life and know also the ability to fly. The zombie chases after two of the Satanists. One of the Satanist is killed by the flying baby. There's some subplot about one of the cops going loose cannon and doing a whole bunch of drugs. It doesn't make a lot of sense. There's a final confrontation between the cops, the flying baby, and the zombie rapist. Somewhere in there the zombie rapes and kills a goth chick who is playing with a blow up doll, and there's a curious bit about the zombie falling in love with the blow-up doll. None of it can be taken seriously for a second in any way whatsoever. If you are not laughing at the special effects, you're laughing at the over the top lewdness of the film. Then there's the whole bit with the goth chicks getting raped with the giant zombie penis. All the women that get raped on screen look like members of Switchblade Symphony. I don't know what the director's fetish for raping goth chicks was all about. The shock value of the sexual content is seriously offset by the string the flying baby is hanging from. And then there's very specific 90's references that feel rally dated- one of the satanist's has a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt, the title is a play on the X-files, a very popular TV show at the time. This thing is goth people in the 90's screwing around with camcorders. If you play me some band from 1980-1994 or so that wore thick black eye make-up and a lot of hairspray that never made much money doing what they do, in particular if they were big on drum machines and echo pedals, then you've found the sound of my adolescences. I'll probably still even tell you that these were unsung musical geniuses. The In Goth Daze compilation- that's my album right there. I don't know if I could say they same about video output. I got a good chuckle out of the Necro Files. I'm not sure I would say that it was genius or anything. I doubt anyone has heartfelt nostalgia for it.

Lou Reed and Metallica Lose Even Me

Up until this point I was one of the few people who liked the Lou Reed and Metallica collaboration, an album almost universally panned as a bomb of a project. Lou and the boys finally lost even me. It was the video that did it. Daren Aronofsky, who directed the unbearably bad film Pi was called in to handle the video. And here it is- Notice how it is a boring black and white video of Lou and the boys doing the song without anything else going on. You call in a big shoot Hollywood director and all he comes up with is this? That's extremely stupid. There's some double exposure effect, and beyond that, it's Lou and the boys playing in Metallica's studio. That's a choice I don't really get, especially with Lou Reed going on and on about hanging out with Warhol and Warhol's experimental cinema, etc. I really don't get how this was going to turn around the public perception of the album as a catastrophic artistic failure. It won't. The pubic perception is that the album is really just Lou Reed doing a bunch of spoken word over repetitive metal riffs from Metallica. That's sort of what it is. I actually hear a lot more then that going on in the music. From footage of live performances a lot of the guitar parts you might think are Metallica are actually Lou Reed. As for the video I don't see anything of interest going on. So they lost even me eventually. It's unfortunate. For a while, I believed that this particular album would lead rock out of the kind of dark ages that it's been in for about ten years where The Strokes and The Killers started getting a lot of press. The Strokes were somehow safe and acceptable to sell vodka and American Apparel clothing, and so they won the lottery and became the new face not only of rock but of the arts in a more general sense. If that's a world dying, it is dying because rent is now in New York three times what it is in Las Vegas. You could take current metal bands or goth bands over The Strokes. I certainly would. I can go on and on about the Primitive North America compilation and the Metalhit Free Download Series, the Gothic Daydreams compilation, but none of those bands are doing anything that truly radical that I've heard. Akitsa is probably the closest. It was not the disappointment of the season. Large chunks of Philip K. Dick's notebook were just released that consist of schizophrenic religious rantings for hundreds of pages. That thing is an abortion. If anybody really came off well on the Lou Reed and Metallica project, it was me. I was able to expand my readership substantially by writing about the project. However, that was more true of other topics this summer and fall- Human Centipede 2, for example. Perhaps, when IFC releases Human Centipede 2 I will probably hide in my room and watch it over and over again and listen to a whole lot of Michael Savage.

Pete the Retarded Pedophile (Short Story)

Child molestation and pedophiles just keep coming up. First there was the scandal over at Penn State, now there's the one at Syracuse. It's everywhere. It's in the national news and in it's in the local news here in Vegas. I never got the whole kiddie porn thing. I mean, I like women with large breasts. I'm not gay, but I'd have thought, you know, they'd be drawn to a big dick, right? I don't get it In my room over at the Bunkhouse I overheard this guy yelling over the phone "I'm not your lawyer! Shut the fuck up you pervert! You pervert with your 12-year-old girls" and the last thing the man said was "I have no son." Over and over again, "I'm not your lawyer, pervert". Good God, I'm glad I didn't find out more about that. Then that fat guy at the Denny's on Boulder Highway, he was telling me that from being a social worker, he'd learned to hate shrinks. I asked to give me an example. "Well, I work with retarded people. And one of the retarded people I worked with was this retarded pedophile named Pete." "Was he victim of sexual abuse?" "No. Not that I know of, at least. Pete is retarded to the point of being mentally about twelve years old. He'd gotten in trouble for touching little girls. I think he just likes sex. He likes to be in control and he can manipulate little children. Anyway, Pete's big thing was that he said he wanted a scooter. and the shrink would ask 'how does that make you feel?' feel and all that. The shrink was buying it all. Pete was making it like he wanted the scooter to get out and meet people in the community. I told the shrink 'I think Pete wants the scooter so he can touch children.' and the shrink goes into how Pete hasn't touched anyone in years and this and that. Well, I went to my superiors and they told me to listen to what the shrink says and write a grant to get Pete the scooter. I said 'he wants a scooter so he can molest little girls'. They told me to write the grant anyway. And the grant to get Pete a scooter went through. Oh, guess what happened? Pete used the scooter go molest a little girl again." I suppose that would be one reason to be mistrustful of shrinks. Well, back at the Bunkhouse bar, Cowboy James was smoking and having some Jack telling me a whole a bunch of stories about working as a security guard, and pedophiles comes up again. "You know Gables down the street? They just busted a child prostitution ring and there and the cops who did it was saying that the oldest girl they pulled out of there was thirteen years old." "Mexicans" the bartender asked Cowboy James. "Blacks. " Cowboy James answered " My friend Ray did the arrest. Now he's a father of girls about that age,so he really had a hard time with it. You see that's why I could never be a cop. If I was making that arrest I think my gun might just accidentally go off." Cowboy James chuckled and sipped his Jack. I laughed. Cowboy James is alright. He's a little bit of a braggart sometimes, but he's alright.

Film Review: Robot Monster

This film appears on many worst movies of all times type lists. It's a fairly preposterous film. In that I'm trapped in this situation in which only horror film reviews and metal reviews I write get many hits, I'd choose this one as being noteworthy. This is primarily for the very curious costume that was used for the villain. This consisted of a gorilla suit, except for the head, which appears to be a diving helmet. The film was originally in 3-D and released in the early 50's. The basic idea of the film is that this one family is left surviving on planet Earth after Ro-Man, the gorilla with a diving mask, has killed them all off with a death ray, because the scientist father has developed an antidote serum. For some reason the machines Ro-man uses to communicate spits bubbles. Ro-man is left to kill off the remaining humans. He's about to kill the eldest daughter in the family, but he develops feelings for her illogically. His superior kills him, and then it ends with little Johnny waking up after having hit his head. It has a big "it was all a dream…or was it?" kind of ending. Human Centipede 2 also has that kind of an ending unfortunately, but it was all so beautifully offensive that I forgive Tom Six. Robot Monster has a lot of footage of the man in the gorilla suit and diving mask walking through some empty desert, probably outside of Los Angeles. It's kind of hot when Ro-Man ties up the eldest daughter. I got a good chuckle at the costume but this is film is only at all remarkable for the very odd costume that was used. It's not unlike other 50's science fiction flicks. That costume though has become semi-iconic an image of b-films. Does Ro-man represent the machine? The atom bomb?The communist threat? The Freudian punishing father? Little Johnny's own repressed sexual drives? All of these things? None of these things? He's sort of curious in that he's a composite of the animal and the machine. He's laughable to anyone but a small child though, that much is sure. Here are some images I've attached from the film. You can take a look at them and ponder the curious nature of Ro-Man.

Video Review: The Cult: Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum

I'm in the process of refining my subject matter for writing very seriously. in the last six months, blog posts I've written have gotten somewhere around 5,000 hits, but close to a thousand of those hits were for two different posts. The answer to what they were completely blows my mind. The one got the most hits was a review of the single "Satanic Royalty" by Midnight for Jerry Magoo. I couldn't believe that, a.) it was someone else's idea and b.) I found it to be a relatively mediocre track. The other blog post that got a whole lot of hits was a review of the films Inseminoid and Humanoids from the Deep for my "solo" blog. That's even worse. I don't necessarily even consider those mediocre films, they're probably really actually poor films if I think about it for long. Hey, if that's what people like, inseminoid and "Satanic Royalty" by Midnight, that's the kind of thing I'll write about. Personally, I like the metal bands and the goth type bands, I like the horror films. Of course, I consider myself more than just someone who watches horror flicks and listens to metal and goth bands. That being the case, I may as well speak openly on my opinion on such things. I will here explore an example within the general topic of goth and metal music of the 80's, which I addressed in my review of "Satanic Royalty". If I had to rate my five favorite albums, they'd be about as follows 1. Joy Division: Closer 2. Voivod: War and Pain 3. The Cult: Love 4.The Cult:Dreamtime 5. Various Artists: In Goth Daze (goth compilation from Cleopatra Records) Those are albums I've known about for years and years and keep coming back to. If some young people interested in starting a new band approached me, I'd tell them to listen to those albums very, very closely. You'll notice that not one, but two early albums by The Cult appear on this list. The Cult began as a goth band under the names Southern Death Cult and Death Cult with vocalist Ian Astbury and ended the 80's as more or less an LA style hair metal band. Dreamtime and Love, their first and second album, are situated in a transitional period between those two polarities of sound. It's a distinctive sound. It's also a sound which a band would truly have to be able to play to create. The Cult was able to get away with it. They were able to get away with a lot- the singer Ian Astbury had a lyrical obsession with Native Americans and even tried desperately to look like one, but was in fact, British, though he was exposed to Native American culture by living near a Reservation outside of Montreal as a child. The other thing is that especially on the second of those albums, Love, they made musical and lyrical allusions to the 60's hippie movement, but the band members were about ten years to young to have had any direct involvement in it. A lot of early Cult has resurfaced in recent years. The above clip is from a live VHS called Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum from 1984. Footage from Dreamtime Live at the Lyceum ended up reincarnated on YouTube. The title is slightly misleading, many of the tracks on this release are not from the album Dreamtime, but are from when the band was known as Death Cult or Southern Death Cult. If you think back on the last decade of rock and roll, if you think back on Modest Mouse and The Strokes selling a whole lot of records, and then listen back on the tracks from Dreamtime, it's shameful what has come to the fore. The Cult at that point had both so much energy and so much sophistication. The future that they envisioned at that point unfortunately has become a future of the past by now. I'm no hippie, my politics are fringe right if anything. I don't use drugs at this point. From a musical perspective, from a perspective simply of sound, the first two cult albums, and to some extent the material recorded as Southern Death Cult or Death Cult, I think the Cult really had it at that point.

Final Note Before Returning to Vegas;

Well,I'm moving back to Las Vegas tomorrow. The reasons for my leaving and coming back are too complicated to get into here. I think the question people who read my blog, that are familiar with my work might be surprised by the city that is generally my home, but let me clarify a few points. This was left on the other blog I write for, Art Observations with Jerry Magoo. It is for my review of the new William T. Vollmann book. I corrected the spelling. Here it goes: "Hello,

I had the chance to see Vollmann give a reading of a short story at Fresno State University a couple years ago. 

It was a strange event. The audience was an older, local crowd. From what I could tell, they did not really appreciate his detailed account of sex with tentacled vegetation." The funny thing about that is- the sex with plants thing, that's not William T. Vollmann who did that. I've never heard of William T. Vollmann writing about having sex with plants with tentacles. That's Mark Von Schleggell the commentator is talking about. It's an error that betrays quite a bit of information accidentally I suppose it was a given that William T. Vollmann and Mark Von Schleggell are not household names exactly, I would have said William T. Vollmann was far more well known then Von Schleggell. To an extent that's true. However, here's the thing- William T. Vollmann and Mark Von Schlegell- what few people know who they are might not even be able to keep them straight. I'll be honest about it. It's really quite sad. What you have to understand is that Mark Von Schlegell and William T. Vollmann are relatively successful writers as far as it goes. They have publishing deals, something relatively hard to get. A lot of those experimental fiction guys were/are academics. It's brutal. I'm far to the right of most of those guys politically now, but it's still brutal to see that. I express that with the firmest of sincerity. It would be very easy to dismiss a city like Las Vegas as being uncultured, but then we would have to step back and really examine how much interest there really is in the Mark Von Schlegell and William T. Vollmann types even in New York. Jerry Magoo is primarily a New York based webpage. People are forced to spend a lot of time chasing paychecks and New York would appear to be be becoming more and more a city for the very wealthy. In other words, it's kind of irrelevant. Las Vegas doesn't have the cute little used book stores with the hipster in the horned rim glasses sitting behind the counter, but what of it?

(cover of the book about sex with plants)

Lou Reed Explains the Lyric "There's No Oedipus Today"

This one resurfaced on-line just as critics have been bad mouthing Lou Reed's work with Metallica, and apparently as Metallica fans send him death threats. At one point record companies sent out albums that are one sided interviews with artists, along with a script that went with it for the DJ to read. This interview was in support for the Blue Mask album in the early 80's. This is well worth giving a listen to. Lou Reed has given many of the most annoying and pretentious interviews I've ever heard. http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/2006/11/Lou_Reed_Blue_Mask_Interview_Side_1.mp3 This interview actually reveals something I've wondered before. Reed is talking about the lyrics to the songs "The Gun" and "The Blue Mask". They are both about very sick, diseased minds in his view, but makes the distinction that the main character in "The Gun" (which is about a guy with a gun raping another man's wife) is stupid and the main character "The Blue Mask" (something about really extreme homosexual sado-masochism and castration) is quite smart. The line which I'd never understood in the song "The Blue Mask" is the line "Spit upon his face and screamed there's no Oedipus today". Reed explains that the character in that one is familiar with psychoanalysis and Freud and that that this is a situation which is beyond all that. That's some warped stuff, if you know what he's talking about and thinking about it for a second. I think these metal people should give Lou another listen, that's what I think. I'd love to see him play this one with Metallica. That'd wake people up.

Megiddo: The Devil and The Whore Album Review

Here we go with another black metal review. On-line, overwhelmingly the blogs I write that get the most hits are either horror film reviews or metal reviews. The audience for the horror film and metal reviews overlaps strongly with an audience of people that are strongly involved with the visual arts, especially after I started working with the Jerry Magoo blog, but it's still really those two topics that overwhelmingly grab the most attention. It's not necessarily the material that I care the most about, but I am more then willing to try and meet with my audience halfway. As such, I will discuss here the Canadian black metal band Megiddo, Not to be confused with the old Celtic Frost track "Dawn of Megiddo". Canada has provided us with a fair few good metal bands. I remain a devote Voivod fan after years and years. Cryptopsy is fair. I've been a fan of Akitsa since I first heard them on the Primitive North america compilation in 2009. I've been recommended Megiddo as being a band to check out if I like Akitsa, although Megiddo are from Ontario unlike the other bands, who are from Quebec where metal seems to have had a large following. I don't like paying for music, so it is for me to happily inform you that there 2000 album Megiddo is available in it's entirety on youtube if you look around. The comparison with Akitsa is valid. Both play a kind of primitive black metal recorded on low-fi. I wouldn't say that Megiddo is nearly as musically adventurous as some of the Akitsa I've heard. I will try to avoid using the vague and over-used term "experimental" because black metal itself constitutes such a cultural margin aesthetically, but Akitsa are very distinctive sounding. I've read Akitsa go as far as to cite Throbbing Gristle as an influence, they broke a lot more boundaries of genre definition then Megiddo did. I know that I've been insulting Genesis P. Orridge on here a lot but it is worth stating that in Throbbing Gristle, Genesis was one band mate out of four. Megiddo were much more of a straight ahead black metal band from what I've heard. The intro to "Across the Shores/Four Sons" is a little slower and sounds somewhat like a goth band, and there's a three minute noise track at the end, but The Devil and The Whore is almost entirely hard, nasty black metal. The lyrics are typically obsessed with standard black metal themes of annihilation, death, and Satan. "i will laugh at the death of your children" is a particularly choice lyric. They throw in two covers towards the end of the album, "Violence and Force" by Exciter and take this torch by Razor. It's an okay album. I'm not sure I'd rank it as highly as Voivod's War and Pain or Akitsa's excellent work, but for free it is well worth a listen.

Book Review: If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer by the Goldman Family

Ladies and gentleman, the holy grail of sick and perverted talk show/tabloid culture- If I Did It. This is the odd "hypothetical" confessions of NFL legend O.J. Simpson, about how he would have killed his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman, if he did it. Of course O.J. Simpson didn't kill his ex-wife. But if he did, this is EXACTLY how he would have done it, and explains in detail EXACTLY why he would have done it. Of course, we all know he would never do a thing like that. This book was originally sold as If I DId It by O.J. Simpson, but because he owed more money to the Goldman family in the wrongful death suit brought against O.J for killing Ron Goldman, it was re-released in 2007 under the Goldman Family name. It was re-issued with additional material, including information about the history of it's publication. There was a ghostwriter named Pablo Fenjves involved, but he apparently put together the book very closely from interviews with O.J. Simpson- this before O.J. Simpson was sentenced to Prison in Nevada for armed robbery,where he still is today. I have to hand it to Fenjves, that's a bold move. I would not enter a room with O.J. Simpson without a .45 caliber handgun in my hand pointed directly at his forehead. In fact, there is a strong likelihood that .45 handgun would "accidentally" go off. That being said though, this is an excellent, excellent book. I read it three years ago in Las Vegas, just as O.J. was begin sentenced for the robbery related charges right there in town. When I was in college, William T. Vollmann did a reading up at Bard, and people talked about how disturbing he was,and how they were afraid of him, but William T. Vollmann never murdered anyone. If you want to be exposed to a truly sick mind, this is the book. There is no faking what O.J. Simpson is. He can not hide the truth even from himself, no matter how hard he tries. It's funny, when I wrote my two short story collections back when I was in my twenties, my goal was to write like William T. Vollmann or Thomas Pynchon. I don't even read those guys anymore much. It would not be an exaggeration so say that by now I am more influenced by If I Did It. How grotesque is it? Towards the beginning of the narrative, O.J. writes about Nicole having a terrible temper, perhaps not immediately grasping the irony. That's how sick the book is. What appears to have triggered the murder was two factors in the relationship O.J. had with his ex-wife- they continued to have an off-again on-again physical relationship after their divorce, and that Nicole became associated with drug users, which O.J. did not want his children to be around. A reasonable human being would have dealt with the second of those two factors by calling a good child custody lawyer and a p.i. firm, but this was O.J. Simpson, and well, he heard a little something about his ex-wife engaging in some group sex on cocaine, he got a knife, went over to her house, and, well… the key line is "I had never seen so much blood before anywhere in my life." O.J complains in the book about the media inaccuracy in their portrayal of him as a spousal abuser. Again, he doesn't seem to see the irony. Ron Goldman had nothing to do with anything having anything to do with any of this. He was returning a dropped pair of glasses from the restaurant he worked at. You may remember from the highly televised trial a character named Kato who was more or less freeloading in one of O.J.'s houses. This blew my mind- directly before the murders took place, Kato showed O.J. a photograph of a woman in Playboy, told O.J. he knew her, and offered to introduce her to him. O.J. was not interested, and instead committed a double homicide out of some freakish obsession with his drugged out ex-wife. Even after reading the book twice, his reasons for committing the murders make little sense to me. I was sort of wondering though-between when he got off for murder and when he got arrested for armed robbery- there were all those photographs of him in the tabloids golfing with shady looking white dudes. Where did he find those people? The book doesn't explicate that matter.

Review! Disinformation: The Complete Series DVD

Disinformation exists today as a publishing house and a website. They put out a whole bunch of material on conspiracy theories and the occult, things like that. Very briefly Disinformation was a show on British TV, and the Disinformation:The Complete Series DVD contains the footage that exists of that, as well as footage from a conference they held in New York in 2000. I had the DVD back in the early 2000's, and my friends and I used to laugh at it. It was an inevitable that I would go back and review the Disinformation: The Complete Series DVD. My review of Howard Bloom's book The Lucifer Principle is getting more hits then I expected, my writing about how Genesis P. Orridge has been getting hits, and both Howard Bloom ad Genesis P. Orridge appeared on the DVD Disinformation: The Complete Series DVD. It was released in the early 2000's. Genesis P. Orridge gives a very long dull interview about what a genius he is-this was however, at least before his breast implants were put in. The Howard Bloom interview where he says "fuck the god of war" that I've discussed elsewhere is on that same DVD. Another reason Disinformation is timely to discuss right now is that if you go on their webpage, they have all kinds of Occupy Wall St. propaganda up. CBS news reported that American Apparel is donating clothing to the protesters. That almost makes me consider Occupy Wall St. youth-oriented marketing versus other modes of capitalism. As I've written elsewhere, I don't have a strong opinion about Occupy Wall St. because while plenty their are figures on the right- Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan for example-who have criticized Wall St. types and the bailouts, but most of the protesters are leftists and I'm certainly not a leftists anymore. I think it does make a review of the Disinformation: The Complete Series DVD timely, however. The above clip is edited down from footage from the same DVD. This is an interview with a woman named Brice Taylor that claims that she was placed under mind control and used by Sylvester Stallone to make pornography involving sex with dolphins. It was all part of a C.I.A conspiracy. She is either a.) psychotic or b.) a con artist. It feels like a stupid thing for me to bother to point out, but she doesn't provide any evidence that what she says actually happened or indeed that such things are at all possible. That's actually one of the more interesting bits on disk one of the show. There's a whole bunch of profiles on either new agers or conspiracy theorists on disk 1, and a lot of these people could easily pass for homeless. . There's an artist on there talking about building a time machine. There's a guy who says he's from outer space, of course. A couple of these people seem pretty self-assured in having been in contact with aliens. Other things are even more mundane than that. There's some documentary footage of a fetish event in Los Angeles. There's documentary footage of the AVN Expo porn convention in Vegas. I usually live in Las Vegas, I could have gone to the actual AVN Expo very easily if I wanted but I've never bothered. As absurd as the first disk is, I've never seen a greater example of artistic and intellectual failure anywhere in my life. If you can stand to listen to former Psychic TV keyboardist Douglas Rushkoff for ten minutes you have more tolerance and patience then me, but the section of this DVD with him speaking is a half an hour. He starts with a quote from Timothy Leary and makes less and less sense from there on in. The comic book writer Grant Morrison starts by saying he's drunk and he's coming up on drugs, and he then starts telling a story about being abducted by aliens. Grant Morrison goes on for 45 minutes from there. I'm not a big fan of psychedelic self-annihilation of the mind. Listening to 45 minutes of Grant Morrison on drugs is like water-boarding. I always got a kick out of the footage of Marilyn Manson on this disk. In it he whines about sports heroes and jocks in high school. It's sort of absurd that he still cared about the jock beating him up in high school after he himself became super-rich and famous, but that very clearly looks like what happened here. I think the time to get over it was long ago, Marilyn. The art critic Anthony Haden-Guest introduces the artist Joe Coleman by saying that Joe Coleman did some performance artist piece where he bit the heads off white mice, and that the white mice were real. Joe Coleman's speech makes no sense. I think there was a lot of drugs circulating backstage when they did this conference. The DVD ends with the late science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson, who starts be saying he doesn't have a vagina he has a "willy" and starts ranting about how you have to have a "willy" to be the pope. Robert Anton Wilson rambles for more than an hour. I think Robert Anton Wilson might have also been high. Either that or he was just a total drug burn-out. He talks about drugs on that video to the extent that you'd think his life completely rotated around them. The only way I could really sit through any of this crap now and truly enjoy it would be with a bunch of friend's mocking it. If Disinformation represents a counter-culture, I'll stay with the mainstream. I still don't have a clear sense of what the objective of their "revolution" ever was.

Short Story: The Fake Gold Coin

That was probably the strangest case I ever worked on with Metro. What had happened was there were three homicides within a few blocks from one another. There was no sign that the individuals had any connection to each other, except they were all killed next to bus stops, and it turned out from the video on the bus they had a very strange interaction on the bus before the murder happened. All three people shot were crystal meth addicts. It was a married couple, Michael and Tina Bryant, and this one woman Denise Christopher. It was down on Freemont St. Meth, of course right? The interchange was so very odd. Michael and Tina Bryant sat down next to this Mexican guy Felipe Rodriquez who couldn't speak a lick of English. Michael was seen on the video trying to sell him this stupid coin and kept saying over and over again that it was 14 k gold. Felipe Rodriquez handed Michael Bryant twenty dollars for the "14K" gold coin. At that moment Denise Christopher, who we had dealt with a number of times for charges related to prostitution and crystal meth, she started telling Filipe Rodriquez that the gold coin was a fake. "If that was real 14 K gold it would say 14 K on the back. That coin ain't gold, they just need money to buy dope." The ironic thing was she was just as drugged out as they were. Felipe Rodriquez just looked utterly confused and apathetic. The killer was not Felipe Rodriquez. He almost really didn't care about the coin, the rip off, all of that. As soon as Denise pointed out the rip off, Michael and Tina Bryant grabbed the twenty and ran off the bus. I think it was two stops later that Denise got off. Her head was blown nearly clean off with a revolver just after she got off, and then the killer backtracked and shot the Bryants. We got the face of this one guy who got off the bus at the same time as Denise. It wasn't Felipe. Felipe was off in outer space. But we got the image of this forty years old male from the video camera, and a squad car found him wandering around just outside a Denny's a while later. White male assailant by the name of Jordan Brown. This is the strangest part about it. We pulled up to him and got out of the car, approached him on the street. "Oh you're looking for me, right?" "I don't know, should we be?" "Well, if it was a sane society you wouldn't be. If there were more people like me out there, there'd be a lot less people like them, and that would save taxpayers a whole lot of money." "So you did it?" "Absolutely." "Why?" He shrugged. "I'm sick of drug scum like that breathing my air." I looked at him for a long while. Really, as a private citizen, he did not know the half of it. There are meth addicts who will pimp their 8 or 9 year old daughters out for meth. You can hit them with two or three bullets and they'll still come after you, not even knowing they've been hit.

It's Time to Turn Off Psychic TV, Part 2!

I'm guided in choosing which of these blogs I do by the stats that blogger gives me. Wait, someone called me "what a bullshit" on the shout box of the Last.fm artist page for Psychic TV. Actually, that's more like 20 hits, I think. That's amazing! I got ten-eleven more hits then I would have otherwise gotten already so far. The thing is that if I posted a link to that blog on the Psychic TV artist page on Last.fm, I doubt anyone would have looked at it. It would have smacked of self promotion. If people disagree with me on something like that, that's not that bad. Much better that than the blog is simply ignored, right? That's the real risk you take on writing blogs on a subject like that. They even slapped my name on there- as though people know who I am! I've got to say, that's very flattering. With luck, I now have people from the Psychic TV fan camp who may be curious as to what my connection with Phil Spector is or who this Daniel Nicherie I mentioned was. That to me is some exciting and potentially fertile intellectual ground. I think Genesis P. Orridge made some decent music in the late 70's maybe. For the last ten years or so all I've seen from Genesis P. Orridge is an aging drag queen performing a retro psychedelic show in Williamsburg. That and Genesis gives these long interviews about how his/her own genius. Nowadays the press is panning Lou Reed and Metallica for collaborating on this album that I feel is really not bad. I think if you want to see a real has-been,Genesis P. Orridge is it. Psychedelia is dead to me. Williamsburg is dead to me. And most of all, Psychic TV is dead to me. Remember, that's more of an opinion about Psychic TV than most of the world has. Psychic TV are relatively obscure and a lot of people that have heard of them never liked them. And Psychic TV started in thirty years ago. I'll freely admit that I used to listen to them quite a bit, and now I really have no use for them. That is especially true of music Genesis P. Orridge makes now. That's considerably nicer then I often am about bands. Now, if you want to watch an aging drag queen do a bunch of poor Velvet Underground covers or whatever, that's all you babe. It's a free country. I'm just taking things in another direction. However, since this Psychic TV blog did surprisingly well and another blog I wrote on Howard Bloom got more hits then I would have thought, and since both Genesis P. Orridge and Howard Bloom appeared on that weird Disinformation DVD that came out years ago, at some point in the future you are likely to see a review of that on here. If something pulls in hits for whatever reason, I will go with that general direction.

Book Review: Patrick J. Buchanan: Suicide of a Superpower

Yes, it's a new book by Pat Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? is the title, and the author is the same man that Donald Trump labelled a "Hitler-lover" a number of years back. Considering how long Hitler has been dead for, that'd be quite some little fetish. Despite all the accusations that Patrick J. Buchanan is an anti-semite he manages to stay on MSNBC as a conservative commentator years after Michael Savage was fired for homophobia. Michael Savage is almost a moderate by comparison. Savage apologized for his homophobic statements, Pat Buchanan doesn't really apologize for much of anything. If you want to start an argument, quote Michael Savage, Pat Robertson, or Pat Buchanan in a conversation in mixed company. Here is Pat arguing with Al Sharpton: (incidentally, if you want some big laughs, google "Al Sharpton F.B.I informant") The last big Buchanan controversy involved his sounding far too sympathetic to Anders Breivik, the mass-shooter in Norway, with regards to the influx of Muslims into Europe. His alleged Hitler fetish isn't particularly evident in his new book. He mentions Hitler only briefly, noting that while Hitler disdained Christianity, he regarded religiosity necessary for the survival of a nation. Pat Buchanan likes Christianity, and sees the decline of it's influence in an increasingly secularized America as instrumental in the nation's decline. He notes that "Republican courtship of the Jewish vote has failed" and being that he doesn't like liberalism, he is in that sense anti-semitic. Buchanan is very quick to point out the role of Jewish feminists in the pro-choice movement, for example. Buchanan doesn't get into holocaust denial or Jewish conspiracy theories in this particular book. What he does is spends pages and pages lamenting what he sees as the fall of western civilization and in particular, the United States, and he blames liberalism, multiculturalism, and secularism. That's more or less all he's doing in this particular work. Many are likely to feel the book is racist, however, he seems as concerned about things like the decline in U.S church attendance as any particular race issue. If you're looking to this book for hardcore hate speech you're going to be very disappointed. However, here's a nice little Buchanan quote to throw out at the Q and A segment of a Judith Butler lecture-"The contention that men and women are equal is found in feminist ideology and not human nature." Don't get me wrong though. I don't believe that this book is irrelevant at all. I think this book should be widely read. Buchanan gathered together way too much valuable statistical information for this book to be ignored. There is a section on the issue of food stamps where Buchanan likens dependency on government assistance to narcotics dependancy. Ironically though, Buchanan mentions the issue of food stamps being used to purchase junk food, but he somehow missed the problem that drug tests are not required to receive food stamps, and people trade food stamps for drugs, alcohol or money to gamble with. The actual problems with the food stamp program is likely much worse then Pat Buchanan claims it is. That our government doesn't do drug testing on people receiving food stamps and gaining government assistance is insanity to me. Reading Buchanan has convinced me without question that Ivy League schools have discriminatory admissions practices against Evangelicals and Mormons. I'm sure that is absolutely true and that is also insanity to me. That's the kind of point Buchanan brings up that should be taken absolutely seriously. He'll disavow you of the belief that Europe is without a far right or serious immigration issues. There are some very intriguing details about the expulsions of Gypsies in recent years from what are generally perceived to be progressive European nations like France. France is not the progressive utopia of tolerance that leftists and people that call themselves "artists" think it is. 18,000 is a lot of Gypsies. That's the kind of information that Buchanan is very good at digging up. He's not a dumb man. It's just that concepts of equality that many people have he does not.

Response to the Occupy Wall St. Human Centipede

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The details on this one are slightly mysterious. The artist is apparently one Stefan Tcherepnin whose work I am not familiar with at all. The human centipede sculpture was displayed at the Occupy Wall St. events. What is perhaps most curious of all is that I understand he is part of a social network that reads one of the blogs of which I am a contributor and have used to write about the Human Centipede phenomenon.

I do have an opinion about it. I think it's pretty silly. Especially if it was made in a gallery in Brooklyn. Let me remind my readers, I am right wing and have no time for Williamsburg or Greenpoint "bohemian" culture.

No, I don't have license over the Human Centipede thing, that would belong to the Dutch horror director Tom Six. I have been very impressed by the fact that Human Centipede 2 was initially banned from release in the U.K., in so far as it means he was able to create something which could still shock anyone. Based on that it shouldn't be any surprise whatsoever that the art world proper, specifically meaning the mainstream of the visual arts within the established gallery system, would grab Tom Six's images. It was almost inevitable that this would happen.

If Tcherepnin got the idea from me, and this I cannot know, still that's pretty funny. While most people tied to the art world in New York are of the political left, I am of the political right. I've been going to the shooting range at least once or twice a week lately. Dead serious. I'm a huge fan of gothic/industrial music and extreme metal, I have a real affection for films by people like Cronenberg and Tom Six, but I'm not a leftist.

The right is strongly divided on the topic of Occupy Wall St. Ron Paul had some sympathy for the movement cause because he can't stand the Federal Reserve. On the other hand you have Herman Cain's now infamous line "If you aren't rich and don't have a job, blame yourself". Glenn Beck said something along the lines of "Democrats, get out of bed with these people. They will drag you out of your house and kill you" likening the Occupy Wall St. cause to violent Marxist revolts in history. To be honest I am undecided on this particular issue. The truth is probably somewhere between Ron Paul and Herman Cain. So that's not even a political issue I had a very strong opinion about, really.

That's predictable as hell that they did the human Centipede thing at Occupy Wall St. thing. The New York Gallery system is so lockstep socialist on any and all issues, unfortunately. If you go back into my writing on Human Centipede 2, you'll see that I often mention Human Centipede 2 in the same breath as Michael Savage (an author and right-wing radio host who is banned from entering the U.K.) and that's not an accident. The art world can break the taboo of borrowing from Human Centipede 2. I think Michael Savage represents a set of ideas that would still be very taboo for the New York art world to invoke at all. Here's what Savage has said about Occupy Wall St- take note of the word "street vermin".

LULU: Lou Reed and Metallica Full Album Review

Yes, it is finally here: This album is getting wretched reviews which i don't really understand. I do understand that very, very devoted Metallica might feel alienated by the band for taking on the project, which doesn't sound that much like Metallica normally sound. I would be so bold as to suggest that this was much more a Lou Reed album then a Metallica album. The songs are mostly very long, which is going to turn off some audiences.
However, is you put this album next to rock and roll bands from the last ten years that Have gotten attention, the Strokes or whatever indie rock bands, the sophistication and playing ability on this album blows all of that away.
In certain ways it is a throwback for Lou Reed to his Velvet Underground days. Lou Reed and Metallica laired a lot of heavy guitars on top of each other, going for a sort of update of Lou Reed's White Light/White Heat album- it has a very big sound There is a lot of feedback and dissonance on this album.They have some strings sounds that are a reapportion of John Cale's electric viola playing with the Velvet Underground. There is a lot of drone exploration on this album, in particular on the track "Little Dog".
The way I understand this album is that in the early days of the Velvet Underground in the 60's, Lou Reed was clearly doing things that preceded and influenced what was to come in the genres of punk, gothic/industrial, and yes, even extreme metal in terms of volume, dissonance, use of feedback, and drone. For most of the last 40 years of his solo career he was seemingly out of touch with what he had helped create, and was making largely surprisingly tame records. In 1979, Joy Division idolized Lou Reed, but really it probably should have been Lou Reed trying to get Ian Curtis on the phone. For this album he has a metal band at his disposal. "The View" and "Little Dog" sound like doom metal sort of, like the band Earth. Other tracks like "Mistress Dread" sounds kind of like a gothic metal band like Moonspell. "Junior Dad" sounds almost kind of like an extended version of a Cure song, "Mistress Dread" almost sounds a little bit like the Joy Division song "Twenty-Four Hours". With a metal band behind Lou Reed he kind of recaptures what he was in 1967-1968. The whole thing about the lyrics being inspired by the German plays of Frank Wedekind is kind of misleading. The trick of taking lyrical themes of sadomasochism from works of older European literature goes back all the way to "Venus in Furs" on the first Velvet Underground album.
Metallica serving as Lou Reed's back-up band do a fine job. I think this material would have been really boring if it had just been released as Lou Reed's new album. It essentially would have just sounded like Lou Reed's album The Raven, except with references to Wedekind's work instead of Poe's. It's definitely the heaviest album Lou Reed has made since White Light/White Heat.
It is what it is.

Short Story: The Dog and Pony Show

It was maybe the one case I worked that really called me to question right and wrong very seriously. That's irrelevant to what I do, that's more what lawyers and judges are supposed to do. This was one homicide where I could really see where the murderer was coming from.
It was a Filipino-American couple. We have a large Filipino-American population in Las Vegas , generally very clean, hardworking nice- you know the drill. This couple were actually doctors. I think they worked at that same clinic that Conrad Murray, the doctor that killed Michael Jackson, worked at. I never got the whole propofol addiction thing. How do you get addicted to a drug that's only effect is knocking you unconscious within about 30 seconds? But Michael Jackson gambled his life for it, and failed. Conrad Murray was a sick-o, but I'm not even sure he was the most perverted and sick doctor in the Las Vegas area. The couple from the case I'm talking about would be solid competitors at the very least. If we had known what kind of shit this couple was into, they'd still be alive but they'd most certainly be in jail. David and Lynda Arroyo were not upstanding citizens.
First of all, they were shot in the head from a fair distance away it would appear. Very clean shot, almost had to be a professionally trained individual. This was done with a 1911 style .45 caliber handgun. There was simply no way the murder was going to allow this couple to live. When my partner and I showed up at the scene, there was a mess of brain tissue all over the parking lot at Commercial Center. Where were they found? Right outside of the Green Door . We'd been monitoring the Green Door fairly closely for some time. Technically they described themselves as a social club for legal reasons but it's a sex club. We were watching them for bringing in girls that charged for sexual favors, That was the least of our concerns. The Arroyo's had been spotted coming out of there before they were shot and of course it had to be something involving prostitution or sex or something like that. How could it not be? Homicide outside of the Green Door, that could not have been good.
This was clearly no robbery and done by an experienced shooter with knowledge of firearms. I mean a .45 bullet will pick up a body and lift it in the air, There was nothing stolen from the bodies. They had like five platinum credit cards in there, a few hundred dollars in cash.
The key evidence in the case ended up being from the cellphones. This was a bitch to work on because my partner Billy he is Mormon, as are many officer in Metro. It would have brutal on any individual probably but especially brutal on Billy. Each of them had cell phone movies of themselves having sex with literally dozens if not a hundred different sex partners. And we had to watch pretty much all of them. By the way, the couple was not attractive. I would have rather worked a case involving human fecal splatter, if not decapitation. At their home we found boxes and boxes of these "tentacle hentai" DVDs. Tentacle Hentai is that animated pornography from Japan with the creatures with tentacles raping the Japanese school girls.
Of course, what else did we find? Photographs of the couples having sex with dogs, the wive in particular had a thing for German Shepard's, and also a pony.
I looked across at Billy.
"I have a feeling we have our motive."
Billy noded.
"I suspect you're right."
"I wonder if they might also have been into children."
"You could be onto something. "
We checked the sex offender registry on the Arroyos. There was nothing but we did start interviewing neighborhood families with children over by where they lived and up where they worked.
The thing is, we felt very sure that it had to do with the sex with animals. Those photographs had been sort of recent, only within a few weeks. And there were the various partners they had, one guy fucking the late late Lynda Arroyo after another.
This was a very deliberate hit, somewhat akin to an abortion doctor slaying or something like that. This was someone who had a background in firearms, who did not intended to wound or to immobilize the victims, but rather to kill. It was clear in my mind that this was someone who knew very well what the Arroyos were doing to the dogs and pony. This killer was someone who recognized the perversion, the nightmare of who this couple was, the obscene crime against nature that they had perpetrated and acted in such a way that it was certain that the crimes would not be committed again. Not after a prison sentence, not after a probation period, not after some acquittal, but simply never again. In the old testament the punishment for lying with a beast among the Hebrews was death, and so I played with the idea that this might be a very devote Christian. However, it would not appear that the couple attended church and that most of their social life revolved around the whole Green Door thing, The security guards we interviewed at the Green Door said that the couple was there most nights. These people had no capacity whatsoever to control sexual urges of any kind. They would have probably gone to jail for years for the dog and pony thing had they lived and been caught.
That was also something that we were very curious about was whose dog and whose pony was that?
The pony photographs appeared to be from out of state, it looked like Vermont or somewhere.
A woman that worked serving drinks and handing out towels at the Green Door called as and told us something important. This was really the break in the case. Her name was Kendra Davidson.
"He was raised as an army brat in Germany. He knew firearms inside and out, I believe he mentioned his favorite handgun was the 1911 .45."
Bingo.
This was going to be one bitch of an arrest we thought. That guy around here would likely have accesses to some serious firepower. We had several handguns registered in his name. What we did not know was if he had assault weapons or automatic weapons at his disposal.
This was where the case became a bitch. SWAT was in ready. We used helicopters on his house.
When Billy and I walked to his door and rang the door bell, Mitchell Davis opened up politely.
"I knew about the dogs, and I think they might have even been talking about children. Know you can arrest me, but when this gets in the news, let me tell you something right not. You know how some people view people who kill abortion doctors as heroes? Well even more people are going to view me as a hero. So let them send me to prison but you know just as well as I that I did the right thing."
"That's above my pay rate to determine" I said.
I'll never forget what he said though. The law really doesn't like vigilantes. They have that problem now in other cities with these caped crusaders, these masked heroes running around like comic book characters. They are all going to be stopped by a super villain named Doctor Thorazine. I saw exactly where Mitchell Davis was coming from, and if I'd been assigned to the case there might be an incident of police brutality. Being a cop is a serious bitch. The military might be worse, but law enforcement is pretty bad. You know what's real bad? Those guys who drive the armored cars.

Book Review! The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom! Terrible!

This book is old, but it's in a certain way very it's quite timely. The media is running a live stream of the involuntary manslaughter trial of Michael Jackson's final doctor Conrad Murray, and it is not looking good for Dr. Murray. Conrad Murray's trial comes only a few years after the trial of Michael Jackson's one-time PI Anthony Pellicano. Incidentally but not totally off topic, Pellicano recently said in a Newsweek prison interview that he quit working for Michael Jackson because Michael Jackson was doing "something worse" to young boys then molesting them without specifying what. The Murray trial lifestream seems like one medical professional after another verifying that Conrad Murray was in extreme violation of medical ethics. Then there is Howard Bloom.
Howard Bloom was actually MJ's publicist back in the 80's. Howard Bloom also has a memoir about the 60's that Timothy Leary blurbed, which probably explains a lot of things. Have you ever seen that TV show Disinformation that aired on British TV briefly? Disinformation is a publishing house now, but it was also a television show for a while. There was the 2 DVD release of it that I had back in the early 2000's that my friends and I would make fun of. There's an interview with Howard Bloom on there where he says "fuck the god of war!". A little too much blow in the music industry back in the 80's, huh guy? They should make that Disinformation DVD the new Rocky Horror Picture Show with people yelling call backs at the screen because that DVD is hilarious. That same DVD release has the late Robert Anton Wilson babbling at length about his "willy" and how "you gotta have a willy" to be the pope. That DVD also has Marilyn Manson whining about football players beating up nerds. It makes exactly 0 sense. I'm talking about unintentional irony, by the way. A really excellent way to make the case for your own intellectual credibility is to be the guy who says "fuck the god of war" on the Disinformation DVD. That's right up there with the interview they on there with the woman who says Sylvester Stallone forced her to make dolphin porn.



Howard Bloom's big book is The Lucifer Principle. It's this weird book that I vaguely recall goth people in the 90's being into. The Lucifer Principle is a "science" book by Howard Bloom about how violence and aggression are hardwired by nature into human DNA and dominate human history. . The statistics I've seen on gun ownership in the United States generally have it at about a third of U.S. homes owning firearms. How often do you see something in the news about somebody in the United States randomly shooting masses of people? It comes up in the news only every once and a while. Also, the shooter is generally established as being psychologically abnormal- this person leaves YouTube video s that make no sense (in the case of Jared Lee Loughner) or hasn't had sex for 17 years (in the case of George Sodini)-things like that. It would seem that such an obvious issues would complicate Howard Bloom's basic thesis. He missed it though. That's not surprising because Howard Bloom has no military or law enforcement background whatsoever. An excellent book on the nature of violence by someone who does come out of the security industry is The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker. Of course, what he has to say about the nature of violence in no way resembles what Howard Bloom has to say about the subject.
Anthony Pellicano, Conrad Murray, and Howard Bloom- that's the best and the brightest right there. Only Michael Jackson would have all three of those people on his payroll.
Anyway, back to the Lucifer Principal. I've read it before but re-reading it now I'm blown away by how dumb it actually is. Howard Bloom has this whole notion of "memes" or ideas operating like genes to create the"super organism" of cultures and discusses cultures as being literally living "super-organisms". I think the answer is drugs. I think those Disinformation people do a whole lot of drugs. Robert Anton Wilson was a big drug guy. The Lucifer Principle is painful. Howard Bloom must be unbearable at cocktail parties. Howard Bloom thinks he's got it all worked out with his memes and" super-organisms". If you want to read some acid-head book trying to explain the history of war in terms of the behavior of bees and ants, then this book is all you babe. In bare essences that's what the Lucifer Principal is. The whole thing is completely absurd.



Howard Bloom is the overlap between Jackson camp and Disinformation. That's quite something. Robert Anton Wilson's willy and Neverland Ranch. That's quite a combo.