Moving Rocking Mourning

It's been a crazy week, cos I got moved to full-time at my job (a year after my last job and I finally have a suitable replacement!) and have begun moving all my stuff to the Eagle's Nest - Kristin's place in Virginia Highlands. I love the Highlands, looks like a fine, upstanding part of town where I won't hear too many gun shots or feel like I could get mugged walking to my car.

Played a pair of shows at WRASfest, and recorded them, and I will post them once I get my life in order; probably by this weekend. The Danger Woman performance went across wonderfully well though I couldn't hear anything but the lead guitar and I keep thinking I played the wrong chords during "Sailor Moon" but I am not sure. Couldn't hear the keyboard. Spooks played an awesome and confused show concluding with a long kraut rock jam that felt really amazing at parts but we'll have to review the tape to see if that came out as well from the crowd.

B Jay's funeral was yesterday and while I couldn't go cos of my new position at work I did get to meet up with everyone at Manuel's afterwards. So many people came from all across the USA to pay their respects, and there was Johnny Cash playing while silent home footage flickered over head. It was good to see alot of out of towners (Jack and Julie, Jane, Meghan) mingling and visiting but everyone looked pretty drained. A large part of that was probably the previous weekend.

It's just so weird to imagine. Just over a year ago absolutely nothing was wrong at all and then suddenly one day all this bad news comes flying out of nowhere. B Jay was hit with the absolute worst of the worst. I saw him right after he got the news and you could tell he was trying really hard to hold it together. The man fought for his fucking life during that last year, and he refused to let it get him down. He kept going out and playing shows and visiting friend and keeping his spirits up. It's all the more amazing that he had advanced knowledge of what was coming. He found peace and comfort in the warmth of his friends and loved ones and so many people will now keep his memory a happy one. Send all positive thoughts to B Jay.

The causes of life are few
but the causes of death are many

WRASfest 2009

Show begins with Danger Woman and Danger Force Band at 8pm, Spooks play later! Also Thy Mighty Contract and Zoroaster!!!!

Rest in Peace BJ

Bobby Ubangi, Atlanta punk rock fixture, passed away yesterday. Less than a year ago he was diagnosed out of nowhere with a number of terminal cancers and given not until the end of 2008. My most fond thought of BJ is playing a Die Slaughterhaus Records revue (my band was Tabitha) with him at the old MJQ. His band was The Lids and it was tight and loud and fun and so good that it immediately made a huge impression on me as 'upper level, more evolved and finely tuned' punk rock than anything us kids were putting on around him. Later we ended up in the basement of the DSH and the two of us were sharing a love of early Tyrannosaurus Rex, and he told me about his vinyl copy of My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brow. I had never met anyone that loved that record like I did, let alone heard of it!

What happened to BJ underscores the temporality of life that becomes clearer and clearer to me as I get older. Nothing on this earthly plane is permanent, and everything creates and attachment that only results in pain when the inevitable happens. It is important to realize that we are not our physical bodies alone. Even science has told us this, and if you are a scientist and object to this, substitute 'eternal soul' for 'matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed'. Not that our physical aren't real, but they are simply manifestations of the eternal soul that lies hidden from view.

People die and pass away and this was the first blues of the world and will be the last. Every living thing is born to die. The way to deal with this is to realize that BJ was not only his self when he was 10 or 15 or 20 or at any one point in his physical incarnation. He was the eternal spirit driving that material manifestation, and his energies will be felt on this material realm and realms beyond throughout infinity. Amen.

Black Lips - "I'll Be With You" Video from Vice Records on Vimeo.

Motorhead and Drive Video

Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her was an awesome Japanese Shibuya-kei rock band from the 90s who made a bunch of records and there was a time (my teenage years) when I would buy anything buy any band that was friends with Cornelius. I traded someone for a copy of "Motorhead and Drive Video", which is a video version of their complete 1998 LP "17". The videos on this are jaw-droppingly awesome, budget-produced, and full of terrific and brilliant ideas. I really wish more bands would do videos like these. When I saw these as a kid it influenced the way I approached music videos from then on. Anyways, recently I got a video capture card and took a few of the songs and put them on youtube:

Count Zero Number One


This video is hilarious. Like all these videos, this one is just crammed with lofi charm, inexplicably random footage, and ancient analog video effects. The song is a response to Cornelius's Count Five Or Six, which was hyperactive futuristic math-rock based around voices counting numbers in alternating stereo channels. Love the intro with the old man playing multiple saxophones. It must be from the same event the blonde lady was in...

Slow Start


I don't know why but I really love this slow, slow song. It makes me think of the third Velvet Underground album where everything is dreamy and gentle and played on simple guitar rock instrument lineup. This video is a cool idea and pulled off with three layers: Aiha singing superimposed over a very slow pan (of the band in an elevator?) with another layer of footage slowed down to, I don't know, 2 or 3 frames a second. Beautifully compliments this song.

Double Life


I didn't upload this or the one below but it's on youtube right now and if it wasn't I would have put it up cos it's my favorite from the video. Of course, it's by Cornelius so you can see why! Aiha has the words to the song written on t-shirts that she is wearing in layers and taking them off after she sings each line. I really really want to know what video editor Cornelius used on this because it looks amazing, it must have been a psychedelic Amiga computer or something. The trails are pixelated and multi-colored, the constantly scrolling red-bars-on-black background makes me think of an old vector graphics arcade game, and I have never been able to figure out what the two girls are doing on the shirts during the instrumental break. That last image is wonderful!

Seventeen


This is a really nice and sweet song about a 19-year-old being in love with a 17-year-old, and it marks the last "17" track on "Motorhead and Drive Video". It's a sweet song and you gotta love that Everly Brothers nod. The video is very breezy and wonderful; just the band sitting around all dressed in white in a white room, with the sunset fading in and out of the image.

If anyone wants a DVD copy of this let me know cos I'm going to be backing it up. I also have lots of other 90s-era Shibuya-kei Japanese underground rock stuff that I've been collecting since my teenage years so I will post more in the future...

RIP Michael Jackson

I believe in you, Michael.

Out on the Weekend

It was a nice day for this. I always loved this song, the way the arrangement is so stripped down, acoustic guitars and drums and electric guitars. It's that simplistic brilliance that Neil Young does so well. The rest of Harvest is similarly devastating but I don't have time to record covers of the whole record, at least not right now....

"Out on the Weekend" (Neil Young cover)

Beatles, Satanism, and Art

Popmatters has a review of a new book called The Lennon Prophecy by Joseph Niezgoda that adds a whole new layer to Beatles conspiracies, the most famous of which of course is the Paul Is Dead conspiracy. In this one, John Lennon sold his soul to turn his then-mediocre and directionless band into the biggest act in history, and he then paid for it 20 years later.

When was the pact made? Niezgoda pinpoints the date - December 27, 1960, the night the Beatles played at the Town Hall Ball Room in Litherland, England. Lennon was a 20-year old wanna-be rock star in a mediocre band not so different from so many others at the time. He was desperate to “be more famous than Elvis.” Desperate enough to sell his soul to the Devil, Niezgoda contends.
During that performance, Niezgoda reports, “the Beatles evoked a response noticeably different from anything in their past.” As they played, the crowd unexpectedly surged onto the stage and the girls started to scream. It had never happened before, but it would always happen afterward. It was the birth of Beatlemania. All four have noted this night as the turning point in their careers.
-John's Pact With Satan by Margaret C. Galitzin for Tradition in Action.

The author of that review admits that she 'threw out Beatles albums along with the rest of my rock music many years ago' and was convinced that The Beatles (not just Lennon) had all sold their soul to Satan even before hearing this book. So she's pretty biased in some ways. I am of the opinion that Christian Fundamentalists and Satanists are more or less in the same game, they just think the other side is the 'bad side'. I also think all YHWH-based religions are mythical soap opera fan clubs that encourage bloodlust and materialism and other behaviors deficient to the true spiritual evolution of humankind.

Mark Chapman's claim to have been possessed by several demons gets trotted out, as does the oft-noted "Butcher Album" cover of the Beatles for Yesterday and Today, which really never looses its impact every time I see it. Margaret quotes Niezgoda's affirmation that this is a depiction of Satanic rituals and says 'it’s surely not just avant-garde art' even though bloody dolls-as-avant garde art was decades old by the time of this shoot. The original dolls were produced in reaction to the chaos that was the first World War, and alongside the Dada movement gave absurdity a voice in an era where the 'rational world' was tearing itself to pieces.

Artsy embrace of silliness and absurdity is the line of thought that heavily influenced the Beatles, who in their early days were hanging around with art students like Klaus Voorman and Astrid Kirchherr and Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe. If anything the Beatles made a pact with German art schoolers (compare the cover of Revolver to the collages of Hannah Hoch) and those ideas and people stayed with them through most of their careers. And that is a book I would much rather read than this.