Mid-Month Miscellany, or, Hey man, are you down with all the voices in your head?

So, the gig is tonight!

I am going to play the whole set. I’m really proud of this! Considering that I had not played guitar for more than a couple hours per month, if that, for the last ten years or so, I’m really really happy with my overall progress, both in terms of learning the material and in terms of having the stamina and calluses to play through the set without cheating on any of the chords!

Here’s the set list. I've linked nearly everything aside from No F in Juice (No effin juice) because I don't think it's been recorded and As Yet Unaimed because we are just teasing it for 30 seconds to a minute.

1. Bag Lady (original) into Garbage Man (original) into As Yet Unaimed G minor tease (original) into the end of Stairway to Heaven (Led fucking Zepplin)
2. Publisher’s Clearing House (original)
3. Because Mother Said So (original) into Sinister Exaggerator (the Residents) If you aren’t familiar with the Residents, I have to stop here and strongly suggest you take LSD at some point and explore their catalog.
4. Gypsy Song (original)
5. Ignorance & Apathy (original) into As Yet Unaimed (original) into Shamabala (Three Dog Night) into Dear Prudence (the Beatles)
6. No F In Juice (original) into Pinball on the Water Duck (a mash up of an original, Pinball Wizard by the Who, and Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, which is every guitar player’s first riff).
7. Sittin' on the Porch (original) into Am I Evil (Metallica) into We are Here (original)
8. Seventeen (Sex Pistols)
9. Druid Krunch (original) into Thank You for Sending Me an Angel (Talking Heads) into Fisheye (original) into Hot Babes (original)

We have an hour and the music in the set is 57 minutes with NO pauses. Me and the other guitar player ran through it with no more than five seconds between songs earlier and it went pretty well. I wanted to play I Wanna Be Your Dog for an hour instead of any of this, but sometimes we don’t get what we want.

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Speaking of being your dog, I do not know exactly why, but I kind of want to write a short story where aliens come to earth and after seeing pugs and French bulldogs and fucking toadline bullies, decide in a fit of pique and poetic justice to conquer us and breed us into forms pleasing to them but agonizing to us.  Maybe something a little like All Tomorrows but probably less a work of speculative science fiction and more focused on the emotional and physical particulars of the horrendously brutal shit we do to creatures we claim to love.  Perhaps with a dash of On the Uses of Torture by Piers Anthony.  Not generally a fan of Piers, he's kinda creepy (though, I guess, pot meet kettle), but that particular story was pretty good.  

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Last week one of the guys in this band gave me a disc and was like “hey here’s that Area 51 stuff!” My understanding was that he (dude currently playing drums for us) along with our keyboard player played together in this band called Area 51. I have heard both of them mention it over the last few weeks.

I listened to the disc. First song I was like who the fuck is this guitar player, he’s nuts! What is this silly super intense envelope filter he turns on here? That chorus effect is really tasty and this guy knows how to lay back when he should. Is he doing this whole part with pick scratches?  Hahaha! I was like, damn this is creative and pretty good! So I asked the guys who was playing guitar.

It turns out I was in a band I have no recollection of.

This should not surprise me. The time period this recording is from is right around 1994-95. My life was in freefall in this period.  Reality and I had only the most passing acquaintance at the time. It was seriously fuckin' chaotic. Much of that chaos was self-inflicted - I'm pretty sure I'm playing through all borrowed equipment because I'd sold most of mine off for dope, so I guess it's no wonder I don't recognize the tones.  And the band itself only lasted a couple of weeks, it was something that got pulled together really hastily as a favor to a couple of guys after their guitar player and singer bailed at the last minute after a show was already scheduled.  We only played one gig.

But it was really weird to hear my own playing and not recognize it.  And it was a really nice surprise to like it - usually the interior critic doesn't give me much of a chance to enjoy my own work.

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Recently kyana at noise sans signal posted something I can’t get out of my head and think is brilliant. Kyana quotes another blogger’s post which I will meta-quote below:

Saw Socially Appropriate Noesis post by Liche's Libram and couldn't help but think that the list of things we consider "sane" that they present as an example of sanity, to quote in full:

"• the world makes sense
• everything will work out in the end
• bad people will be punished and the good will be rewarded
• but if good people suffer there’s an unknown good reason for it
• I am one of the good people
• causality flows from past to future
• the adults know what they’re doing
• I can trust my senses most of the time
• my emotions are mostly appropriate responses to my situation
• people have meaningful subjective experiences and laundry machines don’t."

would work as cross-out list to represent the eroding sanity quite well in a games where it is important.

As I read this I kind of went through it and automatically started self-assessing. The thing is, I think many of us are walking wounded who have at least a couple of these crossed off.  On the other hand, perhaps only a complete psychopath would have nothing struck through.  Bah, I don't know.

Still, I really want to try this at some point; I don't know if I'll use it as sanity mechanism or more as a method for helping a player settle into character.  Roll a d10 and cross off that many of these, that's what your character believes.  Or maybe it's more of a on a scale of 1-5 how much do you agree with the following statements kind of a thing.  Not sure yet.

I do think that this would have to be handled carefully, and I probably wouldn't try it without player buy in.  

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I have started work again on the World with No Extras, but it’s been going harder and slower, I think mostly because most of my current creative energies and time have been channeled into getting my chops up for this gig in late September and re-learning the material.  But I am working on Heliotrope Hill, and hopefully will have something to post at the end of September  / start of October.

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I'm interested in the phenomenon of urban exploration and how much like dungeoneering that truly is.  Again, it’s been a long time since I’ve done much urbex, but some of the places I visited were very very much like dungeons in that they were large enough to get lost in and contained elements of physical danger.  Three places in particular keep sort of floating into my head – the Peabody Estate, the Elgin Mental Hospital, and the Hinsdale Tunnels.

The Peabody Estate, especially, was very much like a dungeon in retrospect.  When we explored it, it was totally derelict.  Someone had bought it and started converting it into condos or something, but a lot of the original architecture was still there as well.  So you'd go from being in a half finished modern bathroom, lift a piece of hanging drywall and crawl through the studs into a massive chapel with ornate walnut woodwork.  The place was absolutely massive.  We tried to explore the basement but it was flooded to chest level with icy, murky black water.  We were dumb but not quite that dumb, and decided to stay out of the basement.

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A phrase that has begun to haunt me is, “The weather has changed.”  Seasonal changes seem to have a profound impact on me and the summer into fall change is one that always seems to bring a very strange combination of frisson and a profound sense of loss.  The beginning of autumn in the Midwest is spectacularly beautiful.  The last few weeks of September and the first few weeks of October are my favorite time of year, a time in the Midwest when everything is golden and crisp and so perfect it almost makes up for the rest of the year.  I tried to capture the feel of it in a piece I did for a game Dave over at Grand Commodore ran.  The piece is called Autumn in Troutbridge and is an early entry on this blog if you are interested.

Another sense in which the weather has changed is in the sense of climate change, and it seems to me that I may not get my golden month for very much longer.  It feels like 2023 is the first year where someone can shout the end is nigh and it doesn't even raise an eyebrow.  I’ve grown more and more pessimistic about the way we deal with climate change; it just seems to me that the forces demanding continuous growth are just too entrenched in our society for us to do much of real substance about it until that society collapses.  See the Termina entry from Max Cantor’s Weird and Wonderful worlds for what I think our society has become.  The only metaphor I know for explaining the cognitive dissonance of a civilization in which we simultaneously have more knowledge and more possibility than ever before and in which almost all of us feel like something truly catastrophic is about to happen is the rock at the top of the mountain.  I think most of us have a sense that the rock of western civilization has begun to roll downhill, and it is simply too big and too heavy for us to stop it.  We will have to wait until it comes to rest on its own, and before that happens, it is bound to crush whatever is in its way.  This is something I very much hope I am wrong about.  I would love for this to be a much more graceful and intentional degrowth, but man it's really hard to see that happening.

Of course, even without climate change looming, EVERY year may be the last year, just as every day may be the last day.  When this particular seasonal change between summer and autumn comes, it’s like this idea, this piece of intellectual knowledge, leaves my brain and becomes something I can feel in my body.  It is a terrifyingly beautiful feeling.

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I recently happened upon a piece of art by a guy named Erik Thor Sandburg and the graphic, surreal nature of it reminded me a little of the MUZAN E  (無残絵), (“Atrocity Prints”), Ukiyoe from the late Edo and Meiji period, specifically the EIMEI NIJUHASSHUUKU (英名 二十八 衆句) by Yoshitoshi and Yoshiiku.  This also brought to mind SHIN-EIMEI NIJUHASSHUUKU (The New Atrocities in Blood) by Kazuichi Hanawa and Suehiro Maruo, a much more contemporary work.  I became aware of Maruo’s work when I saw it featured on the first Naked City album in about 1990, but it wouldn’t be until much much later – probably around 2008 or so – until I saw more of it.  My wife and I were in a Japanese bookstore (we have one near Chicago, which is pretty fuckin cool) when I saw a print of Shin-Eimei Nijuhasshuuku.  I thought about getting it, but my wife thought it was pretty distasteful.  She's probably right.  She usually is.

But I've always been fascinated with what I think of as extreme or transgressive art - whether that's visual art like this or written, things like The Story of the Eye by Bataille or Eden Eden Eden, Pierre Guyotat's novel about the French-Algerian war.  That piece had a major impact on me and I've tried to do a write up on it a few times along with Lord Horror, but someone over at 3am wrote this and I think they did a better job than I could:

Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden (1970) is a modern epic. Published fifty years ago, it was written by a thirty-year old author in the south of Paris over the course of six months. The book’s thematic preoccupations with slavery and prostitution, and how the two overlap through history and the present, continues to generate a delirious rupture across the space of literature. Having passed away on February 7 of this year at the age of eighty, Guyotat is unable to witness the anniversary of Eden Eden Eden‘s half-century, yet the work’s monumental legacy still causes scandal, admiration, and tremors through what he described as the ‘Great Prostitutional Pandemic’ of our age.

One single unending sentence, Eden Eden Eden is a headlong dive into zones stricken with violence, degradation, and ecstasy. Liquids, solids, ethers and atoms build the text, constructing a primacy of sensation: hay, grease, oil, gas, ozone, date-sugar, dates, shit, saliva, camel-dung, mud, cologne, wine, resin, baby droppings, leather, tea, coral, juice, dust, saltpetre, perfume, bile, blood, gonacrine, spit, sweat, sand, urine, grains, pollen, mica, gypsum, soot, butter, cloves, sugar, paste, potash, burnt-food, insecticide, black gravy, fermenting bellies, milk spurting blue… are but some of the materials that litter the Algerian desert at war—a landscape that bleeds, sweats, mutates, and multiplies. As the corporeal is rendered material and vice-versa, moral, philosophical and political categories are suspended or evacuated to give way to a new Word, stripped of both representation and ideology. The debris of this imploded terrain is left to be consumed—masticated, ingested, defecated, ejaculated.

Maybe I'm just a sicko, but I think this kind of work has undeniable power.  I've posted a number of Muzan-e below, but you will have to scroll if you want to see them.  They are very much NSFW.

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The epigraph from Eden Eden Eden.  I gather it's Tamasheq and translates to "and now we are no longer slaves."  If I ever get another tattoo this might be it.