Nostalgic for the Nineties?

I call it 'A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man Wearing a Cat'. Yup, that's me, like a hundred years ago. I look like a frigging chipmunk with those cheeks. That was back when I was planning my first band - a duo with my sister. We'd borrowed a Casio-tone keyboard from the school's music room and worked out how to work the pre-programmed drumbeat on it. We were both quite into metal then and had selected the 'heaviest' beat and then jacked the tempo up as high as it would go. I didn't have either a bass or a guitar but I figured if I blew onto a piece of wax paper wrapped around an old comb I could make a sound that roughly approximated an electric guitar. I figured wrong - what that sounds like is a kazoo. We quickly abandoned the idea - thus denying the world it's first and only brother/sister kazoo & Casio-keyboard metal duo. Society's loss, I guess.

The cat's name was Comet. He was the biggest, sweetest, most chilled cat I've ever known. He was not, however, terribly bright. My father once allegedly referred to him as an amiable boof-head.
I loved that cat.

But all that is years before the content of this blog takes place, so onwards...


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The faded plaid, the jeans with the knees worn out to ragged tangles. The hair rendered into unnatural colours with cheap dyes and then left to grow out, always darker for a full inch at the root. Combat boots and summer dresses bought from some op shop or other. Laces dragging and tattered. Hair hanging across unsmiling faces. The slacker chic. The carefully-crafted cynicism masking a kind of frail naiveté. Weird rambling films about dis-spirited kids working in fast food joints or convenience stores; drifting abstractedly through the world. 'So fucking what?' becoming a catch-phrase. I loved the flick 'Heathers' man. I adored Winona Ryder's brittle assertivness. I totally longed for Christian Slater's coat and world-weary humour. With lines like: 'Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a body-count'. Jeez, that stuff is legendary.
And okay, I'm aware that 'Heathers' was actually released in 1988. I just forever associate it with the very early Nineties - when I first saw it myself.
The Nineties had grunge; they had that old perennial favourite androgyny; they had a bitter laugh and a slightly knowing wink.

Man, I miss that shit.

That Nineties-specific nihilism seems almost innocent now: like kids play-acting the end of the world. Now we've got sexts and rampant narcissism. A different, shallower kind of hopelessness. This era feels vacuous, hyper-materialistic, vapid. The Nineties had a whiff of that too, but every generation pushes that vibe deeper. God, am I ever sounding old and cranky.

Still at least we've got hipsters now. I adore hipsters.
I didn't really work the grunge aesthetic. I mean, I wore the knees out of every pair of jeans I owned but that wasn't deliberate, wasn't some kind of statement - I just have really bony knees and that's hard on fabric. I had a hint of plaid, though. And then, as now, I was always in need of a haircut. But I did as pretty much every other kid my age did - I went to school, I watched 'Friends'.
Then in the last year of highschool I started working the Goth shtick a little harder.

None of the albums that really changed my world during the Nineties were grunge. I had the required copy of Nirvana's Nevermind (on cassette no less), sure. But I can't say it really impacted.

So here's a scrawled list of the discs (or cassettes, dubbed tapes with photocopied covers, or whatever) that meant something to me then. These are the albums that linger with me still even though I haven't listened to any of them in well over a decade. Forgive me then, for these will only be fragments - broken shards of memory. They will only be what those albums meant to me, or the traces of them that linger with me still. Doubtless, all of them deserve more than that but they are almost all lost to me now - packed away in boxes, left in other cities, given away (or in the cases of the tapes - simply rotted down to white noise).
So here goes...

PJ Harvey 'To Bring You My Love'.
Hell, I loved this album. The primal, almost feral urgency in her voice. The percussion - sometimes delicate, sometimes near-tribal, the heavy mood of the guitars. The open-hearted need there, something almost carnal. I still fondly think of the desperately whispered playground chant - taunting: 'little fish, big fish, swimming in the water.' She is an amazing artist - is Polly Jean Harvey. A damn fine songwriter and musician, blessed with a thick, powerful voice. Her shamanic delivery - a punk poetess and a fitting heir to the throne of Patti Smith. Not that Smith is herself ready to secede that throne just yet.

Throwing Muses 'University'.
A tape copy of this. Bought quick and cheap from a record shop. Back when there were record shops. I loved her voice - Kristin Hersh. The naked vulnerability of it, the wounded energy. This album was all hooks. Rich, fat walls of guitar. Melodic as anything. I didn't think I knew any of the songs until I put the thing on. Bam...I'd heard damn near every one on RDU: the student-run radio station. I just never knew what they were. This album was less of a taster for Throwing Muses for me than it was a gateway drug to...

Kristin Hersh 'Hips and Makers'.
A solo album in the truest sense of the word. For the most part it was just her aching, bee-sting voice and her own acoustic guitar accompaniment. Every now and again there was a sighing of cello -  courtesy of Jane Scarpantoni, if I recall. This album was so fragile and so brave, strong in its own delicate way. The songs hung around inside of me for days, weeks, months afterwards. There was such courage on display here. To listen felt almost voyeuristic. The lyrics were impenetrable: 'never was a Baritone till you walked in', 'we have hips and makers, we have a good time'. But it felt like they spoke of things too personal, locked too deeply within Hersh herself that you couldn't hope to understand them without first living inside her head. The album sparkled and glimmered; a thousand beautiful, broken shards winking in the sunlight.

Cop Shoot Cop 'Release'.
A five-dollar used CD bought from a store that always smelt of feet and stale cheese, old glue. The disc was all beat-up; fingerprints and scratches. Someone had listened the hell out of it before me. It had a freaking anvil on the cover. This was the album that snatched me away from metal and opened up a whole knew world of possibilities to me. Without this disc I would never have fallen for the music of Nick Cave or Tom Waits. Frontman Tod A had a cynical swagger of a voice. The music was all dissonant no-wave, noise rock shot through with primal jazz and blues DNA. Dissonant frigging horns, man. The lyrics were exquisite - bitter, bruised and perfect.
'Well it's 4:30 in the morning and the vacuum sucks you in. The tell-tale trace of lies upon you face; the sidewalk feels just like your skin.' CSC are gone now. Disbanded, all the back catalogue out of print. Tod Ashley is still rolling though, man; got himself another gig, been running it for many years now. Called Firewater - they play wild Circus/World Music/Klezmer/Surf/Garage/Punk. They're something special.

Mazzy Star 'Among My Swan'.
Those hazy sun-shattered guitars, rolling out like the way the air shimmers over a heated road. The aching drawl of Hope Sandoval's voice. They sounded like a dream on a sweating afternoon. If David Lynch had set Twin Peaks in warmer climes it should have been these guys on the soundtrack in place of Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. There was always a darkness beneath the melody here. They'd draw you away from the everyday, but there'd be an unspoken threat. Underneath.

Portishead 'Portishead'
Though I adored the crisp drums, Isaac Hayes samples and dark matter of the debut - it seemed almost too graceful, too penetrable. I preferred the sneering guitar rolls here; on the sophomore album. The half-choked drumbeats - booming and echoing but buried deeply, weirdly muffled. Hip hop at half the speed - crawling endlessly forward. I loved the biting black wall of brass; the Morricone influences; the fact that on a couple of tracks Beth Gibbons seemed to be channeling an evil Shirley Bassey. It sounded like the soundtrack to an infinitely darker, more dangerous and deviant Bond flick. I heard once that the strings and brass sections were recorded separately for this one - pressed onto vinyl and then sampled back into the final mix - so that they could be scratched and chopped into place, just like on the debut. I heard they blew out their studio budget. 'Half-Day Closing' sounds like a psychedelic rock band dissolving into the ocean. 'Cowboys' looms up full of swagger, bitterness and very sharp teeth. 'Only You' will break your heart with its yearning and devotion.

Mercury Rev 'Deserter's Songs'.
The bruised heart of New Weird Americana. This album was written while locked away in a cabin, despairing that they'd never break though, never shift enough units to become a viable act (they'd hung their hopes on the divine 'See You on the Other Side' and it'd sank without a trace). This album is beyond sublime. It's a lavish disc - so densely layered it's positively orchestral. It soars, it sweeps, it burns its way into your heart. Jonathan Donahue's voice is a fragile tenor, peculiar and achingly beautiful (like a choirboy Neil Young). I had a bit of a crush on him for a while there (but y'know; in a totally masculine, heterosexual way). It introduced me to mellotron and the idea that music can create this vast rippling panorama. 'Holes' sounds like flying. As a song it simply yearns. 'The Funny Bird' is a hurricane in an abyss - the My Bloody Valentine-style waves of melodic feedback, the treated vocals - full of desperation and hope.  This album was pastoral and wistful, full of joy and sorrow...and beneath it all, a woozy, tripped-out darkness. It sounds deeply odd. Queasy and surreal; a 3am phone-call of an album. And again, positively Lynchian.

Tricky 'Angels With Dirty Faces'

This album suffocates, it strangles, it chokes and unsettles. From the cover onwards it confronts you, unblinking and unrelenting. Tricky's hash-fogged rasp playing a ghoulish call-and-response with the achingly sweet yet utterly mournful tones of Martina Topley-Bird. She sounds like the ghost of Billie Holliday singing 'God Bless the Child' from a locked room while Tricky's shadow of a voice haunts the corners. 'Broken Homes' is crippled gospel. PJ Harvey lends her voice to that one and it is a magnificent performance but this is Tricky's show and he leans crookedly into every dark place. The beats skitter and warp, spurring the album forwards but never resolving into anything as cohesive as a hook. Dissonant blues guitar tangles across a bunch of the tracks; Marc Ribot within the void. Most of the songs seem to develop in spirals, in whirlpools. This album is full of smoke and whispers - it is thick and pungent and psychedelic. It's a smoked-out hip-hop headtrip, man. And it doesn't want you for a friend.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 'Let Love In'.
This almost feels the male counterpoint to PJ Harvey's 'To Bring You My Love'. It's occasionally raw, powerful, even savage and snarling. Other times it has a dark, mythical swagger - Cave as the black-hearted preacher-man with a red right hand and a heart full of dark and terrible things. This album is all about the legend of Cave - the performance, the act. I never cared for his later honesty; I have no real love for 'The Boatman's Call'. I wanted Nick Cave the actor; the tall, looming figure cut out of shadows and crooked lines. Still other times it's almost crushingly beautiful, rich with need and urgency. 'Do You Love Me Part II' remains one of the most hauntingly lovely and utterly disturbing songs I've ever been a witness to.

Bjork 'Homogenic'.
The break-up album. Or something. Full of dark, bone-trembling bass and beats; dense, almost Russian-sounding Classical influences. At other points it's achingly lovely and exquisitely ripe with a sense of awe and hope. 'Bachelorette' remains one of the most extraordinary songs ever written. The rhythm is so urgent, so powerful, so infectious. Bjork's voice is always an astonishment: from childlike wonderment to flirtatious coo; from vulnerable verismo to snarling barely-restrained hostility; and ultimately, to banshee howl. Hers is a passionate, full-bodied delivery - utterly emotive, devoid of any of the clinically-detached ennui of most electronica artists. The lyrics are still a delight (even the odd bit about killer whales). 'I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl'. Her finest album, probably, from a lifetime of stunning releases. It has a strength, a quality that her previous releases were a little light on: for all the ground it breaks it remains a deeply cohesive album. There is a narrative logic to the structure - a coherence. It is an immersive experience. In this dude's opinion at least.

Tori Amos 'From the Choirgirl Hotel'
A voice as rich and sultry as sun-baked earth, as the steam rising from that scorched dirt. Petrichor. I always loved the way Amos' voice had a slightly fractured hoarseness to it, like it was scalded just below the surface. This is a huge album. Denser and more lavish than her others. Amos treats us to her trademark Bosendorfer here - working the lower notes, the ones that hit you in the meat and marrow. But there are other instrumental layers aplenty (very little sparseness here); rich keyboard swathes, marimbas, strings, and (in a possible first for her) blood-stirring dance beats. 'Raspberry Swirl' rides a propulsive rhythm. Infectious and urgent; panting, hungry and powerful - all quite appropriate given the subject matter. There's a darkness to it too - almost a witchy Goth-club vibe. 'Playboy Mommy' seems lightweight, playful in a melancholy way, a jazzy strut. Until you realise it depicts a miscarriage. Elsewhere Amos bewitches and beguiles. I've flirted with her other releases; but this album won my heart from the very first listen.

Acid Bath 'When the Kite String Pops'.
Sludge. Stoner Doom. Psychedelic Blues Metal. Shit, call it whatever you want. All I know is this deranged, drug-influenced band from Louisiana had hit upon something complex and strange and maddeningly addictive. The lyrics are a stream-of-consciousness nightmare - all terrifying imagery about insects and planets and oceans and death. Frontman Dax Riggs delivered them all in either a ravaged, throat-scraping bellow or a smoke-glazed and weirdly melodic voice. Oh, he could be beautiful when he needed to be and one only had to witness the delicate semi-classical acoustic guitar interplay of 'The Bones of Baby Dolls' or the finger-painted scrawl that was 'Scream of the Butterfly' (it was years before I got the Jim Morrison reference) to know that this was a band of rare and corrupt majesty. Man, look at those titles - where do you think I got my writing style from?

Marilyn Manson 'Antichrist Superstar'
Oh, he may seem like a worn-out joke now - for all that his most recent album was a fierce beast indeed. But nothing changes the sense of awe and amazement that washed over me when I first heard 'Sweet Dreams'. I'd never heard acoustic guitar creepy-crawl like that before. This album was like that times a-hundred. It was caustic, poignant, vicious, triumphant and had such a sense of weirdly-joyous anarchy to it. The grinding bass; the bleeding electronic loops and sniggers; the thin, oddly buzzing guitars; and Manson's fractured baritone howl. He could sound so furious at one instant and so wounded, even oddly emotive the next. It was a massive album that made you want to fling up your fist and shout along. 'I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.' They just don't make rage sound that infectiously thrilling any more. 'Man That You Fear' haunts me still - poisonous and sour-sweet with its calliopes and its lurching rhythm; a funhouse mirror of a song.

Mr Bungle.
This album changed the world for me. Just a little bit. There was a DJ that worked the late-night shift on Mondays at RDU; called herself Mighty Mouse. Every time she was on she would throw down a track from this album. It was deranged, wild, a freefall on a rollercoaster ride. Mike Patton's first band - improbably signed to a major label (Warner Bros!) after the success of Faith No More. The songs leapt from ska to funk to punk to metal to jazz to dub to circus music. Often within the same track - sometimes within the same verse. Patton sounded snotty and self-possessed, spitting and sneering and smirking his way through the mire of their lyrics. Those lyrics were skatalogical, pornographic, hilarious and disturbing. Explosions of brass and seasick organs drove most of the tracks. It was madness sculpted into music. It pushed the limits of what a band was capable of. Years later they eclipsed even their debut with the phenomenal, exotica-tinged 'California'.

Massive Attack 'Mezzanine'
Their first two albums - which still sound to me like critically-acclaimed muzak for cocktail parties - served only to introduce me to the sublime, hash-scorched rasp of Tricky (by 'Mezzanine' he was gone). But this disc is a very different beast altogether, and for me this remains one of the most glorious and opulently dark releases of the Nineties. 'Mezzanine' saw their sound roughen, deepen - the crawling hip-hop beats and dub rumblings now cloaked in squalls and shivers of hefty post-rock guitar & bass. Here the urgent whispers of 3D and the deep, threatening interjections of Daddy G combine exquisitely with Horace Andy's rich, reggae-soaked voice and the gossamer-glitter of ex-Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. Each track feels carefully and intricately constructed - layer laid upon layer; complex enough that each listen reveals new elements - yet the listener is instantly drawn in, thrilled, seduced... and intimidated. It is an essential album.

Type O Negative 'Bloody Kisses'
The late and lamented Peter Steele - 6'9" tall and apparently hewn entirely from muscle and cheekbones. Possessed of arguably the deepest 'clean' voice in metal. There was the striking image of him wearing a freaking double bass slung on a chain across his shoulders, gripped as one would a guitar. Type O Negative's sound spliced the blues swagger & doom-laden crush of Black Sabbath with a Beatles-esque sense of melody and the gossamer keyboard-and-reverb fog of the Cocteau Twins. All graced with the stentorian bass-baritone chants of Mr Steele (and the more traditional metal rasps of Kenny Hickey). 'Bloody Kisses' was the album that introduced me to them, to their grim and gleeful vision of the world, and to this day I cannot pick a weak track on it (I dig the supposed 'filler' and instrumental tracks too). It is an immense album - intense, grand, beautiful and heavy as all goddamn. This is Gothic metal delivered with a knowing wink and a thick Brooklyn accent.

So that's my patchwork of memories - fragment stitched to fragment. It's been said that what you're drawn to between the ages of thirteen and nineteen (in terms of film, music, art, books etc) will shape your taste for the rest of your life - you will carry those with you forever and you will always be looking for echoes of what you loved then.
This is what shaped the world inside my head.

That doesn't mean that those are the only truly great albums that I recall from the Nineties - there are others that mean a lot to me; but I either didn't discover them until outside of that decade, or they didn't mean the same thing to me then that they do now. There are a couple of other bands that meant the world to me then but that I have grown to dislike or openly loathe in the years since (*cough* Radiohead *cough*). They too, have been omitted.

Music has changed a great deal since then - now it seems as if the musical world is a great, heaving mass - too vast and teeming to keep track of. Genres have spawned sub-genre after sub-genre. Televised 'talent' shows have drowned the pop music world in a wash of oversung, easy-listening effluent and it has all become so...complicated. In the days of Elvis Presley the sneakiest production trick they had was 'fattening' the voice; a process by which multiple identical copies of the vocal track were laid over one another to make the voice sound fuller and richer in the mix. Nowadays it takes up to sixty separate audio tracks and as many as forty different (synthesized) musical instruments to create a single Justin Bieber song - and after all that effort, production and unrelenting precision all you're left with is a Justin Bieber song.

It's not all bad though. There's just so much more of it, more of everything. Now you have to sift through the wreckage to find the treasures; but it's so freaking accessible now - everything is there and waiting at the end of a high speed internet connection. Waiting for the click of your mouse. But you have to be savvy and careful. You have to do the research.

But back to that list... Back to the meaning of that list.
Ultimately what these songs are is a key that unlocks our past. It is the soundtrack to our memories - to the whirling din of fragments that makes up a perfectly ordinary life. There are things for which there are no words, that is why we have always needed (and will always need) music.

After The Storm

A couple of weeks ago there was a night in Wellington when it felt like the world was going to end. A storm swept across much of New Zealand, descending upon this little sea-port city with wild winds and almost-horizontal rain. At 6:30pm that Thursday night I stood at a bus stop while the wind whipped the thick rainwater back and forth across the surface of the road. It looked strangely beautiful under the streetlights. By the time I made it back to my apartment the footpaths and driveways were a ruin of torn foliage, scattered ferns, and chunks of wet-blackened wood. Lines were brought down at various points across the city; leaving people without power in the darkness and cold. Some for days afterwards - and winter in New Zealand can be harsh indeed. Roofs were torn off, windows shattered inwards.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of the wind beating itself against my walls and windows. Where I live, we weren't hit so bad but the next day I saw footage of coastal neighbourhoods - places where the road had been simply ripped into chunks of scattered cement.

And in the wet, in the darkness; things from the very dawn of time were drawn upwards and into the drains - strange chittering creatures with multitudinous legs.
Oh, you think I'm kidding about that last part?
Let me introduce you to the velvet worm - onchophora.

 

 

Cute little critter, huh. Sort of looks like the lovechild of a caterpillar and a centipede. What my friend found in her sink didn't look too much like that any more. What she found was grey and slimy, long-dead and waterlogged. Those endearing wee legs had rotted down to barbs.

It's a living fossil - one of those rare creatures for whom evolution is just something that happens to other people. Millions of years unchanged. Someone she knows had also found one recently, to their delight - also flushed upwards by the storm. I like to picture a vast, teeming mass of them living below the surface of the earth - down in the dirt and darkness...waiting for the chance to reclaim the world they lost.

And now, the segue...

Atrocity feat. Yasmin: 'After the Storm' (Napalm Records, 2010).

Atrocity are a German metal band with a thrashy, melo-death sound thick with progressive and symphonic influences. They also often betray a keen love of 80's pop songs. I'm not a huge fan.
With the addition of the angelically-voiced Liv Kristine Espenaes-Krull (to whom Atrocity vocalist Alexander Krull is married) they become Leaves' Eyes (a German-Norwegian symphonic metal band with a strong folk influence; they are definitely one of my favourites).

But Atrocity feat. Yasmin is another entity again - the addition this time being vocalist and flautist Yasmin Krull (Alexander Krull's sister). As different as Leaves' Eyes sound to Atrocity; this other project sounds even further removed from their parent band - to the extent that coming up with another whole new name might have been better advised.
That is to say - a lot of Atrocity's hardline fans really hate this other venture.

Their music has been described as ethno-metal, fans of Canadian harpist and Celtic/Middle-Eastern folk artist Loreena McKennitt are advised to check them out - though to my ears the single strongest influence on their sound is Australian darkwave/world/ethno-fusion duo Dead Can Dance.
If you really want to hear Loreena Mckennitt-gone-doom-metal check out US band Todesbonden's album 'Sleep Now, Quiet Forest' - it's utterly lovely, but y'know - heavy too.

Atrocity feat. Yasmin have two albums under their belt now, released quite some distance apart. Their debut is 'Calling the Rain'. I listened to it when Wellington was seized by drought; the grass and bush scorched to straw beneath endless blue skies. "After the Storm' is a logical continuation of their sound on that one.

At their core their music is based around the voices of the siblings. Yasmin has a rich, mid-range voice - thick and earthy with a wonderful keening/wailing quality reminiscent of the folk-singing in the more Eastern parts of Europe. At times she does recall a slightly raw-edged Lisa Gerrard. Alex steers largely clear of the extreme vocal style he favours for Atrocity - which is to his benefit as he has always struck me as an adequate rather than remarkable extreme vocalist - his growls and rasps have always sounded a little thin to my ears; lacking the basso, almost operatic cadence of Morten Veland (in his early works with Tristania); or the anguished intensity of Mr Curse (or Victorian black metal collective: A Forest of Stars). Here he utilizes a rough-tinged but largely melodic baritone style. I'm fairly certain he is working the Brendan Perry vibe in this, but his voice lacks the full-bodied richness of Perry - sounding slightly colder and coarser; it strongly recalls the 80's Gothic-baritone sound and occasionally evokes early-to-mid Nick Cave.
Either way it gives the ethno-metal concoction a definite post-punk vibe and must serve him very well in Atrocity's occasional 80's pop song covers.

Instrumentally the band fuses elements of Gothic metal with Eastern European and Celtic folk music, their sound is rich and well-traveled, but there is a looseness and roughness to their playing - this is not an overly-polished album. It is grandly atmospheric.

Rather than broadening their instrumental palette (via guest instrumentalists) to include a host of exotic and worldly instruments Atrocity feat. Yasmin have simply broadened the range of percussion instruments (adding hand drums, tribal percussion and shakers) and the rest falls to guitarist/bassist Thorsten Bauer. On the basis of this disc I'd say they've got themselves a real find in Bauer. The man is a genius. Throughout the album he utilizes delicate Classical-style guitar tapestries as well as a range of playing techniques and effects to make his instrument sound like a harp or a dulcimer. Heavier, more overtly-metallic playing is also in evidence. Keyboards are either wholly absent or so subtly utilized that they escaped my notice - though a few of the tracks add cello and violin to the mix.

Throughout the disc we are treated to Eastern-styled guitar strumming (that slightly recalls Canadian band The Tea Party) - 'As the Sun Kissed the Sky'; exquisite flute trills (most noticeable on the hooky 'Call of Yesteryear'); a Classical, Spanish-flavoured instrumental 'Flight of Abba Ibn Firnas'; heavier numbers (the ornate, heavy and musically complex 'Black Mountain' sees the return of Alex's guttural vocals); and even a slight 60's psych-folk vibe on 'Goddess of Fortune and Sorrow' - which finds Yasmin utilizing a softer, breathier approach to her typically dramatic, strident delivery.

Fans of fist-pumping, bone-cracking metal will likely go home hungry and that is the bit that makes this album kind of a hard sell. For myself, it's a fine and challenging disc and I would be delighted if Alex Krull and his conspirators continued with experiments in this vein.

Anxiety Always (Remastered and Reissued)

This isn't a new post. This is a remastered and re-released previous post; rather a personal one. I put it up a month or two ago and it got a pretty decent number of hits. A part of me freaked out at some point and went 'Hey, dude. You're oversharing on the internet'. I'm not really much for talking about myself - not in my everyday, normal human sort of life anyway. So, I hit delete and the post disappeared from my profile.
Obviously I didn't wipe it completely. I made a copy first. Otherwise this re-post wouldn't exist.

And that was that. Except, of course, that it wasn't.
I got a message sent to me on Facebook: a friend from long ago, someone I really should have kept in better contact with. She thanked me for my post. For this post. She told me I was brave.
Throughout the course of my thirty-five years on this ball of spinning rock and dirt I have been called a lot of things (granted, most of that was during primary school). But I cannot recall ever being called 'brave' before. It felt good.

When I first seriously began writing - during my sparrow-boned and narcissistic teenage years - I told myself (with the kind of self-obsessed hubris that is pretty much unique to teenagers) that I wrote because I wanted to make some kind of impact - to create something that echoed out wider and larger than myself (a bit like ripples spreading out from a stone cast into a pond, if you want to get all simile-happy about it). I guess in my strange little way I wanted to change the world.

Now, I have to be honest with you. I continue writing because I think I'm pretty great at it. I have a ton of words in me and they all clamor and shout to be heard and sometimes when I read them back I do think: 'Man, I've got something here.' I know that I'll never change the world or start a revolution or anything. I know that these words will never make me rich. Or famous. But I keep writing - even though I could be spending all this time doing something that I enjoy more: like reading, listening to music, watching a B-Grade horror flick (or an old episode of QI), or shouting obscenities at pigeons.
But deep down that arrogant teenager is still inside of me. I figure if I can write something, anything, that...I don't know...resonates with someone else, something that matters, even if only in a small, fleeting way. If I can manage that...
Then that is reason enough.

Also, by taking down the post I was chickening out; pure and simple. I would be once again hiding a part of myself that I have no business being ashamed of in the first damn place. I shouldn't feel guilty for my misfiring synapses and skewed brain chemicals.

I have a birthmark - a wide olive-brown stain on one the side of my neck. It looks kind of like the impression of a palm-print pressed into the skin. For a while there, as a kid, this caused me a bit of distress. When you're real young you don't want anything that marks you out as different; it potentially makes the whole weary business of school just that little bit harder. But as the years melted away I came to accept it. It became a part of me - something that helped define the sense of me that I had in my head. A few years ago I ran into a guy I'd known back in those days. He mentioned something I'd written about that birthmark, back in intermediate or whatever. He said he'd really admired me for that.

I should also mention that when my baby teeth finally fell out the new set that grew in boasted a strikingly prominent pair of canines. Thus, I was rumored to be a vampire for a while; teased a little for it (back then vampires were sadly neither cool nor sexy). But over the years those teeth have become my thing - something that separates me. I even resisted when my parents offered to get me corrective braces. So I'm still a vampire (though now also a vegetarian).

All these things, these imperfections - the birthmark, the fangs, the weird crafting, my struggles with a comparatively minor mental illness...
These flaws make me who I am. And I am not ashamed of who I am.

So there you go: I'm a vampiric, music-and-bad-movie-fixated, closet bogan/covert hippy/undercover Goth/frustrated novelist. With a mild case of OCD.
It doesn't really take courage for me to admit that now, I even feel a certain odd pride. Because if I can live with this then it means that, in some small way, I am strong.

                                                                           (...)

Alright, first things first. This is a music blog and the title of today's post is lifted from the debut album of the electronica outfit Adult. ('and the award for least-Google-friendly band name goes to...'). A husband and wife duo that hail from...I'm going to say, Detroit; they seem like they ought to come from Detroit. Their sound is an abusive mix of abrasive, grimy electroclash scrawled across with dissonant no wave and post-punk influences; Ladytron with a mouthful of blood. The vocalist sounds like Siouxsie Sioux picking a fight. Nervous, tense and troubled; they have released a handful of albums and the titles are a dead giveaway for the uneasiness of the music pressed into those little polycarbonate discs: 'Anxiety Always', 'D.U.M.E' (Death Unto Mine Enemies, I believe), 'Gimmie Trouble' and 'Why Bother?' There is a great time to be had there, tons of fun for the maladjusted. I recommend them.

But they are not the subject of this post.

I've noticed that you get more hits on your post if you give away a piece of yourself; a little personal truth: the blog as confessional booth. So here's a little piece of me.

Since adolescence I've been living with a mild form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Now, a lot of folks will lay claim to this - often they'll smile apologetically and say something like 'I'm a bit OCD about that' or whatever. By this, they usually mean that they like the towels folded a certain way.

Nope.

That isn't OCD, I'm afraid. That's simple fussiness and that's totally cool; everyone is fussy about something. Unless you feel compelled, even forced, to perform certain (often quite time-consuming and seemingly meaningless) rituals in order to stave of the sense that something terrible will happen if you don't...

Well, you're probably not experiencing OCD.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is an anxiety disorder. Basically, at it's core the whole thing stems from some deep, pulsing sense of anxiety; of fretfulness; of something bad just waiting to happen. An archaic term for a troubling or worrying thought was a 'maggot', as in a 'maggot of doubt', or a 'maggot of uneasiness'. It is the best term I have ever heard applied. Picture it: something pallid and squirming, curling and gnawing away somewhere deep in you brain, writhing in the back of your mind. It's as good an illustration of how it feels as any I can imagine - that larval thought that simply won't. Go. Away. Sufferers develop the rituals as a means of banishing the thoughts and I have to say, from my own experience, that the rituals do genuinely help. After they are completed there is a weird sense of achievement, perversely it feels like something has been accomplished. The anxiety is allayed. But, crucially, never banished. Not for good.

I can't speak for those that feel they have to count the times they flick a light switch on and off, nor those who have to count the number of objects touched, in a certain way, in a certain pattern. I've never felt compelled to count anything (perhaps why I didn't do particularly well at mathematics) and my experience of living with this anxiety disorder has taken different forms throughout various phases. My condition is very mild, undiagnosed (well, except by me in an apparent bid to make my psychology degree worth something), and for the most part controllable.

For the most part.

Something is classified as a 'disorder' when it negatively impacts upon your life: professional, personal, whatever. Certainly my condition has never impacted upon my working life. My personal life, well, is perhaps a different story. It's something I've managed to keep hidden much of my life, except from those closest to me. It's also something that I've only recently become comfortable discussing. Shame is a big part of this, embarrassment as well. See, the thing with OCD is; sufferers are totally self-aware. They know that what they're doing is illogical, irrational and would make no sense to anyone else. That doesn't make it any easier to stop. The rules are the rules. So, I've hidden myself a bit in the past. I've withdrawn from circumstances that might either exacerbate or reveal my condition to others. It's my dirty little secret, y'know. This is less of a thing now than when I was younger and full of those raw chemical emotions of youth. As you get older you become...I don't want to say 'at peace with yourself', that sounds saccharine. You become more yourself, I guess; accepting that the way you are is okay and if other people have an issue with it, well, hell, that's their problem.

My condition was at it's peak when I was a teenager, probably.

It began with contamination phobias. It really latched on when I first learnt about the scabies mite. I have a number of tiny red dots in my skin. They look like tiny, blood-shedding pinpricks. They are the result of pigment or melanin or something gone a bit weird. They are nothing. I freaked out a bit when I first noticed them and asked a pharmacist. He told me they were probably scabies (despite the fact that they didn't itch), so I read about scabies.

I really frigging wish I'd hadn't done that. It really doesn't do for a paranoid to discover that there actually is a kind of insect (okay, arachnid, or mite...whatever) that lives under your skin and can be transferred by skin-to-skin contact. Things kind of escalated after that, the thought of some kind of contamination spread by touch stayed with me and became twisted, corrupted by the maggots in my mind. It got so I started to think other contaminations could be spread by contact, so I started keeping my stuff separate (though never food on my dinner plate, though I understand that is a bit of an OCD thing) and fretting about which objects I'd touched myself, and in which order.

It all got a bit strange. I would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time.

Then I went to a doctor. He took a look at my blood freckles, observed that there was one on my hairline (scabies mites never venture above the neck), that they didn't itch, or spread and concluded that they were....careful, big scientific term coming up - red dots.

The scabies fears faded after that, and eventually the contamination thing eased as well. I'm not weird about physical contact any more, though I still have a bit of a thing about blood-drinking, semi-parasitic insects. You might even call it a minor phobia. They freak me out.

Years later, I fell in love and began talking to the stars. Okay, there's no way to not make this sound odd, but you have to understand that I was a teenager: still a seething morass of violent hormones, wild romantic ideals and also burdened with a pretty deep-set inferiority complex. Basically, I figured I didn't deserve her and what began as a weird pseudo-romantic quirk turned into a ritual. Most nights after I'd seen her and spent time with her, I'd stand on my parent's back lawn and gaze up at the endless star-shattered sky. Now it might have sounded like a prayer, and really it's not all that different from kneeling down and murmuring your hopes and fears into your interlocked hands - palm pressed to palm. I prayed to the stars and the moon if it was there hanging golden and fat in the sky. Only it wasn't really a prayer because I am now - and was even moreso then - at best an agnostic. I knew nothing heard me, that there was no God hovering silently in the spaces between stars waiting attentively on my whispered words. It was the ritual that I thought brought me luck and staved off the inevitable, looming break-up.

It didn't work. The relationship ended. The world moved on and I stopped talking to the stars.

Two interesting asides from this little chapter of my psychosis. For a start, shooting stars aren't actually all that uncommon. I saw quite a few and they are pretty cool. Another intriguing occasion was when I startled an intruder. I was just out there star-gazing when the security light attached to the garage flicked on. For a second I didn't think much of it (a strong wind was usually enough to trigger the damn thing) and then a dude walked smartly around the corner and into my parent's backyard. He was solidly built and appeared to be wearing a camouflage-patterned jacket. The light was at his back so his face was just a silhouette.
I said hello.
He froze in a wholly gratifying fashion. Now, a couple of things. Firstly, he couldn't see me - I was well back in the shadows and he would have been night-blind from the suddenness of the security light, so he wouldn't have known that I was just a skinny kid hanging out in the dark. Secondly, I have a strikingly deep (I've been told it's 'big and booming') voice. So I wouldn't have just sounded like the jumble of bird-bones and coat-hangers that I resembled.

He mumbled something about looking for someone else and walked briskly away down the drive. I stood out in the dark for a little while longer - finishing my ritual - and then went inside. I didn't feel nervous at any point, which is odd. I didn't even feel startled when he first appeared. End story.

That was a long time ago. A lifetime ago, it feels like now. The me that existed then is now long gone; buried down deep in my bone and marrow, perhaps, but for the most part he is just a lingering phantom. When I stumble upon anything that I wrote or sculpted back then, in that time it is like looking at the work of a ghost: a 'me' that doesn't exist any more.

I don't miss him. He was, for the most part, a mixed up and frequently sullen kid that withdrew from those closest to him and said some terrible things. I didn't like being a teenager much. Everything got easier when I hit my twenties and my moods balanced out - the roar of my lunatic hormones quieting down to a soft buzzing. By my mid-twenties I'd balanced out, my neuroses kept carefully in check, so much so that much of the time I could pretend that there wasn't something in me - something strange and, I felt at the time, somehow shameful.

Now my OCD manifests in a very narrow and specific way. Perhaps fittingly for a music junkie (or music guru, if you prefer) I'm excruciatingly particular about the storage and handling of my discs. I grip them only by the edges of the disc. I never touch the playing surface. I keep the jewel cases in resealable plastic sleeves that I import from Japan because those ones are of a much higher quality (thicker plastic) than the US-made ones. I use compressed air to remove dust from the discs and the player. I do my best to protect them from humidity, mildew and bugs (I litter my CD storage drawers with those moisture-absorbing sachets you get in medicine bottles and new shoe-boxes). This is a legitimate concern in New Zealand; a country only recently embracing such 20th Century technological advances as air-conditioning and insulation. Thus humidity and damp are genuine issues here. I don't lend my CDs out to anyone...hell, I doubt I'd let anyone else touch them.

I really put the CD back into OCD.

Actually most of this just makes me sound like one of those really pedantic collectors (comics and original-release action figures see the same level of reverence applied to them by other fanatic dudes). I treat CDs like holy items, which isn't really surprising (and for the record, quite a few are out-of-print or otherwise irreplaceable) and perhaps that's really all this is now, not a symptom of OCD but a sign that I'm a bit of a fanatic and a fusspot. Actually, I do have a few graphic novels and such too. I'm quite protective of those as well - hell, they were expensive, man. All of this is relatively new. As a teenager and in my very early twenties I'd happily lend discs, would tote them around to other people's places and throw them on their stereos. Scratches and finger-prints didn't bother me so long as the discs kept playing. It was the music that was important, not the ephemera.

Anxiety is a moving target.

Sometimes it's an overheating fridge, a leaking washing machine, a landlord that suddenly decides they need to sell the property you've been inhabiting at a very reasonable weekly cost, or an infestation of fleas left over from a cat that doesn't live with you any more.

These things are all fixable and can be remedied either by hard-work, a lot of phone-calls, financial expense or, in the case of the fleas: a lot of vacuuming, insecticides and a trip to a laundromat to wash all the bedding. My response to these kind of stress-ors is to deal with them as rapidly and productively as possible. Being able to do nothing or being delayed from taking action is torturous for me.

This is partially a positive thing in that it makes me extremely motivated to fix things and means that I can be really quite productive at times (although it has also led to some rash decisions in the past as well). But with these anxieties there is no need for rituals of compulsive behaviour, because this is all stuff that can be worked through and sorted out: it is something concrete and real and identifiable.

In truth it is probably just perfectly normal anxiety; the kind everyone faces at some point.

A far worse kind of anxiety is the nameless dread that grows in all the empty spaces: in the feeling that something is going wrong. The anxiety that lies behind every unspoken word, every unvoiced concern. Knowing that something is wrong and being unable to talk about it or address it in any real form is terrible. That anxiety is a shapeless, amorphous thing and from my experience, it just pushes you (and by 'you', I mean 'me') deeper into the rituals and deeper into myself.

So where am I now?

I've tried different things: focused breathing techniques, relaxation methods, meditation, and recently hypnotherapy. The hypnotherapy thing was brilliant, man. I must write more about it at some point - it was hands-down one of the strangest experiences of my recent past. And it's not like just falling asleep and remembering nothing of what took place while you were in a hypnotic state. I remember everything. It was fascinating and deeply strange.

And it might actually have helped.

That same week I finally sat down with a GP and described the experience of being me. He prescribed me fluoxetine and lorazepam. Those little foil sheets of pills are sitting inside an ice-cream container in the cupboard. I haven't started taking them yet.

But they're waiting. They're waiting for if the maggot comes back. They're there in case it gets really bad.

For now, I'm okay. Good even. I currently have no rituals and no compulsions. I don't feel anxious. I've cut down on my alcohol intake. I'm walking a lot: the rhythm, the motion and the exercise all help to untangle my thoughts.

I've had an easy time of it, comparatively. My symptoms have always been at the milder, more controllable end of the spectrum, and I've never experienced true depression. I've never had to have everything in a certain imposed order, in a certain regimented place. I've never had to spend hours counting and recounting words or page numbers. I am, in truth, a fairly laid-back guy who just happens to have a few symptoms of OCD. For others, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a crippling thing; something that impacts deeply and constantly on their day to day life.

Me and the Devil

So I read this book...
The cover intrigued me - a super-imposed double of a leopard's face in lurid colours against a sea of black. The title intrigued. It's an old blues song, isn't it? The dust jacket was so weighted down with critical plaudits that it damn near doubled the weight of the novel.

Johnny Depp assured me from the back cover that it contained 'words of wisdom that I will carry with me into the fucking dirt'. Or something like that anyway. Keith Richards was also a fan and felt that author Nick Tosches was one who knew of whom he spoke with regard to the Devil.
From the blurb I could tell little more than that here was a dark prince of literary badassness; a black-hearted man of poisoned letters; a transgressive novelist in the vein of Burroughs, Thompson and the rest of the old, dead madmen.

The author photo was a fascination in itself - there was Tosches, dressed in a fine suit and smuggled in shadows. He had a sour, misanthropic scowl and John Hurt's eyes. The author blurb told me nothing, reveling in the mythology it hinted at: apparently Tosches is 'uniquely acquainted with the half-lit world in which this novel is set'. Or again, something like that; the book has gone back to the library now and no longer haunts my apartment.

In a bold move Tosches had made himself the protagonist (though the character's last name is never given) or at least himself incarnated as an embittered and ageing author, too crook-backed under his own weariness and misanthropy to write any more. It is, yes, another novel about a novelist.
Write what you know, I guess.

I sincerely hope that the novel is strongly fictionalized and the character of Nick is intended as a caricature of the real Tosches, but...hell, I just don't know. What it feels like is the work of a tired self-obsessed old man desperate to mythologize himself in the most lurid and inflammatory way possible. It's also rife with racist slurs, misogyny and anti-Semitism, so yeah, I really hope it's intended as caricature.

But anyway.
Novel-world Nick is a fatigued, bitter old dude with an impressive literary back-catalogue and a mouthful of plastic teeth. He finds himself longing for the youth he always cynically pretended he didn't have (Tosches has played the bitter old man card his entire literary life, apparently, even when he didn't have the years on him to match the world-weariness). He is wealthy and casual with his cash but can now take no real pleasure in fine food or the company of women.

Then he takes Sabine home; she who allegedly 'likes to be raped after bathing in warm, scented water and brushing out her hair' (or yet again, something like that - Tosches uses the exact same phrase about four or five times throughout the novel but I'm still not sure I'm quoting it right). During a sexual act Nick sinks his dentures into the trembling delicacy of her inner thigh and drinks her blood. This act of communion awakens a rush of fresh life and desire in him - he learns that he is able to literally consume youth. He begins to revel in all the luxuries that he had previously abandoned and thus we are treated to a rich, endlessly descriptive cavalcade of fine meals and carnal encounters - all described in lurid, lavish, pornographic detail (and that's just the food).

Apparently Nick, despite all evidence to the contrary (and pick-up lines that include 'can you change the tides by the crossing and uncrossing of your legs?' and 'do you like to watch old men masturbate and know that they too were once young?') is utterly irresistible to extremely young women (the book implies he's in either his late fifties or early sixties; the oldest of his conquests is twenty). Before you know it he has two extraordinarily beautiful and utterly devoted young women willing to let him lap at their sanguinary exultations.
Okay, they let him bite or whip them until they bleed. He then consumes the blood and grows ever more godlike (yup, Nick believes himself to be transforming into a new, bacchanalian god).

Did I mention that one of the young women has elaborate rape fantasies (leading to an extensive discourse on what one might refer to this fetish as in Latin terms) that Nick is all too willing to indulge and the other likes to don a transparent raincoat (and nothing else, of course) and be crucified and whipped. Or that Nick also strikes up a tumultuous sexual relationship with the former's stockings. I can't accurately remember either of their names - but I figure that's okay as Tosches doesn't give a toss about them anyway. Neither are any more than half-written ciphers whose sole purpose in the narrative is their beauty and their devotion to the masterly Nick. They are no more than blank-eyed sex dolls - an onanistic fantasy conjured by the novelist. When they speak it is with no more than his voice.

And so the reader is treated to a never-ending series of transgressive sex scenes (which wouldn't be erotic even if you didn't wind up picturing the guy from the author's photograph engaging in them). This in addition to a never-ending parade of lavishly-described luxury items (Nick has quite a thing for artisanal knives) and fine dining (seriously this frequently verges on food-porn). It is very clearly the work of a man reveling in his own wealth, infamy and imagined debauchery.
Oh, and there's no narrative drive between the endless descriptions and deliberately arcane language.

I read on. Waiting for the descent that I was certain must come. I knew that the narrator - Nick - must one day pay the price of this deviltry, and he keeps buying those damn knives... Even Keith Richards warned him against drinking blood and taking power from it (apparently it's way more addictive than heroine and Richards had seen 'things come out of people').
Oh, I didn't mention it. Keith Richards cameos in the book. He has a couple of dinner scenes. They're pointless but I figure Tosches wanted to make sure that the reader knew that he and Richards were pals - he's met Depp too and makes a point of putting that in the novel (which makes those sleeve quotes seem a trifle biased).

*SPOILER ALERT* (umm, maybe)
To an extent the descent does come. Black-outs sweep down upon Nick - consuming entire months of his life. It's also very likely that he butchers Sabine and her female friend at some point - slashing their throats and drinking their blood, obviously. Nick then meets the Devil while vomiting ghost-rats in his grimy apartment. They chat. The Devil likes high-quality socks and fine corduroy.
This lasts for about twenty pages. Nick is hospitalized, recovers. Starts going to the gym. Leaves his girlfriends. Then the book comprehensively sets about dismantling what little plot it has already established - abandoning the most interesting developments (Nick's changing blood-type, for instance) in favour of shakily ambling to it's vague and pointless conclusion. And he easily shrugs off any concerns he might have about y'know, probably murdering those women.
* END SPOILERS *

I kept reading; hoping for those words of wisdom that Johnny Depp promised me I would be taking to my grave. I never found a single damn thing. It actually left me wondering about Depp. As a novel it's plot-less, purposeless, pointless and hollow. Everything is overwritten and over-described (I know, I know...pot...kettle...black). The endless parade of luxury and debauchery is wearying (it's not cleverly satirical like Bret Easton Ellis' 'American Psycho' - speaking of Ellis, if you want to read a supernatural yarn that mythologizes the author read his novel 'Lunar Park').

Then there's the racism. It seems Tosches is working this anti-PC/shock tactic thing but the way I see it is if you're an old white guy and you're not starring in a Tarantino-scripted Blaxploitation/Western you really, really shouldn't use the N-word. As I mentioned before; he doesn't like Jewish people much either. And yes, to keep his bases covered, there's lots of misogyny too.

It's an adolescent wannabe-shocker. There's no wisdom. No real cleverness. Just bitterness and a definite masturbatory vibe. It even fails as a parable of addiction - as vampirism is a very easy-to-quit addiction, seemingly. However, there is something oddly, horribly compelling about it (and Tosches is quite a fine writer somewhere in there). The greatest enjoyment that I think can be gained from it is to pretend that Tosches saw the popularity of 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and the whole vampire-porn genre (which, God knows, is plenty extensive) and decided to write his own contribution. Why he made himself the protagonist is beyond me - self-aggrandizing, definitely.

So there you have it; if you're looking for a rather tedious, self-congratulatory tome of Literary Professor-porn (with added vampirism and bondage) that nevertheless involves some nice descriptive language (although way, way too much of it) - then dive in, pal.

And last but not least; the human mouth is full of bacteria. A deep enough bite from another person; one that breaks the skin and potentially damages the tissue (at one point Nick accidentally bites through a young woman's femoral artery) would almost certainly become infected. Blood poisoning is a genuine threat. At one point Nick even sort-of (but utterly, horribly wrongly) ponders this - thinking that with the deep crevasses and pouches around his few remaining teeth it's fortunate he didn't contract any disease from his victims' blood. Other way around, buddy. Other way around.

Random Thoughts on Random Things

Picture this:
A ball of stone hanging in the howling, infinite vastness of space; crowded in by dark matter. On a cosmic scale this ball is less than a mote of dust caught in the breeze. But it has a burning, molten heart and is just the right size; neither too small nor too large, to generate a sufficient gravitational field and thus sustain an atmosphere.

It is also neither too close nor too far from a medium-sized star and it rotates at precisely the necessary speed and in the necessary manner. So this ball of suspended rock and fire experiences both night and day. And life grows upon its surface. It turns blue-green. Glaciers form, oceans spread, mountains push out of the restless and churning earth. Forests crawl greenly across those ridges of stone and soil. Flowers perfume the days. From the stinking primordial muck life-forms crawl and slither and hop; they sprout limbs, form rudimentary lungs. The breathe their first sips of this new air. They become things of claws and scales, flesh, fur and feather. Millions of years from reptile to mammal. And from the mammals spring a line of gibbering apes. These apes learn to walk upright, learn to hunt. Little-by-little they learn to plot and calculate. Their brains grow and expand, their hands become more sensitive and dexterous. They become adept at making and using tools. Their fur disappears generation by generation and they fashion crude clothing for themselves; to remain warm.
They learn to shape the world around them. Become clever. Become powerful. Become human.

These humans; they build houses and halls, cathedrals and cities. They snatch the world for themselves.
Genetic lines form. DNA patterns echoed and replicated, twining like an eternal string of beads. These strings bind and wind through multitudinous generations. They bind cowards and kings, heroes and beggars, fools and geniuses, madmen and saints; all the countless shades in-between. These cords stretch through all of human history, across continents and oceans. They survive famines, plagues, war, tyranny, revolution. They pass through acts of horror and acts of nobility. They witness the Holocaust and the Renaissance. Through the entire seething roar of human history these same strands prevail, linking and re-linking together into millions of new permutations. Until finally two people (each the product of many others - a virtual forest of others) come together.
Exactly the right  people, at exactly the right time. DNA codes combine - half from each and the end result of all these endless years of absolute randomness, the end result of this entire writhing possibility is...

You.

If any of the variables were changed, if any of the times were different, you would never exist. Not as you. Not as you are now. You are a single outcome borne of a colossal flux of randomness. Your very existence is a triumph against unimaginable odds. Every day that you inhabit this small blue-green ball of living, burning stone is the equivalent of winning some incomprehensible cosmic lottery.
Every moment is a miracle.

And this is true of everyone; all the uncountable billions that ever have or ever will exist on this scrap of cosmic dust. Every. Single. Person.

We should never forget just how tiny we are; how incomprehensibly minute the world is. Every point of light that we can see in a clear night sky is (or was) another sun - many considerably larger than our own. Space is infinitely vast. And utterly unknowable.
We should also never forget the staggering improbability of us existing at all.

And, I just realized that all this has been said before (and way more concisely) by Alan Moore in his comic 'Watchmen' - he even used pictures. And Monty Python's Flying Circus did it better with a song. "If you're feeling down, Mrs Brown..."
Oh well.

Horror flicks and memories

The past is a lonely place to visit. It is a treacherous place too - fragile, fleeting and full of holes. And you must go there alone. You can sit with an old friend, sure; drink a coffee and reminisce. But for all that you may have shared the same experiences, their past is not your past. Their stories are not your stories. The past does not exist, not in any real tangible way and the future is nothing more than a concept. Only the present is real and it is a slippery thing indeed - point to a single moment and it's gone as soon as it can be identified. But the past, your past, is only words and memories. And it is all in you.

When I first came to Wellington my then-partner and I moved into a two bedroom flat at the ugly end of a beautiful street. The road that ran past the flat was always busy and every night I fell asleep to the sound of cars. It was in Lower Hutt and anyone who is familiar with Wellington will know that 'Lower Hutt' is not a good thing to put on your address. It has a certain reputation - at least somewhat deserved. But for all that we would often walk home late at night along those streets we never saw or encountered anything bad. For the most part those streets were pretty empty after a certain hour and there were never any signs of trouble. We had very little money. No car. On weekends (or whatever days off we shared) we would often walk the short distance to the Queensgate shopping centre. There was a little joint there where they did the best fried chicken I've ever tasted. The skin was really crackly, crisp and savoury. When you bit through it all the clear, fatty juices would trickle out from underneath that skin. It would come with a huge platter of thick-cut fries, heaped with chicken salt. While you ate it the whole experience was bliss itself. It wasn't long afterwards, however, that you'd feel it - that bloated tightness in the gut that comes from eating something really freaking unhealthy. I used to rub my stomach and joke that the chicken was fighting back. Truth is, that chicken had probably had a short and deeply unhappy life and was completely justified in seeking some form of post-mortem revenge. But then the place changed hands and venue and the chicken just wasn't the same - the skin was greasier, the portions meaner, the chips soggy and unsatisfying. We stopped going there.
I was getting too old to keep eating that junk anyway.

Queensgate itself has become a whole other thing from how it was back in those days. Now it's at least twice the size, two-storied: a looming concrete edifice that squats in the heart of the Hutt.
And the cinema we used to go to is long gone now.
It was a weary little Hoyts venue - back when Hoyts still existed for Wellington. It was tucked away, near-as-dammit hidden, inside a worn-out arcade. There seemed to be only one person who worked there; a middle-aged woman who worked the ticket booth and the candy bar. She never tried to upsell us a damn thing, never asked how our day was going, seldom made eye-contact. We both thought she was fantastic. Most days the theatre was all but empty and we had the run of the place. Heck, the only time I ever saw it close-to-capacity was when they screened 'Freddy Versus Jason'; horror movies always brought out the Hutt crowd. The floor was so sticky that my shoes would make a little tearing sound whenever I lifted them from the carpet. But the picture and sound were good. And it felt like ours.

We saw 'House of 1,000 Corpses' there. It was a movie I'd been eager as hell to see. For a start, that is hands-down the finest horror flick title that I can readily think of: it just drips venom and menace and a sense of real danger. The early trailers and teasers had made it look grainy, gleeful and garish; a snarling throwback to the grimy exploitation flicks of the seventies and eighties but twisted and refracted through the post-modern styling of 'Natural Born Killers' and like a billion MTV videos (back when MTV still played music videos, that is). It looked set to restore some bite and danger to a genre that had become too polished, pre-packaged and safe. This was a horror flick made by an obsessive - someone who'd lived and breathed this stuff - who knew the tricks and the traps of the genre - a dude who knew how to give such a flick teeth and could teach it to bite. That someone, of course, being musician Rob Zombie whose music I'd always dug and who had directed a handful of his own music clips - which were, simply, kick-ass.

So we sat there, my feet making those little tearing sounds every time I shifted, and watched this long-awaited, much-delayed movie.
And we both kind of hated it.

My first impression of the film was that it was too ugly, too sordid. It struck me that the characters were not sufficiently developed - the protagonists that is; Zombie clearly loves his villains. It looked fantastic - a cut-and-paste collage of different styles, film stocks and camera angles, and it possessed a genuinely unhinged fever-dream quality that lingered long afterwards. But ultimately it left me feeling dirty, cheated. Betrayed somehow. It wasn't the film I expected to see. There was a nihilism there, a sense of futility that left a very sour taste inside my skull.
So, I was disappointed.

But the past is a lonely place...
Recently I watched Zombie's latest film 'The Lords of Salem'. I found it haunting, demented, oddly poignant and utterly visceral. It was an occult horror flick that variously seemed to recall 'Rosemary's Baby', 'Repulsion', 'The Sentinel', and 'Suspiria' all twisted and corrupted by the late, great Ken Russell. It still felt like a pastiche - like a love letter to a genre written by someone so deeply embedded in it that he couldn't see any way clear. But. That. Worked. And it worked brilliantly. What lingered with me the most from that film was that it basically lived or died by the characters within the narrative. There was a complexity and a richness to them that was almost wholly unexpected, and they were so full of sadness, so fragile and weirdly believable.
So, consider that my recommendation.

But it also got me thinking about the look and feel of 'House of 1,000 Corpses' and I realized that the reason I'd felt betrayed by it was that it hadn't been the film I expected to see (I did a similar thing with Alex de la Iglesia's stunning 'The Last Circus' a couple of years ago: the first time I watched it I was left feeling angry, the second time I realized it was a masterpiece).
That is a stupid way to judge a film.
I thought about it's downbeat tone and it's sense of encroaching hopelessness; whether he intended to or not Zombie might have pioneered the "torture-porn" movement - though 'House...' is not nearly as graphically violent as that sub-genre tends to be.

It also occurred to me: for all that folks tend to point to 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' as the single biggest influence on his work I suspect he may be a bigger fan of that film's sequel (a film, I myself, have very fond memories of). Just so you know, 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre II' effectively parodies the first film - it paints the characters broader, bloodier and with a bolder brush. The black comedy already present in the first film is far more apparent in the sequel (it's also every bit as gore-soaked and violent as 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' was reputed to be, but actually was not). But seriously, considering the blatant pun used for the murderous family's last name (Sawyer, really?) humour was always kind of a thing for Tobe Hooper.

There are echoes of TCMII throughout much of Zombie's work. The increasingly deranged cop in pursuit of the Firefly family in 'The Devil's Rejects' recalls Dennis Hopper's lunatic chainsaw-wielding sheriff. The house in 'House of 1,000 Corpses' is closer to the phantasmagorical style of the abandoned amusement-park-cum-house-of-very-real-horrors in TCMII. Heck, even the set up of 'The Lords of Salem' (a female DJ getting hold of a recording that propels her into the nightmarish narrative) is reminiscent of Stretch's plight in TCMII.
Oh yeah, plus he's nabbed one of the cast of TCMII for 'House of 1,000 Corpses' and 'The Devil's Rejects' - Mr Bill Moseley.

Anyway, all that aside. I decided it was time to take another trip into the 'House of 1,000 Corpses' and see if, all these years on, there were fresh horrors and revelations to be had.

The flick is set during the Seventies; which provides the design team with ample gaudy set-dressing and inspired costumes. A couple of sci-fi and horror-loving dudes (one of whom is Rainn Wilson!) are drifting across country, recording their observations on out-of-the-way rural attractions. They've dragged their long suffering girlfriends along for the journey, on their way out to meeting the father of one of the women. The four of them bicker. They banter. They run low on gas. This leads them to Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen (and fried chicken grease-pit).

Spaulding (Sid Haig) is a surly guy with a mouthful of bad teeth and a faceful of leering clown makeup. We know there's a dangerous man behind that greasepaint as we've just seen him lay waste to a couple of would-be robbers. Hell, their blood is still wet on the floor when our carload of spam-to-be arrives on his doorstep. He has a murder-train out back that takes them on a tour of serial killers, all bathed in burning, psychedelic light. Spaulding tells them the tale of an infamous local madman known as Doctor Satan. Legend has it he experimented on the mentally-ill at the nearby asylum - monstrous, Mengele-style experiments designed to create a master race, or something. Inevitably Doctor Satan's crimes were revealed and vigilante justice prevailed - he was strung from a tree by a vengeful mob. Then his body disappeared.

You just know our kids (okay, the two dudes - their girlfriends are less than smitten with the idea) are going to want to take a look at that tree. Spaulding begrudgingly draws them a map. Pretty soon its raining hard and they're half-lost. On the way they pick up a hitch-hiker - a strange, seemingly demented lass with a cowboy hat and a shrill giggle (Sherri Moon - the director's wife).

Things do not go well.
A man in a frigging bear-head hood shoots out their tyre and the hitch-hiker leads them to her house, not far from where they're crashed-out. And so they are introduced to the Firefly family - a sneering gallery of grotesques; from the murderous matriarch (horror veteran Karen Black); the straggle-haired and lunatic prophet Otis (Moseley); to the looming crooked thing they call Tiny, whose body is warped and rubbery with scar tissue from when their father tried to burn down the house with all inside. The Fireflys already have some guests - a small group of abducted cheerleaders. Some of whom are already in pieces.

Okay, so the narrative taps into, like, half-a-dozen genre tropes. It's more-or-less a manic reworking of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' but there is something else here - something smarter and savvier and weirdly inspiring. The film rapidly descends into an ever-tightening vortex - part nightmare, part fugue. 'House...' hits us with a series of blasted and lingering images: buckled papier-mâché masks, rabbit suits, mutilated dolls and occult rituals. A killer taunts his victim while wearing her father's dead face ('who's your daddy?'). A makeshift coffin is lowered into a wet pit of writhing...what...zombies?...ghouls?...failed experiments? A subterranean cathedral adorned with bones recalls the crypt of the Capuchin monks in Rome - the Bone Chapel.
Oh it's a horror flick all right, but what sub-genre within the genre?
'House...' transitions from slasher flick to torture porn to supernatural horror. 'It's all true. The boogeyman is real...and you've found him'. The final fifteen minutes certainly divided fans - some seeing it as the film collapsing into incoherence.
For myself it absolutely enhances the immersive experience.
It is the final tumble down an altogether darker rabbit-hole.
The last stop on this gnashing ghost-train ride.

While undeniably graphic there is more emphasis on queasy psychological dread here than would be exhibited in later (mainly within the torture-porn movement) films. There is a real sense of vitality and madness - from the cavalcade of cut-and-paste imagery (split-screen, reverse-negative, solarisation, the surreal and saturated colour scheme, continual cutaways; to excerpts shot on grainy film; stock footage; and sequences found God only knows where). It's a leering, dangerous and singular vision.

The soundtrack is inspired, while heavily reliant on Rob Zombie's own tracks (a trick he wouldn't repeat in subsequent scores). Here we have grinding rock, clanking industrial textures, and gleefully ironic choices ('I just Wanna Be Loved By You', 'I Remember You').
And that is delightfully inappropriate use of 'Brick House'. I just have to say...

It's not a perfect film. Heck, one scene feels like it only exists so Zombie can shoe-horn in his beloved 'Pussy Liquor' pun (and linger on yet another close-up of Moon's derriere). The 'girlfriend' roles are underdeveloped and largely interchangeable - to the point that it wasn't until the second viewing that I could be sure which one was the survivor girl. Also, while the film is dense with dread it is rather thin on tension; it never feels like our protagonists stand a chance against the assembled might of the Firefly clan. Moon's demented giggling does get a little grating - though it is a nice nod to the possessed woman in 'The Evil Dead'. And - as has been often pointed out - the core plot is derivative. But it's a wild ride, man, and one that deserves a little respect.

Zombie is a clever guy, while undeniably light on subtlety. He's definitely no charlatan; no pretender to the throne; no Eli Roth. In fact, on the basis of this re-watching (and my opinion of 'Lords of Salem') I would rate him as one of the boldest and most exciting directors working within the genre today. I haven't seen 'The Devil's Rejects' yet; and even Ebert rated that one (albeit with a considerable caveat).

Well, memory certainly is  a treacherous thing. A decade on and the my re-watching of the flick doesn't just alter my first impression of it; it blasts it into a smoking, howling ruin.
Rob Zombie's cinematic debut is a delirious, poison-hearted marvel.

Kontempt

So, Kanye West's latest album 'Yeezus' (yes, as in 'Jesus' and the internet is rife with images of West looking noble and wounded beneath a crown of thorns - dude, it's as if he's just begging to be mocked at this juncture) swaggered onto record store shelves in the last week or so. Could be longer, I'm not really abreast of release dates. Today is certainly the first time I've had a chance to eyeball a copy. Now, I can't claim to know much of a damn thing about West, beyond what even the most cursory skulk through women's magazines or entertainment pages is likely to tell you. I've watched his development and transformation from rap artist to fame whore at a distance, with a kind of detached disinterest. I know that he is kind of a big deal; a self-styled media messiah and possessed of probably the largest and most unrestrainable ego in the entirety of the musical world.

I've seen the Taylor Swift humiliation, the 'George Bush doesn't care about black people' clip (totally worth watching for the look on Mike Myer's face alone), the weird little creature committing hara-kiri in that odd Spike Jonze video. I know about his relationship with Kim Kardashian (herself easily the best and most concise example of all that is wrong with this era's vacuous celebrity-obsessed hollowness and narcissism) - and I am aware that their baby is going to be named 'North' (for the love of God...). I have even heard a bit of his music. I don't hate it. I have a particular fondness for some of the early tracks - the clever use of novel samples (sampling Shirley Bassey was a masterstroke), the sense that here was an artist who was interested in more than macho posturing and braggadocio. Hell, as a rapper he was (while not as phenomenal as his fans would breathlessly assert) at least possessed of good flow and knew his way around a lyric.

I guess I've always been casually intrigued by him as a person. There seems to be a weird conflict in him between self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. This is readily apparent in the track from 'Yeezus'; 'I am a God' which could either be read as ridiculous onanism and self-promotion, or as a sarcastic, sneering attack on the emptiness of the media figure he's become. And with West there's simply no way of knowing for sure which way it's meant to swing.

But I can't talk about West in any depth. I'm not familiar enough with anything he's done to offer any more than I have already typed. The reason I bring him up at all is for something simple and snide and petty.

What the hell is up with the packaging of 'Yeezus'?
Seriously, have record labels just given up even pretending that they're trying to shift physical copies of their releases? For those who haven't seen it: it's a basic jewel-case release. The disc is one of those plain silver suckers that always give the impression that they're upside-down. There is no booklet. No artwork. Nothing. Just a bare clear-plastic case and an anonymous disc. The tracklist, credits and copyright information are all printed onto some sort of transparent sticker or insert that's somehow affixed to the back of the case. It's pretty hard to read. It beats out even 'Steal This Album' by System of a Down for laziest release design ever (and at least that disc was being subversive). It's nothing. It screams 'this is worthless', a thing of no physical value. I seems like the final stage in the worrying descent I first observed when some CDs started being released without cover booklets (i.e. the first European pressing of 'Silent Force' by Within Temptation)  Now, I know it's all just ephemera and that it's the music that matters, man. But seriously...

I'm old. Okay. I remember being a spotty kid saving up what little I could from mowing lawns and other such nonsense so that I could throw down $20.00 on a cassette tape the next time my family and I were in a town/city large enough to have a record shop. I remember poring over those tapes (yes, tapes, okay - see the 'I'm old' thing) - that tiny, reproduced artwork. I used to unfold the little covers. Read the lyrics. Study the images.

As I was a peculiar and craft-obsessed child I would make little figures and dioramas out of papier mache and polymer clay and I often based these on album covers.  I remember making my own 'Walls of Jericho' (Helloween's first LP) diorama; a huge ghoul - hooded and fanged - destroying the wall of a keep. I also fondly recall doing the 'Holy Terror' album cover: an oil-black serpentine monster coiling over a cross. And yup, I made the divided severed head locking lips with its other bisected half from the cover of Pungent Stench's 'Been Caught Buttering' (an image I now know as one of the fine and utterly disturbing photographic works of Joel-Peter Witkin).
I listened to a lot of metal.

Hell, for a while there I even made little fimo figurines of the band members themselves. And not even interesting-looking metal guys like King Diamond and Alice Cooper - these were mostly just generic long-hairs, based on the photos in those booklets. In hindsight, these craft-pieces were probably pretty rubbish.
I spent much of my childhood living in a very small, rural township. Why do you ask?

For me the artwork isn't something to be overlooked on the way to the music itself; it's the first taste of that music. Album artwork done properly should create a context for the music - because for the most part that's the first thing you'll encounter of the album proper (with the exception of an odd pre-album release single or two).
It helps create a world for the music to inhabit.
And over the years I have seen some staggering, beautifully-packaged works; discs in printed tins, heavy gatefold digipacks, ornate cardboard boxes, hardbound digi-books. One underground metal act; Negura Bunget (I think), even released an album packaged in a hand-crafted wooden box that was half-filled with Transylvanian dirt. You can't ask for more than that.

The artwork becomes something of an album's legacy - a means by which to instantly recognize it. Honestly, I'd say the cover of Nirvana's 'Nevermind' is easily as iconic as any of the actual music on the LP. And there have been many fine visual artists who have used the medium to spread their name and extend their reputation. There are loads of hefty coffee-table books entirely dedicated to record covers. As well as magazine articles, interviews with the artists/photographers. The motivations behind the artwork are often questioned and explained...because, hell, people want to know. It's interesting. Some vinyl obsessives even frame and wall-hang LPs simply because the artwork is so good and holds so much meaning for them.
Plus, where would we be without 'worst album covers' lists on the internet? That shit is hilarious.

So, what does the nothing-artwork of Kanye West's latest tell us - that there is no context for him? That he doesn't need one? Or just that the record label was too cheap and contemptuous of his audience to bother with it?
They know that he could release damn near anything and the fans would clutter the internet message-boards to mouth-breathe all over it, while the critical community would all rise up in unison to heap praise onto his colossal (and apparently thorn-crowned) head. He has after all redefined modern music. You know, again.

I really hope that this isn't going to become a thing, at least in the near future. I'd really like it if labels could continue printing artwork and releasing physical copies of albums for a while yet.