Hark the Heralds

I wear a talisman. I wear one single talisman because were I to wear an additional one for every instance in which I upheld a moment of daily life-magic into the light I wouldn’t be able to move under the weight of them all. 

Look, there really is magic all around you. This isn’t some sort of Doug Henning, fucking transcendental levitation bullshit, either. There’s just forces at work. Trust me, they’re there. Their thereness is very, very there. Give them light and let them show you the way of the righteous. You are at your best when you take your place behind them and stop all your pathetic wrangling to try and beat that which functions to precede you. I am no genius, but I fucking know that that is a god damn waste of time. 

Have I made mistakes? Holy fuck, I’m the belle of the ball. I have tripped beneath the weight of my own fallibility so many times I’m like a walking testimony to the virtues of hubris. I build monuments so that I might worship at the altar of my own stupidity. I am crippled at the mere thought of some of the most basic human interactions. And the next day? The next day I light a torch and guide myself into uncharted terrain, fearless, without hesitation and fuck you for asking. 

that’s who I am. 

But tonight, last night, these many nights before that -- I am something else. 

Heralds have shouted the arrival of my ignorance before his court, have dropped scrolls to the marbled floors detailing my every indiscretion. He is not amused. Nor should he be. 

You can do a lot with a brain. 

Mine is like a running joke. Mine is like a gag reel, an eternal next and next and next and fuck you I’m so tired of this and I am so not sure of what this means and I am never the man I was before and will be tomorrow so don’t even think of calling me him. 

That’s who I am.  

I just want to forge something that I can look at from a distance, no matter how slight, and say, “I did that.” 

I have done that. I have done that with both of my children. I step back -- they are there, being stubborn or dancing hip-hop or eating a fruit snack, and what I am lucky enough to notice is -- I did that. But I am not done. 

Where did I go off the rails? Where did I leave the plot? Where did I take a short leap off a long pier and get swallowed in the maw? 

You know what, it doesn’t matter. 

Tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. And that is why I wear this talisman. Because no matter what has come before -- and oh, what a fuck before has been -- no matter what was before, what is next doesn’t exist. 

There’s still hope. Cash it.

You Are Here

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My long time pen pal and I write back and forth about many subjects. What keeps it interesting is that we don’t see eye to eye on everything. Religion is one of those things. This started out as a letter to her regarding my thoughts about god and the universe, but quickly evolved into something else. Thanks for keeping me on my toes, Luli.

To those I don’t feel like explaining myself to, I call myself an Atheist, but I’m certainly not an asshole about it like some folks. I am simply not religious, which is actually different from being an Atheist, but a lot of the time that explanation is simply not good enough. I tend to agree with a lot with certain aspects of Eastern thought, mainly because it’s philosophical and not technically religious. People can believe whatever they want for whatever reason. The problem I have is when people try to change the way I think and give me stupid reasons for it. For my part, I know what I think and why I think it, and I don’t need people to agree with me, nor do I have any desire to change the minds of others. I don’t like religion, but I know that there is some good in it. My grandfather was a pastor who lived and breathed by the word of god, and he was the greatest man I’ve ever known, so by association, it can’t be all bad. He never forced religion on me, but he was always willing to talk if I wanted to listen, which I think is the right way to go about it – live and let live, and help if you can. I could site the Crusades and many other things pertaining to the negative, but that’s sort of off topic. There are things that make me not believe, such as Astronomy (which I will get to shortly), certain details of evolution, and biblical contradictions, but suffice it to say that I don’t care if a god (or gods for that matter) exists. The thought of worshipping anything is “sinful” to me. God could prove that he/she exists to me today, and I would not change my ways. Living beings are not meant to live in guilt and have to worry about whether their actions or thoughts (thoughts!) might be looked down upon by a jealous higher being. Religion was used to keep the lower classes in order, to establish a hierarchy, a caste system. In my eyes, it really has no place in the world today, save to give people some hope that there is more to life than, well, life. No one wants to think that we cease to exist once we die. This is part of the reason I am so against suicide.

Regarding the power of prayer and wishful thinking, God (the universe, whatever) would be under no obligation to give people what they want. There are roughly 7 billion people in the world (meaning 7 billion souls by Christian standards) and over 106 billion people who have ever existed (http://www.prb.org/articles/2002/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth.aspx), and god would have the magnitude of the universe to take care of, so why would an all powerful being even think about what ONE person thinks or wants? To point out how tiny we really are, think of Earth in relation to our solar system. Under the best of conditions in the fastest spacecraft currently available, it would take a ship somewhere between 150 and 260 days to reach Mars, and that’s one of our “neighboring” planets. Scientists hope to one day be able to launch a satellite as far out as Pluto (Dwarf planet, I know) and have it get there in less than ten years. And that’s just the edge of our solar system, whose planets revolve around our sun, a star. Okay. Our star is one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a mind boggling distance between them. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches on Earth. Whoa, right? And what does that speak of beings on other planets (I find it hard to believe that the universe is that big and we’re the only planet with life) and other species, even ones on Earth? Just because we run the show here doesn’t mean we’re necessarily the only ones with souls, granted a soul is to be believed in. Even if god or whoever heard prayers, in the scope of the universe, it doesn’t matter if people get what they want – the world still turns (or, the universe still expands, depending on the viewpoint).

As far as Earth is concerned, I think all people are equal. It goes back to the scope of things. Like a drop of water when looked at under a microscope is a world unto itself, we are the tiny parts (however intelligent) that make up the whole of our planet – we ARE the world. God/religion just doesn’t factor into that for me. Limitations on how you can or can’t think, how and who you can or can’t fuck, and overall how you have to live and die, and many other things just come off as silly to me. Some people point to how Christians are charitable and help people – yes, because by and large they will often feel guilty otherwise. I give when I can, but not to appease a higher power or to assuage any feelings of guilt, to push my agenda, or some other end, but because, however diverse we are, in the end, we are the same.

Religion really has no place in the modern world. Technology has become god, and man is doing all he can to live easier, but that easy living is making our existence a virus to the planet. Maybe foretelling of the Apocalypse was an ancient cynical prediction – and now we have the technology to completely destroy ourselves. How funny that humanity’s race to evolve might end with man destroying himself. Is that what god would want? If he is in control of everything, then that’s the ultimate end for us. Space travel is extremely dangerous, which means that god wouldn’t want us to leave the planet, but as numerous experts attest, leaving the planet is the ONLY way that humans will survive. I won’t even start on the cyclical Ice Ages or Eternal Recurrence. How funny that the only way to survive as a species is to be ungodly. Granted, I know that these are only MY views (and I skipped lots of philosophy and thoughts on interpersonal relationships to keep this from dragging on so long that people, including me, lose interest), but I didn’t come to think this way simply by faith, which I think is a total cop-out reason to claim anything. Don’t really know why you think or feel a certain way? Well then faith is your get-out-of-thinking-free card. The Ontological Argument also gets on my nerves. Do I believe in some higher power/force/element? Yes. I don’t think we have discovered all there is. I bet people thought they knew everything before they found out that the Earth is round, too. We are still evolving. Well, some of us anyway; others are content to waste their lives away on drugs, booze, and/or the small scale of their lives. So many people in the first world live in a dream and criticize reality. In the scope of time and space, we live for less than the blink of an eye, so we owe it to ourselves to do all we can to love, learn, live life to the fullest, be good to each other, and be happy. If daily life is a constant downer, then baby, you’re fuckin’ up. Grow, change, move, evolve, and truly live (and other verbs too)… or don’t; the universe doesn’t care either way.

But…..I….Do.

Dances and Falls

. . . , slouching, fading, fighting, being foolish and reading the holy texts as they are carved on moss-riddled rocks lapped by the angry sea. Crediting the walking dead with their invisible gifts and tidings, sure to take the world by storm. As we lie there, in sleep, as we crash beyond walls seemingly impenetrable and relegate the waking life to a terrible, terrible dream itself, know only perhaps a moment to pause in reflection and bask in the cooling shadow that renders us oblivious to the wages of sin. Nobody knows nothing, nobody knows no one, nobody knows.

In an instant, as the corpses line the boulevard, boney hands in salute to the grimmest parade, rotting stench of your daily reality stinging your nostrils as you crawl, bloodied, naked, in a silent agony before them, as you feverishly attempt to divine a new tenable narrative from the glut of empty, IN AN INSTANT -- you have lost. 

Arms blasting by, unstoppable, merciless, a whirlwind of enraged terror. Ain’t gonna fly when you ain’t got wings. Ooh, I get it, a motto, a catch phrase, a verbal mandala, so pretty, woven from the finest, all gone with the slightest breeze. 

And this is a motherfucking hurricane. Breathe it in, it is you. Take another dose of skin-peeling wind and piercing rains. Immerse yourself in the surge because it is an onslaught and you have nowhere to go.

It waned, was repelled, and there it was. There it was. There it were, be, was. 

It’s so very hard to bring beauty out from between the heaviest curtains of ugly. 

I am a weak man. You need not know me for who I am. So open, so shut down. So close to the very end, just like all of you, and all on my own, so very pathetic. 

I stand on my feet, yes, but perhaps only because I am shackled, I am harnessed, I am tethered. I am so far from home. I can’t lift a finger to salvage the flock from the coming flood. I can already see their bloated shapes in silhouette, floating in a muddied slur, rung, haloed with ants and maggots. there is no comfort in the end of their cries. In fact, it is deafening. And they cry for me. Corpulent, flesh sloughed off in an oily sheen, shades of purple, so very gone, so very here right now. All of it because of me, because I am incapable of building something that can last. I am an evolutionary time bomb. My time has always come. It’s not pretty, and yet it’s still very much there. 

Bring a camera, use a flash. 

I didn’t think it was supposed to be like this, but this is exactly the way it be. 

Pull up a chair and don’t forget your mask. Pull up a chair, always room up front, and watch as the little creature dances and falls and dances and falls again, and always . . .

I Scream . . .

Author: Annie Wilkes

I scream, you scream, we all scream: Get the fuck away from me and leave me alone!

Everyday I hope, there is something better, something more, something I’m missing right in front of my fucking face. Love, I have no idea what that means beyond my immediate family. I get attached too easily to people, I care (I guess as opposed to love) too much it seems. I am trusting and sometimes people think naïve. If I only ‘care’ it’s so much easier to push people away and hurt them before they hurt me. I trust implicitly upon first meeting, but am reassured all too soon and easily that I just don’t like most people. No big deal, I’m not the kind of person to have a lot of close friends, the ones I do have, like 3 or 4 that I talk to on a regular basis don’t even live where I do, with the exception of my sister.

I don’t often come across as optimistic or happy-go-lucky, I find that a bitter and/or sarcastic remark could easily define my day, but underneath it all, I am hoping, happy and most days content. It helps to know that on any given day I haven’t fucked up someones life intentionally or my own. I work my ass off for everything I’ve ever wanted but know full well I am spoiled and could get what I want by just asking.

This is going to derail now. I must have been someone incredibly fucked up in a past life, because I do believe in that shit. The following events took place within a 3 ½ month span of my life. I can’t make this shit up.

My sister’s significant other has a best friend who has professed his love for me, he doesn’t even know me. I’ve never hung out with him, probably haven’t said more than 20 words to him in my life and he continues to tell people he loves me. It really helps that he’s 10 years younger and drunk almost everyday of the past 5 or 6 years of his life and has no front teeth. This may be the most normal of suitors at this point.

Lets see….my next love possibility was like an uncle to me my whole life. 50+ yr old man, whose wife I adore invites me over late one night for a night cap, while we were at my parents house one evening for a friendly game of Texas hold’em. I had fixed him a plate of food cause he was too drunk to do it himself and it’s what you do for your elders, right?! Wrong. True story of “no good deed goes unpunished.” This man is also a drunk, goes on month long benders, pisses and shits himself and continues to invite me over. His wife left him a couple years ago for her sisters ex-husband.

Who’s next? Anyone? Anyone? Yes, the smelly older gentleman who just moved to town who offered to pay me to cook for him. Under certain circumstances this should be taken as a compliment to being a great cook. Given the events of the last couple weeks of my life I wanted to cry, not to mention this man was asking my brother about “available” girls in this town. I felt dirty, for no other reason than I just did. I still can’t look this guy in the face, he was very adamant on the phone, as if he kept offering to pay me would have made me change my mind the 4th time he asked. I may need to go puke now.

The only man I was sure I had ever loved disappeared on me shortly after I graduated high school, he is 3 yrs younger than me. So the last time I saw or talked to him was September of 1996. I only know this because two months ago he found me on a social networking site and reminded me of the last time he kissed my face and knew it would be a long time before we would see or talk to each other again. He then proceeded to tell me how much he still loved me, would do anything for me and would fly to see me immediately if I helped him figure out how much a ticket would cost, oh wait, “Get a quote for one for my son too. What am I going to tell my wife?” EXCUSE ME?! FUCK YOU. Stop calling, forget you know me, WHAT THE FUCK?! WOW.

The fucked up portion of this story follows two weeks after the last part of my love odyssey. In my last relationship, and I use the “r” word loosely, it lasted a year and was more of a relationship than I had ever known in my little over three decades of life. There were promises made, four letter words exchanged and bliss if in fact that’s what it was. After leaving town for more work there were a few phone calls one or two emails and then this person must have fallen of the face of the fucking earth. And then, one month short of a year since I last saw his face, I ran into him. I saw him in the airport, I was sitting talking to a friend and I looked up and he was standing there, looking at me from across the terminal. He then proceeded to turn and walk away, he had to get on the escalator and put a floor between us. I sat there somewhere between a second heart shredding and the joy of the memories. I had to go to the bathroom and hurl, fortunately for me as soon as I came out of the bathroom my flight was boarding.

So now I’m hanging out with a dude (who I thought was cool) until a week ago when he told me for some fucked up reason that he liked my older sister but he also has a crush on me. “Hold that thought, gotta fly away for a vacation, hang out with my ex and two kids, call me!” HO-LY FUCK!

I am now sure that whoever I was in a past life, my dismembered, beaten and broken body is lying in an unmarked grave somewhere and whoever I knew in that life does not search for answers to my mysterious disappearance.

I wish, I hope.

Guest Post

Author: Xenos

Let's just pretend, for the sake of argument, that there is a god. What sorts of characteristics should a god have to be worthy of worship? Modern Christianity seems to hold that their god is omnipotent, omniscient, both omnipresent and "supernatural," eternal (yet able to step into time when direct intervention is needed), and the epitome of goodness. On the other hand, the gods of most polytheistic cultures (except the Hindu god Brahman) were far from any of these absolutes, yet considerably more powerful than humans, including controlling the forces of nature. For this reason if no other, they were at least worthy of attempting to appease. But aside from the priests and/or priestesses of these gods, did anyone really worship them? Or is/was the average polytheist's relationship to the gods mostly another area of application for rational choice theory (maximizing self-interest)? I am specifically concerned with the traits of rationality and consistency, but we can certainly attempt to consider power, knowledge, and goodness in relation to worshipability.

As you might have gleaned already, I do not believe in god. My wife does. She believes that earth is probably the only planet in the universe with intelligent life. I do not. My whole train of thought revolves around these two differences in beliefs. Apparently Stephen Hawking is now warning the denizens of earth that extraterrestrial life, if or when we encounter it, is likely to be much more advanced than we, and to treat us as Columbus treated the Native Americans. My wife scoffs at him as if he were proposing the looniest idea she’s ever heard.

Of course, he’s a world-renowned theoretical physicist specializing in cosmology...and we’re not. So he may have a pretty good idea about how realistic such ideas are, probably better than my wife or I do, anyway. So I wonder how she can be so quick to dismiss what he’s saying. But then, I also realize that she has a dramatically different perspective.

If you believe in god, especially the Abrahamic one, then you probably take the Bible as a primary source of information about how, and why, the universe came to be. You may be willing to see the human interpretations that are actually written there to be only a figurative understanding of actual events, but you probably think that god created the whole thing in a sequence more or less congruent with one of the two versions given in Genesis. And you probably think the point of it all was to create mankind, to set us all up for this test of faith that is life, in which we each prove our worthiness to spend eternity in god’s presence, or something like that.

And the Bible doesn’t say anything about folks from other planets. So then, there must not be any. God didn’t create them, so they don’t exist, and anyone who says they do is obviously wrong. Never mind that that’s what they said to Copernicus, Galileo, or Columbus. But again, I’m in danger of appealing to empirical evidence instead of hard and fast rules laid out by god in his ghost-written diary. So, even though scientists who study space may have scientific reasons to believe that there may be intelligent life from other planets, that’s not an available avenue for arguing with a theist, at least not until some extra-terrestrial alien has made its presence known beyond all shadow of doubt (I think even most bible-thumpers now recognize that our planet is more-or-less an oblate spheroid rather than a suspended plane).

So, if we pretend that god exists, and that god is male enough to call “he,” and that he created the universe (or multiverse), and is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent (yet supernatural) and unequivocally beneficent, then why did he create such an utterly huge universe just to put life on one tiny little planet? Surely, being omnipotent means he could have just created our solar system, or even just our galaxy, and still given us plenty of stars for our night sky. If he needed to make sure that we had certain minerals and chemical elements floating around, he could have put them all in our galaxy. He could have legislated the laws of physics differently, for god’s sake. As an omnipotent creator, absolutely nothing would be impossible, so that also means that nothing is/was completely necessary. It was all arbitrary, based on his desire to create it the way he created it. So why such a huge universe in which to hide our tiny little planet? Maybe to give us a nearly infinite frontier, so we’d always have more to strive for? But that leads us back to justifying sciences like astrophysics and cosmology.

So, it seems that god, if he exists, and if he has the qualities ascribed to him by the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic faiths, and if the Bible is really supposed to tell us all we need to know about such things, is irrational, and maybe a bit neurotic.

And since we’re discussing god and rationality, can I ask about the changes that god went through between the old and new testaments? I mean, what happened to that guy? For thousands of years, he was a tough-love, discipline-minded, vengeful tyrant who told us to stone people to death for breaking the social rules he gave us. Then suddenly, he was all about giving up worldly possessions, loving thy neighbor, and turning the other cheek. It was like he did a bunch of acid and became a hippie. Yet aside from the specific rules that Jesus changed (and the ones that we have simply decided are too silly), the rest of the old testament is still supposed to provide guidance. Huh? How are we supposed to know what god wants when he apparently has at least two dramatically different personas? Is this maturation, a phase, or a personality disorder?

So, if we pretend that god exists, and has the aforementioned characteristics commonly ascribed to him, and if the Bible is his idea of a manual for directing our lives and societies, then it would make more sense with this god, as with those of the polytheistic pantheons, to follow a rational choice model of appeasement rather than to worship a neurotic schizophrenic who may send you to paradise, or tell you to murder your child.

"Nurturing Phrenology or Poor Charlie Manson"

I wrote this article a couple of years ago, so please forgive any grammatical errors or time sensitive inconsistencies.



"A consistent number of members from professions amongst the creative arts as a whole, suffer from more types of mental difficulties for longer periods than members of other professions."


I read that sentiment in a medical journal. It referenced the mental health of selected jazz musicians (who were meant to represent all musicians for the sake of the article). The power punch of the thesis involved (and was in my opinion, limited by) the listing of social disorders belonging to a handful of famed artists. The point the author made seemed founded in environmental elements for me, so I had a hard time not having violent thoughts as I found myself angered- but still falling under the audacious spell of their proposition. The fact that my ire was raised probably means that I, myself, am an unstable creative type, but I can think of several worse personalities to have. So.. what of it? The holes in the argument are huge, and I'm sick of presuming I'm crazy, because the beast of opposition prevails. And if you must know I privately maintain that the constructs of Society, in general, are totally fucked up.

So, I started to wonder, "Is any aspect of the musician vs. mental health issue genetic or the product of a learned response?" (nature vs. nurture).I understand the difference between the opposing scientific beliefs, but I was unable to glean a comprehensive conclusion from the article. The author only spoke about one tiny piece of art history – Jazz is, after all, a speck in time. An incredibly important one, no doubt, but what of the rest? What kind of people were the musicians in the dark ages? Was it only the rich cavemen who had spare skins to beat on and were capable of feeding their families and still got the kinky girls? Or were they all burnouts?


There are a countless number of artists who fell into depressing environments. Miles Davis, James Brown, Tina Turner, Charles Mingus, Jelly Roll Morton, Robert Johnson- just to name a few. And I didn't even have to leave the continent for that list, because I'd never make it back to my point before I found a new injustice. It would appear though, that regardless of whatever "mental problems" or social disorders that musicians have suffered, they aren't the members of society running around murdering people. That's what armies do. And, for the most part, mortality by occupation sees most musicians dying from heart failure like everyone else, with maybe an extra helping of drug overdoses, vehicular accidents, suicides and other causes. I jump to cause of death, because it's a natural stepping stone in the pursuit of defining the roots of casualty within the framework of musician vs. the world. And I don't think I am being dramatic.



What I started to unravel, as I looked further into the suggestion that musicians and artists were luckless, sensation seeking nihilists (who were deviant sufferers by extension of their craft alone) and were therefore prone to the "seedy" life, didn't really surprise me. As I departed the present day and started tripping over the carcasses of Harpsichords, I found myself weeding through tangled fields of music record, naming the typical Room 101 Masters as stable examples of how a musician should behave. Try as I might, I could find hardly anything on criminal activity or victimization of our classically-composing Forebearers. I was hoping for some Syphilitic duels or an execution by the King. Nothing! This doesn't mean that crime wasn't rampant among these guys. It just means that I didn't find it or History hasn't documented or preserved it for some reason.


Paganini, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Mahler, Brahm, Wagner, Strauss, Chaikovsky, Bellini, Rossini, Monteverdi, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Paganini, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar, Irving Berlin, Ernest Hogan, Fats Waller ... all had parents who were either musical instructors or had their child studying as early as 2. They were either well off or dropped off at some private orphanage that created prodigies. Our "Masters" were bred in golden cages, and these dynamic show dogs became the base of our musical cheer ladder. They probably didn't even want the job, except that their 20 brothers and sisters needed to eat. My partner in music crime, Jonathan, says that Gesualdo wrote weird far-out stuff for his time and was also independently wealthy. To which I say, was he the exception to the rule then? The tradition of selectively cultivating artists continues today, but because Art isn't taken as seriously in our modern world culture (i.e.:no strong presence in curriculums), our "show dogs" are treated as the sickly shadow of their original progenitors. This obviously isn't fair, but until we replace the elitist literary idiots at Macmillan Industries and other Text Book publishing houses, children are always going to think that they have to write overtures from an incubator to be taken seriously. And while I'm rearranging the face of our history books, little girls need to start seeing pictures of women in those books too... The good and the bad of it.


I'm not saying that all musicians who were bred to play, don't deserve credit for their art. I do suggest however, that they were forced into roles by the powers that be, devastating powers that insulated them from the pain and beauty of life, and shut everyone else's pain and beauty out. I'm also not saying that we have no control over our own destinies. I am asserting the idea that we should always consider the complex environments that give us music before judging the music itself, and the bounty hunters of prodigious sound ought to spread the net some. I mean... MORE! Being incapable of separating the anthropology from the archaeology is what draws me to artists who have suffered through the production of their creations, while under more duress than others. It's too bad that billions of men and women have been not only denied access to music, but have also been robbed by all of our ancestors. Of everything they could have left, they left us with a legacy of forced agonies that we could never hope to top. But the true facts of life are bleeding all over us. I mean, shouldn't Little Johnny Leper get to be discovered as the prodigy he is before his fingers fall off? Sure that's philanthropic... but, it's mostly SMART. It's about getting more for all of us.


Since, I don't have the resources to travel the annals of all time looking for a complete and fair history covering every artist's work and their life-story, I can't make a justified conclusion about this theory that musicians are more prone to anything over another. Even though mysterious outsider artists have been flinging their blood Pollock style on cave walls forever, a large amount of historical record is based on assumptions and discriminations. Legend is highly speculative by nature, and I totally believe that the majority of our history IS legend. That was more of a sweeping emotional statement, than something I came up with using beakers and calculus, but I still believe it.


I don't have a conclusion here. Except that maybe, Class War has always been ON. You can't deny it. Stories always start out the same. Born Rich or Born Poor. So how does that figure into the general mental health of musicianship? It isn't a tidy package. Maybe when I have some time, I'll venture back to the places in history, where the crimes against the arts were even weirder. We'll ride our time machine back and spy on the punishments of creative types. We'll watch them having their skin scraped off with oyster shells and then the burning of the leftovers. Or maybe we could even sit in on one of those Gut-a-cow-and-sew-up-a-criminal-inside-to-die-in-the-rotting-carcass-at-high-noon parties, and wonder what their song meant.

I see the World as being full of scores of dead musical ghosts who never had the chance to play music. Maybe, every breath we take is the ether of a musical soul who was hung by the throat for his politics 3 thousand years ago. Maybe, every breath we let escape, is the floundering essence of cheated apparitions. I think it's easier to manage your vision today, but ghettos still remain filled with desperate children, who if given the chance could be that prodigy of this century. I am glad to be a part of this time period, where I have the opportunities I make for myself, but we have to help make BETTER opportunities for kids around us, because History is not that encouraging. And mental health is fucking relative during War time.

Nonetheless, I wondered how all of this related to, or directly affected our numbers amidst the "Mortality by Profession" charts. Because apparently, carelessly-driven, hyper-sensitive creative types can't avoid a party or a pill or any other gateway libation, that eventually sees them face down in a gutter of human disregard, slowly drained of opportunity. A mess of scribbled on napkins in their soiled pockets listing innumerable romantically charged failures.... Or so I figured. I made these two lists as I hunted for Sensationalist stories.

The first list is of some musical victims of homicide. I didn't include any Neanderthals, Highlanders, Friends to Vishnu or listings from the Ming Dynasty... (A couple of these guys weren't confirmed murders, but highly suspicious)

Murdered:

Darryl Abbot
Marc Blitzstein
Carlton Barret
King Curtis
Rhett Forrester
Marvin Gaye
Timur Kacharava
Al Jackson
John Lennon
Don Myrick
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Felix Pappalardi
John 'Jaco' Pastorius
Mia Zapata
Bobby Ramirez
Selena
James Sheppard
Peter Tosh
Rick Garberson
Johnny Ace
Sam Cooke
Samuel George Jr.
Cornelius Gunter
Lee Morgan
Terry Knight
Eddie Jefferson
Rudy Lewis
Øystein Aarseth
Jannie Pought
Stringbean
Stacy Sutherland
Tupac Shakur
Notorious B.I.G.
Walter Scott
Larry Williams
Countless rappers
Albert Ayler
Wardell Gray
Don Drummond
Brian Jones
Harry Choates
Lord Buckley
Bobby Fuller

Musicians Who Committed Crimes:

Vince Neil..
Steve Jones
Manson..
Jazzist Rosolino
Phil Spectre
Rick James
James Brown
Lead Belly
Varg Vikernes


In closing, I just want to say that I learned something very significant once that changed the way I look at the world of the arts forever. Still-life paintings weren't always about the skill of the artist's depiction. They were about capturing the exotic fruits that wealth could afford. When fancy pants or "dandies" would come calling, they would marvel at the fruits in the paintings that were imported from far away places and had cost a fortune. So, the art was about it's social value, and the value was in the owner's ability to afford the fruit (and so also control) the artist making the painting. You think those poor artists wanted to waste their short lives painting fruit baskets? I'm not saying every artist lived by a for-hire credo, but Money sure as fuck changes things now doesn't it? So the next time you look at a still-life, don't assume it was painted for practice. How this relates to the mental health and wellness of musicians and artists through history, is obvious I think, but needs so much more attention to respectfully work out the implications. So, I apologize if I have dragged you into my quagmire of criticism only to be unsatisfied with my conclusions.

And, I'm not saying Charles Manson was a good musician by the way, but his mother DID sell him for a pitcher of beer when he was a boy.

Please enjoy this video of Jeff Beck and Seal covering Hendrix's Manic Depression to film footage of Taxi Driver.



This "Article" was posted on Nonalignment Pact February 28th 2007.

Together Under the Sun

With the sun, a banner, a barter of the highest order, in celestial trade for our relative comfort back on earth, all our hopes. We shattered silence with the voice of our emptiness, raised in a world without end, a walled city, founded on a fount of fear and threat. 

In 1961, Paul Schaefer, self-appointed Lutheran minister, former Hitler Youth and former Luftwaffe medic, stepped from his plane onto the Chilean tarmac. In photos he is seen smirking. Perhaps it is because he has escaped justice back home for his crimes against boys. And perhaps it is because his true legacy lies before him. 

He purchases a large parcel of fertile land with the money he has collected from his followers. In time he brings them to Chile and from there they start to build a walled city. Within the confines of his city Schaefer’s followers develop the empty land into a seeming Utopia lush with gardens, crops, a bakery, a hospital, living quarters, an airport, a massive arsenal of weapons both brought in and manufactured on-site and even a secret maze of underground tunnels that wind beneath the colony, giving Schaefer a way to flee if necessary. 

As he establishes his stranglehold on his people through fear, intimidation and abuse, he also eventually cultivates a relationship with the newly-minted Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet, a military man, seizes power from Salvador Allende through a U.S. backed coup. 

Pinochet has many enemies, both real and imagined, a side-effect of deposing a democratically elected leader through violence. Pinochet develops a systematic plan for torturing and executing those accused of being his enemies. Unfortunately for Pinochet, his torturers are not very skilled, and thus are often unable to get much in the way of confessions from their victims because the torturers are so heavy-handed most of their victims die long before anything of value can be beaten out of them. 

By the time Pinochet is in power it is 1974 and Shaefer has virtually mastered the art of control. In fact, there is supposedly good reason to suspect that Shaefer has learned much of his torture techniques from some of the most notorious fugitives in history - men like Josef Mengele. There is also reason to believe that Schaefer’s colony is virtually a waypoint for other Nazi fugitives being funneled into South America as a sort of evil underground railroad. Schaefer, seeing opportunity fall directly in his lap, offers Pinochet his expertise on the arts of torture and murder. It’s a match made in Hell. Schaefer gets the umbrella of official protection he needs, as well as an utterly ridiculous charity status for his colony.

Shaefer is not only a revolving door for the world’s worst, however. For him, Colonia Dignidad is more of an outward expression of the way in which he wishes the world to be. He is fully established in a position of ultimate power. He surrounds himself with young boys, charged with all sorts of menial tasks at his whim, and he sexually abuses them as he sees fit. This literally goes on for decades. He creates layered and immutable laws designed to keep families apart, to keep men from being sexually involved with women. This plan is so well executed that he is able to keep his congregation from producing any children for 15 years. On the occasion that someone eventually does happen to become pregnant he separates the parents not only from each other, but also from their newborn until the child reaches the age of 6. And on, and on, and on, etc . . .

As what I imagine is a way of endearing themselves to the surrounding locals, the Colonia hospital takes in the Chileans and provides them with world-class medical care. As the Colonia’s reputation grows outside of its walls, a growing number of Chileans actually long to have their children live in the compound in order to get an education at the Colonia grade school. Many of these Chileans are trained to become loyal followers of Schaefer’s cult of personality, and many of the young boys are also sexually abused. 

Eventually, in 1990, Pinochet voluntarily leaves power as a response to pressure from the Vatican as well growing international dissatisfaction with his legacy, and is replaced by a newly-elected president, Patricio Aylwin (an opponent of Schaefer’s). With their governmental protection revoked, and as members of the Colonia escape and get the word out on what really goes on in the compound, it is a matter of time before the authorities raid the Colonia and attempt to capture Schaefer. 

Somehow, Schaefer is able to escape with a staff of thugs and nurses and eventually makes his way to Argentina. He is able to remain there, undetected, until 2005 when he is finally captured and brought to trial. 

He died last week. He was 88. 

In the footage of his being brought to the courthouse in a wheelchair, he looks at peace, calm, he gently smiles. 

There is no way to measure the damage this one man has wrought on the world. 

The colony is still there today. There are attempts at contrition from this outpost of evil, many of those so willing to comply, to enforce his madness, free to live out their days in the Chilean sun, utterly outside of the justice they deserve.