Kristian Hoffman's Diaries

2006 thru 2007


Kristian Hoffman

September 14, 2007: Serial Partial Update For Lazy Lapsers Like me
May 14, 2007: Klaus Nomi Tribute, Parma
August 22, 2006: West Virginia: Trash Like Me
August 12, 2006: I Join The Gun Club
August 6, 2006: Mel Gibson: Party Madness
July 26, 2006: My Space Mayhem
July 22, 2006: Branding Grandstanding Plus Ancient Gossip
May 16, 2006: Benefit Ballyhoo
May 13, 2006: Thespians and Bunnykins
April 17, 2006: A Barrel Full of Blather
March 2, 2006: Dress Code, Birthday Suggestions, and the Devil Of Today
February 16, 2006: New Math and Old Glory
February 14, 2006: Valentines Day, Mumps TV or not TV, & The Little White Sperm that Tried!
February 8, 2006: What do YOU get out of my whimpering remorse? A FUN LINK!
February 6, 2006: Studio Magic! and Turban Party Revisited - My (sort of) Bad
February 3, 2006: Vegas With the Downtown Sensation - and Turban Party!
January 26, 2006: Happy New Year - and Thanks


SERIAL PARTIAL UPDATE FOR LAZY LAPSERS LIKE ME

First let me say that I have been SOOOOOOOOO darned intimidated by the prospect of taking up the task of these diaries again - It's been soooooooooo long! And I'm obviously, incurably, patently incapable of self-editing, so after so long, it's mammoth! Let's face it - for a blabbermouth like me, sometimes a "Blog" is really just a Bog! Or a Bleagh!

So, if I'm really going to do this ----- Where do I begin? And the most apt question of course is: Who cares?

But then I thought, well it's obvious: I care! And I have the vague suspicion that some of you might be able to muster up a shred of charitable empathy as well. We're all friends, aren't we? So far, anyway? Wait - don't answer that!

But if I were actually going to attempt this, first I had to make this a task that I could actually face - figure out a way I thought I might really do something about the mystery missing segment of my on-line existence. And the first thought that popped into my head was: "Let's be LAAAAAAZY about this!"

So - LAAAAAAAZY it is! I'm giving myself the highly unprofessional permission to just get as far as I get, leave things unfinished, drop whole stories and come back to them later, and, laaaaaziest of all, just copy in stuff from my own regular diaries, no matter if I can actually still remember the accuracy of the incidents or not. I'm going to add pictures later - or not! I'm going to leave things out, gloss things over, give short shrift! In short, I'm actually entering the realm of legitimate journalism!

So here, at last, is the first chapter in my return to Blather-a-go-go. Non Sequitur? Of course! Scattershot? C'est vrais! But at least I live up to the high standards I've set for myself - I'm still unbelievably, unremittingly, unrepentantly VERBOSE! And all for you, my dearest reader! If words were love, we'd both be ejaculating right now!

PIQUANT OBSERVATION ON A THEME OF BEYOND THE BLUNDERDRONE! THOUGHTS OF THE DAY

Just sat through a few brief moments of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome on some obsure cable channel. Tina Turner - delicious in that dead ferret wig! Have you seen the high school pictures of her that have been circulating? I’d post them but they’re in the dreaded MIME format, which means I don’t know how to make them into jpegs. If I had an iPhone, I’d send them to you! But anyway, that’s what I call a great makeover. She is Goddess.

Of course at this (advanced) stage in my life, I can only stand to watch the horrendous Mel Gibson for moments at a time, as I’ve said before.

And of course one of the remarkable things, which is precisely why I’ve already remarked on it elsewhere, about Mel’s willful descent into Bible-based madness is how he has managed to completely rescind his own one-time world wide adulatory cult status as ass-plow fantasy fodder. Poor guy! He put the “I Object!” into sex object. And that Grizzly Adams Taliban beard too - what’s that all about? Fundamentalism surfing?

But back to MMBT: this time capsule was interesting on several levels. First of all, it reminded me of that more innocent moment when Mel was a sort of 80’s gay icon so long ago - a punk-adjacent update of James Dean, with the added attraction of long, lingering loving takes focused on his leather clad backside, especially in Road Warrior. I don’t know what that says about Director George Miller, but it sure helped gaggles of nascent gay fantasists find something to obsess about in their silent daydreams between bashings. Tangent: (please sing this to your self mentally in a Robert Plant screech) Does anyone remember Wilding?

Add the fact that in Road Warrior, two of the “bad guys” had a loving gay relationship that was never exploited as complicit with their “badness”- it was just a (hot!) matter of course. In a pre Queer Eye world, This movie was sexual-outsider-friendly!

But what really came home to me this morning is - girlfriend! The FASHION! Come on, all you Tyrah-cketeers! You Project Runamoks! Without Road Warrior , and the basically unwatchable sequel, there would be no Mod Prim!

You don’t know what Mod Prim is? Do the math: if “Ab Fab” equals “Absolutely fabulous”, and, on a more personal note, “Am Fam” equals “American Family”, then Mod Prim obviously means: “Modern Primitive”! Where were you in Silverlake’s glorious 90’s, when it was, as Vag Davis squealed continuously through the whole decade, ON FIIIIIRE?

Anyway, I was astonished to realize that all the sartorial tropes and templates and conceits of the Silverlake Uber-Recruit where right there in this garsh dang movie: the shaved heads, the tattoo “sleeves”, the unisex S&M lite belted leather harnesses and bustiers, and the Plethora of Purposeless Piercings. Why, there was even bear culture and bad music!

This “look”, merchandised ad nauseam by admitted pioneers in the “ tribal” genre like Ron Athey, and which then trickled down to become an imagination-free uniform of choice for scads of heretofore repressed Weho fags, who were looking slightly eastward (like Dorothy in search of a broomstick to sit on!) after years of amyl-addled clone-hopping white parties. Whenever a Puce Pioneer was moved to venture east of Vermont (usually by passing inevitably from the ranks of perpetrators of WeHo's rigidly cruel agism, lookism, or just old fashioned jism-ism into the pitiful ranks of the victims of same) they'd use Mod Prim affectations to jumpstart themselves into a slightly more exotic culture, and hope to find a soft target landing in some safe manifestation of mall rebel, but which was still clone-y enough to read well at Chi Chi La Rue’s porn awards.

Mod Prim was comforting because you could let your gym membership lapse too! Where are lapsed Fitness Nazis banished to die? Silverlake! First we take Manhattan, then we take Akbar! Add one tattoo, pretend to actually LIKE Einsturzende Neubauten, and shake (don’t stir) that booty - suddenly that big gruff Echo Park bartender is smiling at you, and making you a bad margarita!
Mod Prim also spread exponentially like Silverlake Wildfire into the biker-lite affect of straight heroin addicts everywhere - and their girlfriends, and through them into east side NA and AA survivors, and the downtown “artsy” types who still clung to the watery dilution of the last vestiges of romance sprinkled like dandruff on the grave of the Velvet Underground Thrice Removed, and had closets full of lousy Social Distortion records (Mike Ness had an early sleeve! But he had the excuse of the Neo- Rockabilly Tattoo fad - of which Mod Prim is definitely the ugly stepsister). If heroin chic had its day, Mod Prim would party all night long!

It was a short hop, skip, and a NIN remix to a cable show, and thus “Inked” was born. If language is a virus, Mod Prim is the plague!

Mod Prim also claimed hair band victims from Motley Crue to GNR as their spotty and poorly rendered metal tatts crept inevitably toward MP style sleeve-dom, and it crept onto the arms, through the eyebrows, lower lips and tongues of every contestant on “Parental Control” from Boise to Bayonne. It made Ralph Feinnes in Red Dragon look like a quaint and tired Gauntlet Leather Panties Night also-ran!

And all it took was a five minute window into the past, courtesy of that darned Thunderdome, to realize: The Prim Starts here!

So, the final question is - whom do we sue?

BTW, what’s with that frightwig on Mel’s Thunderdome anyway? The bizarre Brylcreem forehead brushback and the totally incrongruent Grandmama Addams sides? Who greenlighted that look? Did grown men at the height of their professional careers actually make that decision? Or was there a Dingo involved? Why do “real men” not have bangs when they have long hair? The same deplorable thing generally happened as far back as Errol Flynn and Cornell Wilde and the ever-dour pouty lipped sexless Stewart Granger. Mel should have studied “This Town” era Russell Mael - now there’s a hair style for a real man!

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY

Why why why WHYYYYYYYY haven’t I been able to make myself write more fun-filled fabulous diary entries?

I haven’t REALLY written anything for this space since ----- um ----- ooooof ---- pardon me! - hiccup ---AUGUST OF 2006??? Can that be true?

And, as if you didn’t know, I’m usually so wordy and self-involved that I can’t wait to describe my feelings about --- well, I admit it --- just about anything! I can EASILY write 20 paragraphs about a 5 minute Mel sighting - in re-runs on cable yet! I’m usually sooooo hopelessly in love with the Me-ness of MEEEEE! What happened to the jocular foppish fellow who didn’t have a single feeling that he didn’t find remarkable? And that he remarked upon, interminably, ad nauseam?

Well - let’s follow the clues for a moment, if you care to.

First:

2006 - WHA’ HAPPEN?

PRETTY SONGS AND UGLY STORIES


Hmmm - Where did everybody go?
Photo By Rocky Schenck



I guess first I have to admit, I had to WORK. That CAN interfere with the will to self-document. I know it’s unseemly for one who is universally regarded as lazy gadabout twee-psych pseudo-gentry to EVAH engage in anything as menial as actual labor. I’m embarrassed about it too! I’d much rather wax verbose about how nauseating I find our man Mel, GWB, and/or on occasion, Glenn Close.

But no - making a hugely ambitious first-time-ever CD with Ann Magnuson requires nose-to the-grindstone effort and concentration. You have to actually think about stuff’n’shit! Ouchy!

Yours truly did actually “WORK”, day-in, day-out, producing, arranging, co-writing, conscripting fabulous musicians, rehearsing, and even actually playing and singing on this preposterously gradiose epic by the fabulous and inimitable Ann Magnuson.

It was almost like a - yikes! - real job! For about 9 months there were CD-related chores and missions EVERY SINGLE DAY. Lawsy, how does the general workforce manage? And they commute! I don’t usually ever do ANYTHING that requires effort everyday.

So - Since I’m known generally as Captain Atrophy, after these long hours I would come home and barely even have the energy to cruise the Jack-in-The-Box drive-thru. Our fabulous local faux “Craftsman” JITB, natch, because we live in a preservationist historical overlay - Thank God! It’s got fake river rock columns and those cheap reproduction lamps you see on the Gilmore Girls, and everything! So I’d get my daily (sadly discontinued) Lime and Cilantro salad, go home, exhaustedly pop open a bottle of Casillero Del Diablo Cabernet (then still quite inexpensive at Trader Joe’s) and pass out during the midnight re-run of Top Chef.

There’s really nothing like recording to make you feel creative and fulfilled and juicy and tender and even occasionally beefy! It’s great! But at the end of the day, it also makes the old coot sleepy! And thus it doesn’t render diary writing much of a priority.

During recording, I was privileged to work with so many wonderful people: my core band of Rock Gods: Dave Bongiovanni, Joe Berardi, Ernesto Garcia - and erstwhile (and as of 2007, current) Rock God William Bongiovanni.

Then the glorious gals: Heather Lockie, Lisa Jenio, the Chapin Sisters, Abby Travis, and Weba Garretson.

Plus: Fabulous guests like the ever handsome DJ Bonebrake, Rockstar Jonathan Lea, boyish bear-bait classical harpist Alexander Rannie, the world’s most famous saw player, David Weiss, and even the fabulous Earle Mankey contributed a stellar finger-pickin’ good acoustic guitar solo.

What I’m trying to say is - it was like a party every night! So much talent in one little room (Mark Wheaton’s fabulously appointed Catasonic Studios) or other (Earle Mankey’s fantastic Thousand Oaks home). No wonder I was pooped.

I AIMED FOR SCHENCK-STYLE GRANDEUR, AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY VINTAGE INKWELL!



Does this qualify as Louis Cat-orze?


Then there was the fun filled (some might say inebriated) Rocky Schenck photo shoot for the cover - what a genius!

A visit to Rocky’s house is always like a special visit with the Mad Hatter, and boy do I have decorator envy.

As proud as I am of my impossibly cluttered Addams Family life-styling, Rocky has me beat on every rococo, ghostly, baroque, over-the-top level. Every where you look there are desks made out of tortoise shell, furniture made out of driftwood, sculpture made out of coral, palatial gilded mirrors, vintage Spanish tile, Red Chinese “People’s Statuary” porcelain figurines, and iridescent stuffed birds straight from the tragically dismantled Potter’s Museum of Curiosity in England.

As a brief aside - said Museum of Curiosity not only had the entire “Story of Cock Robin” done completely in taxidermy in elaborate vignettes, but they were (conveniently!) geographically situated right next to a cat euthanizing facility, so they used all of the adorable kitten corpses to make mock school rooms with desks, tables, chairs, blackboards, etc., and little farm yards, in full clothing. At least Rocky doesn’t have any of THOSE! I’d have to kill him!

Rocky is really sort of like the A-list version of me. A little sad really when you think of it - me being a poor stepsister to someone else’s vision. Everything he has is a just a wee bit bigger, grander, more elaborate, more gilded, legitimate. This is not a position I’m used to - I generally condescend to lord my 1897 silver plate glass-eyed cats popping out of top hats over all and sundry! But, drat! They just seem so small next to his Louis XVI grandiosity. But at least I have photo-documentation, courtesy of the great master himself!


Being a ghost is better than an Oil of Olay Chemical Peel!
( photo by Rocky Schenck, for the "Pretty Songs" CD Booklet )


TAXIDERMY BREAK!

Speaking of Potter's Museum of Curiosity - circa 1977, my very close friend (and original Gun Club drummer) Brad Dunning and I had an idea for a vigilante group. We were so totally over "crimes against humanity". I mean, it's just a bunch of people! As if being born automatically should give any asshole automatic rights to anything! Being born is not an accomplishment! It's practically a crime!

But we were definitely concerned with another sort of crime - Crimes Against Civilization! We may not have been in love with Mankind, but we were (and ARE) in love with many of his peculiar accomplishments. So we were attempting to write a comprehensive manifesto of how to deal with Crimes Against Civilization, and to conscript our friends into wildcat justice dealers.

You know, crimes like when they replace all the original wooden window frames in a 20's home with aluminum ones. We thought that was a crime worthy of death. Or at least maiming and torture. Or being forced to wear polyester, at the very least.

Of course we were young, and in bands, and lazy. What seemed rousing at closing time after the third $2.00 double margarita at El Coyote began to feel something like a chore in the cold hard light of day in Brad's bachelor single ( I actually slept in the closet - read into THAT what thou wilt!) at Fountain and Gardner.

But the idea has never really left me - people aren't important, really. But the obsessive accomplishments of many driven eccentrics are. Which is a roundabout way of getting to:

SELLING OFF THE CONTENTS OF POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITY AND DISMANTLING THE MUSEUM WAS A CRIME AGAINST CIVILIZATION!!!

I first heard about this museum from Jim Spinx, whom I met through Beirut Slump bass player, fried okrah making, "Too Lazy To Live" star and sometime roommate Liz Swope. Jim sent me a catalog of the museum from England, and told me I MUST go there. Well - the downfall of civilzation was just a little too fast for me! Even so, I'm very glad that a couple of the minor items in the collection made it into the home of one Rocky Schenck, because who is more deserving than he? If these beleaguered items are the orphans of art, then Rocky is the saving adoptive grace of Brad Bitt AND Angelina Jolie! What better fate for them - save one:

KEEPING THE GODDAMN MUSEUM INTACT FOR OUR EDIFICATION AND THAT OF OUR PROGENY-IF ANY

But Nooooooooooo! That seemed as tall a request as keeping fanatic Talban hoodlums from blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas.

So instead all you get is these downloaded photos, works for ye mighty to look upon and despair, just a few examples of the only recently dismantled collection of fantasically appointed anthropomorphic tableaux, which neither you nor I will EVER get to see in person. As myth-buster Pat Loud always used to say: "Why do they call it Never Never Land? Because we NEVER NEVER get to go there!" Wah! Wah!








Oh Mr. Potter! We hardly knew ye - and now we never will!


WHERE WERE WE? OH - THAT'S RIGHT! I CAN'T READ!

Back to the work on Pretty Songs. After the intensive design sessions, there was the inevitable checking and re-checking of the eensy weensy text for the cover art - and still, we managed to leave off a SUPER important credit for Jonathan Lea, who played EVERY SINGLE GUITAR on “Is This Heaven?” Ooops! Sars, buddy!

ENTER LUXURIA, AND SPIN!

I’m pretty sure right about this time, mid-to-late 2006, legendary Super Casanova Eric Bonerz gave me call and said, “The Millionaire [bless his soul] has recommended you as a DJ for the radio station I’m restarting. It’s basically a tribute to long-time thrift shop record collectors everywhere, and we want a variety of DJ’s to showcase their own particular and peculiar obsessions every week.”

Sounded like heaven to me! A pre-emptive license to play the hundreds of insufferably twee pop confections I’d been hoarding for years and years, plus any quirky novelty records I couldn’t even pay any of my friends to listen to? Wheee!

Of course I said yes - and the first couple of shows were easy - I’d been binging on vintage vinyl and CD re-issues of trivia obscura for so many years that purging came as a violently regurgitative release!

Sure I’d play the Pipe Dream, the Geranium Pond, the Almond Lettuce, the Blossom Toes, Kathe Green, the Picadilly Line - not to mention various bombastically unlistenable Richard Harris cuts (so many to choose from!)! I’d play “Lavender Popcorn”! “Tara Tiger Girl”! “Sweet Little Innocent Lorraine”! “I Lied To Auntie May”! “The L.S. Bumble Bee”! “We Are the Moles”! “Glass House Green, Splinter Red”! “Lazy Fat People”! “Over the Wall We Go”! “Swallow The Sun”!

Of course there was a wealth of outre cover versions to leaf through - Frankie Randall, Julie London. Sue Raney, Eartha Kitt, Rosalind Kind - so much psychedelic camp - so little time.

And I could force whatever listeners there might possibly be into my favored shadowy cul de sacs of Michel Polnareff, Eric Charden, The Moon, Illes, the Klan, Czerwone Gitary, the Wallace Collection. Grapefruit! Appletree Theatre! Los Brincos! Thorinshield! Tinkerbell’s Fairy Dust! Boudewijn De Groot! Erick Saint Laurent! I could finally even play the obvious lite psych bon bons like Donovan (and his peculiar aural stalker, Arthur) and the Cowsills, why - even Barry Ryan! - with smug impunity! In fact - someone was inviting me to do so!

VAIN VICTORY?

My mind was filled with thoughts of karmic revenge on people like my older brother’s best friend, Ron Seeley. Ron Seeley was an acerbic high school over-achiever from a family of pretentious professorial intellectuals, and although he superficially seemed sophisticated and worldy to my young eyes, in retropsect his most prominent social trait can be reduced to a single word: bitch.

When I was a top 40 obsessed tweener (admittedly - what a glorious top 40 it was!), I was always treated as the clueless unhip nerd teeny-bop little brother in the fight for the family turntable in the living room, not only because of my completely age-appropriate adoration of the Monkees, but because of what turned out to be a totally prescient fascination with the Bee Gees, the Left Banke, the Merry-Go-Round and the Kinks.

So when I, with tremulous and fragile pride, finally spent my saved-up allowance on “There Are But Four Small Faces”, and brought it into the living room to sneak it onto the stereo, thinking, “This FINALLY will SURELY be ‘heavy’ enough to gain the approval of these cruelly elitist elders”, I was absolutely crushed to hear Ron say with snide nasality, “Isn’t this that AWFUL bubblegum band, the Small Faces?” And I retired to my room in utter defeat and ignominy. I was really ready NEVER to come out. I can still remember Ron’s casual dismissal of my most secret dreams as he leaned against our yellow formica kitchen counter in his rumpled beige khaki shorts and Penney’s Towncraft print shirt, helping himself to something out of our refrigerator. It was a bleak day, and I have yet to recover.

Now, as an adult I could look back on both his and my brother’s pathetically predictable selections of Canned Heat, Cream, those awful Butterfield/Bloomfield jam records, and the Rolling Stones with an air of a hardened (wizened?) obscurist’s bitter retropsective superiority.

At least I’d had the sensitivity, even as a child, to be drawn to some of the LEAST selling masterpieces in recorded history! Those guys were just rote FM lemmings in comparison!

But it still hurt even years later that, as a vulnerable child (boo hoo!), I’d had no one to with whom to share the mental adventures which that technicolor music had taken me on. At least not until I met Lance Loud, and we proceeded to force copies of Vilallage Green Preservation Society and Sparks’ first LP on all of our unwitting and bemused high school friends!

Before that, listening to “Sound of the Screaming Day” by the Golden Earrings, which I had gotten by mail in a trade with a Dutch pen pal, was a lonely vigil!

So --- here was my final triumph! Vinyl vengeance! A passle of highly regarded lounge-core hipsters had asked little ME to be one of the premiere DJs on their brand new radio station. It only took, oh, about 50 years - half a century - for the pay-off!

Thus I give thanks for making me the determined lyte-psych nerd I am, Ron Seeley! You gave me the emotional dragon scales to make it through decades of disdainful sneers to this glorious moment!

As a slightly mitigating concession to my brother, (who is now completely removed from the decade-hopping world of vinyl collectibles, and makes a living calling contra dances all over Europe instead - that’s his “real” music now, and he couldn’t give a fuck about any of this shit anyway) I do have to confess that I first saw the cover to the Thorinshield AND the first H.P. Lovecraft LPs in his collection, although he STILL wouldn’t let me listen to them!

He thought I was too young, and he knew I wouldn’t like “real” music like that, and besides, a kid like me wouldn’t know how to handle “real” LPs. Even my more loving sister had told me the same thing about Love’s first album: “You just wouldn’t get it Kristian.” I snuck into the living room one day and listened to it on the sly, and was somewhat proud and astounded: whether it were true or not, I felt like I DID get it.

So, years after not be allowed to listen to Thorinshield and H.P. Lovecvraft, I was still haunted by the mesmerizing 60’s graphics on those covers. I doggedly searched for copies of them in thrift shops and used record stores, longing to hear the magic behind that mandala medallion and that crazy rapidiograph seething garden-of-evil flower bed.

Of course, I finally DID find my own 50 cent copies in the Salvation Army, and also concurrently bought anything that looked even remotely psychedelic, or kooky, or old. Those were the dinner time records we played our record collecting infancy, from high school through punk all the way to the new wave, along with all the other “baby’s first collectibles” hallmarks of that era: Esquivel, the Sonics, Tiny Tim, Louis Prima, Mrs. Miller, Hayley Mills, the Shaggs - you know, the usual.

I was eager to tell my brother that I’d found these records which had, in a way, set me on this record-obsessed journey. When I was finally able to tell him (he’d lived in San Francisco for years, and we rarely saw each other), I was utterly confounded that he confessed that he didn’t remember either of those records at all! It was so primal to me, yet not even a footnote in his memory!

Is that the definition of a hollow victory?

It really shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, because when I finally got to listen to the Thorinshield LP, it was full of glorious off kilter over-orchestrated twee pop-psych - the very thing my brother had so volubly disdained throughout my entire childhood!

And H.P. Lovecraft? Despite pleasant moments, they were just a fairly rote folk/psych outfit - nothing like the “heavy shit” my brother and that darn Ron had proclaimed to be “real” music all those years ago.

It was then that I wondered - if they hadn’t been so mean to me, would I ever have developed my “outsider” aesthetic? Did I need that rejection to be open to Lance, and New York, and Punk, and gosh darn -- all great music in general? Did I NEED someone to rebell against to clarify my own tatse? Should I actually be THANKING these people? Hmmmm......

After about three milliseconds of consideration, I realize definitively - NAW!!!! No way! Fuck them! I would have liked the Bee Gees and the Innocents and the Sopwith Camel no matter what, because I’m RIGHT and THEY’RE wrong! Look buddy, there ARE some absolutes!


But childhood trauma aside, Luxuriamusic was going to be a blast, and I soon encouraged my great friends and fellow light-psych twee pop obsessives, Andrew Sandoval and Steve Stanley, to join as DJs. My old friend Howie Pyro was next on my Luxuriamusic invitational, but he had already gotten the call from Kari French, and soon after Jim Laspesa got conscripted, and Ron Sures was already there, and the Millionaire came back from Providence and signed on. So it was shaping up to be a roster of some of the coolest record collectors I knew, sharing all of their magic and knowledge like one great big aural carnival ride/time machine/acid trip. Grooooooooovy!


FREE TICKETS TO PEPPERLAND WITH ANGIE!



I'll Boudewijn YOUR Groot!


Thus was my very own weekly radio show, PEPPERLAND SPICERACK, on Luxuriamusic.com, born! As you might be able to infer from the title, it's basically a forum for anything from the late 1960's through the early 1970's (with occasional impulsive and unapologetic time travel to other realms), that is Beatle-damaged, or trippy, or melodic, or orchestrated, or humourous, or all of the above. Or anything that has a heaping helping of joyfully rebellious 60's attitude. As marginally gifted but gloriously enthusiastic Boutique owner Angie Cat sings in "Angie Cat", the composition by Spanish genius Manolo Diaz which I use as my theme song:

Tengo mini-car
Tengo mini-skirt
Tengo maxi-heart!
I love Ho-Chi-Minh
I love Che Guevara
I love Kosiguin
Yo soy Angie Cat!

And of course, I also feel free to transgress into Bowie territory whenever I want! So be sure to try logging onto www.luxurimusic.com - you're sure to hear something ridiculous!

TO QUOTE THE DREADED MARTINI RANCH, “HOW CAN THE LABORING MAN FIND TIME FOR SELF-CULTURE?”


Anyway, as I was saying, the first couple of shows were easy - I almost went through them as an automaton, because there was such a huge back log of music I had NEEDED to finally share.

But after that it became - dare I say - work? I actually had to listen to that whole damn Jolliver Arkansaw LP that had lain untouched at the bottom of some pre-millenial pile of thrift-store purchases, to find the solitary track worthy of sharing with the audience I hoped to seduce into being my new cyber Family Von Trapp. Von Trypp?

I had to look through all three Love Generation LPs to find a single track that hadn’t been played to death. And even though it’s a joyful chore, I had to carefully scan and scrutinize Amazon.com for the latest re-issues, or I might miss wonders like the ultra Badfinger-esque Fickle Pickle CD containing the heretofore unknown classic “Wilfred, the Homosexual Stoat.” I OWED that Stoat to my listeners, if any!

Yup - it dawned on my addled head that one actually had to do some legitimate prep work for these shows! Egad! Go through thousands of records, think about possible themes, try and keep it to the real quality items, stay away from over-played classics as much as possible, research new archaeological possibilities, keep a steady stream of new disc-coveries coming in - and, the most time comsuming of all - actually LISTEN to the music you planned to play before hand! Every week! This was like a whole other job!

JUST ANOTHER EXCUSE

Once again, diary writing was put on the back burner, and after a while I didn’t even notice that the pilot flame had gone out.

Of course throughout this period I was also playing gigs with Abby Travis, Mink Stole, the occasional gig with my own band, gearing up to do gigs with the Abe Lincoln Story, all my usual rock whoring activity on top of production duties.

And - there was......

TRAVEL!


A few years ago my friend Elizabeth Seidman had sent me a post card of Der Bein Haus, the “Bone House”. It had haunted me ever since - one of the places in this world I MUST visit.

As Justin and I were planning a possible life-enriching trip abroad, we had several possible destinations in mind. But I just kept chanting “Bone Church! Bone Church!” And wouldn’t consider anything else. I found the post card, and it turned out that it was called Kostnice (“Church of Bones”) or more officially, the Sedlec Ossuary, at Kutna Hora outside of Prague.

That was all it took! I would not be swayed. Of course I’d heard that Prague was a fun travel destination, but I really didn’t know the first thing about it. Prague, Schmog! I just HAD to see der Bein Haus! Bein Haus ist Mein haus!

So we made plans, Justin actually did research and found a fantastic sublet, and we booked tickets on Air France - which is a whole ‘nother story as they say.


FASHION ASSAULT AND BRANDING UPDATE, EN ROUTE TO PRAGUE

Now you may think Americans have no fashion sense, and you may be right - perhaps “sense” is the wrong word. Is “uncontrollable urge” more apt? Perhaps “will to disaster”? See “Mod Prim” entry above! Lets put it this way: Americans are fashion-bent. On any given day you can enjoy visions like I did at LAX in the crowded lounge of any decaying understaffed airport:
Morons branded with Dior sunglasses where the logo is bigger than their nose!

People pushing by in an orgy of quilted maroon leather with the huge applied Chanel interlocked “C” logos in polished brass! Bootleg? I think not - they seem too self-assured. But maybe that’s the very nature of bootleg logos - it takes someone utterly brazen to pull it off.

And for those of you who find those “fashion” statements a little too predictably mall damaged, there’s always a sprinkling of a few pioneers like the following, who engage less in fashion “statements” and more in fashion “howling” :

Kitty corner from me, there is the lady with the grizzled Alice B. Toklas ‘fro, the bizarre huge proto-hippie string art earrings with aquarium pepples for gems which scrape across her wizened liver-spotted beige collarbone, and the siena denim skirt suit with the subtle aboriginal print that just screams “Museum Store Catalog”. The skirt is appended with rows of purposeless Project Runway pockets, each festooned with several large rough “primitiva naif” buttons in distressed silver. She’s wearing hammered sheet copper bracelets that look like odes to crumpled discarded paper. It’s like a power-lesbian-L.A. Eyeworks-splinter-group-Bodhi-Tree-New-Age-Folk-Art-Boho-Mama cultural salad. It’s like Shirley MacLaine threw up and Gandalf said - “Wait - I see Jesus’ face in that vomit!” I wonder dispassionately - can that perhaps really be Weba’s grandmother? After all - she’s doing crafts!

Yes, Alice B seems to be methodically weaving heavy gauge silver wire into some sort of lariat/jewelry on a stick. Boy - how DID she get THAT past security? Did the cumbersome square burlap Tienda Ho carryon with the magenta Polynesian stencilling signify she was from some search-exempt pacific rim religion? Or just that she was a tourist hopelessly damaged by the upper State Street boutique shopping district in Santa Barbara?

Tourist or native, Tiendo Ho, that high end vaguely wiccan import boutique was a long time favorite of all Suburban Sunset Magazine pseudo bohemians - from my peace activist mom, right down to my brother’s make-up free Argentinian yoga instructor vegan wife. Could this tribe truly be mine?

Meanwhile, further branding abounds, from the legitimate uniformed members of the U.S. armed forces (oddly, they’re NOT hot. They just look young and pimply and stupid) to the casual splashes of camo in a rainbow of color treatments on just about everyone’s outfit, including several babies, and the 70’s styled flares of the slightly seedy bottle blonde being shepherded along by the muscular Israeli in the Abercrombie and Fitch Tee Shirt. Now HE’S hot! Israeli soldiers - now THERE’S some real queerbait!

This makes me think two things (aside from my fantasy of taking the entire uber-hot Israeli army from the rear in a total wet-lube tsunami coup d’ass): Camouflage is NOT an appropriate fashion pattern or accessory. Camouflage is what people wear when they’re sneaking around trying to kill someone or something. Camouflage=death. Camouflage is not good for babies. It’s not good for Madonna. War outfits are not cool fashion statements, unless we’re talking Sgt. Pepper. (OK, OK - Yoko’s bullet belt was cool , but with her trademark beret it was always more Symbionese Liberation than Army/Navy/Marine.) War outfits, and the pattern of camouflage are about killing. Killing is not cool. No sir, Mr. Gunn, Sir! That’s just not my brand!

Also, call me an old stick-in-the-generic-Payless-mud, but the urge to declare commercial fealty by using a corporate logo to adorn any article of clothing I wear is as foreign to me as....um.....Scientology. Listen, I’m an unrepentant Bowie fan, and I won’t even wear a super cool vintage Bowie T Shirt! And I’ve got them - and the medallions, buttons and patches that go with them - I just won’t wear them.

Meanwhile, I’m next to two typecast slightly horsey “Third Watch” (now THERE was a show rife with hot Queerbait!) East Bloc babes - you know how there was a fad in mail order Russian Mafia brides for a while? That underrated movie "15 Minutes" utilized this passing fad to it's logical conclusion. And had a naked Russian pro wrestler running through Times Square! Anyway these Belorussian Babes were in clingy chartreuse sports stretch wear with matching chartreuse iPods. Their flowery lace unmentionables are protruding over the waist band like an invitation - or is that a threat?

Ice skating contestants? I’ve seem similarly alien fashion sense on those midget Russian prodigies when they show them disco-ing in the wee hours at Olympic Village.

Then there’s the scrawny 5 foot chinless wimp in the George Michael stubble, droopy asymmetrical Marc Almond eyes, incongruous Fauntleroy hair, boney torso skulking in the billows of an Ex-Large sleeveless “24 Hour Cougar Run” tee shirt pocked with ugly stains, the black gloves with the fingers cut off, the Oliver Twist hat, the denim pedal pushers that just reach his toothpick calves, the rows of jangling gypsy bracelets, the soiled looking yellow do rag (WS friendly?), pink flip flops(!) dwarfed by the huge Luis Vuitton satchel he’s dragging his boutique water and God knows what else in. He’s got a rock star contestant lisp I can here from 30 paces. Yup - them’s travelling duds!

Of course every aspersion I might cast boomerangs right back to me in the form of Lance’s mid-70’s Am Fam emergence from that plane on the Santa Barbara airport tarmac - all Altamont scarves and floppy Ogden’s Nut Gone hats, his mirrored tortoise shell glasses somehow making his Scotch-Irish nose look even more protruberant and less glamorous. And what about me walking around Paris in a floor length 20’s silk velvet dressing gown, waist length Clairol herbal essence shag and braces? But that was different! Ahem! There were cameras! And the 60’s stilled lingered as if there were the ghost of a defensible prototype for this sort of peacock behaviour. Or that’s what I’m saying now, on record!

Anyway - I applaud the conviction of these headstrong fashion aberrantics, even if I lament the cultural touchstones that they scrape loathsome graffitti onto. It’s not really eye candy - more like eye pretzels - stale eye pretzels. But it’s astonishing!


AIR FRANCE ANARCHY!

Air France - Sacre Bleu! When we and our colorful fashion outlaw cohorts finally boarded the plane, I was rewarded with all the assaultive hauteur of French culture’s self-regard by a ratty flea bitten seat pocked with hardened grease stains and peppered with crumbs from the previous passenger’s baguette.

When I pulled down the tray table (French blue d’accord) it was a treasure map of stains and marks. Charitably I assumed they were permanent, but a cursory swipe with a damp napkin proved otherwise: apparently according to French hygeine, an air passenger doesn’t rate a wipe with le damp cloth, nor a brush with le vacuum. There was enough jam sur la table to be mos’ def!

After our resolutely middling “Le Denny’s” meal of a tough greasy chicken thigh, some Del Monte mixed vegetables, and a gateaux as searingly dry as l’attitude Francaise, plus beaucoup de unrequested baguette evente d'hier, Justin tried to free himself from the enforced crowd control device of the stewards resolutely NOT clearing the tray tables by attempting (horrors!) to bus his own Le Tray.

At the kitchenette he was greeted by stern hectoring “NON! NON! NON” from the appalled staff as if he were fomenting a second revolution. “ TAKE VOTRE PLATE BACK TO LE SEAT!” was the huffy instruction.
“Can’t you just let me put my trash in the gargage can, and leave the tray with you?” Justin replied reasonably - to a self-determining American anyway.

“NON! NON! NON! NON!” came the chorus in miltary clipped diction. “RETURN WITH YOUR PLATE TO YOUR SEAT!”

Justin tastefully replied with the classic Continental rejoinder: “You CUNT!”, and returned to his seat as instructed, but not before leaving his tray, with napkins and like detritus thoughtfully arranged so as not to spill, in the middle of the floor in the aisle.

Amazingly the staff showed a deft Cirque De Soleil sense of balance as at least 10 of them, over the course of the next half hour, were able to negotiate by, over, and around that tray on the floor without so much as a displaced peice of cutlery. However, this althletic grace did not extent to the gesture of actually stooping to pick up the tray.

In America, this sort of brash “point making” would be an invitation to a delightfully frivolous clss action law suit, but I guess in Air France, l’attitude c’est tout! It was almost like they were encouraging l’anarchy! Never mind the Bollocks, here’s the Frog’s legs!

It actually made me feel a grudging respect toward them - they picked their role and stuck to it. Punky!

...........TO BE CONTINUED BY YOUR OWN PERSONALLY LAPSING LISPING LAP DOG!

KLAUS NOMI TRIBUTE IN PARMA ITALY

Hello all you young lovelies! I have been SOOOOOOOO inexcusably busy or lazy or something, and I AM just leaving for NYC and then SPAIN (aren't I a globetrotter?), that I just haven't been able to get it together to write any new diary entries. Believe me, I've got the material! But not the dedication, apparently.

However, recently, there was a fantastic Klaus Nomi tribute in Italy which I was invited to attend AND participate in.

Sadly, neither time nor bank account would allow such a transcendental transcontinental folly - but I'm offering the next best thing - a diary entry from an artist who was actually THERE!

The lovely singer/songwriter Vivanne Viveur volunteered to be my eyes and ears, and here is her entry about the event:

Body: London 10 May 2007

From a secret diary

Rainy London the air is fizzy so sure something will happen, and here it comes: Respira Lab - a congregate of artists wanted Vivianne Viveur to arrange and play live a song of Klaus Nomi in Italy. It sounded fascinating.
The first thing was to choose a song and understand Klaus Nomi as a person and artist. Klaus Nomi first filled my heart with loneliness and my choices were "Death", "Cold Song" but then I thought that probably he wanted to gift people with other worlds so the song that chose me was "Three Wishes".
Vivianne Viveur arrives in Parma. WeÕve met Respira Lab: Giovanni, Alice and Erica three lovely mad geniuses. The place was the Veronika Club absolutely perfect for the event.
I started to drink heavily to calm myself down - I was extremely excited, because you could tell that something very special was going to happen, and it did!
The event at the Venue started with "The Nomi Song" (the documentary about Klaus), people looked kindly lost.
I liked when he goes back in his country where he used to play before he was going to greet death.
Citronella, an Italian artist, was personifying Klaus with amazing dresses; Angela Buccella read a touching letter to Klaus Nomi.
When we played I fell into a spell! My feet refused to touch the ground - I was somewhere else, where I always wanted to be - in the dreamland the same place where you write and paint.
Then was the moment when Christian Rainer that played "Total Eclipse". He was already one of my favourite artists, but knowing him and listening to that version...... I was shocked!
He was fabulous. And then he asked me to play the floor tom at the end of "Total Eclipse"; so I thought that Klaus wanted all of us to stay together very tight.
Afterwards DJ Donut played records like she was swimming and took all of us into space.
She was stylish. Klaus, you must have been a person with a great heart who believed in art as a pretext to embrace humanity.

The Klaus Nomi tribute wasn't just a success, it was something else.... he was there!

With love

Vienne Langelle

Thnak you, Vivianne!

West Virginia: Trash Like Me


WEST VIRGINIA
CHAPTER ONE: TRASH LIKE ME



Cranberry Flats: Anyone Got A Banjo?


I went with Ann Magnuson to Charleston, West Virginia to participate in a benefit for the local chapter of Covenant House, whose credo is quoted below:

“We believe that through our different faith traditions, God is seen on the side of the poor. We believe that we are to use our prophetic imaginations to create a new earth.

“We believe that we must work together across all barriers and boundaries in order to solve the social problems of our community. These issues are interconnected with the social issues of our state, national and global community.

“We believe that all people have rights to housing, food, clothing, education, health care and employment. These rights ought to be guaranteed to all human beings irrespective of race, class, sex, religion, creed, sexual identity, age, handicap or national origin.

“We believe that we must act justly on behalf of all people.”

Wow! They set some pretty high goals for themselves. I think more along the lines of, “If only I can manage to get the tile in my bathroom redone in a period appropriate style, puh-leeeeeeeze God - sometime before I die!”

I believe the Covenant House organization has chapters all over the U.S.A. - isn’t there one on Western near Fountain right here in L.A.? Or did I read that sign wrong, as I rushed by it to waste my disposable income on overpriced restaurants and collectible vintage LPs by bands like the Sauterelles, and that sign really said the much witchier, more Californian “Coven House”? Uh-oh - I’m beginning to sound like the guilty white liberal I am! Excuse me!

Well, suffice to say, these Covenant House folks are GOOD people - that’s GOOD with a capital G-O-O-D! Ann had been playing these benefits regularly, and I was thrilled to be part of it. The weird thing is that I actually got paid as well, about which I felt somewhat conflicted, but I wasn’t QUITE enough of a guilty white liberal to forego the honorium. They don’t give those vintage LPs away for free! I still have my eye on on important things, like that mono version of “God Bless Tiny Tim”. So I rationalized effortlessly: “Well, these people have been doing this for years - They must know what they’re doing!”

Ann and I had a secondary motive of having her show me around all the playgrounds of her youth in and around Charleston - the High Schools, Hollers, and Head Shops that had shaped her budding perspective on American life and culture, or lack of same. Fun! We were also going to visit her father in the Snow Shoe ski resort, so what little altruism we embodied was spread pretty darn thin, even from the get-go.

WV CHAPTER 2: CANDYLAND

We were picked up at the airport by one of Ann’s dear friends, Candy, who was a staunch member of what was, suddenly, a fast vanishing species: a West Virginia Democrat.

It felt very “Jackie-Oh!” to be taken up the winding roads through the wooded hills and along the dramatic riverside cliffs, festooned with industrial revolution “Mothman Prophecies” bridges, to Candy’s lovely home with the tasteful heirlooms and the immaculately appointed atmosphere of gentility and casually lavish hospitality. Candy was highly literate, a game and humorous conversationalist with a glowing purebred beauty, like an idealized portrait of a youthful senator’s vivacious wife. This was no fast food Martha Stewart/Laura Ashley snooty approximation of breeding - it was hard-earned rarified book-learnin’ warm and welcoming “culcha”, doncha know. Fantastic!

Lest one get the notion that there was even a single ounce of pretension, one had only to look to the left to Candy’s partner, a hot silver-haired pony-tailed rock’n’roll loving post hippie smartass who also runs the local head shop (Where for 99 cents I got my early Xtian Rock Musical version of The Narnia Chronicles “The Roar of Love” from about 1978, by the 2nd Chapter of Acts, containing the hit “Are You Goin’ To Narnia?” - scary!).

Candy’s books spilled out of every crevice and shelf, and though most were neatly divided by subject and alphabetized, many were causually tossed about on every surface with bookmarks, as if caught in midread, easily controverting Candy’s humorous disclaimer that “Books are just SOOOOOOO decorative!”

I recognized many of the books as identical to those in my parents’ collection, more through visual acuity in regards to their distinctive spines than having actually read any of them - I’m a child of my generation after all!

But it made me wonder about the generational mind adventures they must have shared, binding geographically distant intellectuals across the nation much as we today might share a website. My eyes wandered across the familar bindings of Balzac, Rumer Godden, Joyce, Mann, Dinesen; “Joseph in Egypt”, “Babbit” - all books I am unlikely ever to read in this particular lifetime. I also spotted the books once given me as “suitable” reading for a child, like “Anna and the King of Siam”. There were titillating sounding collections like “The Complete Works of Osbert Sitwell” in lavish gilt Victorian bindings, between the volumes of poetry and whatever cultural diversions had graced the New York Times best seller lists over the last 20 years. Art and photography, history and science, wonderful children’s books - everywhere the hunger for edification. How I love an oasis where language and culture are so valued!

West Virginia doesn’t feel particularly “southern” - you don’t get the sensation of grand ante-bellum plantations, or the historical smudge of vine covered slave quarters, or the romance of Mark Twain riverboat culture - it feels much more transitional; a halfway point between the sleepy south, the industrial north and the prairie midwest. “More backwoods!” giggles Candy helpfully, and there’s a reason why the tourist stops are filled with Hillbilly outhouses made out of local coal - its backstory is more fuedin’ families with stills-in-the-back-yard Deliverance than Scarlett and Rhett.

Apparently, until the recent depression that has emptied the city, giving it the rare American distinction of actually losing population, the major industries here were chemicals and energy in all of its environmentally incorrect permutations. You wouldn’t know it to look at the gracious streamline moderne university glamorously floating just beyond the peaceful green riverbank like an errant Fred Astaire ocean liner, while behind it the recently gilt capitol dome glows in the humid piercingly blue sky.

Candy’s house reflects this midway point between genteel grandiosity and rusticated restoration hardware functionality. It’s sort of highly sophisticated colonial ranch living. Though every surface in the house is white glove clean, outside the humidity inspires picturesque moss to grow on everything, giving a romantic air of natural decay amid the lavish blooms of lilac and dogwood everywhere.

Candy’s daughter, a frisky energetic natural beauty, is a sous chef at the local nouvelle/sushi restaurant, and she brings us all sorts of luscious tidbits and samples as our jet lagged eyes blear up and we’re ready to sink into downy beds. There’s all sorts of cackling laughter and storytelling and soon we feel like family. I know why Ann loves these people, and it’s not just the hospitality, although that doesn’t hurt! It’s something open and giving in the spirit, something easy and warming. Something about loving life and longing to share that enthusiasm.

Is it then, just as we’re drifting sleepward, that we hear Candy lightly sharing, with a sort of subtle air of restrained mourning, that no matter how comfortable and rarified she’s made her homelife, she’s really lonely here, because the ugliness of Red State politics has become so oppressively ingrained into every aspect of this seemingly down home culture? Is it then that she shares that besides her daughters, her partner, and her friends at the covenant house, and a single adventurous gay couple who have bought property down the road, she really has no one to talk to? I think that’s what she shared, after the cabernet had loosened our tongues to make like life-long friends. But I’m sure it slipped out unheralded amid cheery banter, between blasts of songs on their brand new copy of Neil Young’s “Living With War” CD (about which I admire the bravura sentiment, and it’s GREAT he did it, but it would have been nice if he’d spent ten more minutes on the songs).

It makes America seem even more strange and cruel - that such a beautiful environment can have such an overlay of spiritual want. Candy has charitable appointments most days, volunteering as a docent at an art museum so schools can bring their kids there, giving a reading class to other kids, to say nothing of what I imagine her political work entails. I see her on the go the next morning, driving out to organize all sorts of good things. And she has a fantastic loving family life, and a gracious home in which she makes strangers like me feel so unequivocably welcome. Is this the same lady that sounded like she was fighting back a slow-moving, long-threatened, long-suppressed tear last night, before she brushed it aside with another charming anecdote? It’s confusing - it’s not raw enough to be sad, but it adds to the bleak grey impression of a country’s populace so far off the track that true hope seems almost like a lost commodity - the rare vintage of which cannot be spared for everyday use, but must be saved to be savored in spiritual crisis when all fighting and caring has left one empty and drained.

But that’s not what we talked about over coffee the next morning! Candy was on the run with a thousand things to do, and Ann and I would be busy with a quick visit to the people who run Covenant House, then rehearsal and soundcheck, and then maybe take a spin around Charleston gawking at architectural treasures, and maybe take a solemn moment at the beautiful hilltop “holler’ next to the former art museum to where the memorial for Ann’s brother had been held.

WV CHAPTER 3: (THANKFULLY) BRIEF PRURIENT ASIDE




My Dreamboat?


The beds had been so comfortable that first night, and I felt so safe in that house, that I’m sure it contributed to the wonderful dream I had: I was in a typical NYC railroad tenement flat, much like the ones I and all my East Village friends all inhabited at one time or another, and as I walked through it, the apartment just kept telescoping lengthwise magically so it could hold all of my New York friends from over the years like we were at a big High School reunion, and some people from L.A. were there too. So I got to laugh and chatter with Billy Stark and Howie Pyro and Patrick O’Leary and give my dear friends Liz Swope (Beirut Slump) and Liz Seidman (Disco Lolitas) long lingering hugs, and finally I got through the throng to the end of the mile-long telescope/apartment, where it was so packed that there was only room to sit on the bed. So I ended up squeezed in between my old dead boyfriend Bradly Field (Teenage Jesus) and the delightful Theresa O’Donahue of the Fabulous O Sisters. I was so happy to see Bradly that we just started kissing (a little too demonstratively! You may write and request the embarrassing necrophiliac X-rated version) and holding eachother, and suddenly his nose began to twitching, “Just like Oscar’s!” I thought. (Oscar is the white cat that lives with me and my current BF). Then right before my eyes, Bradly’s nose mutated INTO a cat nose! Meow!

I woke up and had one of those bittersweet moments - there had been so much death around me, and around my generation and tribe, with Lance and Bradly and Klaus and John Sex and Tom Rubnitz and Joseph Fleury and scores of others gone - it had for years been the one constant - then why do I still live? I could have gone down the path of what I had or hadn’t done, and whom I had or hadn’t failed, and it beckoned like a seductive come-hither siren song of shame and regret. But somehow I remembered to just be grateful for life and the path I’d been given, and that, after all those crazy adventures I’d been blessed enough to be on with those wonderful kooks, I was lucky enough to be here, on yet another one! Thank God, if any! Life is good and rich and full of discovery, and there were robins nesting in the gloriously opulent trumpet vine just beyond the Steinway that Candy’s longtime helpmate “Nanny” was polishing, and we had stuff to do.

WV CHAPTER 4: COVENANT HOUSE PARTY

We went round to the Covenant House and met Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey. They were two petite, vibrant, warm, welcoming, exuberant and humorous women, with little pixie haircuts and sensible clothes. Their can-do optimistic energy reminded me so much of the best qualities of my Mom’s friends from the days of Quaker Peace Activism - they make it seem like there isn’t anything dull or academic or mournful about “doing good”. Apparently, though I’ve never actually practiced it, it’s an exciting calling that gives you an enviable bubbly energy.

So these ladies immediately put me at ease. I always get the pre-high-school-exam jitters of being hopelessly trapped in a grimly interminable ritual of sensory punishment when taken on a tour of some institution - I have the self-involved “Do we really HAVE to see it?” naysaying attitude of exhaustion-before-the-fact. I’m a lazy snob! But this wasn’t like that at all. I felt like I was with my favorite aunts or slightly older sisters, and we were running around to go on some great new white water rafting boat trip or something - they were simply abuzz with good vibes.

It was very moving to go through the house, which offers a drop-in center, emergency assistance, food pantry, free clothing, adopt-a family program, counseling and an AIDS residential and resource program. Covenant House's AIDS program was instrumental in forming a statewide coalition: WV Coalition for People with HIV/AIDS. You can learn more about the coalition's mission and works at: http://www.wvaids.org.

The house itself is an revamped sort of craftsman affair with facilities for drop-ins to take showers and do laundry, or just hang around socializing in the garden or living room, and there is a private entrance for people with HIV to enter with dignity if they choose to use it, and to guard against any potential negative feedback or ostracism from the drop-in’s community of origin, which is a sad testament to the invidious continuing prejudice that is not yet uncommon.

The drop in center/ living room is warm and sunny with lots of original woodwork, and the people working there are on first name terms with most of the visitors that day.

One of the volunteers came up to me and shook my hand, and said “I read all about you on your website!” Gulp! Maybe I should tone down the rant? Nawwww! Because apparently these good people are still speaking to me AFTER they read it, and really, who else matters?

Candy met us for the end of the tour, and we went upstairs to see the art that had been donated for a silent auction during the performance the next night. They had taken “Family of Man” type photographs of the staff and the people who called Convenant House their haven over the last 25 years, and framed them with distressed wooden window frames rescued from various razed houses.

It was work that at once put me off with its naked guilty white liberal manipulation - it was like assembly-line wistfulness - and yet moved me nearly to tears to see the work that was done to give these disenfranchised souls a lift, however transient, in their quality of life and their feeling of community, safety, and resource. And of course I mentally revisited the trail of the dead in my own life. It was difficult to look at. But it helped seeing it under the guidance of these wonderful vivacious literate caring people.

I think Barbara and Patricia actually founded this particular branch of Covenant House (www.wvcovenanthouse.org) 25 years ago - after they........

.........Well, that’s a whole other story! And it’s a big one! But briefly, they are notorious/famous/revered for being former nuns who very publicly resigned from their religious congregation, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur (SND), after a protracted struggle with the Roman Catholic Church involving their public pro-choice stand on abortion.

Their struggles with their institution (and home) is detailed in a highly regarded portrait book “No Turning Back” that they co-wrote, wherein they tried to get the Catholic Church to at least create some forum in which creative dissent about abortion, and finally about anything, was allowed and dealt with fairly. I actually think this book is required reading in many courses on feminism, civil disobedience, and religious freedom, etc.. It’s a tragically predictable story of patronizing dismissal, and finally the compromises the charch ask the two women to make are too much for their spiritual well-being. Even though the Catholic Church protests that it is bad for the faith at large if they resign, they choose to do so, leaving the institution that they had both chosen as young women to devote their foreseeable lives to. And in a heroic turnaround, they seem to claim that leaving the church was when their real lives, spiritual and otherwise, actually began. Pretty heavy! They are like rock star activist nuns! The more I learn, the more humbled I am.

It’s hard not to feel small when preparing to merely play some goofball music for such dedicated inspiring experts who are out there in the trenches, doing the draining and sometimes thankless work of really making a tangible difference in peoples lives, and this gosh darn world.

But then maybe there is a place for what may be charitably termed “court jesters” like us? A sort of liberal USO? Maybe our small gift is to give the community some welcome distraction, hopefully lighten their hearts, and even make it feel MORE like a community by drawing people together with music and laughter? I know that’s pretty watered down Monday morning rationalization, but I have to do something to make myself feel O.K. in the company of these saints.

We were reassured constantly how welcome we were and how excited people were about us, and even that sales or making money on the event was not an issue. They perceived these concerts more as outreach sessions to the community at large, to local politicians, business men, residents, and indeed anyone who might be drawn in by the music and fun and then become interested in what they were doing.

WV CHAPTER 5: GO-GO SHOW BOAT - BAND OF GOLD!



Anyone for Bowie?


So I tucked my self-doubt into my vest pocket, or would have if I were wearing a vest, and we headed for rehearsal at the adorable little gem of a vintage theater, one of those catalogue mini-palaces from the 20’s that most mid-sized towns of America still sport. If they haven’t yet been razed, we’re lucky enough that the current trend is towards turning them into revitalized community art centers, like this one had been. It had a Greek revival theme with somewhat time worn plaster bas reliefs of generic Gods and Goddesses all over the walls amid less specific floral motifs.

The band was waiting for us there - most of them “Mountain Stage” radio show regulars. The band were musical director Ron Sowell on acoustic and rhythm guitar, Ryan Kennedy on lead guitar, Julie and Laurel on backing vocals, last minute replacement Ken Tackett drums, and Chris Allen on bass. Ron looked sort of like a friendly pirate, long hair with an impish grin; Ryan looked like he was at LEAST 3 generations younger than me, and by his fashion signifiers, he could either be the intimidating “gangsta” guy from down the block who wanted to kill fags, or just a nice guy who happened to buy a lot of black clothing at the gap. Being paranoid, I was fearful he might be the former, and for a while I just kept my trap shut! Ken was a tall handsome Wilson Brothers type, and apparently was a big golf buddy of Ron’s and they kept an affable repartee going, while Chris was the quiet one, but occasionally let go with a sassy zinger.

What was amazing was that from the murky rough demos of the songs from Ann’s new CD that, in effect, we’d be basically previewing here, they had learned EVERY SINGLE SONG almost NOTE perfectly - and they had an incredible relaxed groove oriented feel that made the songs seem even better! And on the rare occasion that I had to correct them and say, “I know it was hard to hear, but that song is actually a MINOR chord”, they all listened attentively, didn’t bristle under my musically illiterate direction, played EVEN BETTER, and then THANKED me! They also went on and on about how much they enjoyed playing the material, and loved the chord changes. I thought, “Is this a trick? Or just southern/transitional hospitality?”

But it seemed absolutely genuine. Ryan was just an absolute revelation - no matter what you suggested, he telepathically embodied your vision, only better than you could have imagined it. He was like the magnificent Fredo Ortiz (Genius Beastie Boys drummer, with whom it is often my pleasure to play in the Abby Travis Band) of guitar. There was no pop refence too obscure for him to pick up on it - and I thought, “Don’t these people usually play Bluegrass or something?” But they were totally connecting to their inner glam - maybe that’s why they enjoyed it so much! Glam is for EVERYBODY!

We had even thought that, to make it easy on “the guys”, Ann and I would play a couple of numbers by ourselves. But they practically begged to be on those as well - so Ken learned a delicately swinging brush part for the deceptively complex “Sky’s A’Cryin’”, which is basically one verse and about 14 unrelated bridges, in about 5 minutes flat.

And we had arranged “Sex In Heaven” so they would only have to learn a little tag and the last chorus - I thought it was too complex to throw at them with all the other meterial they were going to have to learn. So it was wild to discover that, on their own, they had learned all the parts to that as well, and seemed genuinely disappointed that we were sticking with the pared-down “acoustic” version.

I just wanted to marry them all! And I have an absolutely magnificent band in Los Angeles - but there is something magical about coming across the U.S. to meet a bunch of strangers and have them bring such hi-falutin’ golden salutatious srump-diddly-umptious instant trouble-free quality to your most opaque composition. It was like a little bit of heaven! I won’t believe anything I see on the red neck channel anymore! I think those woefully unfunny homophobic crap-spewing comedians are a bunch of fakes - a passle of citified posers condescending to a people they know nothing about. Because if this is the kind of musicianship you get in Deliverance country, us big city rats could learn a thing or two!

So we went home aglow with the inspiration of meeting these new musical friends, and looking forward to the show the next day. What made the approaching show even more poignant was that I learned that it was also a farewell show for Barbara and Patricia. Here I’d just met them, and seen all the fabulous work they were doing, and now it was already time to say good-bye.

The Charleston Daily Mail said:

“Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey, co-directors of Covenant House, will leave at the end of the year and return to New England to be near family. The former nuns believe the time has come to pass the leadership torch. For the last 25 years, they watched the seeds they planted sprout, grow and flourish.

“Now, Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey believe the time has come for new leadership to plant ideas and form visions for Covenant House.

“ ‘We feel assured the mission and the original vision can continue without us," Ferraro said. "We are leaving when things are in good shape. We feel good about leaving it in good hands. We need to look at emerging leadership. You have to know when it's time to let go.’

The two will return to their native Massachusetts to be near their family members at the end of the year. A search committee is now looking for new leadership for Covenant House.”

Easy come, easy go! Anyway, I wasn’t too sniffly as we got ready for the show down in the dank basement which smelled of rats and spilled beer - but they were vintage rats! Ann’s hair and make-up were being done by an old school wise-acre charmer of a gay beautician, who actually was wearing cream colored loafers that he could be “light” in.




Backstage I'm Lonely!


We went on after a Ron Sowell solo spot, during which he played a heartfelt anthem in front of a slide show of the history of covenant house, and the audience may not have been “capacity”, but it was pretty darn full.

It was an ambitious set which included:

Falling for an Actor*
Old Enuf 2 B Yer Mom*
I Met An Astronaut *
Mystery Hole (a hilarious Bongwater song about a local Knott’s Berry Farm type “crooked house” attraction, and any sexual innuendo in the title is purely intentional. I didn’t play on this, but it was an anarchic wild swamp rock number that allowed Ann to fully access her Miss Pussy Pants Raver persona)
Just a Guy*
Is this Heaven?*
Cynical Girl*
Sex in Heaven
Lady Stardust
(* = Songs from the new CD)
Amd more! Plus other stuff I didn’t actually play on, like the West Virginia anthem!

The show went well, and the band played like magicians, so we got a genuine ovation that let us play the encore “Moonage Daydream” with impunity, going from slinky to hyper glam over the course of four minutes, and ending with one of Ryan’s amazing solos. It seemed odd that after the sophisticated audience recognized every one of Ann’s expertly timed pop references with avid laughter and warm applause throughout her show, the name “David Bowie” would be greeted with a hush that indicated he just didn’t enter their pop culture vocabulary at any juncture. Weird! Is this a Bowie Free State? Hopefully we made some converts, but all I know is, it sounded fantastic. Charleston, got to go Bowie!

Afterwards there was a meet‘n’greet in a gallery next door with rich pastries which were mostly gone by the time we got there. Apparently some heavy politicos showed up (Mayor? Governor?) but I didn’t meet them. I think there was a guy running for Senate named Higgins gladhanding in a 40’s fashion outside the theater, and was Bonnie Brown his adversary? She was there too. I think we’d seen her stumping in the harsh sun beside the highway outside the university earlier. Small town Norman Rockwell politics! However, I DID get to meet Ann’s tall imposing silver haired Dad, who looked more like a Republican Congressman from “The Contender” than any of the real condidates, among other family members and their friends who’d all come from distant places for the occasion. But mostly I just hung out with the band, who were so funny and friendly it was like an instant gang of peeps. It was weird to think we might never play together again. It was hard to say good-bye! But it gave me a new kind of faith that there are wonderful friendly musicians everywhere.

OMIGOD! I’m listening to a medium cool Mamas and Papas wannabe band called “Juarez” who keep ending up slightly more Spanky than M’n’P, and they just sang in four part harmony “Life is a sad little frug, with the icy touch of a pop art clown”! Fantastic!

WV CHAPTER 6: CHARLESTON NATION?




We Have Always Lived In The Castle


It only takes a little research to find out this starling fact: the West Virginia State Soil is Monongahela Silt Loam . Just thought you’d like to know!

Anyway, Ann and I got ready to leave Charleston the next day, but not before driving down the 1500 block of Virgina street - the LONGEST BLOCK IN THE WORLD! There Ann told me of her secret fantasy: housing prices are very low in Charleston, (at least if you live in L.A.!) and as she drove me through the historic garden district there was mansion after mansion in the “ragtime” style ,all walking distance from the sweeping capitol grounds and the river. Grand brick affairs with columnated wrap around porticos, stained glass windows on the first landing, garden gazebos and romantic gables, and about a third of them were for sale!

I guess that’s what happens when all the main industries leave town. Ann’s idea was to get as many of our friends who were exhausted by LA - which means most of them - and get them to buy these mansions so we could all be artsy neighbors and start a sort of magical arts community, and just in effect co-opt the whole town.

In that moment, seduced by the gorgeous architecture and the verdant setting, I BELIEVED! Charleston is one of those towns where they’re carefully restoring what’s left of the historic downtown district, in hopes of inspiring a return from the suburbs of business and pedestrian traffic, and at first glance, it looks like it’s working - the vintage street lamps and Victorian detail gleam with recent paint and polish. But empty storefront after dusky empty storefront tell another story - it’s a town without focus, without dream, and the appallingly ugly mall only 6 blocks away is the only downtown edifice that seems to inspire any custom. Could we really get a party of kooks to move here and take it over, like we did the East Village in our youth?

But there’s one major difference, besides the stodginess that inevitably comes with age - this is no urban center, connected to the rest of the world as a vital thriving community. It’s a cute country retreat. And it isn’t even close to ANY other major cites. Mounting the smallest of tours for whatever incredible musical aggregrates our fantasy commune would lead us to create would be a logistical nightmare. And no matter how close the internet has brought the world, actual travel is often required - especially if you like PEOPLE - and I do! Still, those “for sale” signs in front of those gorgeous mansions continue to haunt my daydreams.

WV CHAPTER 7: WEST VIRGINNY WAYFARERS

Before we got completely out of Charleston, we made a side trip to Nitro, a small hamlet whose main industry is - Nitro! It was a crumbling roadside strip of white wash peeling brick single story boxes, with chest high weeds crowding in from the foothills like triffids. They had a nice bunch of antique malls there with reasonable prices on the vintage tin-types Ann was researching for her new CD, but the most remarkable thing about it was that the kids WERE having fun in Nitro- by lighting piles of tires on fire! Retro! Now that’s good sport. The black smoke heaving into the sky was as dramatic as any injun smoke signal in a 40’s serial. And I got a piano shawl with 20’s egyptian belly dancers. So there.

We meandered through West Virginny at a leisurely pace - went to Pearl S. Buck’s home, a home of near-Amish severity but the ghost of the writer made it feel lively and inspiring. The backyard windows looked onto a sunny orchard, then a wide field, and then rolling foothills where not one sign of the 20th century intruded - not even a telephone pole. The whole state felt like time travel, and I remembered from some Willy Pogany illustrated nursery rhyme book that only the yellow rose knows how good mud feels between the toes. Buck’s books had also been deemed “child appropriate” when I was in grade school, so I was reading up on extended families with mistresses and infidelity and revolution as just a bitsy tweener. We stopped for lemonade at some friends of Ann’s who had a working farm, and a humble house full of family antiques on a grand bluff overlooking it, with a bullfrog pond, a Grimm’s forest sneaking down on it from the hillside, and crazy arrays of wildflowers. The late spring air was thick with fragrance and buzzing bugs. Could life ever have truly been like this? I had to shake myself to remember that this farm was actually the vanity project of a wealthy retiree - not the hardscrabble existence that true farmers had before corporations destroyed them. Even my memories and sense of what is American are courtesy of Disney, and thus suspect. Like Radiohead says, “Nice dream”.




Shopaholic: Pepperidge Farm remembers, But WV tries to forget!


We stopped to pet a Llama (!) that rushed to a rough-hewn fence to greet us. At a country cafe in a small town that seemed to have more churches than populace, the sign by the cherry blossoms in front of the chapel across from us proclaimed, “ Reverend Lucy”. Now that was Rockwell-free reality! Must have been Episcopalian. We stopped at abandoned company towns clinging to steep piney-wood hillsides right out of a pre-Nick Cave sullied Murder Ballad, built for railway or lumber workers - Of course, despite the cruel stratifying indentured servitude heritage of these company towns, now, to paraphrase the Micah 4:3 adage, they shall beat their cottages into time shares.



Llamarama!



And of course we drove by many roadside triple cross displays - coarse ochre handmade two by four crosses, co-opting the landscape like Avenue D squatters in an explosion of folk art fundamentalism, peeking out of forest and glen, or naked on hilltop. Calvary Alert! Here’s what the net is good for: now I know that Calvary means “skull” as, apparently, does Golgotha! That really puts the goth in Golgotha!

You know, I may only be writing this incredibly verbose account of our trip after all these months, but I have an excuse, because we just opened our jar of West Virginia grown Zekes Original recipe Hillbilly salsa! And it’s good! Strangely pickle-y, but right tasty!

We then drove up a steep curving hill on the way to Snow Shoe, familiar in feel from all my visits to Idaho. We got to the top after a long ride, and it opened up into a spare ghost town of architecture not unlike a minimalist Universal Citywalk - it all seemed faux, but faux what? Neither chalet nor chateau, it aimed for something grander than mere “resort”, but recent upgrading left it spookily generic. It was like an Olive Garden restaurant masquerading as Zurich. Of course it was summer and off season, and it would have felt quite different with the expected crowds of college swingers and ski bums, covered head to toe in lycra corporate logos and weirdly form-fitting neu-ski gear, fresh off their hot toddies, and trolling for ski molls, along with the odd middle aged couple on the beginners’ slope in pink sweat pants and hangovers.




Yeti alert!


But the actual condo complex that Ann’s dad called home was much more culturally flavorful. It had a sixties "Hef puts his feet up" feel, and his back door terrace looked into a thick forest where there was often bear sighting. The apartment was uber-manly, avocado green and dark panelling, with mementos of various world excursions and framed pictures of Ann in all the stages of her career. Martinis were offered as casually as if we were all in the Bond family. There were little patches of snow and frost lingering, and the air was as crisp as a laminated guide book. Her dad had fun neighbors who invited us for powerful cocktails, crab on toast points, and resort gossip about marriage and health and occasional local scandal. Ann and I took long walks in the crunchy pine needle carpeted woods and thought about life’n’stuff - as one might, when on a soaring mountaintop skyspace, caught somewhere between the great creator and the outsized steaks her dad bought us at the one restaurant that was open off-season.

My mind wandered to divorce, American style, in my family as well as Ann’s, and how the artsy found their family of choice as soon as they could escape to whatever tawdry Mecca beckoned and was affordable. I mean - that’s how I met Ann! In a tawdry yet affordable environment - backstage at the New Wave Vaudeville show! There was a lot of private stuff that I’m not going to tell any of you until you write me pleading beseeching fan mail, hopefully with offers of sexual favors. But it was poignant, plaintive, profound and piquant being there. And pretty too! And while I pulled out the earth-toned plaid tweedy castro convertible in the guest room, and snooped through the closets and drawers (no porno!), I got to think about the wonders of long term friendship, and having a creative history with someone, and survival and commitment and all those other good things that make for snooze-fest reading but resound in my soul nonetheless. I’m very lucky to get to travel with Ann and make music with her!

We rounded out the trip with a visit to Cranberry Flats - a big plain of primordial swampy tundra, with mossy rotting logs enough for any aspirant leprechaun or garden gnome. Columbine flowers (NOT AK47s, nature lovers) actually grew wild in the rich damp earth, as did cranberries. The creaky boardwalks that kept you from sinking into the ooze were silver from elemental pummeling, and peppered with bear shit, which made one think that the bears liked a nice place to evacuate, just like us! And we happened upon a little mouse carcass that we poked with a stick. How I love nature!

Somehow, in retrospect, it all seemed like a real Moonage Daydream: why did I feel so guilty when confronted with the Barbara and Patricia - true saints of our time, yet only a day later, when confronted with some of the most gorgeous wonders of nature I’d ever witnessed, I thought not of God our creator, but of possible property investment, and how I could get all my pals to have a big party out here? I’m just a lot more Druid than Catholic I guess!

Trees’n’flowrs’n’nature’n’shit just make me want to get some red wine, pull out my Hello Kitty boom box, put on some hot tracks by Shampoo, and dance around making an even bigger dope of myself than I already am! Maybe I am the son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp! And you’re all invited - to be Trash Like Me!



Monsanto at Snow Shoe!
I Join The Gun Club



Well, first there’s the REAL Gun Club - we Americans! That damn Pakistani terrorist Muslim Liquid Explosive plot sure smacks of pre-election convenience, and it even has a 9/11 cross marketing branding tie-in with Ollie “Headline-huggin’ 3-flops-in-a-row” Norths’s new milquetoast take on the whole damn fear thing.

I mean, I do think there ARE Muslim terrorists that are stupid and evil, but are they all REALLY out stumping on the campaign trail to get a bunch of Republicans re-elected and keep Bush in power? Who fucking profits?

Both the Bush and Blair approval ratings were falling off precipitously, and now those two bunker buddies can get all cozy over this supposed triumph of our Big Brother security policies.

Then why, on the front page of the Los Angeles times, IN the headline, are they still calling it an “alleged” terrorist plot? But at least it gave Schwarzenegger a moment to flex some atrophying muscle by deploying the National Guard - very True Lies! Everybody wants in on the act! Except, apparently, sensible Oakland, who refused Arnie’s blustery blowhard offer.

At least when I talk about my Gun Club, I admit it’s only show biz! So let’s set the way back machine to right before the June 29th Opening Night Premiere of director Kurt Voss’ Gun Club Documentary “Ghost on the Highway”.

DON’T KNOCK THE ROCK


Who am I? Davey Crock? KH Pix by Dawn Wirth



Only the previous Monday, I was happily conscripted as a temporary Jeffrey Lee Pierce channeling medium through the generous and unfailing machinations of fab indie photog, and long time friend, Dawn Wirth . She used all of her persausive powers (and perhaps some of her delicious Brownies) to remind her friend Terry Graham, Gun Club drummer extraordinaire, that I was “perfect” for this assignment (and who am I to argue?), and apparently it worked! Because later, when I picked up the phone, it wasn’t my usual techno-friend, the pre-recorded telemarketer; it was the providential call from Terry.

Just moments before, my friend Arthur and I had been wondering how we were going to get into the darn show at all - we didn’t know about the movie, but we wanted to see Kid Congo Powers revisit his Gun Club incarnation for sure! The only thing was, we were sure Kid, with whom we both shared varied adventures, would be getting into town too close to the show for us to wheedle tickets out of him, and the show was already sold out.


But now , suddenly, thanks to Dawn, THAT was solved: I was going to be IN it! That’s the A-List of freebies!


I got to have one run-through of the song on Wednesday (the night before the show). When I walked into the NoHo rehearsal space, legendary Flesheater Chris D (who produced the original Gun Club masterpiece LP “Fire of Love”) was in the middle of an intimidatingly masterful rendition of that OTHER “Fire of Love”, the single. Pretty heavy! Chris always had those arched eyebrows that make him look either angry or thoughtful, depending on your state of mind. So I quivered in a dark corner, too scared to even say hi.

But Terry is a perennial wit and charmer, and warm as all get-out. And Kid is, of course, the Rajah of love and affection (although I don’t know where that Cramps turban went!) just radiating welcome, and Ward was at his sly sardonic best. Rob Zabrecky was on bass, just one of his million OTHER capabilities beside being a celebrated songwriter, rock legend, and Magic Castle magician. And of course I know him from his Velvet Hammer incarnation, so soon I was at ease. Thus singing my assigned song “Fire Spirit” with this fantabulous convention was just chock full of rock’em sock’em fun.

As I left, Kid asked me how I was going to dress, and I said without hesitation, “Why as a swamp wizard, of course!”

Oh how I LOOOOOVED that first Gun Club LP! Thankfully, I tastefully neglected to share how many times I’d had sex to those seminal (ha ha) tracks - a tad too much information? But the mysterious Kashiselvis , who opened for the Gun Club at the Variety Arts Center, certainly knows!



Kashiselvis opens for the Gun Club at the historic Variety Arts Center
L-R: John Edsall, Fred Maddox, Robert Mache, KH, Paul Rutner, Kash, Joe Katz, Craig Roose, P.J.Goldfinger



Anyway, our three minute preparation apparently went well enough that they all said, “Why don’t you sing ‘Goodbye Johnny’ too?” I don’t know about you, but I took that as a supreme compliment.

So we decided to do that song without a rehearsal - in keeping with Ward’s admonition “Don’t be too good! You really shouldn’t sound so much like a real musician!”

The day of the show I got to the venue - the uber-buzzy Redcat Theater in the basement of the notorious, blindingly reflective Disney Concert Hall, the building that took architect Frank Gehry out of a dead-end of ugly minimalism and down a rabbit hole of delightful Reynolds Wrap whimsy.

I caught myself rudely scooting right by Dawn, who was waiting outside, because my sieve-like mind was just obsessively going over and over the lyrics to “Goodby Johnny” and I was in an alzheimer’s adjacent fog. So I blindly groped my way back for the soundcheck, into the 80’s black box minimalist auditorium. The technicians were all very helpful - and young! However, the brackish water in the cooler dressing room that contained a few floating candy wrappers, and a single lukewarm can of Tecate that certainly should have been carbon dated before trying, kept me grounded in mildewy “Rock” reality.

Thalia, of the NYC band Come, was the featured singer for the evening and would sing ALL of the songs besides my brief mini-medley. She may have had a petite body in a blood-red western shirt, but she filled the room with her super cool punk rock rasp - very melodic, like Jeffrey crossed with Janis Joplin, but also capable of cool whispery Morrison spell-casting. She was bringing an almost manly rock prowess to her reverent interpretation of the songs. So her soundcheck went like magic.

By comparison, thinking of my inescapable instinct towards unforgivable hamminess, I never felt gayer! (Think, in grade school sing-song: “I don’t go out with the girls anymore! I don’t intend to marry! I just go out with the boys I adore - WHEEE - I’m a fairy!”) At first I thought - is this affect appropriate for this swamp rock legacy? But then I thought, well Jeffrey was an unpredictable drag-lite fey hambone too, given to all sorts of inept dancing and writhing that made him look a little light in the mocassins, so I just gotta be true to the scattershot breadth (ahem) of his persona and just “represent”, as the kids say.

After soundcheck, I went backstage and sucked on my generic Equaline Hall’s-wannabe mentholyptus honey-lemon lozenges - that’s the extent of my stagecraft, all in a neat little wax wrapper. I got introduced to Kid’s new significant other Ryan (which was somewhat incestuous, because didn’t he used to go out with my sometime collaborator John Fleck? Hmm.....Maybe there are only a limited amount of fabulous people in the world and we’re just switching partners like a Gone With The Wind ballroom scene).

Then we all went out to the foyer/bar to check out the vittles, and there was Jenny Lens bouncing around in her hippie mama frock with resplendent iridescent maroon locks, while her catalog of incredible punk era pictures were slide-projected on two walls around us, together with amazing selections from equally fabulous collections by my amiable Gun Club procuress Dawn Wirth and the lovely Theresa Kereakes, who gave so much to the “How I Saved the World” Mumps compilation. Theresa was there as well, all smiles and honey smooth skin - later, in her new interviews that were included the movie, she looked like she was all of 18. And of course, there WERE some pix of me and Lance et al amid the more site-specific Punk Royalty of the Los Angeles scene. Not only were we bi-coastal, but now we’re High School art class multi-media too!

Also milling about were loads of punk and post-punk legends, including Lisa Curlin and Ann McClean of the immortal Lotus Lame and the Lame Flames. How it brought back former lead Flame Cindy Schwarz’s coyote-like shriek in one of their top hits, “I caught you giving blow jobs at the Apache!” During my tenure as one of the Lame Flames biggest fans (and often their housegurest as well), I had the privilege of seeing hostess with the mostest Cindy go from being a bank president to a gun runner! And I’m not kidding! To those of you in the Lame Flames know, where IS Jocko?

Anyway, I bet now that erstwhile Lame Flame Clayton Clark ( a wonderful artist who also designed a Gun Club album jacket or two!) is married to mainstream Hollywood uber-director Gore Verbinski, someone could get a pretty penny, or at least some petty blackmail cash, for some of those lo-fi videos of the Flames doing a conga line around the chain link fence on the semen-soaked floors of the “One Way” Leather Bar, which was the Flames’ spiritual home back in the days when Hyperion was a rather sketchier locale than now, before the greening (as in $$$) of the Silverlake real estate boom. The One Way was sort of the gay sister of the Anti-Club, sharing many of the same outrageous acts and savvy promoters, and proof that for one brief shining moment, fags could actually ROCK!

Back at the Red Cat foyer, there was Ann (Magnuson), looking fab in her black gown, escorted by Arthur Brennan, who’d lent Kid his Golden Gibson Les Paul as back-up just in case of a broken string. I didn’t even recognize legendary walking encyclopedia L.A. rock historian Johnny Angel, looking tough and macho, but being very gentle when I apologized by abjectly kneeling at his feet. Or maybe he just likes it when people do that? We also met two Gun Club superfan kids, one of whom had the entire Botanica shelf from the back cover of “Fire of Love” tattooed on his arms. That must have been a chore!

Then back into the auditorium for the movie showing. Michael Des Barres, Silverhead cheekbones and Glam-era Garbo eyes completely intact, welcomed people to the opening night of the festival and the world premiere of the film with his usual sardonic snappy repartee, which, if not quite Oscar Wilde, was at least Oscar Levant, to the giggles of the sold out audience.

Kurt Voss made a brief statement, and the lights went down.

Then there was some puzzled silence as nothing happened for a couple of minutes. People were shifting in their seats uneasily, and several muted coughs could be heard. Finally, the screen was covered with a vibrant yellow sunset portrait of a field of waving wheat, and while some academically bearded talking heads started expounding gravely about the genius of a true British orginal, the blood red credits trumpeted “The World of Scott Walker”!

A little muffled tumult came from the back of the theater, and the film stopped suddenly, to return the screen to neutral grey. After a brief but uncomfortable interlude, icons representing the production companies that cobbled together the financing for the film together passed by, and there was a collective sigh of relief and some applause as the title “Ghost on the Highway” appeared on screen.

What first emerged was how articulate and funny and smart and moving Ward and Terry were! As were almost everyone involved in the movie. But why no Brad Dunning (the Gun Club’s first drummer) interview? Dave Alvin, Jim Duckworth and Dee Pop were by turns hilarious, scathing and poignant. As befit the films’ subject.

It was yet another tragic arc of a misbegotten visionary, not unlike the Nomi Song, in that the genius of choice starts a bewildering downward arc from which he never recovers, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, just death. Glum! And Jeffrey’s demise seemed more willful and self-determined than most - a slow but utterly committed act of suicide-in-increments as a supposed doorway to transcendence. Was it just the drugs? Or something imbedded and inseparable from his persona, his psyche?

Unlike Klaus, most of whose demons came from without, it seemed like one of the greatest tragedies portrayed in the film was that of Jeffrey buying into his own sad predictable self-mythologizing, and railroading himself into the “death legend” of his iconic muses.

That character flaw seemed so part and parcel of what made Jeffrey unique and yet lamentably out of touch with where is true genius lay - in his craft, his voice, and his vision.

Somehow, sadly, he seemed to feel it lay more in affecting the boring excesses of his clueless forbears. I still don’t believe the mystique of a willful death wish makes you a better artist. In fact, to me it’s just another form of soul laziness. And this was doubly lazy because it was an applique or decoupage of other people’s death wishes into a patchy scrap book Frankenstein of a rock persona. The tragedy is that without that overlay, Jeffrey would have been great anyway.

The movie also had a peculiar reverse mystification factor: It’s funny - but the more people tried to explain Jeffrey’s “genius”, the smaller he sounded - everyone name-checked the supremely rote Burroughs/Faulkner appropriations as if they were not something that every tired punk-by-numbers was doing at the time. In a particularly over-the-top moment, they even credited jeffrey with inventing thrift shopping and record collecting (!), as well as giving him credit for inventing a fetish for a cemetery pallor by avoiding the beach, citing that hopelessly generic punk‘n’goth affectation as further evidence of Jeffrey’s genius for living and direction. I was kept wondering - are you really referring to those things that every single nascent punk-in-waiting had been doing since 1971? Where are you from - the valley?

Weirdly, the guy making most of these dramatic claims was one Mr. Steven Tash. I had actually met Mr. Tash under peculiar circumstances before - he played “The Teenager” in my then-boyfriend Donald Kreiger’s performance/theatrical extravaganza called “The Unwrapping”.

Donald played “Ranger Don”. Bruce Schwarz (he of the genius grants for his incredibly gorgeous marionettes which he sculpted, dressed, and wrangled with equal facility) made all sorts of floating cat mummies, and some tastefully abstracted human nude mummies as well, including a life sized one, which wrapped and unwrapped while mysteriously floating in one of those magical Vaudeville black out scrims.

I supplied one of my very first tascam 4 track soundtracks of whimsical incidental music, AND I got to play “The Mummy”! I was in a full Mummy body suit, which I enjoyed as much as armor from self-identification as a dreaded “actor” ( I actually didn’t ever talk to anybody back stage - I just grunted) as I did because it was Halloween-y and I got to shuffle around in Lurch-like slow motion to my heart’s content. Unfortunately for Donald’s and my relationship, I personally got great notices at the expense of just about everything else in the production - Ooops!

Anyway, I remember Steve Tash as an inexhaustibly perky and enthusiastic Steven Gutenberg type - kind of a walking Pepsico head shot. He seemed like he’d just come off a tour with “The Kids From Fame”, and was just slumming in a bit of equity waver work between Jack in the Box commercials.

But here he was, his frizzy shoulder length hair dyed post-Rockabilly black, Brooklyn-lite NYPD-Blue-friendly accent, a drape coat, and a distressed western themed Knot’s Berry farm type appartment filled with collectibles, holding forth on his relationship as one of Jeffrey’s closest friends. Who’da thunk?



As Lurch sayeth, "Grrrrr,Grrrr..."


I guess back then I was still so prejudiced, even though it was admittedly the post-punk 80’s , that I thought you were either in OUR tribe, or you were one of THEM. You know, regular people! Eww! Here was a guy who had a toe in both worlds, and apparently the weirdo side of him ultimately won - but even though I worked with him, I had absolutely no idea!

Anyway, in the film Steve still had a chummy self-effacing charm, but he was one of the chief Jeffrey-boosters, constantly citing Jeffrey’s most unremarkable pasttimes as proof of his unearthly gifts.

Maybe Steve and the others just weren’t quite able to articulate Jeffrey’s particular brand of genius - it is difficult to pin down, because it wasn’t really about being an original, or an innovator; or even about being a master of pastiche like Bowie. His hybrid of CCR swamp fetish and Cramps redux guitar sounds was more of an inspired mash-up than anything particularly inventive - it was a sound that some fan was bound to make - witness the outpouring of middling "psychobilly" bands soon after. But there WAS something that set Jeffrey apart from those bands. Part of it was tight rocking workmanlike songcraft. But what of his much vaunted "genius"?

I think his genius was more about an uncontrollable will (or even rage) to self-expression that could not die. It wasn’t WHAT he expressed - it was the act of expression itself. That was where Jeffrey was a giant, and could not be denied. He wasn’t any more a legitimate bohemian outsider than a member of the Dawson’s Creek cast - in fact his most believable persona was not the tired Morrison-lite shambolic shaman with a petite soupcon of Johnny Rotten confrontationalism.

His true outsider soul was actually more convincingly hinted at by the pink leggings and “Let’s Get Physical” head-band ONJ bottle-blonde stalker-adjacent Blondie fan club president. Jeffrey could absolutely rock, and wrote fabulous timeless rock songs, but it wasn’t his references to heroin (yawn) or poser pseudo sexual longing for Ivy from the Cramps (cringe) that gave his soul it’s depth - it was this needy wail of wannabe-ism that remained his most unique and timeless role.

That unspeakable raw chasm of hunger is what made Jeffrey a legitimate outsider beyond question, and a revolutionary, and a seer - not despite this utterly desperate nerdism, but BECAUSE of it. He had an utterly desperate need to BECOME - through devouring the de rigeur “school of punk” book list, through listening to the “right” obscure jazz records, through name-checking and posing and taking the “right” drugs, he WOULD transcend, he would BECOME - by will alone. His was no dry “Ziggy” persona to don and discard at will. He was mortgaging all of his emotional and psychic reserves to truly re-invent himself in the guise of some Frankensteinian hybrid of hipster icons. He was Eve Harrington times 10! His genius was to distill this nerdishly needy wannabe-ism into the chemically imbalanced dizzying Munchian “ Scream” (as brutally impassioned as Lux trance-channeling the Phantom in the Cramp's immortal classic "Love me"), an elemental wail of a soul literally DYING to be heard. His genius wasn’t in the dumpy fatigues with the post-Vivienne Westwood Napoleonic mediallions. His genius wasn’t in his occasional Brando/Blondie/Arbuckle beauty. His genius wasn’t that he bought literally into the sad heroin chic pose, or the shopworn off-the-rack inebriated outrage. His genius WAS that banshee wail that haunted the best of his recordings. The wail that lifted his agile and facile but derivative lyrics above their apparent slavishly imitative high school posturings, and made them rank among the best of the Germs lyrics as evocative and primal cries of a universal discomfort in the inadequate human vessel, among the ruins we’ve made of Eden. Oh yeah, having a great band helped too!

The other odd thing about the movie was that there was no Gun Club performance in it. There apparently were some back room machinations, and whipsers throughout the auditorium pointed to Jeffrey’s mom, but I have no proof beyond that speculative gossip - but someone with proprietary rights to the footage that contained actual Gun Club songs had prevented ANY of them from being used. So there was footage of Jeffrey fucking around on stage, baiting the audience, or doing his ridiculous trumpet playing, but all of the set up and back story and unbridled accolades and kudos made you long for proof of the Gun Club’s peculiar genius in the form of at least one wonderful transcendent performance.

It’s a credit to the editing and coverage of the movie that it was never less than fascinating, even without that. But it was a huge obstacle to make a movie about a purported rock god and then never show him revealing his gifts.

Fortunately for US shobos, that actually made the audience hungrier for some live musical excitement at the end of the evening. We wouldn’t have to compete with any actual Jeffrey stage voodoo - because his Fire Spirit had been silenced in some legal wrangle! So all we had to do was be decent and fun, and we’d provide a much needed release for the audience.

I was too nervous to actually watch Thalia do her performance. But I could hear from back stage the thunderous applause and the wild whoops and screams that greeted every song. This was going to be hard! But at least I didn’t have to worry about anyone walking out. They seemed genuinely thrilled to be hearing this music being played by so many original members, and being given voice by such a capable charismatic performer.

As I sat in the dressing room, I brooded about what I loved about the movie, and what it showed about Jeffrey that I could use. I had brought something to do a little pre-song “reading” in what I thought was the “spirit of Jeffrey’, or at least in the spirit of his voodoo pretensions. But then I began to have the usual pre-show misgivings. Too boring? Will they HATE me?

But after the movie, I felt utterly vindicated about bringing along my “homage”: all the reverential references to Jeffrey’s supposedly super-human intellectual capacities in the movie, however much they seemed to miss the point of what was truly cool and transendant about Jeffrey, also gave me a fabulous excuse to wax ridiculously academic - in that “Mick Jagger at the Brian Jones Hyde Park memorial” way. Like Ann Magnuson said with gape-mouthed awe when she played the clueless groupie character in love with Jim Morrison - “He’s deep - he reads books!”

So in that spirit, I pulled my sturdy copy of “The Magic Island” by Alexander King off the shelf - the one I’d bought at the “Little Morocco” street flea market that used to grace Astor Place, before they filled the lot with that strangely retro curvaceous new chrome’n’glass Gwathmey/Siegel “Sculpture for Living” Citibank building.

That had been the flea market where I was kneeling over some worn cardboard boxes, leafing through some used records (oh yeah, I forgot, Jeffrey invented that!) and thought “Wow these look familiar!” I turned them over and they all had my intials on them! They were records some junkie had stolen from one of my Grand Street parties, and now I had to buy my own records...again! A very NYC experience, but one they never showed in Felicity. That sure kept the coinage circulating!

So anyway, I brought this book that had once been the property of the American Society for Psychical Research (!), and if it had gotten onto that particular vendor’s dingy streetcorner blanket by the urge for a fix, what, pray tell, could be more spiritually apt?

When I came out there were screams galore, and Kid generously burbled some introduction for me into the microphone about how we’d been friends for years or something, and the stage was set for me to ease into rock history on a cushion of perhaps unearned approval. It was all about the love!

Still, I could hear the collective intake of breath and the unspoken “Boredom Alert” flashing hazard signal go off in a hundred heads as I opened it to the first page, in a chapter called, appropriately, “Secret Fires”. I thought to myself “Is that all it takes to completely lose an audience that had, only one moment ago, been leaping out of their seats, giving this fabulous band a standing ovation, and even to lose the respectable passle of them who were screaming my name when I came out here?” Even the band itself looked stonily prepared for the worst.

But I plowed ahead with the Morrison/Bowie/Jagger/Johanson (remember HIS reading re: La Kane at the Palace?) homage plan, and all I did was change the name of the proragonist in the book to “Jeffrey”. This is what came out:

“Jeffrey, son of Catherine Ozias of Orblanche, paternity unknown - and thus without a surname was he inscribed in the Haitian civil register - reminded me always of that proverb out of hell in which Blake said, ‘He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.’

“It was not because Jeffrey’s face, frequently perspiring, shone like patent leather; it glowed also with a mystic light that was not always heavenly.

“For Jeffrey belonged to the chimeric company of saints, monsters, poets, and divine idiots. He used to get besotted drunk in a corner, and then would hold long converse with seraphim and demons, also from time to time with his dead grandmother who had been a sorceress.

“In addition to these qualities, Jeffrey was our devoted yard boy. He served us, in the intervals of his sobriety, with a passionate and all comsuming zeal.

“We had not chosen Jeffrey for our yard boy. He had chosen us.”


Jeffrey Approved?



It was strange, but in the context of the moment, what had been concocted in a halfway jocular farcical frame of mind was suddenly...well....it was WITCHY! It seemed like the right thing to say.

And then I said the first lines of the song “I can see clearly...” and the crowd roared in thrilled recognition.

But.......we flubbed it - just like rehearsal. No one came in on time, and we came screeching to a graceless halt. That’s drama class for you! Just like the REAL Gun Club. But I started it again, this time with Ward’s coaching and Terry’s full attention, and we went into the song in a kind of fury. It’s just a GREAT GREAT song. So fun to sing! Dawn Wirth afterwards said - “You really channeled Jeffrey - you were possessed by him!” Which I thought was a little too generous, but I loved hearing it!

With that powerhouse of a band behind me - finally really playing “ROCK” with Kid Congo after all our carefully rock-resistant years of semi-goth posturings in Congo Norvell, I was sure something was working. I really WAS “going to the mountain!” I felt in tune with the voodoo of the song somehow. Gosh - maybe I was a little too harsh. Maybe there WAS something to this shambolic shaman thing after all!

And the crowd was screaming, and jumping up and down - the roar was like a warm blanket of approval enveloping me - it was so darn Beatlemania or American Idol - a sort of faux knee-jerk adulation,once removed - these weren’t MY songs, and this wasn’t MY band, it wasn’t actually ME they were screaming for - I could have been practically anybody. So it wasn’t even really MY moment. But the reality of the approval didn’t seem to discriminate, and I thought “I could get used to this! This is what it’s like when people actually LIKE you!”

So I was shaking my beige buckskin suede Schott Brothers “Rancher” Davey Crockett leather fringe jacket - I’d thought I’d never have another Americana/“Bad Indian” moment like this to exploit this seldom worn relic from the back of my closets. I had no mocassins, so my Lakota war dance had to be in Italian pimp shoes. It was kind of magical! We were putting the “wow” in Pow Wow!

But I can’t repress my inner Schecky for long, unfortunately. So when it came to the “break down” part of the song, it was my dubious gift for mockery, as opposed to transcendent mojo rising channeling, that won the psychic battle:

“Shhhhhh! Shhhh! I’m going to make a CONJURE circle - a CONJURE circle” I recited in rather unconvincing witch doctor style, etching an imaginary circle in the stage - “We’re going to call Jeffrey - let’s call Jeffrey to join us.....” - a few wrist flicking sprinkling motions, and hopefully psychic sounding moans - “ I am sprinkling the oogly googly” - the name of that particular brand of pixie dust came from the lyrics off the immortal Lavern Baker Classic ‘Voodoo Voodoo’ - and I leaned my ear to the ground, injun style, and while I'm down there inanely incanting "oogly googly" I look up at Kid and he begins to crack that adorable smile of his into a laugh and I can hardle contain myself - should I just lie down on my back, and start giggling at what an oaf I am? NO! I must continue to conjure - “I hear something....yes...could it be.......yes...it’s Jeffrey!...very faint.....louder now.... he has something he really wanted all of you to know.....” - I stand up to deliver the message from the ether, as my arms greet the rising Hopi Sun - “This is what Jeffrey wanted to tell you - HE REALLY WOULD RATHER HAVE HAD NICK CAVE SING THIS SONG!”

I know, I know, I KNOW! That punch line is SO fucking lame, so UN-witchy, but I had heard the rumours that the Gun Club had really tried, and failed, to get Nick Cave to do the whole set, and then they just sort of continued failing down their wish list of requested rock luminaries to do the singing until they finally arrived at...well....me. It seemed funny in my head anyway.

But here’s the weird thing. First of all, they were like the classic I’m-happy-‘cause-I’m-in-on-the-joke “I recognize THAT” rock audience - when they heard the words “Nick Cave” they all SCREAMED, just as if he was walking up behind me to take over the mike. And secondly - even my lousy schtick couldn’t kill the voodoo! Because I went right back into the remainder of the song, and Cave or no Cave, they continued rocking and screaming right through to the end of it.

What a fucking high! I was totally seduced by my moment of faux celebrity. I was in love with this moment! I ran over to Ward, who looked like he was afraid I was gonna hit him, but I just gave him a loveing caress on his cheek, and I actually kissed Rob Zabrecky AND Kid Congo on the lips - and they started playing “Goodbye Johnny” which is much more slinky and spooky. It was just kind of tingly.

And Jeffrey’s lyrics were suddenly new again in their despair of what we as a species have done. It was like an eerily specific lament against Bush (the “flashlights “especially reeked of the new culture of indiscriminate surveillance) and all current human crimes against the planet and eachother.

I’ve thought for some time that we’ve gone so far that you don’t even need to learn to mourn from experience anymore. You’re born into a sort of ready-made mourning that is as inevitable as diapers and cancer. And it was all there, so simply, in Jeffrey’s lament. And in the sad minor raga-billy chords. It wasn’t really faux Morrison anymore - it was as REAL as the soul of what Morrison represents, or what Morrison was meant to be, or could have been, if only our imagination of him were manifest:

“Look what’s been done Johhny, Coming out of the east like rain
Look what’s been done Johnny, coming like a God with no name
There are flashlights on the backroads
I’m out here in the desert.
All your dreams are dead in the desert.
I’m all torn up Johnny
It all just beats me down.”

Ooooh - I just basked in it.

And then the REAL singer of the evening, Thalia Zedek came out again, and did a show stopping version of “For the Love of Ivy”.

Fantastic! What a night! I didn’t even have to wait to feel good about the performance until I saw Howie Pyro at the opening of the new branch of Manic Panic in Venice Beach and he said, “Everyone says you were the best thing about the Gun Club show!” - somehow I knew it was a super fun evening, one of those magical times where things come together with.....well....with shambolic shaman voodoo?...and even I hadn’t managed to spoil it. Here’s to Jeffrey - a Fire Spirit indeed.
Mel Gibson: Party Madness, or

Don’t Jew Wish You Could Get Away With That?



O.K. WAR WAR WAR! It’s getting so I can’t bear to even peep at the front page from across the room, even to gripe. And you know going on a gripe-fast diet is likely to have incalculable repercussions in the area of my blood sugar! If I can’t complain, who, or WHAT AM I? My soul goes rudderless down the Styx unless I’m kvetching!

But the monstrous acts of the warmongers in this world are now so far outside of the boundaries of what I might once have optimistically called “human behaviour”, that I can get no purchase on them, even to bitch. It’s like they’re making the corpse watch his own murder over and over again. Clockwork Orange was a comedy compared to this!

So I will defer to a far greater mind than my own - noted 50’s peace activist A. J. Mustie, whose simple yet heartbreakingly profound slogan was like gospel at the dinner table of my Quaker youth:

“There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”

Eat that shit, motherfuckers.

Still, as that song goes unheard, I feel that my very inability to deal with what’s going on in the world brings me to something REALLY important, and much more fun to write about:

MEL GIBSON!



Did you hear the one about...?


First this: I detest Mel. I detest his smirk, his stance, his hairline, his clothes, his affect, his false ‘aw shucks” charm, his oeuvre, his family, his movies (O.K., I admit it, I liked “Ransom”). He makes me physically ill.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - it seems like it might take a LOT to destroy the transcendent fuck-fantasy cachet of the one-time ultimate queerbait leather clad S&M poster boy from Road Warriors. He was the masturbatory icon of the ages! Those leather trousers! That ass! That youthful beauty! That biker affect! Yummy!

But it was an easy job for our “Love Removal Machine” Mel Gibson. His ridiculously illiterate revisionist fundamentalist views, his horrifically neanderthal contention that his wife will not enter heaven with him, and of course the grim punishing bloodlust that he considers spirituality in The Passion of Christ (to say nothing of the gratingly homophobic Braveheart) have rendered this one time jerk-off blow up doll into fool-proof anti-boner reverse Viagra. Droop!

This, then, is Mel’s ultimate accomplishment: he made the uber-hot Road Warrior ICKY!

And not just minor league garden variety “Could you pop a Certs?” icky - But MAJOR LEAGUE SOUL DESTROYING GAG-WHILE-I-VOM-IN-YOUR-MOUTH ICKY! “Get Your Fucking Cooties Off Of Me!” icky! “Don’t pop that festering leprous pimple in front of ME” icky! “Fucking loose stool dripping dog shit on my shoe” icky!

It’s not merely some testosterone macho Cigar Club “Drive Hummer and Carry Big Hollywood Power Stick” icky - that kind of icky could still be considered remotely sexual, if only in the most primal “Challenge and Conquer” “I made Rambo my power bottom bitch by shoving my police baton up his ass” way. No, it’s the sore loser on the playground, runny nose, athlete’s foot, anal wart, “first smelt it dealt it” loathesome, gruesome, yet strangely powerless icky. Mel’s behavior makes him ICKY, and SMALL!


BUT! What of that drunken rant of his that’s been played out on every front page in America?


WELL - and you can QUOTE ME: THIS JUST IN! And apparently it’s news so earth shattering that it’s duking it out with the Lebanon crisis for predominance on the front page: People say OBNOXIOUS STUPID THINGS WHEN DRUNK!

So I’m sorry, but even though Mel’s ickiness runs so deep it’s like AIDS of the soul, I MUST come to the poor helpless icky and small guy’s defense! That’s right - as a proud American, I’m on the side of the little guy!

I still hate Mel. I hate the way he abuses his power. I hate the way he lies about his father’s beliefs (the same facile way I think he lies about his age). He’s so deeply abhorrent that I actually think the world of casually destructive soul-dead manifestly evil Republicans deserve the embarrassment of him. They deserve to wear the flesh removed from his face as a raw bloody mask. They deserve to be tainted by his evil until they die.

But, in defense of this reprehensible reprobate whose soul has failed the test of charity and compassion on so many other levels, let’s consider this: drinking doesn’t make you an anti-semite! Nor does it reveal your “