the good in others

__Nice article on New Cia/Jfk files in Playboy linked here__

Earlier that day Senator and Howard had both visited Jack Ruby in jail. That evening Senator arranged for Koethe, Hunter and Howard to search Ruby's apartment. It is not known what the journalists found but on 23rd April 1964, Hunter was shot dead by Creighton Wiggins, a policeman in the pressroom of a Long Beach police station. Wiggins initially claimed that his gun fired when he dropped it and tried to pick it up. In court this was discovered that this was impossible and it was decided that Hunter had been murdered. Wiggins finally admitted he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer, Errol F. Greenleaf, testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place. In January 1965, both were convicted and sentenced to three years probation.

In 1967 Roger D. Craig went to New Orleans and was a prosecution witness at the trial of Clay Shaw. Later that year he was shot at while walking to a car park. The bullet only grazed his head. In 1973 a car forced Craig's car off a mountain road. He was badly injured but he survived the accident. In 1974 he surviving another shooting in Waxahachie, Texas. The following year he was seriously wounded when his car engine exploded. Craig told friends that the Mafia had decided to kill him. Craig was found dead from on 15th May, 1975. It was later decided he had died as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds


William Sullivan, Former No. 3 man in FBI (head of counter-espionage intelligence), was shot dead near his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on 9th November, 1977 weeks before he was scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. An inquest decided that he had been shot accidentally by fellow hunter, Robert Daniels, who was fined $500 and lost his hunting license for 10 years.

hangover awards

Massimo Dallamano,, 1972.
(...killer morricone soundtrack in addition.)

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. .1970, D.Argento

Frontier Relicsss

staying true to the ascetic roots

A few years ago I read a series of books about the early recordings of folk/blues music around the turn of the century. There was a couple of insights those books provided that still ring in my head. 'Songcatching' was hardly as romantic as it sounds. The people that went up into the Appalachian mountains with the first portable recording devices to find new music were after money and not much beyond that. Cultural preservation movements arrived decades later. Music that we think of now as being 'old timey' was, back then, immediately marketed as 'old timey' in the Sears Roebuck catalogs selling these early records. The people up in the mountains singing the songs being recorded and usually not being paid were themselves sometimes confused about what was an old-timey song and what was a 'commercial' jingle that had made it's way up into the hills only a few years earlier and become woven into their repertoire.
This is an excellent flashpoint for the perennial debate on authenticity. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like this debate is currently going on. Music is just like food or anything else in that people either don't recognize that it's processed for their sheltered palette or just don't want to know the ugly truth. And so commercialism thrives on a celebration of 'processed-ness' and hollow simulation endlessly. This culture is all about hits,, everything else is swept off the table into the trash along with the best or our minds.


I remember once in college I was trying to explain to a kid that I wasn't interested in going to see the newest hollywood blockbuster ..saying to him something like "don't you see that it's just marketed to you and your age range/class position?" He looked at me incredulously and said, "yeah, that's why I like it."
People will tell you very plainly that they'd rather cut out the whole 'thinking for themselves' part of life if you just phrase the question right. There's not much shame left.
More disturbing is that authenticity in music can't necessarily be heard and pinpointed. What is raw, unbridled 'genius' and what is a postured product of mere craftsmenship aren't so easy to separate in any particular Zapruder film-frame analysis. Once people begin to agree on authenticity signifiers the true progression starts to shut down. Worst is that most seem to view this dynamic as only more reason to shrug and give up on attempting to discern what they are consuming.
I don't trust anyone's arm-chair analysis of how the popular vices of distraction are unavoidable as much as I'd earnestly ask the guy on the bus next to me to quickly explain the big bang. The tensions between conformism vs. authenticity will never become cliche. The argument couldn't be resolved unless we redesigned the human being to be fully loyal to themselves and their own version of history instead of the mass virus/ paid-for-by-our-sponsors script.
There is a strong arm propping up a phenomenological microscope of propaganda for those to look thru who are too lazy to focus their own lens on life. It must ultimately be the audience that holds responsibility for creating the financial waters that the sharks are swimming in. Without their money, Vapid commercialism cannot live.


The line between art and entertainment is continually blurred as they flush down the spiral vortex of spiritual boredom evoked by the malnourishment of commerce-based attempts to achieve mass disassociation. I have trouble believing that people actually listen to music on their Ipods,,, it seems possible they are really just listening to themselves being distracted by it. Ipods are not evil in and of themselves, but the Ipod culture was baited and led on by X-mas-time marketing and the not by the love of music... just as the early folk/blues record labels were hunting out original songs to exploit their singers and not to memorialize them. Modern Music is really just the sound of the bourgeoises' disassociation.
Music means more than just the way it sounds,.. but to really sell music it has to be rendered meaningless. A girl I knew went to see a Fugazi show,, on return her only comment was 'the singer had a nice ass'. Somehow, to me, that illustrates what happened to the underground in a nutshell. There was an interview with Ian Mackaye in a local newspaper and a woman in the fiscal department at work asked me why I was interested in it. I said 'oh, he's sort of a figurehead in the world of underground music.' She said 'what is underground music really? does it really exist?'
I guess not anymore...


What underground music really is::is a raw primordial pool of embryonic and usually more extreme ideas formed on the more lawless frontier. What is really lawless is virtually impossible to agree upon these days. Even originality itself has become a murkier thing to dissect. This underground pool of ideas is largely deigned as useless by anyone who is looking for any power or money. Most people won't have the time to investigate a pocket of subculture with no black and white values that refuses to identify itself. I was telling a friend once about a band I thought he'd like and he cut me off by saying, 'I'll just check'em out later on when they get big enough to be in Spin magazine.' Mindsets like this don't need my anthropological dissection. They display a clearcut desire to be spoon-fed virtually anything that is agreed upon by the larger crowd. It's just an endless line of nodding heads;; the sound and message is completely peripheral.
In theory, underground music exists in an elusive moment of autonomy,, in the stoned mind of a teenager somewhere before he even starts his first band or buys his first four-track and starts on a journey of compromises in search for some affirmation or a sort of loving he feels is denied him. His idealism and autonomy are quickly sidelined by the same old pursuit of getting the rewards that have helped to evaporate our purer interest in the true/raw primordial pool and destroy the idealism that underground music symbolized in theory.

for another version of this debate try reading::

Tolstoy::
"Art, in our society, has been so perverted that not only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what art really is has been lost. In order to be able to speak about the art of our society, it is, therefore, first of all necessary to distinguish art from counterfeit art."
"there are people who have forgotten what the action of real art is, who expect something else from art (in our society the great majority are in this state), and that therefore such people may mistake for this aesthetic feeling the feeling of diversion and a certain excitement which they receive from counterfeits of art."

4 new collages... ...click images for enlargements

...wish you were here


...the road to rushmore


...yellow claw


...man, myth and magic

2 records for healing

I have now seen the Zapruder film over 10,000 times.
these are my conclusions.

A) there is an easily ascertainable duplicity in the eyes of Allen Dulles.

B) listening to LBJ's tapes of him trying to piece together who would be on the warren commission leads you right back into the warm arms of Hoover and his plan.

C) J Edgar Hoover is a perennial symbol for how spinelessness leads to ultimate success.

D) JFK is perennial symbol for how having a spine leads to total destruction.

E) Richard Helm's attitude while testifying about the work of the CIA's international assassins perfectly displays the CIA's basic belief that it is above all law.

F) Richard Helm's is an asshole.

G) The key to the entire case is in Mexico city.

here's an excerpt for your children to research from the diary of Edward Jay Epstein, an author who interviewed George de Mohrenschildt (Oswald's close friend) shortly before his death (29th March, 1977):::

"De Mohrenschildt had put a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself at 3:45 p.m. There were no witnesses — and no one home at the time of the shooting. The precise time of his death was established by a tape-recorder, left running that afternoon to record the soap operas for the absent Mrs. Tilton, and which recorded a single set of footfalls in the room and the blast of the shotgun, which was found on the Persian carpet next to him. No suicide note or other clue was found."

(In fact, three people were at home at the time: the housekeeper was downstairs in the kitchen, and the cook and gardener were in the backyard.)

"Human nature improves so slowly because men are good mostly through fear of punishment" - Alan Watts

mini-collages by E.A.... .------ /////// .......click images for wallpapers...

....criminal's return

....back to the monastery

....'garden of eden is a garbage dump'- e.g.

...winter of fear

more guggenheim bullshit

.......post-launch
(owned: Jean-Luc Rompy)

......vague sub-genius theme

.....monkey man

(owned: hex)

....kicked outta mom's house
(owned: mom's house)

.....more voodoo

collage run-down part 3

.....wild old days #1
(owned: ayc)

......camp desolation etc.

......you never knew

Agitation

The word kṛpaṇa-dhīḥ is significant in this verse. Dhī means "intelligence," and kṛpaṇa means "miserly." Conditional life is for persons who are of miserly intelligence or who do not properly utilize their intelligence. In the human form of life the intelligence is developed, and one has to utilize that developed intelligence to get out of the cycle of birth and death. One who does not do so is a miser, just like a person who has immense wealth but does not utilize it, keeping it simply to see. A person who does not actually utilize his human intelligence to get out of the clutches of māyā, the cycle of birth and death, is accepted as miserly. The exact opposite of miserly is udāra, "very magnanimous." A brāhmaṇa is called udāra because he utilizes his human intelligence for spiritual realization. He uses that intelligence to preach Kṛṣṇa consciousness for the benefit of the public, and therefore he is magnanimous.

d.shannon

The more success Shannon had, the more depressed he became. In 1966, he took a delivery of a box full of copies of his brand new single and went down to Lake Michigan where he sat down and skimmed the lot across the water, saying "I must get out".

fun fact: both Del Shannon and Søren Kierkegaard had slight hunchbacks...

great cinematic moments...

-when Iggy Pop tried to explain the difference between Apollonic and Dionysian to Tom Snyder
-when Ozzy cries in 'California Jam'
-Max Von Sydow in Three days of the Condor
-Bernard Hermann's opening score for the Twilight Zone
-the truth about de-evolution :::: devo
-when they find the Lincoln monument covered in moss in Logan's Run
-when Travis Bickle points the gun at the tv to Jackson Browne's late for the sky
-Floyd's original video for 'Jugband Blues'
-when Pacino fakes being high on 'rush' at the gay bar in Cruising
-in the Parallax View when the guy falls off the space needle

Roger Mcguinn will never stop telling the story about how he ripped off a figure from a bach fugue for the intro of 'Tambourine Man' ...and lazy writers will never stop recycling his anecdote as some sort of tribute to 'genius'. Now everytime 'Turn, Turn, Turn' is played during a documentary on the 60's cultural upheaval poor Val Stoecklein (lead singer of the Blue Things) will have to roll in his grave again.

The Blue Things self-titled record (often known as 'Listen & See') will forever stand as one of the quintessential 60's music documents that was denied an audience. Forming in '64, The Blue Things were poised perfectly for the mid-sixties bohemian flashpoint that would boost so many others less talented far past them. A quick look at some of the top 10 hits of '66 would prove this injustice..
The Ballad Of The Green Berets by Sgt. Barry Sadler
Red Rubber Ball by The Cyrkle
Lil' Red Riding Hood by Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs

The first 10 seconds of the Blue Things "High Life", with it's subtley insidious humming intro, screams out for an infinite life on the AM radio band. But their ultimate moment was the track "Doll House", a relentlessly hooky song about a young prostitute. This song might be one of the best pieces of musicology I've ever heard but it was shot down by DJs who were frightened to play it by a flare up in song-lyric conservatism spurred by an article in Time Life just before the song was released. A long list of unfortunate events worked to sideline the band and eventually destroy them. Their major dilemma was that they barely played outside of Kansas and, like Love and Nick Drake, not touring ultimately did them in. It's amazing that Pink Floyd made it through their toughest years of conceptual transition after the loss of Syd but it just goes to show how powerful management and booking agents can contribute to a band's momentum. In addition to the Blue Things geographical problems, no jukebox version of their debut was made, their manager quit, and in '67 Val Stoecklein left the band for health reasons and the band played shows for a brief time calling themselves "Cracker Barrel." The remaining members eventually became "Fyre" and experienced their peak when they were invited to play Robert Kennedy's post-primary election celebration, only to find out that he was shot on the way to the Ambassador Hotel.
One irony about pumping this record up is that I can't remember putting on side 2. I'm permanently addicted to the first side so I'd rather not have side 2 sour my memory of side 1's perfectness. The only other record I can think of like this is Moby Grape's first record... in which case I have really only ever listened to side 2 because it's so addicting. But that doesn't dampen my addiction to either record. As a warning to buyers I'll add that this record seems traditional and somewhat vanilla on the surface, but if you are at all a 60's loving freak or way into perfect Beatles melodicism then pick this up fer sure. -EA

:The Irony of Conformity:

Conformism is concerned with the currency of vacancy.
This Currency is collected by the act of 'joining'...
The etymology of the term 'to join' is "to wave around in a blustery fashion,, that which is a cheaply assembled costume,, achieving a bogus smoke signal that blearys the eyes of another lonely pedestrian for a moment." Bringing me to my point. One dissolves in 'joining',,, yet one joins to acheive 'visibility'. This is the Irony of Conformity.

:Second Place in the Scapoose Poetry Fair 2006:

'I recall watching through a telescope 'bad men' holed up in some nearby rocks...
and I fear that my five-year-old sympathies were all for the hunted.'
-Harry Partch

..an artist working in a vacuum has got to be the healthiest thing... the five percent who do it in a vacuum are the ones who create the lasting art.
- Exene Cervenka

tombstone art
example #1

"This is not the acme of humanity... but an interesting contrast to that modern cult of sentiment which does not issue from tremendous depths of feeling but from lack of depth and feeling. People enjoy feelings which are not intense enough to torment them and think it would be nice to feel what they do not quite feel."
- Walter Kaufmann

records

Joe Meek

Electric Masada

Prog is not a four letter word

Static From The Outside Set

Les Baxter

Tomorrow's Gift

Gary Stewart

Del Shannon

Roger Rodier

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Mass Meditation

Nashville West

Rick Saucedo

"Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws." - Zarathustra

Back to the Monastery!!!

"The invention of Them creates Us, and We may need to invent Them to reinvent Ourselves." Furthermore, "In the social cohesion of scandal, gossip, unavowed racial discrimination, the Other is everywhere and nowhere. The Other that governs everyone is everyone in his position, not of self, but as other. Every self, however, disavows being himself that other that he is for the Other. The Other is everyone's experience. The other is everywhere elsewhere."
- R.D. Laing

1935... Basel, Switzerland

Albert Hoffman was a serious scientist. I doubt that he lived with much luxury, and/or had his own publicist. The typewriter is often in the most cramped/hottest room in the house; it's hard work. You'd have to spend a lot of unpaid, late-night hours in the lab and most of your experiments have to be disregarded. It's nicer if the work is your true passion but that doesn't make the tedious stuff any easier.

Uberfallig

'In the music I was composing I was trying to express my emotions, my so called negative emotions, which were depression, anger and so forth. Like Stan Kenton did. He got away with it. I've always admired him for that.' - john fahey

'I'd have sold myself, but I felt ashamed.' - fred neil

archived record reviews/rambles

... Dino Valenti "Dino Valente" 1968--
- In the pantheon of non-essential records there lies a special hallway for those of us who perversely search thru piles of shattered and shrugged off careers to find time capsules that supply the soundtrack for another over-caffeinated Saturday morning... It's a simple truth that some musician's backstories are more interesting than others who's music is more worthy of speculation. One of the kings of the backstory is Dino Valenti. His first and only properly released solo record was famously mis-spelled 'Dino Valente' and "buried under an avalanche of non-promotion";.. but being as shady as he was, the name was most likely assumed (some think his name was Chester Powers, another name he used for copyrighting). Fame would sidestep him in many ways. He founded Quicksilver Messenger Service but ended up spending a good bit of their heyday in jail for a reefer charge. He was positioned to become one of the original members of the Byrds (and is also credited for naming the band to some extent) but chose to form a band around his songs. And by the time his solo album came out, the label was already preparing to delete it from their catalog.
An ominous vibe surrounds the stories about the ex-carney/gypsy; people have said that Valenti holds the title of the single most difficult person to deal with in music history. Although he was equipped with barely any musical knowledge beyond a few chords and no interest in learning to play to consistent tempos, Valenti was known for hypnotizing large audiences with only a microphone and his endlessly floating, droning songs. Being a close friend and ally with Dylan, Fred Neil, Richie Havens and many others on the ground floor of the folk revolution, it seems he held his own and commanded a respect from the heavyweights. To his credit, he did pre-date much of the early 60's folk boom, probably already experimenting with his style in the late 50's, but any and all branding as the 'underground Dylan' is totally laughable. Rather than sing about larger political issues, Valenti's song-style was largely characterised by a central mission to score naive teenage hippie girls. Never has an album so transparently veiled the attempt to realize and maintain that fleeting mid-60's opportunity to have a bohemian harem around a bogus guru. The record has been compared to the reverbed-out revelation of Skip Spence's 'Oar', but that's an insult to Spence's purity and soulfulness; it's probably closer to the intent and sound of Charles Manson's 'Lie'; and in it's way further reveals that truly crazy people often play a much more conventional-sounding music than many cult fetishists would have you know.
Truthfully, the album does display a few moments of what you might call brilliance; but it sinks under an almost insidious insincerity. However, insidious insincerity can, at times, breed a great Saturday morning cult record. I feel a little strange about the new generation of folkies who are beginning to eulogize tenuous movements like the 'british folk' era when, to me, a lot of it smells of failed experiments. That is, I'd rather see it for what it is, not an arrival point, but a footnote in a larger dialectic that could still yield better results. The first time I heard about Dino Valenti I was re-visting the life of David Crosby in his book "Long Time Gone." My memories are foggy but I think it said they lived together on a houseboat, before their careers got going. There was a very odd anecdote that Crosby told about Valenti supposedly having an operation on his brain to remove a 'fistula' of nodes that had previously only been found in serial-killers..? From then on his name remained lodged in the back of my mind until later on when I read about his legendary fuck-up of selling the rights to what would become the world famous song "Get together" (which is still being bought and sold by the faceless suits that own the livelihood's of casualties like Dino).
All the shit-talking aside, I keep coming back to the song "Something New" on 'Dino Valente.' The album is somewhat encapsulized in this document of his finely-honed sense of the vulnerabilities of the hippie nymph and how to exploit youth's need for guidance. ..Perfectly produced by Bob Johnston, with contrasting verbed and dry intertwining serpentine guitar lines, the verses are sung with a subtle snarl that set up a killer chorus soaring over the classic E minor to F formula (see Bowie's 'Space Oddity' or Young's 'Will to love') dripping with slothfulness. ..Ridiculous lyrics steeped in sexual innuendo, calculating and creating a philosophical platform for a one-night stand, that have to be heard to be believed...
"There is a garden, unicorns knowing, the sudden enchantment of the ever now!"
"Here there's a tower, straight and tall/ Somewhere to run to when you fall."
(this all culminates to a part where he belts "You can't stay there girl, those cats are square babe!" ... making me lose my shit everytime.)
The more I listen to this song, the more it reveals itself as one of the ultimate time capsules left from the 60's when the pendulum swang deep into that fashion-cloaked hippie insincerity (which is somehow rearing it's head again out of the fog of the new lost bohemia).
For more odd tales about Dino Valenti that will leave you shaking your head for a few days read the chapter on him (among others like Fred Neil and Randy Holden) in "Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers" by Richie Unterberger.

friends of the devil

No one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American public -P.T. Barnum