DC's

Chilly Jay Chill presents ... Botanica

2012-02-11T00:59:00.000-08:00

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Botanica, the theater piece I’ve co-written, recently opened in New York City. I thought it might appeal to DC’s readers and regulars. It involves a human terrarium filled with hundreds of live plants, the fictions of George Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, dirt eating, secret codes, erotic poetry, tasers, and the scientific theory that plants have ESP. There’s immersive and inventive video, sound design, and set designed by a team of Obie-award winning artists.

  If you see the show, we promise that you’ll never look at your houseplants the same way again.

  Here’s the website and below is an enigmatic preview video.

If you prefer, here’s the official description of the show:

 Botanica explores our complicated and inextricably dependent relationship to plant life, presented as a creepy futuristic black comedy where morals, ethics, and consequences unravel along with the human sense of mastery. Primary inspirations for Botanica include erotic literary texts by George Bataille and Louis Aragon, the pop-psychology of The Secret Life of Plants, and the ground-breaking scientific inventions and experiments of Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937).  

The narrative tracks the scientific experiments and developing  relationship between two botanists who are sealed in a research facility. They share their habitat with the plant caretaker, who seems  unremarkable except for his habit of reading aloud to the plants late at night  the most salacious sections of French surrealist texts, along with his own self-penned blue poetry. Initially the experiments demonstrate an astonishing scope  of plant consciousness, but eventually the botanists hit a dead end. They decide to  bring the janitor into their research. The introduction of this human subject reinvigorates  their investigation but leads to unforeseen consequences and unleashes a flood of  unusual findings that end in chaos as the constraints of science and social norms are  overturned.

A little background:

We’ve been working on Botanica for two and a half years. The piece has had residencies at the Baryshnikov Center and the 3LD Art and Technology Space in downtown Manhattan. The idea germinated from a dream about a plant filled human terrarium and an obsession with Laure, the writer and muse for both George Bataille’s Blue of Noon and Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence. There was a great post here about Laure.

We were also fascinated by The Secret Life of Plants, the best-selling pop science book from the 1970s that spawned a documentary with a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder. The book discusses the science behind plants sentience, delving into theories that plants also have ESP; that your houseplants know when you’ve cut yourself or have an orgasm even when you’re hundreds of miles away; that plants can be used to map unseen parts of the cosmos. We’ve pushed these ideas to their (il)logical conclusion.

Some other inspirations for the show:

 - Irene's Cunt by Louis Aragon
 - The Collected Writings of Laure by Laure
 - Bob Flanagan's Slave Sonnets 
- The Robert Frank films Keep Busy and Liferaft Earth
 - Blue Movie by Andy Warhol
 - Je, Tu, Il, Elle by Chantal Ackerman

I’m the cowriter of the show, but the prime mover behind Botanica is director and cowriter Jim Findlay. We’ve collaborated for 15 years as part of the experimental Collapsable Giraffe theater company, working together on the R.W. Fassbinder play Pre-Paradise Sorry Now and creating original works Damfino, Witch Mountain/Black Tarantula, and Pee Pee Maw Maw/The Last Crash.

In their 2001 “Best Of NYC” issue, Village Voice voted the Collapsable Giraffe the “Drunkest, Highest Theater Company”.

In addition to the Collapsable Giraffe, Jim has an impressive theatre background. He’s an associate artist of The Wooster Group. From 1995 to 2003, he led their technical team and designed sets for House/Lights (Bessie Award for Design 1999) and To You, the Birdie! He was also a primary collaborator in the internationally successful music/media performance company Accinosco/Cynthia Hopkins. Since 2001, Jim has worked consistently with Ridge Theater and Bang on a Can on such projects as DECASIA and Oedipus, composed by Harry Partch. Other notable projects include set design for How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Out by choreographer Ralph Lemon and set and video design of cartoonist Ben Katchor’s musical Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island.

A Deal for DC’s:

Botanica runs until February 25th at the 3LD Art and Technology Space. I hope those of you in the New York area will consider checking it out. For the next week, we’re offering a special deal for DC’s readers: $5 off tickets.

Click here for tickets and enter the code “green” to get the discount.

If you’re not in the area but still want to help, we’re raising money to offset some of the production costs. Above the great Kate Valk from The Wooster Group explains why you might consider supporting the project.
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p.s. Hey. This weekend d.l. Chilly Jay Chill aka the superb writer Jeff Jackson not only introduces us and guides us through a new theater work that he has co-written, but, for those of you reading this from the vicinity of NYC, he has an amazing offer of discounted tickets to the show geared strictly for d.l.s and readers of this blog, and, I don't know, I would personally be so all over that offer if I were lucky enough to be in reach, and after you explore the post, I can't imagine that I'll need to urge you to grab the gift. Also, in a bit of lovely timing, a very interesting article about Jeff has just been published in The Charlotte Observer, and I highly recommend you give it a read during the course of your weekend. It's here. Enjoy, everybody, and huge thanks to the man in charge. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool, glad you dug it, Ben. I didn't mention this yesterday so as not to slant the comments, but here's the main reason that said post came into existence: What you see doing its thing in the video at the top of the post is a very large mobile disco unit. It has entirely led light walls and ceiling, and a reflective floor. You can buy it whole, and it can be assembled in, well, whatever space you want, but most purchasers are club owners who want to style up their properties. Well, that mobile disco unit is going to be the set of the new theater piece that Gisele, Stephen O'Malley, Peter Rehberg, and I will start working on in earnest as soon as 'Teenage Hallucination' is over. We'll program the light show and create new music for it, but that 'club' and its melancholy, eye-assaulting pretext is where our theater new piece will be set. We're excited, and hopefully we'll ace the piece and pass the excitement on. I just saw your later comment. Well, yeah, Ben, there's not a question in the world that have all the talent anyone could want to be more full-time artist. I mean, I don't know your work schedule, and I'm assuming it's pretty consuming, but pretty much every artist I know sand respect apart from the occasional superstar has a job, and they just organize their other time and what finances they have in art's direction. I mean, you're doing amazing things as it is, so, obviously, it's just about where you'll be happiest directing your talent. You have all my support now and come what may, for whatever that's worth. ** MVdA, Hey! At the moment, given my crazy days, the blog is probably the safest bet as far as reaching me quickly goes. That sounds fine re: the conversation going on here in Paris. The thing is that we're going to have to figure out the timing because I'm going to be very busy with the festival until the end of this month at least. I should have at least a little more free time available once March rolls around. I'm sure we can figure out a time to do it, but I'll need to work around my heavy schedule, so let's figure that out by email -- I'll make a special point of watching for yours. Thanks, and I'll watch for the pdf. Really glad you liked 'Jerk'. Thanks a lot for that too. ** Joakim Almroth, Joakim! My fellow co-conspirator! Well, I'm glad to hear that you're finally getting the dying job behind you. It seems like the added time is more than compensation for the scariness. It is really cold here, but it might feel beachy to you. Well, I doubt it. It's cold. Going outside is not much fun right now. I'm good apart the usual of late being way too busy and distracted, albeit for a very good cause. Ha ha, that Seventies Blow job Faces tumblr is pretty nice. Everyone, d.l. Joakim passes on an excellent tumblr-shaped find that's very accurately called 'Seventies Blowjob Faces' for those of you might be interested. Thanks, buddy. I'll write to you this weekend. Love, me. ** Empty Frame, Hey. There's some other cool stuff in the larger Festival Nouveau too, most excitingly, to me at least, the great Guy Maddin's 'psychic intervention', which I think is both what it sounds like and, basically, a situation where you/the public get to watch him make his new film. So, hopefully, the Pompidou will be a full plate. 'Never Let Me Go', okay, I'll hunt for that one. That quality you describe in his writing is precisely what I really liked about 'TRotD', so, cool. You have a spec-o-tacular weekend too! ** David Ehrenstein, It's that retro led lighting. So much prettier and emotion-inducing now than it was back when it was cutting edge. ** Ultra VGA, Hey, welcome! Yeah, see what you think of 'ATTA'. I, obviously, dug it. And I hope you dug 'TIHYWD', also obviously. Thanks for being here. Please hang out if you like. Would be cool. ** Pilgarlic, Hey, buddy! How the heck are you, man? Really nice to see you! We're going to try to bring some Korova Milk Bar into our revision (see: comment to _B_A). That Dos Equis spokesman thing is hilarious. I feel a Dos Equis Day coming on. Yury can too, yes. And speak English. Can the Dos Equis spokesman speak English? I bet not. Anyway, yeah, what's up, my friend? ** MANCY, I loved that Krallice track. I downloaded it and its surroundings for some playtime today and onwards. Thanks a lot! New (to us) audio pieces, great! I'll down them greedily later on. Thank you! Everyone, the d.l. and art wunderguy MANCY aka Steven Purtill has newly made available some sound pieces he made a while back on his stunning looking blog Report Abuse, and I highly recommend that you use some portion of your weekend getting with them. Okay? Okay. Go here. ** Steevee, I think that NYC Bulgarian disco might still be there, or maybe it moved locations. When I was building that post, it kept coming up and coming up in all of my searches. I have heard the new Caretaker, and, yeah, it's a beauty. I like his work in general, and I think the soundtrack might be his best yet. ** Oscar B, Osc! Oh, totally, if one can love that accidentally (?) sorrowful, relentless Euro techno stuff outta Eastern Europe, and I sure do. Yum. ** Wolf, The trick is to avoid the whiskey, maybe pop a maybe low dose of 'E', and contemplate the human soul in motion. ** L@rstonovich, Everybody knows Bulgaria makes good porn, but I wanted to throw a little light on their stylish escape hatches. You're going to be in that very cabin in that very jpeg today? Holy crap. That is some serene, adventure-provoking stuff. Man, can I envy you? Too late. It's done. Enjoy and tell me something about it. ** Sypha, Hey, James! ** Jared, Hey. Well, I think the LACMA listing is a mistake because I went over and checked their calendar, and there's no mention of them showing anything by Bresson on March 1st or any other time. Maybe the Cinematheque is going to host the retrospective in May as mentioned, though. Their calendar listings only go up through March at the moment. I'll hope so. If so, I might be able to time a visit home around then. Thanks, man. ** Alan, Oh, I think it's totally sad, melancholy. That's very much a big part of the pull towards it for me. Thank you for reminding me about your email. Yes, I'm, as I keep saying, very disorganized. but I'll go find it and respond hopefully this afternoon. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey, man! Man, I'm so unhappy that I'm missing 'Botanica'. It looks incredible. Anyway, thank you a lot for letting me focus on and spread the word. The boggle is at least a little explained in my comment to _B_A. Business trip! I was in Austin only once. I dug it a whole lot. It's barely even Texas. That profile on you is very nice. I did a link thing up at the top. Things are definitely not quieting down. I'm going to be very swamped for a while. The first week of the festival is going to be the really insane part because Gisele will be in NYC for the Whitney Biennial, so I have to run the show by myself as well as perform in 'Them' including all of its setting up and rehearsing and so on. After 'Them' is past, and when Gisele returns, it should get little easier, but from now until the end of the month at least I'm toast. Hope the trip west goes really well, and thank you so much again, Jeff. ** Ken Baumann, Ken! Thanks, bud. That spotlight is going to a klieg, man. A whole bunch of them. Oh, Jesus, yes, I totally get panicky and feel like I need to organize everything. All the time. That phase is less like a phase for me than like my soundtrack that gets drowned out by others' loveliness when I'm lucky. So, yeah. Where's A off to? Working? ** Rewritedept, I did see that Hot Snakes are back together, and very good news that is, for sure! ** Bernard Welt, Hey, B! Missed you, man. I hope the crazy time means crazy in the 'That shit is crazy' sense or even ' ... kerAZEE' sense. If not, I'm right there with you, man. I did get your marvelous Day, and in fact it's set to go on ... hold on ... on Wednesday the 22nd. Hey, that's the opening night of 'Teenage Hallucination', which is quite appropriate. Be well, pal. ** Todd (once IF), Hey. I remember that answer in that interview. It totally stuck with me, having been there albeit in the Moscow equivalent. I finally got back to you in the mail finally. I'll be better. ** Charlie m., Yeah, I meant the FB thing, and I figured you were being ironic or something, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't making assumptions. Just the other day, some guy I know who's quite smart and savvy was laying it on thick with me about what a guitar genius Wes Borland is, so I guess you just never know or something. I don't even have a turntable here, so I hear you on the split 7"s. Cool, glad you're doing well, man. ** Killer Luka, Oh, well, trashing was certainly too strong a word on my part, yes. Skeptical maybe? Anyway, ... No arm wrestling. I need my arms. My arms surrender victory to yours in advance. Well, I'm glad it's not your gall bladder, although constipation is, of course, no picnic. Fiber, right. Oh, I love vegetarian bacon. It's one of the few faux-meats that are transcendent. There are also great veggie sausages out there too. Not in France. In France, they're crap, but in the US, slurp. I'm sorry about the family hell, my pal. You can talk about it here if you want, seriously. Love! ** Nic Scheff, Hey, Nic! It's awesome to see you! How are you? Oh, sure, my email address is: dcooperweb @gmail.com. No, I'm in Paris working my brains out. I'm trying to get back to LA for a visit in April. Yeah, cool, very cool to see you! ** Little foal, Hey, Darren! Well, you know I'm going to congratulate you without reservations for leaving that job behind. I would be surprised if your parents are really all that upset about that. Especially if you're looking for a new money gig. It seems like, if memory serves, your parents generally end up being cool with things you do that you're worried they'll be upset about, no? It's so natural to question what seems like a drastic decision right after you've made it, but the drastic vibe usually fades away as soon as you feel right with your days' and thought processes' new structure or lack thereof. That must be really frustrating to be so close to the £1200 mark. That missing 300 seems so doable, but how? I'm terrible with money. Is not jobseeker's allowance a fairly normal thing in the UK? I'm assuming its the equivalent of getting unemployment checks in the States? Im glad that by the end of your comment you came around on how your post-job world is an upgrade. It's weird how talking helps. It's kind of magic. Love to you! ** Chris Cochrane, Okay, cool, hit me with the arrival info when you have it. I'm trying to get the 'Them' stuff I need to do my end all settled this coming week: animal, head (?), freezer (?), Recollets arrangements: I need to decide in advance who is staying together in the rooms, although you guys can probably switch around once you get here, plus the office is closed on the day you arrive, so I'll have to do the indoctrination stuff myself. ** Postitbreakup, Gosh, thank you, Josh. Ditto. ** Bill, Ha ha, I know! You ever been there? Not me. Gotta get there, obviously. Branca-like? Interesting. Have a great weekend, B. ** Misanthrope, Yeah, I think that post was very melancholy. You should be in one of those discos sometime. It's intense, and the atmosphere is actually really complicated. That makes me really sad about your nephew, obviously. I mean, yeah, he could still be taught to eat better/differently, but, I don;t know, they say that if you're overweight as a little kid, it kicks in some kind of genetic change in your body that makes getting rid of weight a much bigger problem than it is for people who gain weight as teens or adults, and that you'll have to deal with that your whole life. I don't even know if that's true, but I guess maybe it is. Anyway, he's an awesome kid, and that'll take him through. ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! Nice to see you! I have the Ashbery Rimbaud translation right here with me, but I haven't had any time to start reading it yet. I'll prepare myself. How are you? How is your work? Is winter proving tolerable or even interesting? ** Okay. Enjoy the visit with 'Botanica' this weekend, and please speak to Chilly Jay Chill, if you will, and, if you're in or near NYC, again, I heavily advise that you take advantage of the special DC's discount offer. See you on Monday.

Bulgarian Disco in Frankfurt

2012-02-10T00:59:00.000-08:00

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DEVELOPING DREAMS INTO

CONCEPTS, CONCEPS INTO

DESIGNS AND DESIGNS

INTO PHYSICAL REALITY

'Disco Design Ltd. (former name Pit Project Ltd.) was established in 2000 by Peter Yordanov, who has been the director and designer of our company. Before this time, Peter was a famous DJ in Bulgaria, and throughout Europe. During his journeys within the continent, he noticed that there is not much interior feeling in the Nightclubs. He has had a lot of ideas about designing clubs, and making people feel more comfortable.

'With his profound experience of the nightclub industry, prosperous creativity, and sedulous thirst of knowledge, Peter has developed a unique policy of his company. After designing and renovating more than 100 clubs in unique full custom designs, he has experienced a constantly growing interest for his offers by potential clients.

'Responding to this demand, he concentrated on the development of a new range of articles - SMART PRODUCTS for nightclub and bar design applications drawn by a stylish look - that has been registered community design by Peter Yordanov - but allowing an easy installation within a few days by any night club team usually leaded by an electrician. The appreciation by the public has been overwhelming!' -- disco-designer.com

Watch this Video!

LIGHT ULTRACLUB

!!!!MOST WANTED!!!!

Peter Yordanov

Sex In a Bulgarian Disco

You Asked For It!!!

*!!! IMPORTANT NEWS !!!*

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DISCO-PANEL was Nominated Product

for the INNOVATION AWARDS

at PLASA LIGHTING SHOWLONDON

Make your appointment in advance!

Black seamen No.1 bulgarian dj's :

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HOW TO FIND US

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WE LOVE THIS CITY!!!!

:: Bulgarian Disco Party Pics

Disco Bar Frankfurt Nightlife

Sofia West Party Pix

Disco Bar 22.02.2012 ::

This is a stylish night club where 35 sorts

of whisky are offered. Besides, there

are also So many kinds of alcoholic

drinks and cocktails. The barman's

are one of the best Bulgarians.

A luxury, refined, future atmosphere.

The club has approximately 200 places.

Every day the programme is various.

Special kighting effects, average prices.

Looking for Party People - Party Jobs!

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks, sir. And for the Bresson link. Quite nice piece. Kind of really weird, gross that the Bresson retrospective couldn't find a venue in LA. I mean ... wha?! ** Davidpeak, Gosh, all the thanks go to you. I'm just trying to spread the word. ** Sypha, March 13th. Great! Well, keep me up on any changes in the release date. Presumably they can input the changes pretty quickly. Great, great news! ** Empty Frame, Hi. The Pompidou is closed on Tuesday. Uh, I'm totally out of it on what's going on in Paris during that time because I won't be able to see any of it. I'll check though 'cos I've been wanting to go look at stuff before the festival kicks in. Glad you good health has kicked back in. Your sick time reading is unimpeachable, obviously. I don't know that Ishiguro. In fact, the only Ishiguro novel I've read is 'Remains of the Day' He tends to float along the outer edges of my attention span. What of his would you recommend reading next? ** Wolf, Dorks tend to be better as bottoms, I think. Faulkner knew he was doing, that's for sure, even if he ended up influencing a lot of hyperbolic, oozy crap prose. Not McCarthy's, obviously. He knew what to learn. ** Steevee, Well, I'm glad you're doing the Odd Future piece for obvious reasons, and, obviously, I hope the editor makes good. I talked to someone yesterday who said he thinks he has a torrent of Tarr's 'Macbeth' around somewhere, and maybe I'll get to see it, if he does. ** Postitbreakup, Hey, Josh. Glad you like the 3 book posts, needless to say. I hope all that crying while in supportive company helped. Where are you on the writing now? ** A.r., I hear you, man. Oh, I hope our cube -- well, one very long, wide rectangle plus a smallish, almost-cubeish rectangle plus a theater, actually -- filling will make the spaces work, uh, differently. What's that saying? You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy? I don't know. I'm looking forward to meeting Ossian and I think maybe Stephen too, if I'm lucky. Yeah, I guess I get that he could be kind of psychotic. Kanye, I mean. I'm just not into how decorative and clever-clever his stuff sounds. And I guess I haven't gotten to where I think the place he's coming from is all different from where a lot of others making similar moves are coming from. Anyway, blah blah, and I'm going to try to concentrate on psychosis the next time I overhear something by him. Love back(wards and forwards). ** Ken Baumann, Ken! Hey, buddy! Oh, you were in NYC. Nice. And that's, you know, very, very nice to hear about Michael re: 'Call Out' so far, obviously. I think I owe that guy an email. I heard your Kiddiepunk wow-fest is at the printers! M. and I are going to set up a blog launch pad/post for that baby, oh yeah. You should see my desk. It looks like Un Regard Moderne. ** Charlie m, Hey, Charlie! Tom Morello? You were kidding, right? If not, instruct me. I do know Arkha Sva, at least a little, and I do love their LLN-ness in the image/graphics, and I quite like what I know of their sounds. Pretty bizarre intersections in there. In fact, I think I'll haul something by them up today, thanks. You good? Is all good? ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Oh, man, heavy job sucking of the greatness of you, I'm so sorry. Is there any way to regulate or organize it to ease the draining? I mean, you can't keep living like this, right? Yeah, sorry to add to the possible book reading pile. My to-read list is way beyond the capabilities of my time and attention too, if that help. Love to you, man. ** Chris Cochrane, Well, consider it a done deal. Send me your flight/arrival info, and I'll be there holding up a 'Them' sign. ** Chris Dankland, Hey. Really interesting stuff about Sade. I think he can be quite funny too, although sometimes I wonder if the some of the humor isn't due to the archaic language and translation, which I love by the way. There's a new Sade translation that tries to update the terminology and stuff, and it really suffers, I think. Sade is super logorrheic. One of things I revere about '120 Days' is how it evolves into more a more minimalist (for him) style then closes out with just notes about what he intended to write. That wasn't on purpose, obviously, but nonetheless '120 Days' ends up being this extraordinary experimental novel as a result. Yeah, I'm pretty not logorrheic. I think there are countless ways in which my work is different from Sade's. His work is organized around the notion of enemies, and it's so vehemently anti-religion, etc., and my work has no identifiable enemies, and, yeah, my work is centered in the 'victims' and in their emotional confusion and so on. My stuff is never about sadism or masochism, nor is it sadistic, as I think Sade's work in some ways is. Mine stuff is more like a sinkhole where emotion is always there and at the center/ bottom. Etc. Yeah, of course I'm basically bored by the constant comparisons of my stuff to Sade's, even though I guess my frequent acknowledging of his work as the thing that freed me to do my own work only encourages that. But the comparison leads to immediate misunderstanding of what I'm doing, and I think that inescapable comparison is one of the major reasons why so many people miscomprehend what I'm doing so thoroughly. Saying I'm like Sade or a new Sade or blah blah blah creates a wholly inaccurate preface to my work, and it lets people who don't want to pay attention to what I'm doing, which is complicated and demanding of a reader and, thus, creates enough problems for itself already, off the hook. Anyway, I could go on and on, but I'm really interested by what you're saying, and I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I'm honored by your giving my work so much excellent thought. It's strange that, given my particular interest in that kind of material, I prefer 'Juliette' to 'Justine'. But I think I just think it's a more interesting and lustrously composed novel on a stylistic and formal level. I think it's more about that than a preference for the sadistic pov over the masochistic one. Anyway, thanks. How is your writing going? I don't think you've talked about it in depth in a while. ** Frank Jaffe, Hey Frank! Yeah, the new zine is just stellar! Printed Matter said no again? Wtf?! Is there some kind of guideline they have that your zine doesn't technically meet or something? Have you thought about talking to Scott Treleaven? I think he has some kind of biggish 'in' with them, and maybe he could advise or even intervene. 'Immortals' was a big missed opportunity for sure. Really weird, great moments and a blah story. I'm sure you know that Singh's brilliant costume designer Eiko Ishioka, who had so much to do with how incredible his films look, died about a week ago. That seems like a big loss for his work, but we'll see what happens. ** Misanthrope, You've never read Sade?! Weird/interesting considering what you're into in your work. Chris Christie looks like he's going to keel over dead of a heart attack any second, and he probably will. There's fat that works and that looks, I don't know, interesting, but his is just obesity, and he looks ill. I don't feel bad for Christie in the slightest. People who have metabolisms that lead them to be 'naturally' fat have more work to do, but I have a number of friends who have that, and they take care of themselves, and they look healthy and fit, whereas whenever I see Christie, it's like there should be one of those soundtrack themes they use in horror movies to let you know that someone's about to die. Oh, my eyes are steady as a rock about your porn choice. Despite how it might, seem, when I look at porn, I look at all kinds of porn with all kinds of types on display. Well, within reason. I like porn that has contrasting types in it. If it's porn where two examples of the same type are going at it, even if they're Emos or whatever, I tend to skip it. ** Jeff, Hi, Jeff. Thanks, man. Kobek is very interesting writer and has very interesting ideas as well. I'll go check out the Ligotti and religious figures links a little later, thank you. Oh, and for the Bresson link too, needless to say. Great! ** MANCY, Drive like Jehu, yes! I was listening to them almost all day yesterday. I don't know if I know that Krallice song, but I definitely go find it. Cool, man. ** Killer Luka, I think you're jumping the gun by trashing 'ATTA' before you've read it. But I know you have strong feelings about the way that things like that should be approached, and of course I respect that. Ha ha, 'fraid to say also that Kobek's thing on Disney is a little more nuanced than you're thinking it might be. Maybe you might want to skip that book, actually. Anyway, how are you? Is it true what I hear about your gall bladder? Jesus, pal, you doing okay? ** Okay. I'm not going to say nothing about the post today. See you tomorrow.

3 books I read recently and loved: Sean Kilpatrick fuckscapes, Chiara Barzini Sister Stop Breathing, Jarrett Kobek ATTA

2012-02-09T00:59:00.000-08:00

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'Reagan invented crack deep within his racist bowels, pummeling his vagina with a log, shellacking his penis with Russia, his bullet wounds sporting wigs of diamond. He lives the century backward from all saying, is all about turning the skyline his. The cult of Reagan explodes litter from every hole, super-sized and baying the dust of queens, a doo-wop monarchy ripe with frowns, a dollhouse built of cocaine. Our desks are full of the blisters our halos said. Reagan carried out abortions with his stride, updated the bible with quarantines about himself. Reagan fucked his jewelry and had it killed. Reagan is behind the chatty nature of every drug. The yeast beneath his wrinkles is the twenty-first century’s calendar.

'We are the speech of sutures. We have missiles in our hug.

'Our flag is made of scars. We worship our own corpses instead of singing songs.

'Our poems are lice in the eyes of prosperity and culture.

'Our poems won’t survive: the rat trap stuck on a wet jacket of skin. Trailed through the kitchen, in a V of blood, the rat twitching, muscular system exposed, three feet away, dead but free, pointless effort, but amazing, a genius magic trick we bow to, the artist on the tile.

'We coddle our waste by ranking it. There is no hierarchy in a coffin.

'Pussyfooters of snark, academic wine aficionados tied callow by their stringy balls, the Reich of snoozy nitpicks, to the pissy art of edifice, ideals baked gimpy by courts, courts and their parasitic pews, the pious and ordained, to the clock for being slow – may you all be granted lives long beyond living.

'Save for the flail and its evening, our shedding gasoline in expensive rooms, the vulnerable and their beautiful hate, the hate that grins, for the bullet and its path, for Columbine and Christmas, for crack and all its fucked helicopters that let one see, for the rat glowing outside its skin, the lush bounce our heads piffle, for the audience of cuticles, we grow vast inside our blood.

'Now the graft whittles loose by the noise of its being snorted, borrows everything we love and performs arson in the gradation of its own jury’s severed wet.

'The smoke rising from us is our property.' -- Sean Kilpatrick

SHUCKS ABOUT EVERYTHING: Sean Kilpatrick's Blog

SK's 'Rape Festival, Miscarriage Parade'

Excerpt: SK & Blake Butler's 'Anatomy Courses'

SK 'interviewed' @ The Collagist

Buy 'fuckscapes' @ Blue Square Press

Sean Kilpatrick fuckscapes
Blue Square Press

'The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a ‘fuckscape’: where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book.' – Johannes Goransson, author of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place

'Pregnancy dream of poetry has this Sean Kilpatrick book by the fist. You learn to signal to others from the woken state, here, line-by-line. Do you have any extra money? Buy this book! If you have to skip lunch, buy THIS BOOK! “I held my breath so hard I ended up in the country.” Some poetry you read is forgotten, and never remembered. Some poetry, this poetry, Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry, is a manual for exciting the engine to throw you out of the vanquished pleasures. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood.' – CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank

Excerpt
from The Collagist

A man strangles a woman. She is lifted into the air. Their bodies lit, frozen. These are paintings wobbling on a series of backdrops, actors' heads poking through.

MAN: I'd like to get to know you. If that's okay. I'll fetch myself wrecked by movement. Treasure you about an inch. I'll ruin your sense of alarm. I'm building a home of every sneak you snuck, dude. Where I rid you of bitchiness with a single tusk. You give snippets of approval here and there just to keep me conscientious. (Small explosion). I bow through your moods ready to reply. Are you self-conscious about your body? Spaces don't count if they haven't been torn there. That pussy claps around. An altar for crime, my crimes, mega-plural. They start when I wake up. Approximate the joke. No, someone looking good as you ain't required to contribute. (Explode). I hug you a lot. You get annoyed because I'm kind of silly and your disappointed expectations have turned you constantly quite serious. Cute toenails. I cheat on you with the television. A man does not love outside whatever maximizes relaxation. Screen the socket where my nuts guess. Objective distance quells you. I always keep within my rights. Still, I sleet apologies. (Explode). Offspring, build a roster. Basically garage my expellant. Our chum silent bitch-girl. Her groin is ours recycled. Mmm, sliding contour through feigned darks. We are the proud infectors of a life. My main job: jabber everything's okay. Nothing's been okay since the big bang. Anyway, roll baptismal juice fallow districts from change. Bomb the new. I believe in free assisted suicides for everyone who shakes my hand. I believe outside my house is all pennies. Step back, my hygiene dines on itself. I liposuction our crabs because they touch. You hike into nests. (Her period covers his arm). Aw, love every pain you've had. I swaddle your feces. I'm a flea jockeyed in your stoma twenty-four seven. Pagan in that feed. The testimony of everything right about being alive becomes activated the moment you flinch.

WOMAN: Boy, I'm the calamity being said. Note the sorry varnish. Note your propensity for shrinking. All this would and could. Such male tutelage ralphing its own veneer. Now let me visit gravity as a second pan full of tame spitties spat by saying rawr. You poorly steer the immaculate. You're an ingrown patient beeping his Hot Wheels. Plus, the ceiling's dirty. Plus, I shower in your tools. Hello! I give out the belly buttons here, fuck-flak. Men pass through my prayers throat-banged by mountainous clit. Meanwhile, your every succinct point gets clenched through my halo. When I rip loose our little boy he's going to wear each dress I hate until his peener swabs the deck. I keep snoring through the trial they'll give me for his death. Men who best themselves at love equal unvacuumed fetus I've yet to huff. Oh, and all silence is not stoic. Yours feels practiced. Set me over by my flowers. They tell me what to do. They span the gimmie gimmie this home constantly booms. This home, this home! I've planned an escape from debt so fucking long I've learned to despise whoever hands me gifts. I'll tangle your daydream. We'll pursue drawn-out deaths. My clothes are the only bracket between me and other men. That's why I need so many. I soil myself on purpose for your legacy. Where are all the self-improvement books I keep molesting you with? Why don't their clipped paragraphs line your unhygienic foreskin? But I do enjoy being an object bound higher than maybe television. I have good stories. I'm shiny. I have relatives that hate you and give off radiation. Your unfulfilled needs afford my every strength. Looky-look, I'm your gunky dame, like, bondage is over. I can sit through anything you try. Thus I'm better organized than all beliefs. Not much will do. At least I conquer. All the way Disney.

(read more)

Bum doing the stinky leg!

Canadian Mime 2!

Sean is finally walking everywhere!

_____________

'As attention spans continue to shrink, readers are becoming more and more embracing of very short fiction. The al-qisa al-qasira jiddan—"very short story”—has long been a tradition in the Arabic world, and is currently being brought to English language readers by writers like Osama Alomar. The Dutch writer A.L. Snjiders invented the term "zkv's" or zeer korte verhalen or "very short stories" to describe his popular writing style, which is now being translated into English by Lydia Davis, who is responsible for popularizing the very short fiction genre in the U.S. decades ago. Now, with Chiara Barzini’s Sister Stop Breathing, the boundary between prose-poetry and short fiction has officially been erased. Calamari Press has produced a small, beautiful book, only eight-nine pages long, but containing thirty-nine of Barzini’s “stories,” which have been lauded by Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Ames. The short stories—as well as all the collage art featured with almost every piece—are reminiscent of dreams, of a reality scrambled, abstractly expressed in bits and pieces. Barzni’s writing is surreal, where situations suddenly shift, and what comes next is never expected.

'The collection could be read in one sitting, or enjoyed in a dose per day, depending on how a reader wants to soak up the stories. Either way, Barzini’s stories are delightful as they are haunting: a full-out nuclear bombing (“the faces running next to mine peel off”); a grandfather poisons himself as his daughter and grandson watch; a dead Prime Minister speaks; a dead pope disappears. Most of the stories are set in Rome or California, but Barzini takes the reader from the real and pushes us towards the mythological: “The police patrol beneath the Vatican, in underground pagan temples, wading past Minotaurs, sniffing musk and moss.” Barazini’s writing is bizarre, yet at the same time very familiar. They are entrancing works of prose, putting the reader in an introspective state of mind. While reading Sister Stop Breathing, you will find the corners of your mouth turning up, and— a page later—moisture brimming from your eyes. In other words, these stories are what reading is all about.' -- The Coffin Factory

Chiara Barzini Website
Chiara Barzini @ Calamari Press
Chiara Barzini's 'Dead Prime Minister'
Chiara Barzini's 'First Babies'
Buy 'Sister Stop Breathing' @ SPD

Chiara Barzini Sister Stop Breathing
Calamari Press

'Sister Stop Breathing is Chiara Barzini's debut collection of short fictions (with color art by Cal A. Mari). Gary Shteyngart described it as: "The best thing to come out of Italy since espresso, and it opens your eyes and quickens your heart just as fast." And Jonathan Ames had this to say about it: "These kaleidoscopic arrangements of sentences and situations are of freakish originality and beauty. They are stories like smashed mirrored jewels, which we look into, recognize ourselves and others, then look closely again and realize we're staring at the delicate close markings of a flower. I found these stories to be like life—full of horror and comedy and wonderment for a world that is both grotesque and fantastical.' -- Calamari Press

'Chiara Barzini is a screen, fiction, and journalism writer who was born in Rome and raised as a teenager in Los Angeles, where she became obsessed with canyons, quartz, and the Grateful Dead. When she moved to New York she steered her fascinations towards the discovery that a huge slab of granite beneath the city of Manhattan is the reason why nobody there is able to walk or think slowly. The absence of a mineral subterranean life and psychedelia in the city of Rome, made her return to the homeland a bit harsh, but opened her up to new interests including: abandoned castles and the nightlife of cattle. She lives in a remodeled barn inside the Castle of Torre in Pietra with her dog Sonnie and her partner Luca.' -- Bio

Excerpt
from Sleeping Fish

Volcanoes

I stood on top of overlapping volcanoes. They were perfect, volcano one and volcano two, two ruptures in the earth’s crust. Dry, firm, and inactive. No lava, just craters, and no possibility to move beyond them. They were old craters, from prehistoric times, a time when they rumbled. Some said they had formed when a giant meteorite crashed into the earth three hundred thousand years ago, but I sensed pyroclastic flows still boiling beneath my feet.

I walked to the border of the first crater thinking I could reach green spaces, vast lands, and pastures, but each time I reached the edge, I bounced right back inside crater number two. They overlapped almost precisely onto one another. Only a small strip of land revealed they were in fact two craters, placed almost precisely on top of one another within the same plane. I could see the open space from where I stood. There were meadows, Pine trees, nests, thorns, and wild rabbits running through the shrubs. Every color was vivid. Everything outside the crater, as far as I could see, occurred on just one, magnificent plane. No overlaps. Things were one of a kind out there. Each tree different from the other, each rabbit placed unsymmetrical upon a field. That’s where I was trying to go, where things were one, not like a traced pencil drawing.

I dashed towards that vivid green like a magnet to metal, but when I reached the pastures, I fell right back inside. I walked above and below the crater like a trapped tiger.

There was a man on the crater’s edge who had come to fill a bucket of drinking water for a bull. I reached out for his hand and asked him for help. He grabbed my fingers and began to run. We ran hand in hand along the crater’s perimeter. Side by side, he was out, I was in, but when it was time to leap towards him, I fell back inside again.

The man turned back and smiled, “I’ll come back for you!” I was so excited I tripped and almost fell on my face. I waited there, on the strip of land where the craters overlapped. He said he would bring back a plank I could use to escape.

I sat on a rock. There were seagulls in the distance and the sun was summery. The bull was calm so I fell asleep. My throat was parched but I didn’t bother to find water because I knew he would be back for me with buckets of water and juices. I ate weeds, then inscribed my name upon the highest stone in the mountain. I made a ball from manure and played with it imagining the crater as a large soccer field. I practiced running and jumping waiting for the man to return. I ran from one border to the next laughing and panting. I didn’t mind sweating and feeling the sharp pain in my waist. I didn’t mind that one leg felt shorter than the other, that a dog suddenly appeared on the mountaintop and chased me around barking. I was so happy I even started liking it up there. I waited a night and a day. The man didn’t return. He called me from the foot of the mountain. His voice was like a party. He said, “Here I am. Here I am. I am working on it!” He never came.

I walked to the tip of the basin, slipped over into crater number two, and decided I would stay there forever. No more crater hopping and waiting. Maybe the magma chamber beneath me would erupt and wipe away the thin strip of land that kept bringing everything back to the way it just was.

Chiara Barzini reads/NOON Launch Party

Trailer: Perdona pero quiero casarme contigo, written by Chiara Barzini

Sul set di 'AMORE 14, written by Chiara Barzini

_______________

'Jarett Kobek's ATTA is a curious book. And not "curious" as reviewer's code that stands in as a weirdly standoffish term for "strange" or "delightfully marginal." Kobek is, quite literally, more curious in a useful way about terrorism, and its perpetrators, and the intersection of cultures (religious, popular, technical and academic) that could breed an exterminator such as 9/11 operational planner Mohamed Atta.

'ATTA is a novella that juxtaposes a first person narration by Mohamed Atta with a third person observation that is more amplification and clarification than correction. The book is impeccably researched down to minute details about Atta's life and milieu, and yet it never seems bookish or forced. Kobek weaves the historical and biographical into a enthralling narrative in which Atta's journey from awkward adolescent to terrorist never seems predetermined. In Kobek's hands, this all-too-familiar story has terrific twists and turns, surprises and incredible tension.

'Yet retelling the story of 9/11 from Atta's point of view is not Kobek's only -- or even primary -- objective. One of ATTA's most dazzling qualities is its amazing and thoroughly compelling (and simultaneous) transmogrification of familiar elements of Western culture -- Disney, slasher films -- and the critiques of it. I've read few other books that wade as deeply (or, at times, as mockingly) into the darker eddies of the superficialities and silliness of our culture -- yet also unmask the same qualities in our own critiques of it. One of the book's most brilliant moments is scene-by-scene deconstruction of Walt Disney's The Jungle Book in the voice of Atta; another is Atta's discovery of "secret meanings" in the holiday slasher film Silent Night, Deadly Night. ...

'ATTA revels in connecting disparate dots, but the most human and touching moment in Kobek's novella is not a moment of human connection but of a deep fear that leads to disconnection. Yet it is ATTA's deep curiosity that allows Kobek to place his readers in highly uncomfortable (and even dangerous) zones -- knowing evil, laughing at its misreadings and incomprehensions, recoiling at its horrors, and yet recognizing our own selves in it. Not ourselves as directly complicit in the terrible acts of September 11, 2001 (much too easy), but as fellow residents of the teeming city that trades on death to live, as fellow citizens of a place that understands and can even name its garbage -- and yet resolutely refuses to sweep it away. ATTA is a brave and brilliant book.' -- Richard Byrne, Balkans via Bohemia

Jarrett Kobek Website
Jarrett Kobek's Blog
Jarrett Kobek's 'The Vanishing Yezidi of Iraq'
Jarrett Kobek's 'HOE #999' reviewed @ 3:AM
Buy 'ATTA' @ The MIT Press

Jarett Kobek ATTA
Semiotext(e)

'Ours is a century of fear. Governments and mass media bombard us with words and images: desert radicals, "rogue states," jihadists, WMDs, existential enemies of freedom. We labor beneath myths that neither address nor describe the present situation, monstrous deceptions produced by a sound bite society. There is no reckoning of actuality, no understanding of the individual lives that inaugurated this echo chamber.

'In the summer of 1999, Mohamed Atta defended a master’s thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East and called for the return of the "Islamic-Oriental city." Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek's novel ATTA offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism? Following the development of a socially awkward boy into one of history's great villains, Kobek demonstrates the need for a new understanding of global terrorism. Joined in this volume by a second work, "The Whitman of Tikrit"--a radical reimagining of Saddam Hussein's last day before capture -- ATTA is a brutal, relentless, and ultimately fearless corrective to ten years of propaganda and pandering.' -- Semiotext(e)

Excerpt
from Vice

He takes a bus from Cologne to Prague, travels at night. Money is no longer an issue. Money comes from UAE, from Saudi Arabia, from the men with whom he allies. Money is without meaning.

He flies from Prague on Czechoslovakia Airlines. The plane lands on June 3rd, 2000 at Newark.

Marwan al-Shehhi is in America. They arrange a rendezvous in New York City, the greatest sinkhole of urban depravity. He is from Cairo, knows city life, but lacks preparation. Nothing can ready the human soul for New York.

He gathers his luggage, makes his way through customs, presents his passport. His visa is in a new name. MOHAMED ATTA. He walks out of the terminal and finds a commuter bus. He travels on a highway towards the city. New York’s skyline rises in the distance. A unique horror. Direct in line of sight is the Empire State Building, an Art Deco stab at the sky. To the right, smaller buildings surround the Towers like acolytes encircle a false messiah.

The bus dives into a tunnel and leaves him on the street beside Grand Central Terminal. He enters the building, walks to its main concourse. The rush of people amuses him, reminds him of home. He stares at the ceiling, yellow astrological idols of Greek origin against teal background. So many false gods in America.

Atta leaves Grand Central, walks south on Park Avenue. On 40th Street, he realizes that he moves in the wrong direction. He turns right, navigates west. Each and every building is enormous, of unthinkable size. Skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper.

He reaches 6th Avenue, Avenue of the Americas. He looks south. The Towers dwarf the city. New York is a land of giants until you encounter its titans. Solid rectangle erections of architectural arrogance, total modernist faith in the ability of buildings to shape lives, of the architect’s belief that he can control his vision and utilize it towards good.

But this is false hope. Architecture rapes the landscape, rapes lives around the building. Jews establish the sub-religion of Freemasonry upon a central principle. Certain angles embody specific ideals within the physical compunction of mortar and stone. In their Torah, Jews lie about Sulaymann, son of Dawood, tell tales of his apostasy and his Temple. These lies form the basis of Freemasonic concepts, delusions they give to Crusaders as a tool of cultural dominance, pulling the founders of America into its orbit. Warriors of freedom who capture and enslave Muslims, build a stage for the Elders of Zion and establish muscle behind the occupier state of Israel.

To reach Marwan, he traverses the Cartesian grid of New York, wondering about the effects of compulsory orderliness on the human psyche. Marwan stays in the Best Western at 48th Street and 8th Avenue. Atta asks for Marwan at the front desk, is given a room number. The elevator travels to the 11th floor. Goes quickly, is empty. He knocks on the door. It opens. There, once again, is his brother in Islam.

“Amir,” says Marwan, “You’ve made it. Welcome to America. Welcome to New York City. Welcome to the greatest city on Earth.”

“Brother,” he says, “I’ve told you before. Such sarcasms are unfit for pure hearts.”

(read more)

'ATTA' Trailer 1

'ATTA': Trailer 2

Howard Junker reading Jarett Kobek's 'ATTA'

*

p.s. Hey. ** JoeM, I know, I don't where my head was at exactly. Hm. ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, I don't know or even know of that Frears film. Interesting. Pallenberg: I'll look for it. ** Empty Frame, Wow, Mormon underwear mania. Now that I've actually seen them courtesy of Mr. Ehrenstein's link, they just look like the kind of underwear guys wear in cowboy movies. Maybe the preventative aspect is more on the women's side, i.e., 'Wait, do I really want to get fucked by a dork?' D.l.s in Utah? Not to my knowledge. Everyone, does anyone out there live in Utah? And, if so, do you want to take on a top secret mission on behalf of one of the d.l.s? Speak up, if so. Never been to the Tapies Foundation. Never been to Barcelona. Never been to Spain. Weird all the way around. ** Jesse Bransford, Oh, well, then, surprise (belated)! Yeah, I got waylaid yesterday, but I'll see what's up with the Facebook message and get back to you hopefully before your sun rises this morning. ** Todd (once IF), Hey. Oh, shit, Todd, I've been completely spaced out. I'll write to you today. I'm really sorry to be slow. I'm at my worst at the moment. I don't know what 'BIUTIFUL' is, but I'll hunt it down. Best of all and much love. ** Oliver, Oh, yeah, totally. That 'Diary ... ' is an amazing story. Ha ha, the Soviet idea poem, yeah. He's really something. Thank you, O. ** Allesfliesst, That quote is a lot of pressure to put on something that just look like grandpa without the grandpa. I'll try gruelsome out on some unsuspecting English semi-fluent French person or other today. Oh, the Berlinale is upon us. Or upon you and upon coverage for me. Did you score any tix? For what? I don't even know what's screening there. Anyway, assuming you got tix, take some envy. ** Killer Luka, Marc's pretty damned good, right? Who's Joe Ingham? Wait, I'll find out. Right, a young model duh. ** Oscar B, Hey, you're back here where you belong. Wait, that sounded dictatorial. Cold, it is. But they said it'll warm up a bit today, although I haven't been outside to check yet. It sure doesn't look warmer through glass. Yeah, I think we're going to hook up today, yes? Starting with phone talk filtered through your partner in not such a long time from now. Yippee! Any cupcakes left? I want one. ** Sypha, Hey. Oh, no, I have no idea how much experience you've had with BM, obviously, I just thought, from my perspective, that you were generalizing, but apples and oranges and all that. Yes, I saw that you have the galleys of 'Grimoire'. At long last! Awesome! When is it coming out, do you know? I'll do a rerun of the original 'Grimoire' post to celebrate and to alert folks and all that. ** Statictick, Hey. You've seen Dodie now. Very cool, and it's great that you guys got to hang out and talk and everything. And you hung out with the one and only Matthew as well. And might yet again plus art opening in the background or even foreground. Total heartwarming aspect to all of that. Yeah, pass on the word on whatever the show is. ** Steevee, Hey. Wow, amazing that you got to see Tarr's 'Macbeth'. I've read about it and read incredible things about it, but, obviously, it's not easy to see. And I don't think it's on DVD, although I might be wrong. Sounds so great. Thanks a lot for the report. Any news from Salon? ** Chris Cochrane Oh, hm, I don't know how many CDs you should bring. There's no festival-specific bookshop, as far as I know, but the Pompidou has a very good bookstore, and I would certainly imagine that they would carry the CD. I'll remember to ask Serge at the Pompidou about that and how to go about doing that: getting the CD into the store. Tickets bought! At last! Do you guys want me to meet you at the airport and guide you back to the Recollets? I would be more than happy to, of course. ** Chris Dankland, Hey. Oh, there is a certain swarminess in those sentences. But any resemblance to 'TMS' is distant trace evidence, or I hope so, since I avoided reading Sade like the plague before and during the writing of the novel. But, yeah. Interesting about the difference between reading '120 Days' then and now. For sure. I've read it a bunch of times, and it definitely complicates as one's knowledge grows and one's personal morality and politics and so on cement. It's very hard if not almost impossible to distinguish the myths about Sade's real life from the facts. There is very little evidence of what he actually did. He was an asshole in real life at times, for seemingly sure, but how truly terrible an asshole is basically guesswork. I've heard a little of Deathgrips and really liked it a lot. I didn't know the guy from Hella was involved. Love Hella of course. Hold on. Man, that 'Guillotine' track is really something. Yeah, it's great. Video's terrific too. Okay, I think you've gotten my finger on the downloading button for sure. Thank you for that, man. ** Rewritedept, Uh, yeah, that made sense. Nothing ambiguous there, ha ha. You got me on the God question. That guy's been a conceit in an uneven novel to me since I was a little tiny version of me. Yeah, I'm not an angry person, I don't think. It takes a whole lot for me to get angry or to think people are assholes. I'm weirdly okay with most things and think most people are cool. I like Salinger's stories too, no surprise. "Franny and Zooey' is great too, I think. David Sedaris? Well, you know, David and I were pals back when we were both just starting out. I think I was the first person to ever publish his writing. It was in this one-time zine I edited called 'Farm Boys'. I think he's terrific, although I haven't read his recent couple of books. He lives here in Paris, but I've never run into him, and I keep thinking I should track him down, but I haven't yet. Thanks for letting me see the pic, and thanks for having my things in that nice pile. I'll try to have a good one. You too, right? ** Frank Jaffe, Hey Frank! Holy shit, 'PYWSM #2' is fucking amazing! It even makes the first issue seem like Reader's Digest or something, which it most certainly was not. Man, thank you a gazillion for sending me one and double that for letting me have one of the special ones. Yeah, it's a total knockout. I hope you guys keep doing it. It's really, really special, man. Yikes, about the students wanting chicken, and not just chicken but junk chicken so badly that we don't even matter. Was there not an option to switch to, I don't know, KFC, if KFC is less evil? Inch by inch, I guess. Ugh. I saw a pic on your FB wall or rather on my FB news feed of the art show. It looks great! My day? It was okay. It was so cold that I mostly stayed in and did work from here. I talked to my pal Joel. Back and forthed with Gisele and the Pompidou a bunch of times. Got obsessed with Drive Like Jehu's old track 'Here Come the Rome Plows' and played it about 17 times in a row and decided in the heat of the moment that was, like, the greatest song ever and then lodged on FB where some people seemed to agree. French Top Chef s back on TV. It's an all-star contestants from the past themed season, so I get to root for that teen boy/idol wunderkind chef who won last year again. I guess that was mostly yesterday. Rule your today. ** Jeff, Hi, Jeff. Glad you liked Marc's stuff, and I'm obviously glad that the LLN post interested you. Oh, yeah, 'Writers No One Reads' is great site/blog. I check it fairly constantly. Everyone, d.l. Jeff wants to alert everyone to this fantastic site/blog called 'Writers No One Reads', which is already a big favorite and constant haunt of mine, and, if you don't know it, I join Jeff in highly recommending that you introduce it to yourself. It's here. Thanks, pal. I hope you're well too. ** 5strings, That is a lot of pudding, no denial. Oh, he's in Type 0 Negative? Weirder still. Who'd have thunk, etc.? That meister of ugh Karl Lagerfeld said in an interview here yesterday that all Russian men are ugly. I think that was supposed to be controversial and cool or something, but the headline was 'Lagerfeld (Yawn)'. My balls remain in tact. My nerves, however. Get to writing, yep. Me too. ** Jared, Hi, J. No, I didn't get to see 'Day Is Done' in the real. I was, you know, over here. Assuming the retrospective that Mike was organizing for a big European tour that will include the Pompidou still happens without his personally having finished working on it, I'm told 'DiD' will be included, so ... hopefully. Yeah, I was very lucky to get to see a number of his performance works back when he was mostly concentrating on performance. I think the earliest one I saw was 'Monkey Island', and I think the last one I saw was this performance work he did in collaboration with Stephen Prina in the early 90s. I'm sure you've seen this, an early video he did in collab. with Paul McCarthy. It's one of the most harrowing and very best art pieces I've ever seen, I think. Wow, I would have to dwell on that most terrible lyrics question 'cos there are so many that I can't think of any. I always just think of the examples that are so awful that they're great, and those don't count. Yeah, I think post-Beatles Paul McCartney could easily be responsible for about half of the worst. I'll think it through. ** Alan, Hi, Alan. Oh, that's nice: that guy mentioning my stuff in the interview. Yeah, I believe he has approached me about maybe talking in relationship to that book he mentions that he wants to write, but I can't recall. Thanks, A. ** Bill, Hi, B. Yeah, 'Drive' was on my list I think because I was so surprised by how enjoyable it was. ** Misanthrope, Jabba? Perish the thought. Chris Christie has the Jabba lookalike title all to himself. You felt my pants kick? Wow, I'm stronger than I thought. I'm going to dole those pants kicks out a bit more liberally from now on. What porn managed to get you to sleep? Seriously, I want to know. ** Marc Vallée, Hey You made it! Listen, thank you, man! No, I haven't yet listened to that radio interview due my scrambled life and attention span at the moment, but I should have some time today, so I will. Thanks. And, really, thank you again for everything! ** Okay, those books up there are the three books that I most recently finished reading and also loved, and I hope one if not even all of them intrigue. One can always hope. See you tomorrow.

Marc Vallée presents ... a selection of iPhone Instagram pictures from documentary photographer Marc Vallée

2012-02-08T00:59:00.000-08:00

----
A selection of iPhone Instagram pictures from documentary photographer Marc Vallée.

Marc is best know for his graffiti, protest and youth culture pictures.

Marc has been using Tumblr as an online scrapbook of what he is looking at and thinking about straight from his phone. From vintage prints of his work own work from the 90's to editing new pictures on a computer screen plus books, magazines and art that Marc has taken a look at.

You can view more of Marc's Instagram pictures via his Tumblr page on his website.

“Marc Vallée is one of my favourite contemporary photographers. Many artists are photographing the young, but Vallée’s work is exceptional and solitary, avoiding the kneejerk tendency to either define the young through their fashion sense or create the impression of communing with them by smothering them with fashionable aesthetics. His photographs are fully interested in their subjects, somehow more respectful of their beauty and emotions and, at the same time, more invasive of their privacy than any other youth oriented images out there. Vallée’s work is ravishing, noble, unique, and irresistible.” -– Dennis Cooper.

16” x 20” print box. (Taken with instagram)

90s London Skaters. #Print (Taken with instagram)

90s New Jersey boys. #Print (Taken with instagram)

Andreas End Print from 2000. (Taken with instagram)

Anita Pallenberg backstage at London Fashion Week in the 90s. (Taken with instagram)

Audio Slideshow in production. (Taken with instagram)

Blink 182 (Taken with instagram)

Cameras

Currently reading ‘City of Quartz’ by Mike Davis. #Books (Taken with instagram)

Dazed and Confused #magazine (Taken with instagram)

De La Soul on stage in London in the 90s. (Taken with instagram)

Dennis Cooper on my bookshelf. (Taken with instagram)

Dust Magazine. (Taken with instagram)

Editing

End prints & postcards. (Taken with instagram)

For Eva

Government Art Collection- Selected by Simon Schama- Travelling Light at the Whitechapel Gallery. (Taken with instagram)

Happy Birthday Mr. Bowie. (Taken with instagram)

Jamie 10” x 8” from 1997. (Taken with instagram)

Joe in Dust Magazine. (Taken with instagram)

Joel Sternfeld “Stranger Passing” (Taken with instagram)

Metro. (Taken with instagram)

Moo Cards

More 90s London Skaters. (Taken with instagram)

More from 90s New Jersey. #Print (Taken with instagram)

My Dad Joe. With Laurent from Gallows. (Taken with instagram)

My old #PYMCA book. (Taken with instagram)

Naomi backstage at London Fashion Week. Yes I did fashion in the 90s! (Taken with instagram)

OMA Progress curated by Rotor at the Barbican. (Taken with instagram)

One more Print of New Jersey lifeguards from the 90s. (Taken with instagram)

Print Boxes (Taken with instagram)

Print Boxes from the 90s. (Taken with instagram)

Research Part 2 #LarryClark (Taken with instagram)

Research. #LarryClark (Taken with instagram)

Work. (Taken with instagram)

Author Dom Lyne at home in Camden Town. (Taken with instagram)
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p.s. Hey. Today the photographer and long standing d.l. Marc Vallée gives us a look at the recent work he has been doing with the assistance of Apple's Instagram app, and terrific-ness has ensued if you ask me. I hope you'll enjoy, naturally, and consider reacting in view of Marc, thank you. And the kindest thanks to you for making this place your work's home away from home, MV. ** David Ehrenstein, Hey. Well, one man's silly is another man's ... not silly. Such is life's bouquet or something. I'm interested to read the RS piece on Bowie. What's in the excerpt was actually spelled out recently and a bit more colorfully in a recent Mojo Magazine Bowie profile, but perhaps the article itself digs up yet more. Thanks for the alert. ** Davidpeak, Hi, David! Great, I'm so glad to hear that, thank you. I only knew a little of the LLN work until I put together that post, and now I'm interested to see if I can meet any of those guys since they're based relatively around here. No, I haven't seen 'Until the Light Takes Us'. I've been meaning to, and I'll take your thumbs up as a serious jog. Always great to have you here, sir. Thanks! ** Heliotrope, Hi, Mark. I guess you just need to accept your fate as LA's temporary minimum security prisoner and make the best. Shouldn't be too hard. Yeah, seeing that photo was crazy and sweet. Took me back, it sure did. As did 'liking' it alongside the one and only Mr. George Davis. A Huntington walk sounds so nice. I hope you got to. I am so, so missing LA and everything and everyone it holds right now. Big love, and share a bunch with Jules, please. ** Sypha, Shared interests and reference points do not erase the sharers' individuality. One would need to take at least some degree of pleasure in what Black Metal offers sonically to parse it and find the bands' distinctions, I guess, but I think generalizing about the genre means you miss a lot, and it really comes down to what you enjoy enough to explore, I guess. Oh, yes, I'm sorry, I will send you those days. I've been so busy/distracted that things are clouding important things have been slipping my mind. I apologize. Wow, 50% of Skyrim is a lot, right? I haven't played it, obviously, but people keep saying it's one of the vastest games ever. ** Allesfliesst, Okay, I believe you. That sounds even too nothing for me. I think there's just some strange charisma around that word gruel. And match it up with a food stuff and it gets ... ha ha, transgressive? Or it has a reverse psychological effect or something. Why am I going on about this? It must mean something. Anyway, I'm assuming you're back to spicy solids again. ** Ian Tuttle. Hey! Wow, thanks. It sounds like you're totally on/in the ride I intended. Awesome to hear. Oh, cheap seats ... let me see if I can give you a short version 'cos everything in that novel has a whole bunch of reasonings and schemings behind it. I guess basically it's one of the devices I used early on in the novel to make the reader start to think about their location in relationship to the novel 'cos setting up that way of thinking is crucial if the reader is going to know how enter one of the novel's major threads/secret passages, and which is housed/revealed within the intermittent direct address parts of the narrator's marbled swarm, and which ideally will lead the reader directly to where the narrator/author is hiding by the novel's end. If that makes sense, ha ha. It's also setting up the particular kind of the comedy of the novel, which I guess is happening within his arrogant/insecure tone. I don't know if that will help you at all. Anyway, it's really great to hear you talk about the novel like that. Thanks! ** Thomas Moronic, Hey, T. Cool, man. I'm so glad you dug it. Like I said, I was only vaguely familiar with LLN until MANCY suggested exploring their work more fully. Sure, I would be way into a Hole mixtape post, man. That would be great, if you have the time and don't mind. Thanks a bunch! ** A.r., Hi, A. Thanks, man. Wow, Kanye ... I can't seem to get much with his stuff. What's your way in? Love the raw nerve thoughts. Well, yeah. G. and I are trying to work with and around a giant, lofty white cube right now. Time will tell. Love to you, bud. ** Wolf, It did get very, very cold here yesterday, yes, and it did end up snowing in the middle of the night here finally, yeah, and the park out my window looks royal, and I wish I had cleats on my tennis shoes 'cos the sidewalks look criminally inclined towards human legs. Late 29 to March 4th, cool. Oh, you'll miss 'Them', I think. That's too bad, well, for me, but, heck, it's seeing you that counts, big old time. ** Steevee, Very good news that it went smoothly with the new psych. Is Salon notorious for delaying payments? I hope you get it asap. Mm, I don't know, I think you're being pretty reductive about European Black Metal, and the LLN post yesterday offers good examples of interesting cross-influencing in BM that get lost if you see their lo-fi sound and interest in the handmade as merely fetishistic and forced on them by economics. I think it's a lot more than that. If it seems like Satanic Glam to you, I would say that you're not entering it, or that you're making a broad statement based on a limited exploration, which is of course totally A-okay. Either the form's narrowness and shared iconography is of interest or not, but I would say that you're declaring something that's quite intricate and which differs in aesthetic choices and backgrounding and so on from country to country not to mention band to band, etc. to be aesthetically monolithic when it just isn't. I've only really penetrated the surface of BM in the last several years thanks to the tutelage of Stephen O'Malley, and I fully understand why he takes certain of the work in that genre very seriously, and I guess I've learned to do the same. ** _Black_Acrylic, Everytime you type the words THE SHAPE I get excited. Such a good title. Glad things are evolving in the right direction. ** Oliver, Hi, Oliver! Yeah, MANCY lead me to the Surreal Documents site. A total treasure trove. Oh, and, while I have you, thank you so, so much for the Lu Xun post. It's great, and I've been delving into his work as a result behind the scenes. Anyway, I'm thrilled, thank you, and it's going to launch here next Tuesday, the 14th, if that's okay with you. Are you doing good? What are you up to? ** Elijah Bailey, Hello, welcome, and thank you, Elijah! I only discovered Aäkon Këëtrëh when I put that post together, and, yeah, I've been heavily enthralled with his stuff ever since. I just clicked over and saw your ' ... Swagger' short story on your blog, and I really like its beginning, and I'm going to get to read it in full a little later. And your Salt Mines blog looks really interesting as well. So, thank for occasioning the discoveries. Obviously, please hang out here more, if you like. Everyone, new guy Elijah Bailey has two blogs. This one, called The Salt Mine, has interesting pieces on Cryptography, the Occupy movement, and more, and this one, called Menthol Smoke & Dusty Mirrors, has some fiction written by him. Both are very worth visiting and exploring, and I recommend that you do. ** Jesse Bransford, Mr. Bransford! Holy shit, hi, man! Awesome! I am bad at checking FB messages, it's very true, but now that I know, I'll go check it straight off. You good? I hope you were okay with my appropriating of your Dice Drawings here a while ago. I crossed my fingers that you wouldn't mind. Anyway, I'll write back to you, and wow, so nice to have you here, man! ** Chris Goode, Dude, no harm, I would suppose, in giving scraggly heartthrob status a public try out. However, I certainly trust your judgement, and you don't see me growing it a little out either, 'cos mine is patchy as all get out, so ... I know I had a point there originally, hm. I think I know what you mean about that new idea/decision very well, I think. I won't even try to advise you because you know very well that those late breaking decisions that are hopefully revelations are too dependent on a history of avalanching work and thoughts that are yours alone. Tricky for damned sure. What do you think in the clearer light? Well, yes, I've never thought of Melanie Griffiths when absorbing you, but how do I know you weren't just playing me, man, ha ha? The timing on your revisit to 'Infinite Lives' sounds most fruitful. You know that great Buzzcocks song/lyric 'I'm surfing on a wave of nostalgia for an age yet to come'. Which sounds, you know, better when it's entangled in guitars. And, yes, RIP Antoni Tapies. That was a sad thing to learn. What's the fuck is going on with death lately. ** MANCY, Oh, cool, I'm glad you thought it turned out okay. Thank you again, not only for the post but for introducing me to such interesting stuff. Severity is the word. ** JoeM, You would think he did, but certainly he would. ** Creative Massacre. Hey. I'm hanging in here. That dresser is really smooth and charismatic. Good job, pal! Everyone, please watch d.l. Creative Massacre turn a homely dresser into a dresser-shaped, elegant, eyesight adoring black hole. ** Polter, Hey! No, I'm very pleased you liked the post. I didn't what what you would think. Ooh, Inferno is back. I'm going to go find the list of bands and then curse my distance from them. Thank you for taking a magazine for me. I'm sure it's in safe hands. What do I like about Black Metal? Hm, it feels so good, doesn't it? I think my biology is attuned to it or something. It's like Metal without the dross. I mean, I like some bands more than other bands, of course, and there are bands that just whip me around, period, and others that make me see stars and others that dig out my emotions, but I just like the form. It's very exciting. Basically, it's really hard to describe well, I guess. Thank you about my friend. It's cold here too, yikes, but I'm sure our cold is pretty wussy next to yours. We got snow last night. I'm about to slip and slide around on its aftermath with grocery bags in my hands. Hopefully, the warning sign will satisfy Blogger, and they'll just leave us all in overly guarded peace now. I like that picture of the Lapps. I would like to meet one. And I'll watch the music video when my fingers aren't tapping this p.s. thing into being. Thank you, my friend! ** Frank Jaffe, Hey Frank! Yury walked in this morning with the zine! While I was already doing the p.s., so I haven't opened it yet, but my afternoon is going to be almost all its! Thank you! Very cool about the concert's goodness. Very cool about those who are wisely clawing to get in the zine! Good morning! ** Rewritedept, Hey. Nope, haven't heard the new Lotus Plaza track. I will have, however, by this time tomorrow. I'm not that into the first Silverchair album, which is still too grunge-influenced, but the second and third albums are terrific, and I think their fourth album 'Diorama' is kind of a masterpiece. Oh, it's roommate break up insanity, I'm sorry. The quietest problems are often the really deep ones. Sorry, man, yeah. I just read this cool quote/lyric by Karen Dalton in The Wire: 'If I was where I would be then I'd be where I am not / Here I am where I must be / Where I would be I cannot'. I feel like being invisible in social settings, which is kind of screaming in a, uh, saintly manner? No. I'll blow something up depending on what you choose. It rains in Paris, and it never really quite gets gloomy. ** 5strings, I like Ruskies? I guess so. Yeah, I do. But not the ones at the top. But who likes anyone at the top? Oh, the fingers' length is butthole-oriented. That I get. I can hardly understand the Pompidou insanity either but in a different way. Too long a story. Proof is in the pudding. Who's Peter Steele? He's weird. ** STOVALLSTOVALL, Hey, man. No, I didn't see what you wrote. I missed it, damn. Wow, really? The valentine thing? That is so cool, and, yeah, aw, man, that's so cool. Thank you! I so want to see it. They don't even have valentines over here, can you believe it? Candy companies don't even try to get something going in France to cash in. And that's, you know ... I'm really glad you picked Mike for your project. I mean, yeah, for all kinds of reasons. You sound like you're doing really well, no? ** Misanthrope, I avoid mirrors. I'm really good at it. People take my pictures, and I'm, like, do not show me that. I'm like Lindsay Lohan in that whatever movie where she changes bodies with what's-her-nme from the 'Halloween' movies and looks in the mirror and goes, 'I look like the Cryptkeeper!' Okay, quit indulging your ass's laziness and get back to work, man. ** Bollo, Hi, J! Thanks for the link! Everyone, courtesy of Bollo, here's a great place where you can buy some French Black Metal. ** Jax, Hey, pal. I can wander today since it's an off-day vis-à-vis the Pompidou but, wouldn't you know it, the streets are iced after last night's modest snowfall, so I'll be tiptoeing around a little piece of Paris at the most. Nice to know that David Levitt has been for something, ha ha. ** Tender prey, Thank you, Marc! ** Kiddiepunk, Buddy boy, cool! I'm going to call you in a bit. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. As far as I know, I don't think the LLN bands ever played live. I think they were artists of recordings only. You good? ** Gotta run. Indulge in the gifts of Marc V. today, please, and I will see you, yes, tomorrow.

Gig #14: Les Légions Noires

2012-02-07T00:59:00.000-08:00

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'Les Légions Noires were an infamous group of underground black metal artists/bands that emerged from France in the early 90s in response to the newly born Norwegian second wave of black metal (bands like Mayhem, Burzum and Emperor). With a penchant for prolific demo output, next to no full lengths, rough and raw material, barely audible/listenable recordings, obscure naming conventions, true satanic piety and rabid anti-commercialism - the LLN made a name for themselves by intensifying almost every black metal stereotype known to the metal community.

'Most of the bands centered around a few very talented and driven individuals - Vorlok Drakkstein, Vordb Dreagvor Uezeerb, Vlad Drakkstein, and Meyhna'ch. However, the volume of bands that the group produced greatly outweigh this, with 20+ groups validated as being part of the LLN. The more well known bands of the group included Mutiilation, Vlad Tepes and Belketre, but there were also other hidden treasures and auditory obscurities which many could rightly regard as simply abstract noise.

'Being such an obscure group, rumours about their nature have always been rife. More well known tales are of Mogoutre's demo being recorded with a microphone inside a dead rat, or of the bands recording and living within an ancient castle (dispelled as Meyhna'ch's archaic home). To further to add to their underground predilection, the band had an unequaled elitist view of black metal with unbridled contempt shown in statements like the following: "Black Metal doesn’t mean anything any longer. It has become the shame of Satan, undermined in it’s very essence by all those pathetic worms, false Satanists, traitors and bastards of all kinds, have gathered to insult our art, and the least one can say is that they really succeeded in making it pure shit, a simple and only matter of image, money, publicity."

'While the LLN died silently in darkness by the end of 1996, petering out as other projects, contempt for popularity and alleged drug abuse took its toll, Mutiilation and Vlad Tepes stood out as the most distributed in the group. While the LLN did not last, it's effects on the French black metal scene clearly did, making way for bands such as Alcest, Mortifera, Celestia and more who may have done away with the necrotic rodent production, but kept the melancholic sensibility. Even afar, bands like Xasthur pay homage to the LLN with Malefic covering Mutiilation and providing keyboards for a French band like Celestia.

'Like much avant-garde art, the LLN has it's detractors. Many criticisms about various LLN soundscape projects could even be considered valid, at least if one considers "the conventions" of quality to be "the establishment", but like those who mock Jackson Pollock, most cynics about LLN are essentially saying "anyone could make those noises!" But the truth is of course, no-one but the LLN ever had the evil imagination to do it.' -- Cynic, Metal Underground

The Official Les Legions Noires fansite

Les Legions Noires Discography

Les Legions Noires Interviews @ Pervert the Church

The Black Plague (Les Legions Noires Rare Magazine)

Les Légions Noires @ COSMIC HEARSE

Les Légions Noires @ myspace

Les Légions Noires Private Society

Inside of The Black Legions (Spanish)

The Ultimate Les Légions Noires Torrent

Some Les Légions Noires downloads

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'Vlad Tepes was a French black metal band which was formed in Brest in 1992. The name originated from the 15th century Wallachian ruler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker's fictional vampire Dracula. Worlok Drakksteim also has a side project named Black Murder. He is the composer of that band, while Wlad Drakksteim is the composer for Vlad Tepes. After a number of self-released demos, the demo-tape War Funeral March (1994) was released on the American market by Full Moon Productions. It was followed the next year by March to the Black Holocaust, a split release with fellow Black Legions act Belkètre, issued on the french Embassy Productions. In 1996, another split album with the Black Legions project Torgeist, Black Legions Metal was released by the French Drakkar Productions.' -- Encyclopaedia Metallum

'Nos Terribles Pensees' (1996)

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'Dzlvarv was a project headed by Vordb Dreagvor Uezeerb of the bands Belketre, Torgeist, and Black Murder. Dzlvarv released one demo in 1996. In typical LLN fashion it is lo-fi, eerie, and bizarre. Their recordings touch on one of the many beautiful things about LLN releases. Tape is really the only format that decays, most LLN releases are tape. I love the idea that the releases have a 'shelf-life', and decompose with age like a corpse or dream.' -- COSMIC HEARSE

Dzlvarv 'III' (1994)

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'One of the more underrated Black Legions bands, Torgeist was made of several important and key figures in the French Black Legions scene; Lord Beleth'Rim (voice, guitar), Lord Aäkon Këëtrëh (guitar), Vordb Dréagvor Uëzéërb (bass) and A Dark Soul (drums). For any LLN elitist this is the closest to being a dream team lineup considering that you have the masterminds of such bands like; Amaka Hahina, Moëvöt, Belketre, Aäkon Këëtrëh, Vermeth and so on. Judging from the first song 'March Of The Black Assemblies' it sounds like something straight from an Amaka Hahina demo. The vocal delivery is top notch and resembles something like a snake.' -- Encyclopaedia Metallum

Torgeist 'Time Of Sabbath' (1995)

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'Black Murder was a side project to The Black Legions band, Vlad Tepes. Worlok has stated that this side project differed very much from Vlad Tepes, as in this band he was the composer, and in Vlad Tepes, Wlad composed most of the work. He also describes his music as compositions of murder. They released a promo in 1994 and the Feasts demo in 1995. Last known line-up: Vorlok Drakksteim, Wlad Drakksteim, Vordb.' -- blackmurdeefanspage @ myspace

Black Murder 'Deadsex'

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'Mütiilation was formed in 1991 by Meyhna'ch, Dark Bumsi of Silence and a bassist by the name of David. They recorded some amounts of demos as a trio until 1994, when David left. This was due to Mütiilation joining The Black Legions and his choice to not follow their views. At this time Mütiilation released an EP to honor the circle titled Hail Satanas We Are The Black Legions. Shortly after Dark Wizzard of Silence was replaced by Krissagrazabeth, who participated in the recordings up until Vampires of Black Imperial Blood. Once again it was due to disagreeing views. At his departure, Mørdrëd joined and became the first Mütiilation bassist to be part of The Black Legions. This line-up would be featured in The Black Plague - First Chapter (And Maybe Last One).' -- discogs

Mütiilation 'Black Imperial Blood' (1995)

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'Formed around 1989 under the name of Chapel of Ghouls the name was changed in '91 to Zelda, then finally in '92 became Belketre. As well as Belketre both members, Aakon Keetreh and Avaethre, took part in many other projects with other LLN members. They also had solo projects most notable of these being Keetrehs self titled project Aakon Keetreh and Avaethres project, (under the name of Vordb Dreagvor Uezreevb), Moevot. As with any LLN release, so called genuine works by Belketre come to sites like e-bay and other such places very rarely. Think twice before paying much money for these as they are, more often than not, fakes and bootlegs.' -- belketre @ myspace

Belkètre 'Night of Sadness' (1995)

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'Started in 1996, Aäkon Këëtrëh is the one-man project of Lord Aäkon Këëtrëh. Lord Aäkon Këëtrëh was one of the more famous figures in the French black metal scene. Belketre, Dzlvarv, and Torgeist were the three black metal projects he contributed to before forming his one-man project. However, once he shifted from his former black metal projects, Aäkon Këëtrëh became solely a dark ambient musical project that held true to the precepts of the Les Legions Noires (the Black Legions). After three demos and a short life span, Aäkon Këëtrëh disbanded in the fall of 1999.' -- Attila the Hun

Aäkon Këëtrëh 'Dans la forêt - Untitled VIII' (1996)

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'Of all LLN bands, the shadowy and impossibly named band Brenoritvrezorkre ventured closest to the most dangerous, the most polluting, the most contagious point in the process of rotting. The four demos which the band released over the course of 1995 and 1996, contain music that is unstable, viscuous, formless. They are amongst those rare albums which seem to exude a smell, a stench (Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is another one). Listening to the music, one fears the aural dirt might rub off onto one's inner ear, tainting forever the pleasure of listening to music. Like the dead who are not yet without flesh, the decayed sound of Brenoritvrezorkre can haunt its audience.' -- DOCUMENTS

Brenoritvrezorkre 'Ezleyfbdreb Zuerkl Bervetremdre' (1995)

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'Moëvöt is the work of a French musician known only under the pseudonym Vordb Dréagvor Uèzréèvb. Very little is known about Vordb. Possibly his name was Stéphane Z, possibly he hailed from the (rather provincial) town of Bergerac in the Dordogne. What seems certain is that Vordb was one of the leading figures of a collective of 'Les Légions Noires'. Moëvöt is likely to have been only one of Vordb's many projects, others being Brenoritvrezorkre, Dzlvarv, Susvourtre, Torgeist, Vzaeurvbtre, Dvnaèbkre and (the best-known) Belkètre. It cannot be said with certainty how many demos Moëvöt brought out. Some internet sites list up to twelve demos, but only two demos can definitely be attributed to this project: Voryathre (1993) and the impossibly named Ézléýfbdréhtr Vépréùb Zùérfl Màzàgvàtre Érbbédréà (1994).' -- DOCUMENTS

Moëvöt 'Die Dämmerung' (1994)
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p.s. Hey. A shout out and big thanks to d.l. MANCY who provided the impetus for this post. ** Schlix, Hey, Uli! ** Jax, Hey. Actually, for me FB has mostly been valuable as a way to meet new people. I do like being able to keep up with my friends 'cos I'm so physically far away from most of them, but I mainly use it to discover new people and what they do, and it has been great for that. It depends on how you employ FB. Some people only 'friend' people they already know, but, until I reached by friends limit, I was into 'friending' people who seemed interesting or artists of different types whose work I knew and liked but whom I didn't know personally. So, I would say FB is only safe and unchallenging if you decide you want it to be. So, if you're into the second draft of the radio play, it sounds like things are going well with the producer, yes? Diamond-heisting old ladies sounds like a classic in the making. Your versatility never ceases to impress me, pal. It's a little bit warmer here, as of yesterday. There? ** Empty Frame, Yikes, glad you're on the rise, man. Mike Kelley's death is proving very hard to shake for me, but I think that's important. Unfortunately, the Spectrum Spools concert ended up getting cut due to the budget tightening. After my sculpture show, the loss of that concert is the most disappointing thing to me. But hopefully you'll find other 'TE' things to sort you out. Love, me. ** Bitter69uk, Hey, nice to see you! Totally, right, about NK? And your Nico casting idea is superb, needless to say. Oh, that latest post on your blog about Lloyd Johnson looks fantastic! I'm going to pore over that today as soon as I click 'publish'. Everyone, newish d.l. Bitter69uk has a new, really fascinating seeming post on his blog about the clothier Lloyd Johnson, proprietor of the now defunct store(s) Johnson' Modern Outfitters in London. Very highly recommended! It's here. A real pleasure, thank you, sir. I hope you're doing well. ** David Ehrenstein, So very pleased you liked the Kinski post, thank you, and how cool that you and met and spent quality time with her. Weird sounding event/dinner indeed. Yeah, as I imagine you saw, she and Quincy Jones broke up a while back. Oh, you probably know this too, but I just read yesterday that Abel Ferrara's new/next film is a biopic about Dominique Strauss-Kahn starring Depardieu as DSK and Isabelle Adjani as Anne Sinclair. Wildness. I'll check out the Beverly Kenny thing. Everyone, here's Mr. Ehrenstein with a tip and recommendation: 'Bill (Reed) celebrates the YouTube posting of a clip of Beverly Kenny on "Playboy's Penthouse. Lord how I loved this show! And this clip shows why. Kenny was on the road to overwhelming success when she suicided out. Much mystery attends her passing. An unhappy love affair or just clinical depression. No one knows for sure.' ** Allesfliesst, You're most welcome. Awfully glad you managed to be home when your body rebelled, although, of course, I'm very sorry to learn that it did. Rice gruel sounds so good when you're not sick enough to be forced to eat it and when your taste buds are fine-tuned to the intricacies of blandness thanks to vegetarianism. Hope your really good mood has now fully presented itself. ** Dungan, Hey, Sean. Yeah, Mike's death is a total heart- and head- and soul-fuck, and I'm so wishing that I could be in LA right now too. Okay, if you actually do want to stay near me, there are two hotels that are about a minute's walk away if that. They're nothing fancy, but they're totally fine, and their prices are about as okay as you're going to get in Paris: +/- 100 Euro per night. Where I live is not a tourist area or wildly scenic, but you'll be near a great metro station, and I'll be close by to hang out, accompany you, tell you where to go, and so. The hotels are: Hotel Modern 'Est and Libertel Gare de l'Est Francais. See if either of those work for you, and if you want or need more suggestions, I'm happy to provide some. Really looking forward to seeing you, man! ** Chris Goode, I surprised you! Nice. Beard! That's ... hard to picture, I must say. Scraggly, is it? I can see that working for you. Just call it designer stubble and the art groupies will surely find a way to be all over your thingeroony. Oh, sure, I seriously value a lot of the same things you're talking about and feel super-grateful for having that electively at the center of my formative years. For me, and this is not relevant to your way of thinking about these things, or mine, or probably that of anyone around this place, but I have a deep seeded fear of nostalgia and how it can lay down a kind of law for a lot of people as they get older and less driven to keep culturally connected, and basically I think yesterday that I was just reminding/ warning myself mostly or something. Ha ha, when I first read your 'I sound like ... ' sentence, my eyes saw Melanie Griffiths, and I had an interesting moment of trying to make sense of that, which I thought you might appreciate. Is 'G/H' getting more there as of today? ** Changeling, Hey! Gosh, I guess I'm strangely weird in that I seem to find belatedly awoken sorts of people, or d.l.s as the case may be, mildly and pleasantly electrifying in some positive way. Hm, I actually think your tending to make a molehill out of a mountain vis-à-vis sex is as legit if not moreso than my way of belaboring sex's obvious vs. ultra-secret thing/problem/gift. I think what you said makes sense. You never know whether you're understanding something that makes sense to you, though, I guess. It seems to me like you worry too much, no? Where are you in whatever writing project(s) you're working on? I ask because I try to delay the worrying until I get to the going back and editing phase. I think I see porn the way you do maybe, or it sounds like it, but I seem to find it anti-snoozy nonetheless, I don't know why. Oh, I keep qualifying the word okay in relationship to me because while I am okay, I am also kind of exhausted from the stressful 'TMS' initial publication period plus the overwork that the Pompidou festival requires plus the heaviness of Mike's death on top of that. But I'm okay. I actually am actually okay. Thank you for noticing and asking. That's kind. You can play Fred next month. Anyone can start or stop playing the game at any time. ** Paul Curran, Yeah, beyond is a good way to describe her. And, holy shit, is she beautiful. Additionally. That wobble between confidence and 'knowing' it's shit is such a gouge but such an important phase, but you know that. Muscle through it, and you will. ** Alan, Hey. I like '400 Blows'. It was so saddled with 'greatness' by the time I first saw it that I was probably looking for trouble. I like all the Antoine Doinel films, but I love watching Leaud so much that the movies themselves become green screen to me, I think. ** Zod Microbe, Zod! Awesome to see you, man! Thanks for liking the post. How are you? What are you up to? No pressure, but I would love to know. ** Sypha, Hey. I think I've said this here before, but all the gay guys I know who say Gaga is a Madonna ripoff are young. Cool to see you reveal the TG post fakes. I missed a couple of them. Sneaky. ** L@rstonovich, Larsty! While I've got you, your lovely Varioso will launch here on Friday, the 17th. So mark your whatever, and thank you a ton, man. Yum, 'Weed Forestin'' reissue! I did not know that. Gorgeous, gorgeous record, and I think I'm going to have to get me that handmade double CD package, like, today! Gracias! ** MANCY, Yeah, thanks one-on-one for giving me the idea to first explore LLN and then lay my findings out here. Such awesome stuff. Fingers severely crossed about UW. Severely, I'm saying, although the severity of my crossing is surely just icing on the cake. ** Thomas Moronic, Cool, glad you liked the Kinski thing. Yeah, that Rammel Festival has a pretty awesome line-up. Grr for me. Great about the super-obsession with your in-progress work. Best feeling that the human body can produce, I say. May it continue unabated for all of our sakes. ** Wolf, Oh, gosh, thanks about that sentence. But, really, all thanks go to Spielberg for being such a presumptuous motherfuck. Kinski is one of those 'why beauty was invented' people. I assume you watched the 'Inland Empire' outtake clip. The little scene with her that got cut is pretty cool. Hey, remind me, if you don't mind: when are you and Marc going to be in Paris again, dates-wise? ** Steevee, That is very good news about the Ruiz, for sure! Auteuil's film 'La fille du puisatier' was a big success here in terms of box office figures. From what I recall, it was respectfully reviewed pretty much across the board. It's quite conventional, as I understand, but apparently quite well done. Sucks, obviously, about the ultra-slow Salon payment. I hope that comes through because, obviously, it's a very good gig. ** _Black_Acrylic, Glad you dug it. Okay, firm progress on THE SHAPE then, very good. Here's hoping the collar enhances rather than sands down your idea. ** Katalyze, Hey, Kat! I didn't know about that Eric Erlandson book. I'll definitely read it, and, since Akashic did it, maybe I can sweet talk them into a freebie. Thanks for the alert! How are you? What's new? ** Chris Cochrane, Tell me about it. I mean about the content warning shit. Fucking annoying and, for the moment, I'm told that it's preventing the individual posts from showing up in google searches, which is really a drag. Voidoids! I was just on a Robert Quine trip a couple of days ago: Voidoids, the Lou Reed stuff, his stuff with Ribot, etc. So fucking amazing, that guy. ** Postitbreakup, Hey. Is there no way to trick yourself into feeling the self-confidence you feel when you comment here or on HTMLG or elsewhere when you're writing fiction? I mean, you're clearly capable of feeling confident at times, and it seems like a matter of trying not to make writing fiction such a huge deal to yourself. Obviously, it is a huge deal when you're not writing it or when something is finished, but it doesn't need to be when you're in total solitude with it. I don't know. I just think there must a way for you to talk your insecurities into a stalemate re: fiction. I think an arm-ish day is doable, and I will try, thank you. You too. ** Bill, That fine event is definitely a fine event. Superb double bill. Wish I could ... etc. Good luck ratcheting down the hectic, B. ** Frank Jaffe, Hey Frank! No, not yet, but I'm in France, and France can be a bit sluggish in its mail handling. Crazy small crowds are better than crazy big crowds, don't you know? Happy to see you pre-sack out, man. ** Chris Dankland, Hi. Well, yeah, I think you already know that I don't think Seidel's films are nihilistic much less torture fests. It's interesting how otherwise smart, savvy people's IQs can drop like anvils when their morals are massaged. But I mean, yeah, obviously, my stuff gets hit with those 'nihilistic' and 'torturous' accusations all the time, so that misread/ distortion of Seidl's work sadly doesn't surprise me. Cool you liked the XtX and Frank Hinton books. I'm cool with being your imaginary MFA professor if you wish. After all, Mr. Ehrenstein used to refer to this place as L'Ecole du Dennis Cooper, ha ha. I'll even mock-up some sort of certificate in PhotoShop that you can print out, if you like. ** Misanthrope, I miss LSD too, but I think if I took it now, it would make me freak out about how old I am and how aged I look relative to my delusional or rather ignored self-image. Yeah, that sounds like the ticket with your friend. I have a fair amount of good friends who are way not into some of the stuff I'm into and who don't read my books or seem to have any interest in doing so, for instance, but the friendships are still very valuable. Cool about the freelance work. How are you liking the freer time? ** JoeM, Hi, Joe. I didn't know that about MJ's mom. Wow. ** Jared, Well, pot and Xanax are two very different beasts, right? I mean Xanax leads you almost nowhere other than the somewhere that your body pre-configures, and pot, well, it's not inherently anti-anything. Well, as I suspected, you're holing up with very awesome, enriching books and movies, so seeds are being planted and the pot is, like, what, fertilizer? Uh, ha ha. That wasn't a half-response, man. Whatcha talking about? And the respondent owns the response, I think, right? ** 5strings, Thanks. She does. I'm barely even gay when I look at her. Johnny Long-Fingers? No, you didn't. So, tell. Don't leave me hanging. I want to see 'Chronicle'. It has leapt out at me for some reason. But ixnay on 'Ledge' and 'Extremely Loud'. Moliere, wow! I haven't read him in ... gosh, I don't even know. How's he intersecting with you? Oh wait, you said rad. He's raddifying you. Things at the Pompidou are happening with only the usual amount of hitches, and we've been good on our toes of late. ** Rewritedept, Cool, thanks. Oh, sure that AWK album was sweet. I should try his newer stuff. I bet you're fun to watch onstage. I have this theory that the rock stars who say they're no fun to watch onstage are the funnest. And the ones who 'know' they're hot shit aren't hot. But then I'm in the minority who, for instance, always thought Bowie seemed like he was trying way, way too hard onstage whenever I saw him. Thanks for doing the pass-along with my books. I owe you ... something. Something good. I hope the strangeness resolves in part because I want to know about it. A Parisian day ... that I can do. You try to have a Parisian day too. ** Right. I present a rare concert by the mysterious and legendary figures behind the mysterious and legendary Les Légions Noires for you today. I hope you'll accept the challenge. See you tomorrow.

Nastassja Kinski Day

2012-02-06T00:59:00.000-08:00

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'Nastassja Kinski was 15 when she was put in juvenile prison. For years she had been stealing, shoplifting little presents for her mother, the sorts of things her father would once come home with - bits of jewellery, watches, chains - things she believed would make her mother happy again, "like I remembered her when I was little". As though these things were as central to her mother as food. A lot of the time she would get away with it, but at other times she was caught, and then there would be paperwork and forms to fill in and visits to the police to be made. "Except mum wouldn't take me. I think she thought it would go away. Then I started doing movies."

'And so, when she was spotted by Wim Wenders' wife at a rock-and-roll competition and offered a part in Wenders' film, Wrong Movement, she said, "Yes". In fact what she actually said was: "You'll have to ask my mum." Which is just poignant and sad. There followed, at age 14, a lead part in Reifenzeugnis, a hugely successful series on German television, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, later of Das Boot fame; she was cast as a schoolgirl who has a love affair with her teacher. Already, it was apparent, this strange tension in her nature: the child who grew up too fast. Already, this was being translated, by the adults around her, into a mystery, a seduction: the child as savage in relation to the world, unleashing uncontrollable primeval urges.

'How much did she know of what was being made of her? Probably very little. She was no Bardot, no wild creature of the elements. Bardot came from a bourgeois background, she knew enough of the rules to be able to jettison them. Nastassja knew no rules. Her only model was anarchy. She longed for conformity, for domesticity. You see this clearly in Avedon's portrait of her when she was about 22, naked except for a python draped around her body. How it is possible to look domestic with a snake wrapped through your legs and around your neck is a mystery. But the two of them managed it. The picture is stylised, tame.

'Polanksi saw it immediately. Recognised the need and contacted her with a view to casting her as Tess, a part he had originally conceived for his wife, the late Sharon Tate. You can imagine he had a particular interest now in a story about a woman who loses her baby and her life. He sent Nastassja to Lee Strasberg's studio to improve her English and her accent. "He took a lot of time, two years," she says, "preparing me for that film."

'The film, which was released in 1979, made her. What Ingrid Bergman was to the 40s and Julie Christie to the 60s, Nastassja Kinski was to the 80s: the face of the time. Five years later, when Wenders' Paris, Texas came out - to great acclaim for Kinski and her co-star Harry Dean Stanton, and written by Sam Shepard, the leading American playwright of the day - you would have thought her future fixed. Then, just as suddenly, it was over.

'She was never reconciled with her father Klaus Kinski. Over the years, she saw him only rarely, and towards the end they were not speaking at all. When he died in 1991 from a stroke, there was no regret. "Maybe a minute. No, 30 seconds." She didn't go to his funeral. The last time she had heard from him was when he telephoned to ask her to be in a movie with him. "That's why he contacted me. Business." She doesn't love him. How could she? Imagine, she says - being a father who has never in his whole life done anything right. Who never saw her children. "Not even a picture. That's pitiful, it really is. He had eyes like hell and the sky at the same time."

'At the moment, she is edging back into film, playing bit parts - or love interest, which she's not very good at. As she says, "too detached". She knows there will always be some director willing to use her name, her beauty - she is more beautiful than ever, as though time has somehow reversed to soften her features. But the question is, can her persona ever again achieve the force of the early years.' -- The Guardian

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Stills

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Generally

NK interviewed on David Letterman, 1982

NK dances with Marcello Mastroianni, 1978

NK sings Tom Waits' 'Little Boy Blue'

Sparks 'That's Not Nastassja' (live, 2008)

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Further

Nastassja Kinski Official Website
Nostalgia Kinky: Celebrating Nastassja Kinski
Extraits d'une vie, a Nastassja Kinski Fan Site
Nastassja KInski: Visual Website
Nastassja Kinski @ IMDb
Japanese Nastassja Kinski Fan Site (in English)
'Nastassja Kinski, Still a Daddy's Girl'
Nastassja KInski @ mubi
Nastasja Kinski: Box Office Data
Nastassja Kinski @ Famous People with Narcolepsy

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14 of Nastassja Kinski's 50 films

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Roman Polanski Tess (1979)
'Roman Polanski adapted Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles and came up with this moody, haunting film starring Nastassia Kinski as the farm girl who is misused by the aristocrat for whom she works and who is then caught in a marriage where her initial happiness soon turns to grief. Fans of the novel may feel unpersuaded by Polanski's effort to marry Hardy's Dorset vision with his own fascination with psychosexual impulses toward survival, but the film is an often stunning thing to see, and Kinski's sensitive, intelligent performance lingers in the memory.' --Tom Keogh

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Excerpt

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Francis Ford Coppola One from the Heart (1982)
'One from the Heart is perhaps most famous for being one of the decade’s biggest box office bombs than for the film itself. Coppola went widely over-budget, haemorrhaging away money on the elaborate sets, and the film was a critical and commercial disaster. Coppola fails to grasp that all the best musicals have at least some kind of story anchor and genuine heart at the centre of the songs and style, and his incredible visual panache isn’t enough to rescue One From the Heart from eventual tedium. But it’s a beautiful-looking, intriguing failure, and every great director should be allowed a couple of those.' -- Future Films

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Paul Schrader Cat People (1982)
'I didn't agree with the way the film was done. Overall I didn't like my performance in Cat People at all. I wanted to do the movie in a much rougher way, getting more into the souls and passions of these people. Who cares about blood and flesh smeared all over the place? I blame myself because I listened to the director. I should have rebelled. I followed his path. I sort of melted into what Schrader thought was right. I used to think you had to do what the director tells you to do, but you can't. You have to put your own individuality into it, your own thoughts. I didn't. I let myself be trapped. I don't regret it, except that we didn't go where we had to go...Schrader should have taken all that other shit out that wasn't necessary and gone more deeply into the souls of the characters...he lied to me after all we'd been through. He knew exactly what he was doing.' -- Nastassja Kinski

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James Toback Exposed (1983)
'It is very important to understand that Exposed, more that any other film she ever made, seems to be about Nastassja Kinski. The first hour of the film is a remarkable character study and portrait of a woman very much separated from her own identity, her own persona if you will. One person even says directly to Kinski at one point, "You have the mystery of Garbo, the wit of Lombard and eroticism of Monroe." What is striking about this isn't Toback's mirroring of the critical reaction Kinski always received, but the near disgusted and exhausted look on her face hearing it. Only Nastassja Kinski knows just how close Exposed was to her own self, but I am willing to bet their are few portrayals she gave that were more personal and close to her.' -- Jeremy Richey

Excerpt

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Jean-Jacques Beineix The Moon in the Gutter (1983)
'Playing the embodiment of an artists dream is a near impossible task, and I am not sure if anyone besides Nastassja Kinski could have played Loretta with so much dreamy dignity and calm. She delivers a surprisingly human performance in what probably could have been her coldest role. Kinski, who gives one of the decades most defining performances in The Moon in the Gutter, was hurt by the film's brutal reception, but she would bounce back with four of her best performances before the ill fated Revolution would ground her career a few years later. Beineix would return with a vengeance a few years after The Moon in the Gutter with his fierce Betty Blue, but unfortunately his career has never fully recovered from the pounding that The Moon in the Gutter received.' -- Nick Adams

Excerpt

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Tony Richardson The Hotel New Hampshire (1984)
'The Hotel New Hampshire, a work centered on the very dysfunctional Berry family, features one of the greatest ensemble casts of the eighties. The core of the film belongs to a really wonderful Jodie Foster as the brilliant but troubled Frannie Berry, a handsome (and I think quite good) Rob Lowe as her brother John, and Beau Bridges as their ambitious dreamer of a father, Win. Also as part of the family are Paul McCrane, Lisa Banes, Jennifer Dundas and a young Seth Green. Throughout the film we meet a large variety of supporting players including most notably Wallace Shawn as a Mr. Freud and Nastassja Kinski as the paralyzingly insecure Susie The Bear.' -- Nostalgia Kinky

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Excerpt

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Wim Wenders Paris, Texas (1984)
'The film is perfectly cast, and while Stanton dominates the film, Dean Stockwell is also effective as the brother torn between love for his brother and fear that his return will mean that he and his wife may lose a child that they have raised as their own son. Hunter Carson is that rare thing – a good eight-year-old actor, while Nastassja Kinski is so beautiful that you truly believe that Travis could have been driven nuts with jealous desire. The ending is the probably the happiest possible outcome for these characters, and yet also desperately sad – it reminded me very much of the final moments of John Ford’s The Searchers. Paris, Texas is easily Wenders' best film, and a masterpiece of loss and regret.' -- Spinning Image

Excerpt

Excerpt

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Andrey Konchalovskiy Maria's Lovers (1984)
'Maria’s Lovers is notable not only in that it marks Konchalovsky’s English language film debut but it also marks one of the first English language films ever to be shot by a Russian director. Maria's Lovers would mark the end of an era for Nastassja as it would be her last English language film for almost a decade that would garner any real serious critical and popular acclaim. The film was also important in that would garner Nastassja one of the only major awards for her acting she ever received. It remains one of her finest performances and one of the best films she ever appeared in.' -- Gerard Brach

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Wim Wenders Faraway, So Close! (1993)
'Of the three films Nastassja Kinski made with Wim Wenders, Faraway, So Close! is the weakest and yet there is something profound and right about it. Faraway, So Close! is a overtly spiritual work that has moments that rank along with the best of Wenders, but it’s hard to deny that the film falters in ways that Wenders work hadn’t before it. Gone is the moody perfection that inhabited so much of his early career, and in its place in Faraway, So Close! is a sprawling over-ambitiousness that is as beautiful as it is frustrating and as poignant as it is flawed. It’s a film that finds the great German director transitioning from one of the shining lights of the art house world into one of the most fractured.' -- Nostalgia Kinky

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Antonio Tibaldi Little Boy Blue (1997)
'Little Boy Blue is a difficult-to-review dichotomy of a movie. It continually pairs brilliant film-making with portions that one would expect from a straight-to-video release. The movie starts off quickly establishing its heavy sexual content and unusual family relationships. The alcoholic, Vietnam veteran father played by John Savage is a fierce, detestable character meant to be feared by all but his inexplicably devoted wife played by Nastassja Kinski (what does she see in him?). Savage's character is effective but could have given us more understanding of why he became who he is. Savage spares no family member his brutality and cruelty. Oldest son Jimmy (Ryan Phillippe) receives even more denigration than his two younger brothers. The tension as Savage and Phillippe both realize that Jimmy's now reaching the age where he may be able to stand up to Savage and therefore threaten his dominance over the family is brilliantly played.' -- IMDb

Excerpt

Excerpt

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Mike Figgis One Night Stand (1997)
'The film is narrated by Max Carlyle (Wesley Snipes). Max lives in California, where he has a successful career directing television commercials and is happily married to Mimi (Ming-Na Wen), with whom he has two children. While visiting New York City, Max meets Karen (Nastassja Kinski) by chance after missing a flight; circumstances keep bringing them together over the course of the evening, and they end up spending the night together. The film is directed by British director Mike Figgis. The first draft of the screenplay was written by Joe Eszterhas, who had his name removed from the project following Figgis' rewrite.' -- Box Office Mojo

Excerpt

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Neil LaBute Your Friends and Neighbors (1998)
'Neil LaBute's Your Friends & Neighbors is quite possibly the meanest film I have ever seen. These characters are some of, if not, the worst I have ever come across. What makes them worse than, say Hannibal Lecter, is how they stealthily move behind each others backs to wound each other in the worst and most emotionally damaging ways. You should not be treading lightly when you sit down to view this picture. It's a nasty piece of work.' -- Steven Carrier

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Aruna Villiers À ton image (2004)
'In order to put a painful past and a terrible sense of guilt behind her, a sterile young woman named Mathilde (played by Nastassja Kinski) uses extreme cloning methods to give birth to Manon (Audrey DeWilder), and is comforted by her obstetrician husband Thomas (Christopher Lambert). The child’s growth is abnormally rapid and she becomes the splitting image of her mother. Gradually, the relation between them evolves in an odd manner as Manon takes over her mother’s role in the family.' -- Wikipedia

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The making of ...

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David Lynch Inland Empire (2006)
'Nowadays, Nastassja Kinski is rarely seen on the screen and it is not a matter of being not in demand. With age, the actress learned how to choose roles. After the disastrous comedies Fathers’ Day and Town and Country, the actress refused to star in mainstream films concentrating on low-budget, art-house and television cinema. Her last on-screen appearance was an episode in Inland Empire by David Lynch in 2006. When asked about Inland Empire, Lynch has responded that it is "about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's all I want to say about it." When presenting screenings of the digital work, Lynch sometimes offers a clue in the form of a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."' -- All rovi

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Outtake
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*

p.s. Hey. Let's see ... oh, the Centre Pompidou's website now has an official mini-site about TEENAGE HALLUCINATION. It's in French, but, if you're interested yet don't know French, the info there is fairly easy to glean, and there's a complete listing of the festival's events with dates and times as well as links to where tickets can be purchased for the three events that aren't free. The mini-site is here. Also, I'll be updating the English language TE page I made with the final line up and ticket purchasing options and so on in the next couple of days. ** Jax, Hey. I don't really ever dance apart from this one uncontrollable outburst at a Gang of Four gig a million years ago, but I've had my movements compromised and rendered rhythmic while listening to TG on occasion, if that counts. I know a bit about that film 'Michael'. It played at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and it was pretty much admired by critics. I'm definitely interested to see it. You going? I'm okay, considering, thanks, pal. You? ** Bollo, Cold here too. I seem to have lost my gloves, and I'm feeling it. We actually got some quite light but wholly visible snow on Sunday morning. I'll definitely find and check out that Motto Bookshop site. Thanks. ** Michael, Hey, M. Oh, man, thank you from the bottom of my heart for those words about 'TMS'. It comes at a very good time, and, yeah, just thank you so very much. I'm extremely proud of that novel, and your support for my belief in it really means a lot. Yeah, one more thank you. Take care, man. ** David Ehrenstein, How nice it must have been to see 'Swoon' projected again not to mention in the company of Tom and Craig Chester. Craig is an awfully good actor, and I wish he'd been given far more opportunities to show it. He's even really good in that miserable 'Frisk' film. ** Tosh, Yeah, dying to read the Richard Seaver book. How fantastic it would have been to be able to meet him. Have you ever met Barney Rosset? I've never had the honor, unfortunately. ** Wolf, Telling you about Doctor Love would be breaking doctor/client confidentiality, and I can't do that, ha ha. ** A.r., You can take the singer out of the actor, but I don't think it works the other way around. Love to you, maestro. ** Steevee, I haven't seen 'The Ballad of ... ', but I feel like half the people I know have. From what I've heard, it (the film) isn't great, but they (G&J) are riveting. ** Rewritedept, Ah, you're back in the classic way. Very cool about the shows. I hope the second short gig went really well too. Oh yeah, isn't Andrew WK doing a 'back to his big moment in the spotlight' tour? What a curious artist that guy turned out to be. Some of my books are out of stock at Amazon? I guess that's one of those good and bad news things. Thanks again for kindly loading up on my stuff. Sorry about your mom. My mom used to get like that with me. Stressful. Oh, wait, I just refreshed the page and saw a new comment from you that answers my query about the second gig. So, violent fantasies are the secret behind on your onstage magnetism? Anyway, more commiserating re: your parents, and stay gold, and I hope your Monday arrived sunnily. ** Chris Goode, Well, yeah, that's what I've been thinking way over here: that if that new work of yours doesn't scare you, then nothing would. Or something like that. Oh, thank you a gazillion for the stuff you sent me. How amazing to get to watch those clips! What a joy! I've lodged all or practically all of your gifts into the post, and, thanks to you, was able to turn a simple 'Spotlight ... ' post into a full-fledged Christopher Knowles Day. You rule multiply and multiplicitously. ** Sypha, The magnificence you wrought may have slid into the archives today, but it will live on, instruct, thrill, and so forth eternally or for as long as there are search engines and adventurers with keyboards. Ha ha, I did get a kick out of that B&N story. Who the hell is Dennis Cooper indeed! Well, just for that, I'm glad the Patriots lost that football thing yesterday. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. My weekend? Hm, worked at the Pompidou pretty much all of Saturday, wrote a bit, caught up on things a bit, enjoyed a far too light dusting of snow on Sunday morning, wrote a bit, did Pompidou homework, ... It was okay. Oh, your friend's festival sounds super cool and fun. Yeah, let me ... hm, how best to do this ... Everyone, d.l. Thomas Moronic has a friend who has organized a pretty great sounding festival at CHAMELEON Arts Cafe in Nottingham that will take place this coming March. Here's the official announcement: '9-11 March 2012: THE RAMMEL WEEKENDER: Harbinger Sound and Rammel Club present a weekend of deranged sound blah. Pummeling riffs, abstract sound art, heavy electronics, late license, dancefloor action, punk legends, free jazz and improv we gots it all. This is just the opening salvo, check back soon for more artist information. Confirmed artists are: Astral Social Club, Belied Gunaiku, Bill Kouligas, Blood Stereo, Bong, Cheapmachines, Con-Dom, Dieter Muh, Ekoplekz, Ellen Mary McGee & Sophie Mary Cooper, Heatsick, John Wall & Mark, Durgan, John Wiese, Kogumaza, Makakarooma, Modulator ESP, Nacht Und Nebel, Nick Jonah Davis, Patrick Farmer, Patrik Fitzgerald, Sleaford Mods, Spoils & Relics, Storm Bugs, Surfacing, Swallows, These Feathers Have Plumes + maybe a very special unannounced guest or two. D.J.s : Idwal Fisher, Steve Underwood, Feral Debris, etc. For tickets (about £30 for the weekend) and any more information go here. I would so totally haunt that thing if I had the chance. ** Postitbreakup, Thanks, Josh. I am otherwise doing okay. How are you? Are you making headway with the novel? ** Alan, It always depresses me when artists my age, and G-PO is roughly my age and, thus, perhaps 'getting old' but not old enough to have age as a decent excuse, in my opinion, draw the line on something new and then not only cease investigating it but start lionizing their personal memories then developing and proposing a dictum that says, in effect, that their youth was more daring than that of the currently young. I think I would have to be younger or will have to become even older than I am to find that charming. ** JoeM, Hi, Joe. Nice Crisp quote and way of seeing things. What is Pete Burns' reasoning behind what he has done to his face? I'm sure he has explained, but I guess I've never read those interviews. I've been following that teen murder case you linked to. It's a complicated one and very sad. Jack Frew seems like a very sympathetic boy/figure. Just awful and yet fascinating too. ** Tender prey, Hi, Marc! Yes, we're lodged inside the Pompidou itself now on an almost daily basis. Right now we're working on the specific 'TH' installation in Espace 315, which is quite a task and complicated, and I think we'll start installing the 'Read Into My Black Holes' exhibition later this week. So far so good, and the glitches have been solvable thus far. Gisele goes on tour with our work soon, and I'll have to man the fort by myself for about a week, which will be ... well, a lot. Yeah, Mike's death is a heavy and awful and confusing thing. Losing such a great artist is hard enough, but losing both a good friend and a great hero of mine is something I'm having a hard time dealing with. Thanks for the good words, and, yes, I can not wait to see you! ** Pisycaca, Hugs to you too, Montse! ** Jon Reiss, Hi, Jon. Oh, thanks, man. Yeah, LdC's father was/is an underground comix artist and distributor, and he was a presence and figure in the early LA art scene of the 60s and 70s. LdC handled the Jim Carroll role much better, I agree. But, gosh, how hard would it be to embody Rimbaud as an actor? There's obviously a reason why there haven't been more films made about him given what a fascinating life story he has. BEE does write good sex scenes, yes, I agree. Um, I guess my problem with erotic scenes in fiction is that writers, even really good ones, tend to take a very conventional approach and only add a little style to to the mix. But I think writing well about sex is very hard because sex defies language and generally causes the people involved to suppress the creativity they have involving verbal communication. The effect of sex has this weird quality of being very internalized and inexpressible, and, simultaneously, the physical playing out of sex seems very mechanical and samey and conventionally structured if you're not involved, which makes writing about it very difficult because the value and power of sex lies in how it takes one away from, say, analysis and insecurities and other basic human instincts that form the meat of fiction. It seems like most writers either go pornographic, which tends to erase the content of the sex, or they avoid the nitty gritty and end up hiding way too much. I don't know. I write about sex a lot, obviously, and I'm perpetually trying to figure out how best to do that, and perhaps I'm too interested in trying to make a mountain out of a molehill or something. Well, I sure hope that thing you've been obsessing about comes to fruition. Fingers crossed for you on that. Do you like reading with music behind you? I don't at all. I tried it, and it just never ever worked for me or for the way I write/read, I guess. ** _Black_Acrylic, Good, good about you feeling chipper. Let me know what happens during the Skype call this evening, if you don't mind. ** Paul Curran, Howdy, Paul! How's it? ** Chris Cochrane, Yes, quite soon! Cool about the recording session, man. Maximize your Monday. ** Frank Jaffe, Hey Frank! I'm still excitedly awaiting the arrival and unveiling of my personal copy of The Zine! They showed the Super Bowl live on French TV last night for the first time. That made me sad. At least it was on in the middle of the night. Hope your crowd digs the films. Did they? Very awesome about the Liturgy/Sleigh Bells/Diplo show! What an excellent line-up. I like 'em all, especially Liturgy. Wring today of all it's worth, man. ** 5strings, Weird Zappa family stuff. But, mm, what would one expect? Yeah, Godard blows the mind. I don't think Truffaut ever did. But I guess he didn't try to. Or maybe he did. He was good in 'Close Encounters'. What's been the haps with you? Other than what you told me, not that what you told me wasn't enough. I guess I'm just feeling greedy. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Rumbling events, excellent, spill when you can afford to. Nothing but work here. Well, work leading towards rumbling events, I guess. ** Misanthrope, If Xanax weren't such a double edged sword, well ... I miss it sometimes. The only drugs I ever seem to really miss are the kind of dumb ass ones: Xanax, coke. We should Skype someday or a lot sooner than someday. Let's sort it out. That is some twisted, half-assed thinking on your friend's part, obviously, no offense. Does she actually read fiction? I mean, even Stephen King and Dan Brown and those types don't live what they dream up. I mean, one could do nothing but think of counter-examples for the rest of one's life. How could Spielberg know what it's like for a kid to say goodbye to a talking alien from outer space? Still, I imagine your logic will get you nowhere with her, and I guess just enjoy the friendship you have within its perimeters? ** Jared, Hey! Agreed, obviously, yeah, about the pieces on Mike. I don't think reading and smoking weed and watching movies is inherently a sign of depression. It sounds kind of really nice to me at the moment. I guess I would replace the weed with, hm, iced tea, ha ha. What are you reading and watching? That's probably the telling aspect. You don't have any good male friends there? That does suck. Did you ever meet my best friend/roommate Joel? Try him. He's really cool. I'm hanging in there, thank you for asking, J. ** Okay. The post: I got to thinking about Nastassja Kinski, and guess what happened? Pretty simple. See you tomorrow.

Sypha presents ... Music From The Death Factory: A Throbbing Gristle Primer, Part 2 (of 2)

2012-02-04T00:59:00.000-08:00

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Part Two: The Endless Not

Part Two: The Endless Not was TG’s first major studio album since 1981. Originally to have been released by Mute in September of 2006, for some reason it was delayed and finally came out on April Fool’s Day, 2007. The cover art is a photograph of Mt. Kailash. Thee album has 10 songs, and in a nod to D.O.A. each of the 4 individual band members contributes a solo track.

Although E enjoy it more now than E did thee first time E heard it, E still can’t help butter feel that thee album is a missed opportunity, with thee backing music sounding too much either like Coil or Chris & Cosey but just not much like TG: ironically, these days E find Gen’s singing on it thee most interesting part ov thee album, butter E recall feeling thee opposite way thee first time E heard thee album. It does have a few good tracks: thee opening song, “Vow Of Silence,” is especially good: Wire magazine described it as “Promethean menagerie of shrieks, whoops and drones, as if TG have been uncaged, let loose again.” Track 2, “Rabbit Snare,” is a disturbing jazz number that wouldn’t sound out ov place in a David Lynch film, and track 5, an instrumental named “Greasy Spoon,” is a great homage to thee old TG style (in fact, it’s one ov the few tracks on thee album that sounds genuinely like TG). Cosey’s solo track, “Above The Below,” is perhaps thee best ov the solo contributions, featuring her haunting cornet playing. But most ov thee rest of thee album just sounds slightly uninspired to me. Still, even lackluster TG is better than no TG at all.

Vow of Silence:

Rabbit Snare:

Greasy Spoon:

TG Live

“During its existence from 1976 to 1981, Throbbing Gristle recorded five highly influential studio albums, but their true power always lay in the live performances. The four individual members played equally vital roles in focusing their improvised sounds into a throbbing mass of rhythm and noise. These manifestations became a focal point of major social gatherings for people who hungered for diverse and challenging information and often triggered further developments and interactive pursuits. This in turn brought about friendships and collaborations which gave birth to the ‘industrial’ music scene of the late 70’s. Many of those attending TG performances went on to become influential artists in their own right. The aim of TG’s live work was to dispel any pre-conceived idea of what a ‘gig’ should be, and they adopted various tactics and audio experiments to stimulate and involve the audience with their work. These included the use of high power Halogen lamps directed toward the audience, Strobe lights, industrial strength Negative Ion Generator (which often discharged itself creating a spectacular arc of electricity) and a 6 foot wall of mirrors at the rear of the stage.”

-text from Throbbing Gristle Live Vol. I, by Cosey Fanni Tutti

Throbbing Gristle made their debut live appearance at thee AIR Gallery on Shaftsbury Avenue in London on July 6th, 1976. TG put forth a press release to document thee occasion:

EVENT: “MUSIC FROM THE DEATH FACTORY” live disconcert by THROBBING GRISTLE

PERSONNEL: The members of THROBBING GRISTLE wish to remain anonymous.

SOUND: Produced on Analogue Synthesiser; Minikorg synthesizer; Electric Violin; Bass Guitar; Lead Guitar; Percussion; Prepared Tapes. Projected through 800 Watt Quadrophonic P.A. System.

“Imagine walking down blurred streets of havoc, post-civilisation, stray dogs eating refuse, wind creeping across tendrils. It’s 1984. The only reality is waiting. Mortal. It’s the death factory society, hypnotic mechanical grinding, music of hopelessness. Film music to cover the holocaust. Tantra of the subliminal, word falling, photo falling. In a nostalgia for feeling totally sterile endless tribal music. Thee tribe of mutations, street gangs lobotomized in the Death Factory. It never ends. TV children trying to prepare themselves, meditating on, cease to exist. First LIVE London concert of music by THROBBING GRISTLE to be released later this year on record. Disturbing, cruel, inexorable, yet calming if you hold on brief for life. The music of 1984 has arrived. Made up of various people from all creative areas, post-psychedelic trash, vanguard for thee Wild Boys, death seekers.”

However, it wasn’t until TG’s 3rd performance (at thee I.C.A. in London on Oct. 18th, 1976), that they finally reached a higher degree ov notoriety. Actually part of an eight day exhibition entitled Prostitution put on by COUM to showcase some ov Cosey’s work for pornographic magazines, thee show caused a scandal due to the fact that it featured, among other things, used tampons and pages from some of thee pornographic magazines that Cosey had appeared in. To quote Simon Ford’s book:

“The morning after the opening COUM and the ICA awoke to a deluge of press coverage. The most spectacular came from the Daily Mail (19 October 1976) with its photograph of Siouxsie and Steve Severin and its description of Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn having to fight his way through Hell’s Angels and young men with multi-colored hair, lipstick and nail varnish. Fairbairn described what he saw as ‘a sickening outrage. Sadistic. Obscene. Evil… Public money is being wasted here to destroy the morality of our society. These people are the wreckers of civilization.’”

That same day, in The Daily Telegraph, Fairbairn went on to write, “every social evil is celebrated… there were a few photographs which attempted to make prostitutes look like victims instead of the vultures which they are. Otherwise, there were sadistic exhibitions of used Tampax in abundance and bloody sanitary towels and sticks and flails.”

Of course, Mr. Fairbairn was no stranger to bad press himself:

Having said that E feel that P-Orridge was able to gather far more enviable headlines:

In any event, Prostitution marked thee gradual end ov the COUM TRANSMISSIONS project and thee ascent ov TG. Playing to an audience ov 600-800 people, P-Orridge introduced thee band in the following manner:

“We’d like to thank you all for coming tonight. It’s nice to know there are so many pop fans in London. Tonight we’re going to do a one hour set called Music From the Death Factory. It’s basically about the post-breakdown of civilization. You know, you walk down the street and there’s a lot of ruined factories and bits of old newspaper with stories about pornography and page three pin-ups, blowing down the street, and you turn a corner past the dead dog and you see old dustbins. And then over the ruined factory there’s a funny noise.”

With that, TG launched into “Very Friendly,” one of their earlier songs, an 18+ minute discourse on Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s murder ov Edward Evans.

Many ov TG’s earlier live shows featured lyrics that revolved around serial killers. Consider thee track “Urge To Kill,” which was played only once live, at the Rat Club in Central London on Dec. 17th, 1977, in which P-Orridge narrated a song about serial killer Edmund Emil Kemper to thee tune ov Humpty Dumpty:

“Ed Kemper- he loved his mama/ Ed Kemper- he had a big car/ And all the police forces and all the policemen/ Couldn’t put those girls back together again…/ It’s hard to stab girls to death in their back/ So he’d lop off their head with one great big whack/ Then drive the bodies back to mama’s nice house/ And creep inside with them quiet as a mouse/ Cut bits off and eat them like meat/ Then fuck the corpses rekindling their heat…”

(that same show featured a song entitled “Assume Power Focus” in which Genesis repeatedly said to the audience “all I want you to do is go out and kill” over a crescendo ov piercing air raid sirens).

As the years went by, TG began to abandon such alienating tactics when they felt they were becoming too predictable. As P-Orridge once said (in 1978), “We use no blood now, no topless. Each show is different visually. Whatever people expect, whatever we know they think we might do, we definitely exclude. Ask one person from each gig to describe us, our one hour sound visually, everyone will tell you different and contradictory things. It’s a shame, E like drinking blood but E can’t do it anymore because it becomes a stage trick, expected.”

Many songs that appear on TG’s albums began as live songs. Before gigs P-Orridge would often ask his band mates what they wanted him to sing about. One time Sleazy suggested “Persuasion,” and another time Cosey suggested “Discipline.” These would go on to become two of TG’s most iconic songs. Also, there were many songs that TG only performed once in concert, than never played again. This makes their live shows very unique and exciting to listen to, in my opinion (and yes, E have listened to all ov their original 36 live shows: multiple times).

One ov my favorites of thee old TG live shows is thee concert they held at thee London Lyceum stage on 8 February 1981, which at thee time would prove to be thee group’s final performance in Britain. Seen by some as what Simon Ford referred to as “the first major show of strength for the still growing industrial movement,” also sharing the bill that night were NON, Z’ev, Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire. For this show TG employed church organ samples, P-Orridge’s ritualistic drumming, and an epic 20 minute version of “Discipline.”

The first phase of TG’s live period ended in May 1979, when thee band played two shows in California, thee first being at Veterans Auditorium in LA on Friday May 22nd and thee final show being played at Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco on Friday May 29th (with Flipper as the support group: they played a 90 minute version ov thee track “Subhuman”).

Slightly under a month after thee gig at Kezar, TG officially broke up, on June 23, 1981. To commemorate thee occasion, a postcard was issued with thee words “The Mission is Terminated” on thee front and, on thee back, thee following message:

“Following the termination of the TG project we are now no longer accepting any mail orders. During the coming year all TG records will become available under license to other companies in various parts of the world. Seek and ye shall find.

The last live concert of Throbbing Gristle took place at the Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco on the 29th of May, 1981. The archetype has been investigated, the information is stored.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Cari Saluti,

Chris Carter
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Peter Christopherson
Genesis P-Orridge”

According to P-Orridge, TG sold 180,000 records between 1977-1981.

"Her body was found in Grange Wood Park, Thornton Heath, wrapped in a newspaper and placed in a 'Jubilee' plastic carrier bag. It was left in the ladies' lavatory sometime during Monday 20 June, that's over three weeks ago. The child had been strangled."

List of TG’s live shows during thee first phase ov its existence:

Air Gallery, London 08 Jul 1976

Winchester 21 Aug 1976

I.C.A., London 18th Oct 1976

Nags Head, High Wycombe 11 Feb 1977

Brighton Polytechnic 26 Mar 1977

Nuffield Theatre, Southampton 07 May 1977

Rat Club, Pindar, London 22 May 1977

Highbury Roundhouse, London 29 Sep 1977

Winchester Art School 11 Nov 1977

Rat Club, Valentino Rooms, London 17 Dec 1977

Brighton Polytechnic 25 Feb 1978

Architectural Association, London 03 Mar 1978

Goldsmith's College, London 18 May 1978

Industrial Training College, Wakefield 01 Jul 1978

Film Makers Co-Op, London 08 Jul 1978

Cryptic One Club, London 11 Nov 1978

Centro Iberico, London 21 Jan 1979

Ajanta Cinema, Derby 12 Apr 1979

Sheffield University 25 Apr 1979

The Factory, Manchester 19 May 1979

Guild Hall, Northampton 28 May 1979

Y.M.C.A., London 03 Aug 1979

Butlers Wharf, London 23 Dec 1979

Fan Club, Leeds 24 Feb 1980

Scala Cinema, London 29 Feb 1980

St. John the Baptist Church, Penistone, UK 13 Mar 1980

Oundle Public School, UK 16 Mar 1980

Sheffield University 10 Jun 1980

SO36 Club, Berlin, Germany 7 Nov 1980

SO36 Club, Berlin, Germany 8 Nov 1980

Kunsthofschule, Frankfurt, Germany 10 Nov 1980

Rafters Club, Manchester, UK 4 Dec 1980

Heaven, London 23 Dec 1980

Lyceum, London 8 Feb 1981

Veterans Auditorium, Los Angeles, USA 22 May 1981

Kezar Pavillion, San Francisco, USA 29 May 1981

Starting in 2004 and lasting on till 2010, TG began to play further live concerts. A list ov thee live shows from TG’s second phase ov existence may be found at this link:

http://www.throbbing-gristle.com/tg-files/performance.html

In 1980 TG released a cassette box set ov their first 24 live shows. 22 years later, in 2002, Mute would release a new box set, TG24, containing 25 CDs featuring TG’s first 26 live shows: in effect, over 24 hours ov Throbbing Gristle music. Thee box set included thee following items: a certificate ov authenticity, a wax sealed envelope, two patches, three stickers, four pictures ov Throbbing Gristle, four collage prints (1 of 2 made by each member ov thee band specifically for the release), three button badges and a newsletter with a history ov thee group and thee track listing ov thee box set.

A detailed examination ov thee contents ov thee TG24 & TG+ box sets may be found at this link:

http://nonplus.desensitised.net/tg24/tg24guide2.html

This was thee certificate ov authenticity that came with my copy of TG24:

And here is an example ov two ov thee postcards that came with thee box set:

In 2004, Mute released another TG box set, TG +, which collected thee last ten live shows from thee first phase ov TG’s existence.

Live reactions:

“ANYONE who reads the juicier Sunday and popular newspapers will know the name of Throbbing Gristle.

One may have asked in passing: "Who are these weidies?" I still don't know who they are, or why they should have attracted such publicity, and I went out of my way to see them perform at the Nag's Head pub in High Wycombe on Friday.

Well, I say perform because just at the moment I seem to be lost for words to describe what went on.

I make no apology for saying I am a lover of heavy, noisy, jarring ear-splitting music. I'm young and strong and I can take it. But I had a job to keep my pint in my stomach as I listened to the muck which was Throbbing Gristle's claim to fame.

An ape with his hands severed can thump just as violently on a bass guitar as Genesis did. I thought that was bad, but when he picked up his electric violin and suddenly the place was full of agonised cats.

I can't be sure that he was trying to sing, and I couldn't make out every word he screamed into the microphone, but it sounded like I should have ignored the man and gone home. Our Photographer gave up early. I wish I'd followed him.
But I waited, and watched dumbfounded as Cosey Fanni Tutti bared both her chest and her ignorance of music, and Genesis poured artificial blood over his head and spat it onto the stage.

At least he did stop playing for a while - but only to shout obscenities at the audience and throw a table across the hall. Then he invited half a dozen youngsters from the cat-calling and jeering audience onto the stage, and he handed them the instruments. They sounded better than Throbbing Gristle, even though they couldn't play a note.

Those youngsters paid 75p to go into the hall and listen to the stomach-churning travesty of music which Throbbing Gristle was oozing into the Nag's Head.

The landlord, Mick Fitzgibbon, told me that the youngsters were about ready to throw Genesis P-Orridge, plus his equipment, boldly through the door.

"I'll never have them back here," he said. "The kids were threatening to punch the promoter, and I don't blame them."

However Gig Reserves, the promoters, want to make amends to customers of the Nag's Head. They promise that next weekend's band, Phil Ram, is good, and not to be missed. I think I'll go along to make sure.”

-Keith Baldock, Midweek, 16 February 1977

“THROBBING GRISTLE are hard to categorise or describe, and they probably won't like any of the comparisons that follow, but: If you were looking at them from a Seventies art-rock cum punk/New Wave viewpoint, the closest you could get would be to say they sounded like Suicide or Pere Ubu (although they're less orthodox/rhythmic than either of these two USA groups). If you wanted to convert a hippie, you'd have to throw in references to Hawkwind and maybe a bit of the weirder Gong. For the intellectual market, name drop John Cage and Eno (for young intellectuals). Disco fans could be amused by the electronic rhythmic pulses a la Donner Summer. Ultimately, they maybe sound like a straight band trying to play a song while taped sound checks of all the aforementioned people are played over the PA and someone fiddles with a radio in the background. All of which makes them sound very unsaleable, but they're not (maybe).

I like rock'n'roll, mainly, with overtones of intelligence thrown in. This ain't rock'n'roll by any means, but I kind of like it and there's no reason why it shouldn't sell on a large scale. I mean, no one ever thought Tangerine Dream or Can would make money. But for the moment, they only get the occasional funny gig like this one (check out the Rat Club gig soon), where they played to an audience of, I dunno, maybe 20 people?

They come on and blast the audience with blazing white light which persists throughout the set and makes it difficult to look in the direction of the stage. The numbers roll from one to the next. Strange songs about licking blood and stuff, and one which tells us there'll be no rock, no boogie, no . . . They play for one hour exactly (it's timed).

After they stop, a young black kid asks another, "Ain't there any reggae tonight?" The Throbbing Gristle album will be out soon.”

-Sandy Robertson, Sounds, 15 October 1977

“Sensory Overload

Throbbing Gristle - Film Makers Co-op, London

PLAY GAMES with people's minds and you risk having something very nasty on your hands, as Throbbing Gristle probably know only too well. I could be very cool and say they're simply reiterating the blinding machine scream of early Kraftwerk (circa 'Stratovarius'), literally bombarding the audience with painful, frightening noise. But there's something else going on, something that isn't very nice.

Coincidence or intent. They play beneath a red, black and white logo that is just one step removed from the sort of runic symbols used by various right wing organisations. Their PA is two 'H'-shaped speakers on either side of the stage; HH, 88, Column 88 - the interpretation is tenuous, but it is there. And a young roadie dressed completely in black 'guards' the stage. I could, of course, be wildly off course in this, or Genesis P-Orridge's infamously weird tastes could be leaning towards bizarre totalitarian chic.

Having removed the audience's inhibitions with art-porn movies (I missed the one with the guy getting castrated with a pair of scissors), they might have expected something to happen. They managed to play half an hour or so (I lost all sense of time) before the gig was truncated by violence. (See Our Man On The Floor In A Pool Of Blood for account).

Waves of stomach-churning noise, intestinal gurgles of oscillator and phased percussive synthesiser rhythm filled the room. It was a hurricane of loud, inhuman and disorientating noise roaring around the 'eye' of the stage. Intimidating bassy growls vibrated the room and wild vocalese and spine-snapping guitar flailed out from the stage.

It took on the atmosphere of some Fluxus 'happening' rather than the usual passive musical recital. A sensory overload of awesome noise that places the audience in a very volatile situation. The fracas appears to have stemmed from a couple of stupid morons who couldn't handle Throbbing Gristle's provocative music. But even the group seemed loathe to accept the situation their music forced the audience into. As the room began to resemble a furniture warehouse being attacked by poltergeists, they stopped playing with one final disgusted scream of white noise. Stunning but dangerous music.”

-John Gill, Sounds, 15 July 1978

“Imagine the Stranglers backwards… (a compliment)

“Throbbing Gristle - Cryptic One Club

A youth club under a church. A cramped cellar, lots of arches. The "stage" is 15 feet deep and six feet wide. Twenty at most of the audience can see it. A few more can see part of it. In a corner lager is being sold for 50 pence a can. The writing on the wall doesn't say "a culture never falls to pieces, it just gives birth", but that's only 'cos I'd forgotten my chalk. 
It was hot, crowded, murky, NOISY now and then, silent but mostly decadent. 

Minutes before nine, Genesis P.Orridge introduces (one by one, good lad) Throbbing Gristle, and himself as David Brooks. "Bruce Forsyth has nearly finished," he mumbles, his voice treated and blotted. "To-night is family evening. We usually play for about an hour." 

Genesis P.Orridge is the ultimate rock comedian. Throbbing Gristle's set was funny. A remote parody of a rock (or whatever) group seriously performing bleached, blank, carefully-composed junk. A remote parody of anyone from David Coverdale's White Snake to the Tom Robinson Band. 

Throbbing Gristle understand rock music's terrible tedium and the thin line between white noise and Thin Lizzy. 

T.G. used tapes, guitars, radios, tv's, voices, fingers, rings, a bass, eyes, intensity, a violin, stupidity, gullibility, electronics and stimulants to spew out a rotting, decaying noise. A seagull hiccoughing and amplified? The Stranglers backwards? As musical as Pere Ubu? Or Yes? No. 

Inevitably, when people improvise moments of repeated sound are attained (unlike a rock gig where the whole thing is stiflingly preplanned). Some parts of this T.G. would sound good on record. This doesn't mean that they succeeded or failed; just that they functioned. 

Orridge stiffly stalked the space between amps, instruments and walls, blindly strumming a bass, distorting and macho roles, teasing the sense of control, singing nonsense that could have meant something, sawing a violin, and shing a bright light on the dumfounded, wide-eyed audience. Their response was pride, fear or defiance. It was funny. I didn't laugh out loud. But I smirked. 
The ultimate poseur, I thought, is someone who dances to Throbbing Gristle. And Throbbing Gristle went on and on … just like a rock group.”

-Paul Morley, NME, 18 November 1978

Live Footage

(Performing “Urge To Kill” at the Rat Club Dec 17 1977) AUDIO ONLY

(Performing “Cabaret Voltaire” at the Wakefield Industrial Training College 1978 July 1) AUDIO ONLY

(Performing “Weapon Training” & “Ee Ahh Ooh” at Ajante Cinema April 12 1979) AUDIO ONLY

(Performing “Hamburger Lady” at Guild Hall, Northampton May 26th, 1979)

(performing “Something Came Over me” at Oundle School March 16, 1980)

(full concert of TG playing live at Sheffield University 10 June 1980)

(full concert of TG playing live at Rafters, Manchester 4 December 1980)

(performing “Discipline” live at Heaven 23 December 1980)

(full concert of TG playing live at thee Lyceum 8 February 1981)

(performing “Vision and Voice” live at Kezar Pavilion on May 29, 1981)

(performing “Discipline” live at Kezar Pavilion on May 29, 1981. This is one ov my all-time favorite live clips from any band and it features P-Orridge’s infamous kiss with an ecstatic skinhead)

(performing “Persuasion” live 2004)

Photographic Evidence

Another version ov thee TG “lightning flash” logo.

Another TG logo. One ov thee more common ones, actually.

TG’s current logo, a variation on thee “Endless Knot” ov Buddhism.

Sticker ov thee TG slogan “Nothing Short of Total War.”

1976 poster advertising COUM/TG’s Prostitution show.

-1977 postcard TG sent to various promoters.

Collage artwork taken from thee “Five Knuckle Shuffle” single.

Calendar that came with some ov thee early editions of D.O.A.

1980 photograph ov Sleazy and Brion Gysin in Paris.

Publicity photo ov TG taken in 1976, when Chris and Genesis were still rocking thee hippy look. In thee liner notes to Second Annual Report Genesis observed that by that point in time thee long hair, jeans and black leather jacket look had become totally unfashionable.

TG posing in a park in the UK, 1978.

1980 picture ov TG posing at Industrial Records Studio.

1979 picture ov TG, included as a poster in thee first edition ov thee 20 Jazz Funk Greats album.

1980 picture ov TG posing in their custom-made camouflage outfits.

1980 picture ov TG posing at thee Berlin Wall.

TG in 1981?

1981 picture ov TG in San Francisco.

Veteran’s Auditorium, where TG played thee second to last concert ov their first phase.

Publicity photograph ov all thee members of TG in 2002.

TG as featured in thee July 2007 issue ov The Wire magazine.

TG in Berlin in 2006.

TG at I.C.A. in 2007.

Here is my personal collection ov TG CDs, including all thee live CDs from thee two box sets and also thee TGDVD box set (in between thee two live box sets at thee top of thee photo). Bootleg CDs (there are many) not included in this photo.

Here are various TG-related books, video cassettes, postcards, and much ov thee ephemera that was included with thee TG24 box set, all from my personal collection.

When E first started getting into TG, during a time period in which many ov their lyrics had yet to appear on thee internet, E would often listen to thee albums myself and carefully try to figure out what Gen was singing about. Here’s a scan of one ov my notebooks from thee year 2000 in which E tried to transcribe thee lyrics to “Slug Bait” by ear. E was pretty close.

TG Lyrics

Very Friendly 

It was just an ordinary day in Manchester.

 Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, drinking German wine.  

Her mother had gone to bed upstairs. She slept very well.

 They used to give her three Seconal every night with her cocoa.

 And Ian Brady put on his best clothes, and his blue seude shoes, and he decided to go out with Myra Hindley, as it was six months, on one of those special days. So, Myra Hindley put on a dark wig and drove Ian Brady to the Mainline station, and while she stayed in the car, Ian Brady went cruising on the platform.  

That night Edwards Evans was also getting dressed in his best... 

And his mother, who didn't know that he was a little bit...inclined to the young men, wished him well as he slicked his hair and put on his winkle pickers, and he went down to the Mainline station.  

He waited for about an hour and he was beginning to think there wasn't gonna be any train that night. And then somebody came towards him wearing blue seude shoes and it was Ian Brady. And he introduced himself and he said, "Hi, my name's Ian. I saw you, uh, down at The Viking last week. Why don't you come back to my place and we can, uh, drink some German wine. I've got a car around the corner. My sister's there, she'll drive us back. It's only in Hyde, it's not too far. If it gets late, you can always stay the night."

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

 Very friendly  

So Edward Evans and Ian Brady went to the car and Myra Hindley drove them back to the little council house, said hello to the dog when they went in the front door, and her mother was still asleep upstairs. And she made some excuses and switched on the TV set. And it was "This Is Your Life" with Eamonn Andrews interviewing a Stanley Matthews. And she went into the kitchen, said she wanted to make some sandwiches for work tomorrow. And Ian Brady and Edward Evans sat on the sofa, and Ian Brady started to play with Edward Evans' fly. And he got a muddle, a couple glasses, and right underneath the photograph of Myra Hindley's mother they started to drink, drinking German wine.

  And Myra Hindley went over, up the road, to see David Smith and Maureen Pobo, her sister. But David Smith didn't have his shirt on and he was drinking tea with his wife. They had the TV set on, too. "It's all in the Game"...'s only information. And she said to David Smith, "Why don't you come back to our place, David? We've got something rather special to show you." And he said, "Ok, let me just, uh, put on my jacket." And they both set off, walking through the night, walking through Hyde to their little house. On one side of the house looking...looking out onto the porch. And he knocked on the door. But he was used to that, because Ian Brady had some funny habits.

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley 

Very friendly

  And when he got inside the house he heard some funny noises in the front room over Eamonn Andrews' voice. And Myra Hindley said, "Why don't you go in there David? You might like what you see." So he opened the door while Myra went into the kitchen to get some more German wine. When he went inside he looked up at the sofa and there was Ian Brady chopping at Edward Evans' head with an ax. And he was chopping, and chopping, and the ax was going into the back of his neck and there was blood skirting over the Church of England prayer book. A few drops landed on the TV screen and ran down Eamonn Andrews' cheek, and some bits of bone and white brain landed onto the hearth, just near the brass brush that they used to sweep the chimney. And there was lino on the floor, which was lucky. And it took quite a few hits before Edward Evans gargled. Ian Brady asked David Smith for some rope which he had a stick he used to play with his dog. And they put it around Edward Evans' neck and they pulled it tight till he strangled, and he made a strange noise..... 

[noises] 

and then he died! And he was just a lump of stuff, just a bit more information!

  Ian Brady and Myra fucking Hindley

 very very friendly

  And when David Smith could...up to help him wrap up the body in polythene and take it upstairs, he make excuses, and left, worried, frightened. Very friendly. And he went home to his wife, Maureen Pobo, and he told her what had happened, and they agreed that they should have to tell the police. But they were very frightened, so they stayed awake all night holding one of their knives from the kitchen and hoping that Ian Brady wouldn't come around and say anything else. And then eventually it was morning. And they went out of the house at about 8 o'clock. And outside into the street, they didn't know who it was gonna be. It was Mrs. Bradley walking her dog, a little white poodle, and Mrs. Martin going to Lloyds Bank to clean the waste-paper baskets. And they went quickly up the road till they got to the red telephone box. and when they got to the telephone box, David Smith gave Pobo the knife and said, "You wait behind here while I ring them," and he went inside the phone box and he dialed 9-9-9...  

And in the police station, a rather fat police sergeant who was trying to finish checking his football pool heard the phone ring and he said, "Oh shit!" And he put down his mug of tea which had a coronation picture of the Queen on it, and he picked up the phone. And when David Smith heard the policeman answer and say, "Yes, what do you want?" He told him, and he said, "There's been a m-m-m-m-m-murder..."

Slug Bait

Slug bait

 Can't wait

 Slug slug bait 

Can't can't wait

  I crawl up the grass to your window

 And then open up your room very slow.  

Slug bait

 Can't wait

  I walk into your bedroom

 Then I look at you with your seven months pregnant womb  

Slug bait

 Can't can't wait

  I get your husband to your front bedroom 

I cut his balls of with my knife KNIFE

 I make him eat them right there

 In front of his pregnant wife WIFE 

He's into his balls off

 I look at him very slow

  Slug slug bait

 Can't can't wait  

As he bleeds to death on the floor 

I want you to say don't do any more

  Slug slug bait 

Can't cannot cannot wait

  I look at your big heavy stomach 

It's already moving a little bit with your baby

 I use the carving knife from your kitchen

 I start to perform the operation 

You say "No, no don't do that!"

 I say, "I don't give a ... cat's whiskers."

  Slug bait

 Can't wait

  I pull out your baby

 I chew his head off with my teeth

 I lick him clean

 It's obscene

 As you bleed to death I kill it

 I'm just a wicked boy

  Slug slug bait bait

 Can't can't wait wait

 Slug slug bait

 Can't Can't wait 

Slug bait

Maggot Death

Play a little game 

Play your little game

 Without any name 

Put a record on

Maggot death

Maggots loose

 Bad for you 

I walk your park

 A walk in the park 

Feel the same

 Play for time

 I see the wife every time

 I see the white leather tights

 I got an act you want

 I tell you what to do

 I'm gonna ask you home

 I know just what to do

 Maggot death 

 Maggot death (Screams)

 Maggot death

 What did you want 

Just a silly tart 

You gotta go out now 

Make you pay for death

 Maggot death

 Maggot death (just you) 

You're just a lump in my bed

 Eating up my head

United 

You and I

 Living together

 Loving forever

 At our distance 

Another for instance

 United United 

You become me

 And I become you 

She is she 

And she is you too

 United United

 A corresponding game to play

 A special way for us to stay

 United United

 Its a lie

 It’s the same 

It's a sigh

 It's a game 

Its the why

 It’s the where and the when we're United

 United 

You and I You and I

 United United

 Four faces blending blending blending

 Neverending 

Our places sending

 Shades of evening 

You and I You and I United United

 Oceans between us Sky between us 

Land between us 

Fire between us 

We're United United

  Can't stop it

  United United 

You are my Knight

 You are my night-night my evening 

Its very plain to say

 Its a strange system

 You miss them

 You want to be them

 You have to see them

 You have to be them

 United United 

You and me la la la la

 You and I

 Make ourselves forever together forever and ever

 United United 

Love is the law 

 United United United You and I You and I United

 Time will see us

 Time will free us

 Time will be us

 We are everywhere

 There is no why 

There is no sky anymore

 There is just us United 

United

ZYKLON B ZOMBIE

 I'm just a little jewish girl

 Ain't got no clothes on 

And if I had a steel hammer

 I'd smash your teeth in 

And as I walk her to the gas chamber

 I'm out there laughing  

Zyklon Zyklon Zyklon B Zombie Zombie

And if I had a little leather

 I'd rub your tail off 

I'm just a poor jewish girl

 I've got no clothes pm 

And as I walk into the room 

They're all stood laughing  

Zyklon Zyklon Zyklon B Zombie

And if I had a little manners

 I'd beat the call-up 

While the people in the chamber 

They form a pyramid 

And as I kiss the shiny leather

 I've got no clothes on

  Zyklon Zyklon Zyklon B Zombie

AND THEN MY HEAD SPLIT OPEN!

  Zyklon Zyklon Zyklon B Zombie Zombie

 Zyklon Zyklon Zyklon B Zombie  

See all these little jewish girls

 They have no clothes on 

And with my mind I see you

 With all your clothes on 

And so I spare you from your friends

 Who I give Zyklon 

Just as they take a big warm breath

 Some more pure Zyklon  

Zyklon Zyklon Zyklon B Zombie 

 Zyklon Zyklon Zyklon B Zombie [repeat]

Hit By A Rock

How's that? How's that?

 Hit by a rock 

Spoiling my breakfast

 Hit by a rock

 Blood and brains on my marmalade

 Anti-hero Anti-hero

 Hit by a rock 

I see your face right in my marmalade 

Feel like throwing up but I can't say

 Hit by a rock 

 Makes my meal OK

 Makes me feel someday 

Hit by a rock

 Who did it?

Whose is it?

 Hit by a rock

Makes me think you don't like my records...

Weeping

I want to make you happy just a little

 I want to find you something which is certain

 I found nothing lying, weeping, bleeding 

You never saw me weeping on the floor

  It's impossible to advise anybody

 Be courageous, take it easy, just show trust 

Be reasonable, be an old ghost weeping 

You didn't see me weeping on the floor

  My arm is torn open like a wound 

My universe is coming from my mouth

 I spent a year or two, listening to you 

Discrediting myself for you 

You didn't see me on the floor weeping

 You didn't see me lying by the door

 You didn't see me swallowing my tablets 

You can't look inside my eyes no more  

Weeping Weeping Weeping

  We created cars to fight for space to be in

 We created work to waste our time 

We created love, so one can be the victim 

We all need as a result, we all need love 

But don't know what to do with it 

What's the sense of a situation we can't fight

 It's alright when you both want to fight 

But when one of them doesn't want to fight

 It's the end of love.  

Just looking at first degree burns

 I'm weeping (I can't sing a song like this) 

Weeping

 You didn't see me weeping on the floor 

You didn't see me lying on the floor 

You didn't see me weeping on the floor 

Alone on the floor

  I'm basically nothing like this

 We're all on the floor

 I don't want to carry on 

Except I can't even cease to exist 

And that's the worst

Blood On The Floor

I've got to tell you 

It's that blood, blood on the floor

At the little school I went out

 I broke the rules

 School bully with his 

Crew cut and his big shoulders 

Telling me I was a pansy 

Just like always 

Blood on the floor 

Blood on the door, door

This Is The World Now

To intensify the anguish for the tears they first wept

Knotted in a cluster and like a visor made for them

In crystal filled all the hollow part around their eyes

O lord break off these hard veils and give relief

From the pain that swells my heart and rains down blows

Upon my flesh where then new tears freeze again his body

In the world above for whenever a soul betrays the way

He did a demon takes possession of his body

Controlling its maneuvers from then on for all the years

It has to live and e who am dead must lead thee

Through this hell these scenes of blood and wounds

For memory and vocabulary are not enough to comprehend the pain

The bodies ripped from chin to arse from inside hear another

With her throat slit her nose cut off as far as where the eyebrows start

She steps out from the group and opens her throat which runs red

From all sides of her wound and says bring back to those on earth

This message of the things you have seen take back this

From those who stained your world with blood your world now

Containing approximately five pounds in cash

All this and heaven too

Missing a lorry driver called peter who drives a cab

With a name beginning with the letter C on the side

He lives in Bradford in a big grey house elevated above the street

Behind wrought iron gates with steps leading up to the front door

Number six in its street peter committed crimes before and is

Connected to the container base at stourton

He will kill for the last time in leeds on Wednesday

The tenth of December nineteen eighty

The thirteenth and last transmission

One final picture from the atrocity exhibition

From the shadows of the sun

Out of the arc of the searchlight laureen bell in headingley

Leeds eating Kentucky fried chicken e saw her

And followed her and e took hammer from my pocket

And e hit her and then e dragged her to some waste land

And she was moving about and e pulled most of her clothes off

And e had the screwdriver with the yellow handle

And e stabbed her in the lungs her eyes still open

She seemed to be looking at me with an accusing stare

Which shook me up a bit so e stabbed her in the eye

The taste of the chicken in my mouth the taste of salt

Everything salt in my mouth clueless

E scream the weather is letting me down again for e

Am not ripper e am the streetcleaner locked in the red room

Poor old oldman looking for the wrong man

Noble but no choice misled by a voice

Release of drury arouses fury

Preston was not me but just you wait and see

Sheffield will not be missed next on my list

Nails already dead of colour this exegesis complete and illuminated

E stand upon souls fixed under ice some bent head to foot shaped like bows

The distorted jackknife postures their bras pushed up now the time has come

This the place where no light is e cannot write e

Cannot tell memory and vocabulary not enough here either

Dear nor alive before the king of the vast kingdom of grief

Once as fair as he is now foul all grief springs from his one head

Wearing three faces one red one white one blue

Beneath which two mighty wings stretch out

Not feathered wings but like the ones you would expect a bat to have

And he flaps them constantly keeping three winds continuously in motion

Saying over and over and over again and again and again

This is the world now

Containing approximately five pounds in cash

All this and heaven too

Missing from the deceaseds handbag one edge sharper than the other

This is the world now

The weather is letting us down again and again and again

In a Yorkshire way he says

This is the world now

We be

STILL WALKING 

still walking

 share of thee water

 in its element 

like all of us 

like a book spell of semen

 wall of silence 

or too?

 this end 

or all of us

 he said

 all of us do it

 each time asleep

 each time he said

 especially again

 especially item

 the totem was his

 the uncle was his

 every time it fell open

 at the same ritual

 every time she said

 the words he cried

 and no one saw

 that's how it is

 he said

 that's the whole problem

 each time

 she said   

CONVINCING PEOPLE 

There was never a way 

And there's never a day

 To convince people 

You can play their game 

You can say their name 

But you won't convince people 

There's several ways

 To convince people

 It's the name of the game

 It's the game of the name

 Convincing people 

 There's several ways 

To convince people

 And there's several days

 And there's never a way 

To convince people  

There's one way though 

That you'll never convince people

 And that's when you try 

To be someone

 Who's not telling 

And who's trying to compel

 Who's trying to tell you 

What you ought to be

 Convinced of

   So there's several ways

 And there's several days 

To convince your people

 And you are the people

 Convincing people 

There's never a way 

And there's never a day 

To convince people 

There's several ways 

There's several days

 We don't want to convince people

 Let me tell you

 I'll tell you what I want you to do

 It's no way, no way, no way 

To convince people  

HOT ON THE HEELS OF LOVE

 I'm hot on the heels of love

 Waiting for help from above   

PERSUASION 

Persuasion

 You gotta get some 

Persuasion 

You gotta get some 

Look at me I touch your breast 

Look at me I touch your knees 

And I persuade you

 Like always I persuade you 

 Persuasion 

Look at me I touch your head

 I say the words and you got to bed 

My sister and my mother 

My father and my son 

Do everything I want them to 

With persuasion

 One lot of persuasion 

Like always persuasion

 Now there's lots of ways to persuade you

 I could do it with money

 I could look at you

 I could show you all that

 You might as well do it anyway 

You might as well choose to play the game

 After all you've seen yourself before 

What difference does it make if I take your photograph? 

What difference does it make if someone else sees it too? 

All your friends do it

 I mean nobody will know it's you

 Anybody, it could be any body

 I mean, these magazines, you know.

 They only go to middle aged men 

So why don't you do as I suggest

 I persuade you

 With words I persuade you

 Persuasion

 I've got a little biscuit tin

 To keep your panties in

 Soiled panties, white panties, school panties, Y-Front panties

 By the canal, by the canal

 And I persuade you 

Look at me

There's a certain word and a certain touch

 A certain way and a way too much

 There's a little bit here

 And a little bit there

 When you've done it all it's too late to care

 Oh I persuade you 

Like always I persuade you

 Look in my eye

 Under your covers 

I touch you 

And tell you what to do

 Do it because I tell you

 Do it because I love you

 And I persuade you 

Persuasion   

WHAT A DAY 

What a day

What a dull day 

What a day 

What a dull day 

All day all day 

All dull day 

What an awful day

 What a terrible day

 All day

What a day

 What a dull day 

What a day   

SIX SIX SIXTIES

 I am one of the injured 

A tear blurs flesh

 Dissolving

 Like an injured dog 

Like wasted limbs

 Get smaller 

Pain is the stimulus of pain

 But then of course nothing is cured 

This is the world now

 Move a fin and the world turns

 Sit in a chair and pictures change

 Try to eat us 

And get trapped

 Or injured

 Just

FIVE KNUCKLE SHUFFLE

 Even more fed up

 You're gonna get fed up

 You're gonna be fed up

 You're gonna see fed up 

You're gonna get fed up 

Fed Up Fed Up Fed Up 

You're gonna get set up 

You're gonna go fed up 

You're gonna go bed up

 You're gonna go sped up

 You're gonna be said up

 You're gonna get set up 

A set up a fed up a set up

 I said what a get up 

Am fed up Am fed up Am fed up

 Am fuckin a fed up

 Am fucking my bed up

 Amphetamine

 Am fucking amphetamine

 I've had a lobotomy 

A botom a botomy

 Am always a victim

 Am tired of the victim

 A time of the victor

 A try to assess me

 A try to possess me

 Assess possess amphetamine

 A friend of mine

 Here you are

 We're here are two

 Are you 

You over there

 You're the one I am

 I am that lazy boy all over take some more I need some sleep 

Just an animal a twisted up animal I want to be left alone 

I want that not to assess me not to possess me not to attack me

 Not to distract me I even get fed up

 Fed up 

Don't do this I do this

All my friends do this

Am fed up 

Am fed up I put my feet up I wish I go to sleep

 Fed up fed up fed up

 Deaded Deaded

 Empty bottles makin noise 

Alcohol 

I can see you fed up

 In the corner asking 

Gonna be set up all night set up

 Fed up

 Getting your way with a five pound note

   WE HATE YOU (LITTLE GIRLS)

 We hate you little girls

 All the time

 Everytime little girls

 I hate you little girls

 With your little curls 

And your pretty dress

 And your little breasts

 I hate you

 I hate you little girls 

 I hate your little tits 

I hate your little clits

 I hate your mother too

 I hate you I hate you 

I hate you HATE YOU

 I hate you fucking little girls

 I hate 

We hate 

You hate

 They hate

 We hate you little girls

 I hate you

Post-TG

Seeing as this Report is intended only to focus on Throbbing Gristle, E have no intention ov going into any detail on what thee various band members got involved in following thee initial breakup ov TG in 1981. E will only say that Cosey and Chris started up a new band called Chris and Cosey (also known as CarterTutti later on), while P-Orridge and Sleazy started both thee band Psychic TV and Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth (TOPY for short: thee religious wing ov PTV). However, Sleazy left Psychic TV in 1984 and formed Coil with John Balance (another ex-PTV member). Chris & Cosey and Psychic TV are still active and recording music to this day: Coil is sadly no more. All these bands are highly recommended: Coil in particular is a favorite ov mine.

TG’s second phase ended in 2010, first with Genesis abruptly exiting the band on Oct. 29th in thee middle ov a tour (forcing thee three remaining members to finish thee tour as “X-TG” though they did briefly consider finding a new lead singer: one ov thee names suggested was Justin Bieber, incidentally), then with thee sad passing ov Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson on Nov. 24, 2010. Ov Sleazy’s death, here’s what some ov his old comrades had to say:

Cosey Fanni Tutti & Chris Carter:

“Peter Christopherson, affectionately known as Sleazy, died peacefully in his sleep on the 24th of November at his home in Bangkok, Thailand.

The music and art world has lost a great talent whose unique approach ignored the  conventions of the day and often challenged the status quo.

Sleazy’s playful and inspiring creativity saw him pushing boundaries as a musician, video director and designer throughout his life. He had recently returned to Thailand from Europe, where he had played a short but spectacular series of live shows as a member of Throbbing Gristle and in the newly formed trio X-TG with Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter.   Sleazy's visual art career included work as a member of the influential British design agency Hipgnosis, creating iconic record sleeve artwork in the 1970s for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and, later, Factory Records. He took the first promo photographs of the Sex Pistols, created a highly controversial window display for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's clothing shop, SEX, and went on to design the logo of the hugely popular fashion company, BOY. In 1976 Sleazy met Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Genesis P-Orridge and together they formed electronic music provocateurs Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records, creating one of the first independent record labels of the era and laying the foundation for a new genre of music. The band was infamously described in the Daily Mail by Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn as "the wreckers of civilisation".

TG ceased operations in 1981, after which Sleazy formed Psychic TV with Genesis P-Orridge and they produced two albums. The second, Dreams Less Sweet included his future life partner Jhonn Balance as a member, with whom he went on to form Coil and to release an extensive body of work up until Jhonn's passing in 2004. Subsequently, Sleazy left the UK to live in Bangkok, Thailand and to continue his artistic and musical vision in the guise of The Threshold HouseBoys Choir and Soisong.

Following their original break-up, Throbbing Gristle's legacy steadily grew within the music and art world, leading to their reformation in 2004 and a series of sold-out performances, including in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.

At the time of his death, Sleazy was in the midst of assembling what was to be Throbbing Gristle's next project: a cover version of Nico's Desertshore album. Sleazy was a kind and beautiful soul. No words can express how much he will be missed.”

Throbbing Gristle / X-T

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge:

"You never expect to be writing a eulogy about your deepest and beloved friends when you meet them and they glide into your loops of L-if-E so sleekly, so boldly and with such confidence that it is like one of Nature’s perfectly designed dynamic creatures following its instinct home to where it began. You never expect to hear, without forewarning, that you have lost another dear and treasured member of your chosen, freely embraced famille.

"We have written several pages already trying to write a eulogy/obituary. But it read too dry. It turned into being about facts and dates and becomes a fake entry in Wikipedia! That’s not what we are feeling and it’s NOT what we want to give to Sleazy at this horrible moment that shocked everyone so unexpectedly. My dear friend Bee in Bangkok emailed me the news. "Sleazy died in his sleep lasty night Genny". What do you say? FUCK! It is the slap of a hand on a wall, the crash of a fist on a kitchen table, it is the utter failure of our words to express a feeling! Your mind slides into turmoil. How? What now? Who knows? …Over and over. Who will take care of him? We imagine Bee, and various of his beloved extended famille that he nurtured, supported and cared so deeply for in Bangkok. Sleazy had built his special paradise there. He died there in his haven, amongst his friends, with his dogs, as gentle and peaceful as death can be for we humans. He went to sleep and never woke up perfecting.

"We had the great fortune to visit Sleazy at his previous "compound". A beautiful place to retreat too in between the hectic, stressful life of "work". With my friend HannaH we had come from Kathmandhu where we had done a puja for Lady Jaye who passed away in 2007. Sleazy had prepared an air conditioned room. Clean linen. Peace and quiet. Food appeared miraculously, clothes were laundered…we had gin and tonics in his "dipping pool" every day at 4pm and we talked of death and loss. Sometimes he held me gently in his arms as we cried. He spoke of Jjonn and how hard that loss had been. We’d both been through a horror of finding our "Other Half" dying at our feet and both been treated awfully by the cops on the scene. My lifelong friendship with Sleazy deepened even further into an unbreakable bond of love as we relived this together and we have treasured ever since those days in Thailand.

"We had, needless to say, always loved Sleazy since those early times when we all found his new "real" name so easily adopted. Of course, all families, even those spawning wreckers of civilization, have their little squabbles and minor issues over the years. What is amazing is that our chosen famille (Chris, Cosey, Sleazy and me) weathered thirty-six years despite being attacked and hammered by international newspapers, TV media, the Legal Establishment, and music, art and other rivals. Despite all our various trials and tribulations, "something special almost magical would happen to TG onstage" as Cosey says. The mysterious chemistry that made TG so unique as a unit.

"Sleazy was an astounding talent. During his prolific phase with COIL he developed new visionary methods of mixing sound and video in ways akin in their radicalism to Rembrandt’s breakthrough with catching light itself within the oil and pigment. For me it is his deftness and precision with minutely accurate sounds or shadows that made him so worthy of the honoured name "Master".

"Sleazy was a huge part of my life creatively during our 36 year friendship. He joined COUM; was an incalculable part of the process and experiment that was and remains TG.; he followed me into Psychic TV to collaborate in two classic albums with Alex Fergusson, Ken Thomas and myself; with Monte Cazazza he actively brainstormed concepts and attitudes towards the creation of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth. During that first year or so of T.O.P.Y. a young schoolboy called Geff Rushton turned up at my house in Beck Road Hackney. He wanted an interview about "sex magick". We called Sleazy and said,"We think YOU will be the perfect person to be interviewed by Geff, will you do it?" , because Sleazy wasn’y keen on interviews much back then. Anyway, Geff went, Sleazy did the interview and "one of them got the job". This turned out to be Sleazy’s "BIG LOVE" and they both went on to create COIL and be a huge worldwide influence on what became, with the parallel influence of David Tibet (also named during his bootcamp times with PTV and TOPY) known as DARK FOLK etc.

"Talking of influences, it was Sleazy who discovered Mr Sebastian in 1980 without who we, and hundreds of TOPY Individuals, PTV fans and readers of the Research Book Modern Primitives wouldn’t have been pierced.

"Sleazy loved Bangkok and Thailand. He had been visiting regularly for several years before deciding to move there permanently after Jjonn/Geff passed on. While we were spending time in 2009 with him we were pretty sick from the intense emotional stress of our ceremony in Nepal for the reliving and releasing of a beloved. Sleazy became a source of every suture for my heart, loving sustenance for my soul. He nurtured me with words of wise counsel garnered from his own similar and tragic losses. There had been a long sometimes desolate expanse between the seventies and now. But we had both crossed our abyss and we were blessed by Sleazy’s loving nature gto be able to accept his gentle embrace and, crying like a child we often are, be able to lovingly say to him, "I HAVE GOT MY FRIEND BACK." Many times, since then, we have stopped during hard times, confusing times, and we think of Sleazy and how his mastery of light went from cameras to hearts and souls, and that makes me smile and laugh. Which is as he would wish. We loved Sleazy in all he did...

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge nyc, Nov 2010.

This was Sleazy’s final blog entry (posted on Nov. 10, 2010):

X-Industrial

Well the writing has been on the wall all along, but after the TG show in Hoxton London a week ago, which was relatively painless, enjoyable, and even began to pay off some of the cost of tickets, Genesis decided to move, first hotels, and then cities, un-announced, making herself unavailable for the remaining tour dates, and leaving the rest of TG and all the promotors and fans in a certain amount of a quandry.

Either we could bow to Gen's seemingly senseless and out-of-the-blue decision and pull the tour completely, and so be jointly responsible for all the money paid out, to get us to London, and round Europe, put us up in in hotels etc, or we could play the remaining shows as best we were able (albeit at a reduced fee since Genesis chose not to be there) to lessen our joint losses....  Fortunately, to our great gratitude, and the relief and appreciation of the fans who showed up (amounting to some 99% of ticket holders - very few were only there to see Gen it seems), what Chris, Cosey and I did as X-TG was greeted with just as much enthusiasm as TG had been in the past.   Apparently the public share our interest in "Chamber Music for the Coming Hard Times", and, despite missing the jumping-up-and-down-encore factor led by our undoubtly-skillful and curious looking, trans-dressing (though not trans-gendered) figure head - everyone said X-TG was just as good, if not better, than the old style TG.

On her website Genesis is keen to point out she only left THAT tour and still considers herself part of TG. For anyone that is interested, her included, I can confirm that TG will continue to complete all existing contracts, sales, ongoing negotiations and the recording/delivery obligations already in place, but it's clear neither Gen nor the rest of TG have the interest, time, energy (or even spare cash) to risk pursuing further live performances together, fraught as they are with the possible problems we all suffer from: concerns about health, unequal treatment or contribution, availability of the appropriate medications for pain, stress or lack of sleep, not to mention our own outside/personal commitments...

Also about the future of TG live, I do not regard it as possible for any changed band or variation of personel to perform live as Throbbing Gristle without all the original four of us on stage. If Chris, Cosey and I play live together again it will be as X-TG to make it clear it is a new entity, despite its Provenance which will draw on our own individual work and interests, just as much as any TG reference, which feel to me at least, tired, though the approach to music composition, remains as unique and exclusive to us, as any band I have ever come across....  I for one bear Genesis no ill will, though it would be nice to recieve some communication explaining what happened, rationally, and accepting that her precipitous actions had consequences for all of us, even though I am still several thousand pounds worse off than when we all agreed to do these dates...Money I can ill-afford to lose at this point...  As luck would have it, the "doors" Genesis opened by flying home, and out of the way unexpectedly, have revealed hitherto unseen paths into the future that are both interesting, exciting, as well as being ones I would probably not have pursued, if I'd just been Harry Pottering around in Bangkok with my HouseBoys...

So I thank you all for that, from the bottom of my heart!

Sathu, Sathu, Sathu....

Nobody knows the future, after all.... All we can do is try to make it as enjoyable, inspiring, helpful, encouraging and illuminating for everyone as possible, in the time that we have left.   In my book that means not only remembering the past and music of 30 years ago, (whether or not it's good enough to satisfy drunken Americans!) BUT NOT REPEATING IT, no matter how easy.  

best2all 
unklesleazy

Thee Future Ov TG

In thee year 2011, Industrial Records was reactivated with thee intention ov re-releasing thee old TG studio albums in new, remastered formats (this was done in November ov last year). Currently Carter and Tutti are finishing up thee final TG studio album: TG’s Desertshore: The Final Report. Essentially thee band’s cover version ov Nico’s classic 1970 Desertshore album, it was conceived by Sleazy on a long flight from Bangkok to Berlin in thee winter ov 2006. Thee band has been working on material for it over thee last few years, and Sleazy was supposed to assemble it all together starting in November ov last year, butter he died before he could even start it. Thee album is expected to be released in late 2012 and will presumably conclude thee TG project once and for all.

Links of Interest:

http://www.throbbing-gristle.com/
-thee official website ov Throbbing Gristle.

http://brainwashed.com/tg/
-Brainwashed’s page on Throbbing Gristle.

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~vijay/TG/texts.html
-collection ov various old TG interviews.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060619213208/www.brainwashed.com/axis/tg/live.htm
-Axis Archive ov TG live information.

http://brainwashed.com/tg/hackney.html
-Modern-day photographs ov some ov the key locations inhabited by TG in Hackney, London, including pictures ov thee building where their old studio was located.

http://www.genesisbreyerporridge.com/
-Genesis P-Orridge’s website.

http://sleazybkk.blogspot.com/2010/11/x-industrial.html
-Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s blog.

http://www.coseyfannitutti.com/
-Cosey Fanni Tutti’s website.

http://www.chriscarter.co.uk/
-Chris Carter’s website.

"I think that technology has been explored and the roots of blues music and slave music has been explored, and now we've done the Industrial music. We have to go beyond into where man meets space. I don't mean cosmic like Tangerine Dream, I mean inside the head.”

-- Genesis P- Orridge, LBC radio interview , February 1981

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*

p.s. RIP: Stacy Doris, Ben Gazzara. Hey. Part 2, or the very grand finale, is now yours, and, from here on out, expect that any ignorance you might profess about the work of Throbbing Gristle to be judged willful on your part and met with a highly cocked eyebrow, around these parts, at least. Enjoy, is what I mean. And, Sypha, I'm forever in your debt. ** Michael, The monolith from '2001' more precisely. Thanks, Michael. All is well enough here, and I hope you can say the same at minimum. ** Kyler, Happy belated birthday to Sarah Kane. Thanks for all your effort spent in finding the Artaud quote. Appreciate it, I do, to accidentally borrow Yoda's sentence structure then recognize in horror that I have done just that then come 'this close' to deleting the backwards sentence only to wind up going, Oh, let bygones be bygones. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Wow, that 'Hidden in the Open' flickr show is really something! Everyone, courtesy of David E., do check out the amazing, flickr-based 'Hidden in the Open: A Photographic Essay of Afro American Male Couples from the Distant Past'. It's incredible. Thanks too, D., for the alert about the Richard Seaver book. I'm inexpressibly excited to read that, and it's just the kind of book that Shakespeare & Co. will import without having to be poked first. ** Alan, I do """"love"""" that the content warning ball and chain was fastened to this place on 'Houston Art Car Parade' day. I expect the blog will start getting complaints that the content warning constitutes false advertising next. ** Jax, Oh, please use liberally and wisely, pal. ** Kiddiepunk, Man, cold, you said it. I'm so pissed off that I was so preoccupied yesterday evening that I seem to have entirely missed what looks to have been about five minutes of light snowfall. That better not be heaven's only scheduled dump. If there's any kind of b'day doings today involving extended crew, give me a text. ** _Black_Acrylic, Crazy, right? Man, I hope you can get the Generator show settled and on its way soon. Very cool about the great reception of your Cheryls! ** Jon Reiss, Hi there, Mr, Reiss. Very nice to see you. 'Total Eclipse': I think the director tried. I don't think LdC had a clue how to depict a complicated genius like Rimbaud, and his comment in my interview about Rimbaud being a 'bad ass' kind of spells that out, but I think his performance is sincere. I like David Thewlis, but I thought his performance was kind of schticky. So, I guess I'm not all that into the film. My guess on what happened to LdC's acting is that, as you probably know, his parents were quite involved in avant-garde and underground art, and I suspect their influence on the young LdC's acting decisions was large, but then he grew up and started doing what he most wanted to do, which seems to be giving moody performances in large scale movies directed by big, respected name directors. I think also that the thickening of his body has had an effect too, as he used to display a lot of nervous physical energy all the way up through 'Titanic', and now his body is mostly just this solid object that he lugs around and uses very sparingly in his performances. Those are my guesses. Favorite writers of erotic scenes? Hm. I guess the fact that no one springs to mind is telling of something. I think I mostly am not very interested in writers' erotic scenes, maybe because I have such clear ideas in my own work as to how sex can best be portrayed that I'm too picky about the portrayal of the erotic in fiction. Let me think about it. Surely, there are writers whose depictions I like and who I've learned from, but I'm blanking out at the moment. How are you? What's going on in your world? ** Heliotrope, Hey, M. Yeah, we did the email thing, and I hope I'll to confab with your nephew if not even get to meet him. John McGeoch was a king. His work with the Banshees is out of this world great, and his Magazine stuff is too. Thumbs up, obvious, on the Pere Ubu listening fest. I should do a Pere Ubu gig post, hm, interesting. Jesus Christ about your finger! Ouchy-ouch fucking ouch! There must be easier ways to buy continued time with Jules and LA, man. ** Misanthrope, Man, you really were sleepless about that? I thought you were kidding. I'm sure glad I was asleep when the blog problem/outage was going on. Drone strikes in Switzerland? I've never even considered that option before. Hunh. Switzerland. Interesting. ** Jared, Hey, J! Lovely to see you, buddy boy! Interesting quote from Mike. I'm not sure how deeply he was digging into himself for that interviewer, though. Thanks for the two links. I'm glad I got to read the interview and the interviewer's statement. Granted, I am way to close to the situation to be objective, but that statement really rubs me the wrong way. I mean ... 'Even not knowing Mike, I could tell when we met that he was depressed', etc. I guess I find that and the read on Mike as a talking zombie really presumptuous and full of really half-baked, received psychology. Maybe he was just bored with the interview. It's just so easy to interpret someone to your own standards when you have a narrative layout that you can just color in however you like. We all want to know why Mike did what he did, and there's an inherent charge in reading someone assert some kind of authority and deeming to pass along precious insight, but I found that statement pretty tabloidy, and the headline-like assertion that Mike said he was going to stop making art, which, as the interview shows, is not what he actually said, and which he countered shortly thereafter, just adds to my suspicion. So, yeah, I'm glad I read it, and I'm not sufficiently far away from the situation emotionally to make a call that isn't entirely my own, but I'm pretty certain that Mike would have found a stranger's mind- and soul-reading of him based on one interview session ludicrous. Sorry for the rant. I'm pretty shaken up by Mike's death, obviously. How are you doing, Jared? What are you up to? ** A.r., Interesting. Well, I mean, Oldham was and, I guess, still is a film actor, let's face it. Love you too! ** Tonyoneill, I actually have a bead on a download of the Franco film already. I'll check to make sure it's the Danish one, although I guess I'll grab it either way. That interview is just more pull in its direction. Thank you most kindly, T. ** Wolf, It doesn't sound serious to me, but they don't call me Doctor Love, for nothing. Wait, they don't actually call me Doctor Love. Actually, one person did, but, oh, that was so very long ago. ** Rewritedept, Hey. I'm always here, man, no sweat. Hope you made to to the top. Thanks for forking out for my stuff, man. ** MVdA, Hey, welcome! It's great that TG proved to be an irresistible force in getting you in here. Yeah, I'm just the worst with email. I just went over and checked my email, and there was one from you that had somehow evaded my eyesight. Sure, I'm happy to do that conversation. I'll write to you later today or this weekend at the latest. Thank you! Your work looks very, very interesting. And, of course, if you want to hang out here now that the door is open, please do. ** Chris Goode, Hi, Chris! Your scaredness -- that's not a word? Blogger's autocorrect function just changed it to sacredness three times before it relented to my apparent word coinage, although I guess sacredness would work too -- is understandable. I mean, the piece sounds, well, amazing. And I know having those deadlines is how you roll with your work, but my nerves are all a'jangle just thinking about working that way. GOD love you, long story short. Well, yeah, if you really don't mind sending me some stuff about your Knowles piece, I would love dearly to have it in the post. The post is a 'Spotlight on ...' deal, the spotlight being on his book 'Typings', but you know how I love to add as much re: the artist in focus as I can, so, yeah, if you don't mind sending me things, awesome! Strange about that scary archivist. He or she is doing a fucking awful job of supporting Knowles' work. 'Typings' and his other book 'Drawings' are totally out of print and cost hundreds to buy from rare book outlets, and that's just fucking ridiculous. Hope the restarting has revved up everything you need. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey, Jeff! Awesome to see you! Fantastic that the opening went so well. I'm gonna do a google and see what I can find. I'm okay, I guess, just getting back to heavy work on the Pompidou festival today and having a hard time with Mike Kelley's death, but, otherwise, all movement seems to be forward. ** Steevee, Hoping that actor feels like working the bear look, obviously. ** Ian Tuttle, Hi, Ian. Thanks, man. It's going to take more than some Googs who can't keep their morals to themselves to keep this place down. How are you? What are you working on and doing and stuff du jour? ** Sypha, Voila! Thank you one-on-one so very much, James. Love, me. ** Okay. You know what to do. Please give Sypha's astonishing TG post the attention and comments it deserves until Monday rolls around, and thank you! See you then.

Sypha presents ... Music From The Death Factory: A Throbbing Gristle Primer, Part 1 (of 2)

2012-02-03T00:59:00.000-08:00

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“Guaranteeing disappointment to the end, TG’s calling card is a constitutive hostility to belonging; to a genre, to a gender, to a lifestyle, to a music scene, to a society.”

-Drew Daniel, 20 Jazz Funk Greats

“There’s an irony in the word ‘industrial,’ because there’s the music industry. And then there’s the joke we often used to make in interviews about churning out records like motor cars- that sense of industrial. Up until then pop music had been based on the blues and slavery, and we thought it was time to update it to at least Victorian times- the Industrial Revolution.”

-Genesis P-Orridge, 1983

"We're troublemakers, really, 'cause otherwise the world's a very boring place to be.”

-Genesis P-Orridge

This Day is dedicated to thee memory ov Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (27 Feb 1955- 25 Nov 2010). RIP. It is also dedicated to the Vatican Gun Club and all 9 mm automatic users everywhere. Perhaps a trigger to the fourth secret of Fatima (Pope as Anti-Christ) it is to the memory of victims of terrorists everywhere. During the conference on tactics memories serve as slaves.

This Report has been assembled from various data related to Throbbing Gristle.

Throbbing Gristle: an English avant-garde music/visual arts group from Dallas, Texas that were chiefly responsible for thee creation ov thee musical genre that came to be known as “industrial.” Originally a spin-off ov thee performance art group known as COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle (or TG for short) consisted ov four people: Genesis P-Orridge (lead vocals/bass guitar), Cosey Fanni Tutti (lead guitar/cornet), Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (tapes), and Chris Carter (synthesisers/rhythms). Thee first phase ov TG’s existence began on Sept. 3, 1975 and terminated on May 29th, 1981: during this period they recorded five major studio albums (along with a number ov singles), and played 36 live concerts: they also distributed some ov thee earliest independent music video tapes. In 2004, thee band reunited, creating new music (primarily a new studio album) and playing some more live shows before disbanding again following thee death ov Sleazy in late 2010.

TG were one ov thee first bands to employ thee use ov sampling in their work. Basically, had thee Wild Boys ov William S. Burroughs’ novels ever been giving thee chance to grow up and form a rock band, Throbbing Gristle would have been thee result; in fact, TG were good friends with not only Burroughs but also Brion Gysin and Derek Jarman (the latter for whom they even recorded a few film soundtracks, such as In The Shadow Of The Sun).

E won’t go into detail on what E like about TG: it should be obvious from reading this Report alone. E will say that E like their music, E like thee images that thee atmospheres they create on record conjure in my mind, E like Gen’s unique singing voice, E like that despite their pretentions thee band didn’t take themselves too seriously (and also that they had a perverse sense of humour that E can appreciate). E like that they recorded (and released) pretty much everything they did (a tactic adopted from Andy Warhol), and E also enjoy their mischievous use of deliberate misinformation as a way of playing with and confounding people’s expectations (which can often lead to some confusion).

This Report focuses primarily on thee first phase ov TG’s existence because E know more about that period ov their work than E do thee second phase. It does not delve into thee COUM TRANSMISSIONS project that proceeded TG. If you want to know more about that, do your own research: as P-Orridge once said, “E think if TG is trying to do anything specific, it’s trying to de-condition people’s er responses, demystify creative, musical activity and life too, and most of all it’s er trying to make people think for themselves, decide for themselves and direct their own lives by their own values and experiences, by experience learned BY THEM from life and not second hand, unproven experiences handed down by education and religion and dogma politics.”

To whet one’s appetite here’s a description ov some ov COUM’s antics though:

“I used to do things like stick severed chicken's heads over my penis, and then try to masturbate them, whilst pouring maggots all over it...

In Los Angeles, in 1976, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (LAICA), Cosey and I did a performance where I was naked, I drank a bottle of whiskey and stood on a lot of tacks. And then i gave myself enemas with blood, milk and urine, and then broke wind so a jet of blood milk and urine combined shot across the floor in front of Chris Burden and assorted visual artists. I then licked it off the floor, which was a not-clean concrete floor.

Then I got a 10-inch nail and tried to swallow it, which made me vomit. Then I licked the vomit off the floor and Cosey helped me lick the vomit off the floor. And she was naked and trying to sever her vagina to her navel with a razor blade-- well, she cut it from her vagina to her navel with a razor blade, and she injected blood into her vagina which then trickled out, and we sucked the blood from her vagina into a syringe and injected it into eggs painted black, which we then tried to eat. And we vomited again, which we then used for enemas.

Then I needed to urinate, so I urinated into a large glass bottle and drank it all while it was still warm. (This was all improvised.) And then we gradually crawled to each other, licking the floor clean. ('cause we don't like to leave a mess, y'know; after all, it's not fair to insult an art gallery). Chris Burden, who's known for being outrageous, walked out with his girlfriend, saying, "This is not art, this is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen, and these people are sick."

In Amsterdam we did a performance in the red-light district. The people in the theater asked, "What kind of lighting do you want?" and we said, "Oh, just put on all the red lights." Then we played tapes of Charles Manson's LP, Lie, cut-up with soundtracks of trains going through thunderstorms, and we went through all different kinds of fetishes. Sleazy cut his throat and had to kind of do a tourniquet on his throat, and Cosey and i did this thing of spitting at each other and then licking all the spit off, and then licking each other's genitals, and then having sexual intercourse while her hair was set on fire with candles. There was an audience of around 2,000 people.

And each day it got heavier, so that on Easter Sunday I was crucified on a wooden cross, whipped with 2 bullwhips, covered in human vomit and chicken wings and chicken legs, while I had to hold burning torches - people in the audience could hear the skin burning on my hands. And then i urinated down Cosey's legs while she stuck a lighted candle up her vagina, so there were flames coming out of her vagina. Just ordinary everyday ways of avoiding the commercials on the television....”

-Genesis P-Orridge

Please note: The quality and content of this album should not be compared to conventional live or studio recordings. The Throbbing Gristle repertoire consisted of a diverse range of intentional (and unintentional) tonalities, timbres including: tape hiss, phase errors, white noise, distortion, clicks, pops, extreme high and low frequencies and occasionally silence. Please bear this in mind when listening to these recordings.

-from the liner notes to The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle

All music in this Report decomposed by Throbbing Gristle.

For Throbbing Gristle:

(note: thee following band profiles are extracted from thee booklet that accompanied thee TG24 box set. These profiles included ones previously issued by thee band in 1979, and also updated ones provided for 2002: thee band member pictures from 1979 are taken from thee Heathen Earth CD booklet).

Genesis P-Orridge (1979)

-Plays Electric Violin, Bass Guitar and Vocals in Throbbing Gristle.
-Born in Manchester, England on February 22 1950.
-Now lives in London.

Favourite Food: Cosey’s Sunday Lunch; Cosey’s Chocolate Cake; Museli; peeled Apples; Steak; Cosey’s Spaghetti.
Favourite Drink: Tea; Milky Coffee; Drinking Chocolate.
Favourite Colour: Blue; Black; Military; Drab.
Favourite Music (though not interested in music): Tiny Tim; C. Nieman; Nico; Jean Luc Ponty; Pearls Before Swine; Doors; Early Velvets; Fugs; Leonhard Cohen; John Coltrane; Syd Barrett; Captain Beefheart; Early Zappa; Stockhausen.
Favourite TV Programme: Soap; Lou Grant; After Noon Plus; Executive Suite; Match Of The Day.
Favourite Actor: Clint Eastwood; Peter Cushing; Sean Connery.
Favourite Actress: Jane Birkin; Bardot; Sissy Spacek.
Likes: Uniforms, Self-Discipline; Jackboots; Leather; Collaging, Letters, Voyeurism; Holidays with Friends; Cosey Fanni Tutti; Watching TV; Gardening; Tremble (our dog); Cats; I would like to have enough time to just relax and learn to be myself.
Dislikes: All Dogmatic Politics and Religion; Russian Bureaucracy; Sandra Harris; Cigarette Smoke; Pubs; Fairgrounds; Parties; Weddings; Gangs of Any Kind; Rock Music; Thieves; Washing My Own Hair; Coconut; Passports; Fat Women; Casual Relationships; Ignorant Criticism; Shaving; Crowded Shops; Justifying My Own Actions; Puritanism; Being Alone.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (2002)

-Currently plays processed bass guitar, prepared electric violin and divines words and voices as a member of troubadors to the worlds, THEE MAJESTY (with Larry Thrasher and Bryin Dall).
-Born in Victoria Park, Manchester, England on 22nd February 1950.
-Now lives in New York City.

Favourite Food: Sugar; Peeled Apples; Digestive Biscuits; Italian Food; Thai Food.
Favourite Drink: Thai Red Bull; English tea; Good Champagne.
Favourite Colour: 60’s Candy Stripes; Red and Orange Together; Turquoise.
Favouite Place: Kathmandu, Nepal; Bangkok, Thailand.
Favourite Music: Incredible String Band; Dr. Strangely Strange; Nick Drake; The Zombies; The Creation; The Small Faces; Love; early WHO and almost any UK psychedelic/garage recorded between 1963-69.
Favourite TV Programme: Eastenders; Blind Date (on US TV).
Favourite Films: “Belle De Jour” by Bunuel; “Apocalypse Now Redux” by Coppola; “Je t’aime, Moi Non Plus” by Serge Gainsbourg; “Wild in the Streets” by Barry Shear; “The 10th Victim” by Carlo Ponti; “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” by Russ Meyer; “The Brink” by Ruth Weiss; “Hustler White” by Bruce La Bruce; “Behind The Green Door” by the Mitchell Brothers.
Favourite Actor: Pierre Clemente.
Favourite Actress: Catherine Deneuve; Pamela Anderson.
Favourite Writer: Howard Bloom’s “The Lucifer Principle”; many of the Beatniks.
Likes: being with Miss Jackie; SPIKE my ferret; “Lucy” and “Distance” our cats; Travel; Exotic Surprises; Androgyny; Loving domesticity; Dancing with language; Being alive and healthy; Kissing; Love with my soul mate; Lifelong Friends; Kindness; Immortality.
Dislikes: people chewing gum; People who walk slow and get in the way; Conscious hypocrisy; Flying; Arguing; Cigarette Smoke; Bootleggers; People who dump garbage in the street; Noise; Selfishness; Mortality.

Cosey Fanni Tutti (1979)

-Plays satellite Stick lead guitar and raver lead Guitar in Throbbing Gristle.
-Born Hull, Yorkshire, England on November 4 1951.
-Now lives in London.

Favourite Food: Steak; Y.M.C.A. Dinners; Treacle Pudding.
Favourite Drink: Milk; Tea; Coffee; Spring Water.
Favourite Colour: Blue.
Favourite Music: Nico; Patti Smith; Captain Beefheart; Vera Lynn; Good disco; Jim Morrison.
Favourite TV Programme: Executive Suite; Ripping Yarns; World in Action; Coronation Street; Grange Hill; Soap.
Favourite Actor: Clint Eastwood; Jack Nicholson; John Hurt; Helmut Berger.
Favourite Actress: Sissy Spacek; Jane Birkin.
Favourite Car: Black Range Rover.
Likes: Listening to radio Four on my own; Swimming; Girls in Running Shorts; Winter Nights; Cheetahs; Nude Sun Bathing; Knitting Special jumpers; Gardening; Watching kids play.
Dislikes: Sooty and most people; Cigarette Smoke; Sloppy Eaters; Women’s Lib; Selwyn Froggitt; Stench of Pubs.

Cosey Fanni Tutti (2002)

-Cross media artist exhibiting world wide.
-Works with Chris Carter as Chris & Cosey and CTI. Vocals, guitar, effects, keyboard, drums, cornet and anything to achieve required sounds.
-Born in Hull, England on 4th November 1951.
-Now lives in Norfolk, England.

Favourite Food: Vegetables; Fruit; Curry; Home made cakes; cream teas; Thorntons chocolate.
Favourite Drink: Cappuccino; Water.
Favourite Colour: Blue; Red; Black.
Favourite Music: Some classical; Film music; Abba; Nico; Doors; Blondie- too many to mention.
Favourite TV Programme: The Sweeney; Minder; Graham Norton; Gimmee Gimmee; League of Gentlemen; Seinfeld; Documentaries; Athletics.
Favourite Actor: Dennis Hopper; Ray Leotta; Johnny Depp; Jack Nicholson; Brad Pitt.
Favourite Actress: Kathy Burke; Milla Jovovich.
Favourite Car: Mini; Mercedes clip top.
Likes: Hotel sex; Tormenting Chris; Kissing; Nick’s smile; My cats; Having my feet rubbed; Being massaged; Swimming; Laughing; Peace and quiet; Reading; Gardening; Sitting on the beach at the end of the day; Going to the movies; Slim hipped small breasted women; Greenpeace; P.E.T.A.; Strong but sensitive people; My Apple Mac; Being with close friends.
Dislikes: Being ill; Cigarette smoke; Sloppy eaters and slurpy drinkers; Rap, R&B, Radio one, Country and Western and other such inane music; Most people; Dishonesty; Laziness; Self pity; Selfishness; Wasters and leaners; Dumbing Down; Soaps; Organised religions; Dogmatism.

Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (1979)

-Plays Tapes, Processors and Trumpet with TG.
-Born in Leeds, Yorks, England Feb 27th 1955.
-Now lives in West London.

Favourite Food: Steak, salad, chips, raspberries
Favourite Drink: Milk; Perrier Water
Favourite Colour: Blue Cream Grey
Favourite Music: (when listening to music at all) Captain Beefheart: “Trout Mask Replica”, The John Barry Seven, Late night Radio 2
Favourite TV Programme: Soap, late movies, CHiPs
Favourite Actor: Derek Jacobi, Perry King, the fair haired one in CHiPs
Favourite Car: Black Honda Accord
Likes: Silly electronic gadgets, quiet night air, boys going through things for me
Dislikes: cigarette smoke, hypocrisy, dead ‘eds, beer, wastefulness.

Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (2002)

Favourite Food: Potatoes generally (organically grown obviously)
Favourite Drink: Lightly sparkling Water (but NOT Perrier)
Favourite Colour: Green, Brown
Favourite Music: Djivan Gasparyan, Lal Waterson, Arvo Part
Favourite TV Programme: none
Favourite Actor: Brandon Sexton III
Favourite Film: The Thief of Bagdad.
Favourite Car: None
Likes: Young Arseholes (as in orifice), quiet night air, those moments in human interaction when the Goddess that flows through us all is revealed.
Dislikes: Young Assholes (as in human); Hypocrisy; Wastefulness.

Chris Carter (1979)

-Plays Synthesisers and Rhythms in Throbbing Gristle.
-Born in London, England on January 28th, 1953.
-Now Lives in North London.

Favourite Food: Steak; Y.M.C.A. Dinners, Treacle Pudding.
Favourite Drink: Milk; Tea; Coffee; Spring Water.
Favourite Colour: Blue; Black; Neutral.
Favourite Music: Various Soundtracks; Abba.
Favourite TV Programme: Grange Hill; Star Trek; Old Films.
Favourite Actor: Jon Finch; Dick Powell.
Favourite Actress: Jane Birkin; Georgina Hale; Jenny Agutter.
Favourite Car: Range Rover; My Dad’s Tractor.
Likes: Eating Out; English 60’s Films; Radio 4; Cinema Generally; Making Tapes; T.G.; Technical Exhibitions; D.O.A.
Dislikes: Cigarette Smoke; Long Distance Driving; Right/Left Wing Politics; Religions; Beer etc.; Male and Female Chauvinists.

Chris Carter (2002)

-Musician, sound designer, consultant, writer, equipment reviewer (and beta tester) and graphics/web designer.
-Works with (and assists) Cosey Fanni Tutti. Also works as Chris & Cosey and CTI.
-Keyboards, rhythms, sampling, programming, production.
-Born in London, England on January 28th 1953.
-Now lives in Norfolk, England.

Favourite Food: Pasta; Curry; Treacle Pudding.
Favourite Drink: Cappuccino; Weak Tea (no milk); Cranberry Juice.
Favourite Colour: Blues; Blacks; Whites.
Favourite Music: Numerous Soundtracks; Abba; 60’s Lounge Music; 60’s Psychedelia; lots more.
Favourite TV Programme: The Sweeney; League of Gentleman; Star Trek; 1970’s US/UK Sitcoms.
Favourite Actor: Peter Sellers; Sid James; Peter Cushing; John Hurt; Ron Jeremy.
Favourite Actress: Jane Birkin; Georgina Hale; Jenny Agutter; Diana Rigg; Louise Brooks; Cicciolina.
Favorite Films: Ealing; Hammer; Carry On’s; Most Films Directed by: David Lynch, Nic Roeg, Ridley Scott, Luc Besson, Michael Reeves, Cronenberg, Greenaway, Fincher, Peckinpah, Kubrick, Polanski, Jeunet, Anderson, Herzog and many more.
Favourite Car: Mini (Classic and New).
Likes: Eating Out; Cinema; Photography (Nude and Abstract); Walks By The Sea/In The Woods; Manipulating Audio/Video; Apple Macs; Porn (Contemporary European and USA/Swedish from the 1970s-80’s); 24-Hour News Channels; Feeling Connected.
Dislikes: Cigarette Smoke; Alcohol; Long Distance Driving; Right Wing Politics; Religion; Dogma; Laddism; Lies; Deceit; Feeling Disconnected.

How E Discovered Them

E first came across TG in thee summer ov 1999. Looking back, 1999 was a pretty pivotal year in my life. That summer E had just finished my first year ov college, and during that Freshman year E began to explore subject matter such as independent films (in particular thee works ov David Lynch) and experimental writing, such as Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. In thee Spring ov 1999 E began to get into alternative music for thee first time: thee first two really alternative CDs E purchased was Crackle by Bauhaus and Twice Upon A Time: The Singles by Siouxsie & the Banshees. That summer E was working on a novel entitled Red Cherry that was my attempt to write a sort ov Thomas Harris-esque psychological thriller (the novel took place in Boston and revolved around a female detective trying to capture a serial killer who was slaying fashion models and photographing their corpses). For this novel E did quite a bit ov research, visiting thee library ov my campus often over that summer to read books dealing with serial killers, forensic science and analyzing wounds, that kind ov thing. Then in August ov 1999 there was released a video game for thee Nintendo 64 called Shadowman. E never got thee game, butter that month it was reviewed in an issue ov thee magazine known as Electronic Gaming Monthly. Praising thee game’s dark atmosphere, one ov thee editors mentioned how it made him want to re-listen to his old Throbbing Gristle albums. Seeing that band name flipped a switch in my head: E wondered what this Throbbing Gristle was, what kind ov music they made, and so on.

By thee start ov my second year ov college, Fall ’99, E was a full-fledged Goth: dressed in black all thee time, thee long dark trenchcoat and thee boots, skull jewelry and all ov that. At thee time E had a huge crush on a girl who worked part-time at thee campus dining center. Her name was Karen and she was also very Gothic in terms ov fashion and musical tastes: she often dressed up like Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Now that E think back, thee only reason why E had purchased a Bauhaus album in thee first place was because E had seen her wearing a Bauhaus t-shirt during my Freshman year. So perhaps E was trying to capture her attention (when E started thee first book ov my Trinity fantasy trilogy in thee summer ov 2000, E named thee main female character “Karen” after this girl E had a crush on). Karen would often tell me that she liked thee t-shirts E was wearing, and one day she mentioned how she did a weekly radio show ov Goth & Industrial music at thee campus radio station. So E told her I’d give it a listen.

Thee only problem was that her show (entitled “The Mistress Mayhem S&M Show”) only aired on Saturday, at like midnight, and because E didn’t live on campus E had to drive all the way there and park my car in one ov thee parking lots, just so E could get thee reception (which naturally made thee security guards suspicious: they were always bothering me when all E wanted to do was just listen to thee show in peace). E only heard a few installments ov it butter E still look back on those nights fondly: listening to all ov this exciting new (to me) music whilst reading Poppy Z. Brite or Caitlin R. Kiernan novels. Butter thee first night E went, thee very first song was “Do You Fear (For Your Child)?” by My Life With Thee Thrill Kill Kult. Thee second song was “Stigmata” by Ministry. It was my first exposure to industrial music and E was hooked.

Thee next day E went to thee local CD store, where E purchased thee MLWTTKK album that had “Do You Fear (For Your Child)?” on it. E also purchased a compilation album put out by Rhino in collaboration with Alternative Press, entitled AP Presents Industrial Strength Machine Music (1978-1995). This album had come out thee previous month ov that year. E mainly got it because it had “Stigmata” on it, butter also because it featured a track by Throbbing Gristle, entitled “Hamburger Lady.” Thee very first track on thee album, in fact. So that evening E listened to “Hamburger Lady” and E was very disturbed by it, in that there was nothing really “rock” about it at all: then E read in thee liner notes that thee lyrics were about a burn victim, which creeped me out even more for some unknown reason.

E forget the exact date that E purchased my first TG album as E have lost the receipt, butter E do know it was sometime in November ov 1999, at thee same CD store where E had purchased thee aforementioned industrial CDs. That day they only had one TG album in stock: Entertainment Through Pain: Throbbing Gristle’s Greatest Hits (first put out by Rough Trade in 1984, then released on CD by Mute Records in 1990). Below is a photograph ov my own personal copy of thee CD in question:

So E decided to get that album, figuring that the greatest hits would be a good place to start. Bear in mind that at this point in time E still knew nothing at all about thee group, other than that they had started thee industrial music movement and that they had songs about serial killers, Nazis, mutilation and so on (all things that appealed to me during that very dark and nihilistic period ov my 19 year old life: those were thee days when E would often enjoy flipping through books of Joel-Peter Witkin’s corpse art, or reading books about thee Manson family such as Helter Skelter, or studying thee Church of The Final Process). E forget my first reaction to thee album: it’s been too long. E do recall being surprised by how upbeat and poppy a few of thee songs were: butter even these poppy songs seemed strange and slightly “off” to me. Inside thee booklet there was a picture ov thee band, which can be seen below:

So this was the first picture E ever saw ov thee four members of TG. My first impression was that these people had to be true degenerates, because who else would dress in those types of weird clothes (also keep in mind that at this point in my life E was unaware ov the existence ov either Martin Denny or the “Exotica” musical genre). E was also intrigued by thee list ov albums off to thee right ov thee band photo, as these albums also had thee track listings and E found something alluring about songs graced with such titles as “Slug Bait” and “Maggot Death.” E decided E would have to investigate thee band further.

As 1999 wound down to a close, E became even more obsessed with industrial music and E kept buying more and more CDs that fell within that genre (for example, on Dec. 26 1999 I purchased The Downward Spiral, my first NIN album: later on in January of 2000 E would buy quite a few more NIN albums). Also in January ov 2000 E got The Second Annual Report, which was thee first TG studio album. That was when my TG obsession began in earnest. In fact, it’s safe to say that both TG and NIN were my prime musical obsessions for thee first half ov the year 2000.

Anyway, to make a long story short as 2000 went by E pretty much purchased any TG album E could get my hands on, along with various books dealing with them (some of which are listed further on below). My interest in industrial music soon mutated into an obsession with power electronics, and by the year 2001 E was heavily starting to get into Whitehouse: butter that is a story that E have related elsewhere.

Initially TG’s biggest influence on me was on thee music E was working on at that time. In December ov 1999 I started up my first band, Buffalo Bill (named after thee serial killer from thee film The Silence of the Lambs). A look at thee early track titles such as “Maggots” and “Conservative Blood on the Floor” seem to reveal a strong TG vibe (probably a nod to thee TG songs “Maggot Death” and “Blood on the Floor”). E no longer have my very first attempt to record a song: E think E destroyed thee tape one day in a fit ov humiliation. E recall that it was just myself growling thee word “SCUM” into a toy echo mike while striking thee floor ov my bedroom with a heavy roll of duct tape for crude percussion. Shortly after that E would graduate to using a keyboard, then a Voyetra Digital Orchestrator program on my computer, and thee rest is history. Years later, when E started my Boy Destroyer side project, E recorded a song entitled “We Hate You (Conservatives)” (a reference to thee TG song “We Hate You (Little Girls).” E also did a cover ov thee TG song “Discipline” for thee second Boy Destroyer album. Actually, E should mention that for another ov my side projects, “Zyklon Vagina” (which was itself to have been a parody ov TG), E did record a song called “Worm Food” that was a rip-off ov “Slug Bait.”

In a way, TG even inspired my writing at that time ov my life. Consider this sequence ov paragraphs from Illuminated Shadows, thee first book ov my Trinity Trilogy:

“The first thing Sypha saw when he stepped into the living room was his father’s body. The body was naked, his hands tied behind his back, his feet tied to each other. He laid on his side, surrounded by a pool of blood. His penis was limp and shriveled, and Sypha could see a ragged, gory hole where the balls had used to be. His father’s cheeks were bulged, like a squirrel storing nuts in the winter… Blood and flesh dotted his father’s mouth, as if the man had just ate a particularly gruesome meal. Sypha just stared at the body, shocked, not being able to understand the image he saw. Could this corpse be his father, a man who, just hours ago, had been alive and happy, cracking jokes and working the land? This just couldn’t be real.”

To the north of the living room was a giant fireplace made of square grey bricks. In front of the fireplace was a large purple sofa. Sypha could see a pool of blood slowly forming under the couch. Sypha took a deep breath, then looked past the couch…

Lying on the ground on the other side of the couch was his mother, also naked, her hands and arms covering her face, blood in her hair. She had many deep stab wounds all over her body, but the thing that really caught Sypha’s attention was her stomach. It had been sliced open in a horizontal manner, from left to right, and all of her guts had spilled out of it. Looking at her, Sypha was reminded of a giant jelly donut, spilling out its bloody red contents. The carving knife used to cut her open was impaled in her left breast, and from her stomach cut there protruded a long, bloody umbilical cord. At the end of the cord was the headless, bloodstained body of Sypha’s unborn brother, resting on the living room’s white rug.

And that’s when Sypha fainted, in a pool of his mother’s own blood…”

One can only wonder what my parents thought when they read thee above passage. Looking back, it seems to be an obvious homage to thee TG song “Slug Bait” (consult thee lyrics below), and possibly also thee TG live track “Guts on the Floor.” Though one can’t ignore that thee Sharon Tate murder must also have been on my mind as well. E was obsessed with that crime back then and for thee cover art ov my industrial band’s first cassette release (yes, in thee year 2000 E was still under thee impression that people still listened to cassettes, which perhaps indicated a tenuous grasp on reality), E wanted a black and white glamour shot ov Sharon Tate’s face on the front and a picture ov her butchered corpse on thee back. What can E say, other than that E was very immature back then.

Anyway, enough about me, it’s time E turned your attention towards thee band itself.

Thee Birth of Throbbing Gristle

Throbbing Gristle was officially born on September 3 1975, which was itself thee 36th anniversary of Britain’s entry into World War II. According to Cosey, “Throbbing Gristle is Yorkshire slang for an erection.” Chris Carter had joined thee band after thee name Throbbing Gristle had been decided upon, and he claimed that he hated it. When asked in an interview to explain why they had chosen that name:

P-Orridge: Because it was daft.
Tutti: And yet, it did describe the way we played, it was throbbing.
P-Orridge: And gristle is tough but human, like flesh on glass. So it’s tough, and throbbing is also often used to refer to machines and engines. So it is actually appropriate, but it is also instinctual.

P-Orridge also liked thee incongruity that resulted when someone was trying to write a “very intellectual piece and they keep saying ‘Throbbing Gristle’ in the middle of a sort of philosophical existential debate.”

In 1979, P-Orridge elaborated further on thee name:

“Throbbing Gristle: Thee involuntary muscular spasms of death perhaps, sound throbbing, body, blood, air, cunt, throbbing air conveying sound, affecting thee metabolism. Throbbing, pulsing, rhythmic direct. Throbbing of pain, bruising, injury of existence, throbbing with excitement too. Gristle. Hard, tough, neither skin nor muscle, a paradox, on thee boundary. Gristle, rejected by everyday consumers when they buy meat at butchers: meat, sign of human animalism, death to feed life, of our assumption to have right to genocide of other species that we might live. Gristle, cock, sexuality, fuck. Gristle, rejected matter, unwanted, separated from good. Throbbing gristle, thee moment of orgasm, penetration of male into another body, joining of two people in most vulnerable moment, moment of immortality, sperm and thee moment of life injected. Possibility of birth, or masturbation and wastage. Throbbing gristle: crude colloquialism, working class street culture, ordinariness made unusual, something common place sex’ fuck made oblique, subtle seen another way. Regional slang, parochial joke, rough humour of vision. Uncouth. TG. TG.”

It is interesting to note that in a letter to Vile magazine in January 1976 P-Orridge referred to thee band as being called “Throbbing Gristle and thee Xerox Girls,” that their first album ov “alien rock” would be called DRY BLOOD TAMPAX and that it would be released on their own label, “Insipid Records.” By thee year’s end Insipid Records would instead be called Industrial Records, DRY BLOOD TAMPAX was instead called The Best of Throbbing Gristle Vol. 2, and Throbbing Gristle and the Xerox Girls would be just plain old Throbbing Gristle.

Although Virgin Records did at one point express an interest in signing thee band, in the end thee members of TG decided to just start their own record company. Originally they intended to call it Factory Records to “make the Warhol connection but rejected it as too obvious, too specific and too limited.” It was Sleazy who suggested Industrial Records (IR for short) as thee best name, and that was thee one thee band settled on. It was Monte Cazazza who coined thee company slogan: “Industrial Music for Industrial People.” The label’s logo was derived from a black and white photograph of thee first gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz I.

In regards to the label’s logo (which caused quite a bit ov outrage at thee time), P-Orridge stated:

“We chose Auschwitz as our logo because it seemed appropriate for our music. And it’s also one of the ultimate symbols of human stupidity. And I like to remind myself how stupid people are and how dangerous they are because they’re stupid… Humanity as a whole is stupid to allow anything like that to begin to occur. There’s no one person that’s guilty… We didn’t even know it at the time, but the local people in Poland used to call Auschwitz the factory of death. We called our album ‘Music from the Death Factory’ as a metaphor for society and the way life is… Everybody lives in their own concentration camp… What we’re saying is: be careful, because it’s not far from one to the other. The human race is the biggest masochist in the world.”

Of course, TG also got in trouble due to the fact that thee band logo (a lightning flash image designed by Carter and Cosey) was partly inspired by the insignia used in thee 1930s by Sir Oswald Mosely’s British Union ov Fascists.

Thee Industrial Records Story
(as stolen from TG CD1: text by Genesis P-Orridge)

Industrial Records began as an investigation. The 4 members of Throbbing Gristle wanted to investigate to what extent you could mutate and collage sound, present complex non entertaining noises to a popular culture situation and convince and convert. We wanted to re-invest Rock music with content, motivation and risk. Our records were documents of attitudes and experiences and observations by us and other determinedly individual outsiders. Fashion was an enemy, style irrelevant.

We wanted to also investigate music as a Business phenomenon and propose models for entirely new and innovative modes of commercial operation. A parody and an improvement. Industrial Records was founded before any of thee better known of the English Independents and was at its close the 3rd largest, yet the most elusive. We wanted to make music and records more effective and relevant to our Industrial society, and we wanted to make business more efficient and creative as well. Industrial Records Limited was born. Named as the most unromantic yet appropriate title we could envisage. Big records companies produce records like cars; we are connected to a contemporary social situation, not a blues orientated past style; we work hard for what we want, we are industrious; we parody and challenge large industrial companies and their debasing ethics and depersonalisation; we work in an old factory; industrial labour is slavery, destructive, a redundant institution so we call it the Death Factory. Music From The Death Factory, from the world, from life. Records in English also mean files, documents, as collected by Government agencies, employers, schools and police forces. Our Records are a combination of files on our relationship with the world and a Newspaper without censorship. Monte Cazazza suggested our business slogan should be INDUSTRIAL MUSIC FOR INDUSTRIAL PEOPLE. You Get what you deserve. Or do you? Well, from the people with a vested interest in controlling and guiding society to follow their recommendations as to what attitudes you should have, what motivations should govern your bebaviour and what goals you should be satisfied with, you DO NOT get what you deserve. You get what you are given, and what you are given is primarily conditioning that pushes you towards blind acceptance, wasted labour, frustrated relationships and a vast sense of hopelessness. We are trained to feel we are not responsible or in control of our society and world so that we will continue to let "Leaders" look after us like parents with retarded children.

Leaders are not essential, we are TAUGHT to believe we need them, that we are not able to assume responsibility for ourselves. Lies created leaders, lies perpetuate leaders, lies destroy joy and creativity and hope. There are NO LIES on these records, no one here is a leader. We assume full responsibility for ourselves. We will not be deflected from our destiny. OUR LIFE. There is currently a trend back towards total control and safety in the record and music industry. Groups are styled, hyped and successful before they even release a record. Old outlaws and thinkers are opting for security, comfortable records that apply radical discoveries to banal musical ends. Show business and its inherited goals and justifications are triumphant again. The public is seduced and cheated by emptiness packaged alluringly in cheap tinsel. Fear is the Government once more. On this record are people who were not afraid to think, did not avoid risks. People of all ages are here, from 16 years old to 70 years old. Truth and hope have no boundaries, no set style, they are implicit most clearly in the way you choose to live. The title of the last record issued by industrial tells the rest. "Nothing here now but the recordings."

Or perhaps there is...”

Industrial Records Discography

1977 - TG, THE SECOND ANNUAL REPORT
1978 - TG, UNITED / ZKLON B ZOMBIE. 7" Vinyl Single.
1978 - TG, D.O.A. THE THIRD AND FINAL REPORT 1979 - TG, 20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS.
1979 - Thomas Leer & Robert Rental: THE BRIDGE. 12" Vinyl Album.
1979 - Leather Nun: SLOW DEATH. 7" Vinyl Single. 1979 - Monte Cazazza: TO MOM ON MOTHER'S DAY: Monte. 7" Vinyl Single. 1980 - TG, HEATHEN EARTH. 1980 - TG, SUBHUMAN / SOMETHING CAME OVER ME. 7" Vinyl Single. 1980 - TG, ADRENALIN / DISTANT DREAMS. 7" Vinyl Single. 1980 - Dorothy: I CONFESS. 7" Vinyl Single.
1980 - Elisabeth Welch: STORMY WEATHER. 7" Vinyl Single.
1980 - S.P.K. : SLOGUN / MEKANO. 7" Vinyl Single.
1980 - Monte Cazazza: SOMETHING FOR NOBODY. 7" Vinyl Single.
1981 - TG, DISCIPLINE. 12" Vinyl Single.
1981 - William S. Burroughs: NOTHING HER NOW BUT THE RECORDINGS. 12" Vinyl Album.

Pictured above is thee building TG referred to as “The Death Factory,” the address ov which is 10 Martello Street in Hackney, London. It was from this building that Industrial Records operated, and where thee studio where TG recorded most ov their albums was located. One ov the reasons why thee band referred to it as “The Death Factory” was because it was situated next to London Fields Park (where many plague victims were buried in the medieval period) and also because thee building was a disused factory. It was purchased by P-Orridge and Tutti in 1973, back when they were still heavily involved with COUM Transmissions. E believe thee building is still standing today, though it might be abandoned now.

When not working at IR Records, Chris Carter worked as a sound engineer at thee London bureau ov thee ABC News agency, and Peter Christopherson helped design album covers for Hipgnosis (he is one ov thee people thanked in thee liner notes ov thee Pink Floyd Animals album). Christopherson designed many of thee TG album covers, and thee reason why the first TG album cover was so minimalist was because Sleazy was sick ov designing glossy album covers for other rock bands during his day job. Cosey, in thee meanwhile, made a living modeling for pornographic magazines and also stripping. This was the music she usually stripped to:

-PVC outfit: “Hard Working Man” (Captain Beefheart)/ “Heaven” (Pere Ubu)
-School girl outfit: “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick” (Ian Dury and the Blockheads)/”Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (Crystal Gayle)
-Pink satin shorts etc: “Easy” (Commodores)
-Some topless dance tracks: “Native New Yorker” (Odyssey)/”Instant Replay” (Dan Hartman)/”Lady Marmalade” (Labelle)/ “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” (Sylvester)/”Disco Inferno” (The Trammps)

For many years Genesis and Cosey were a couple, but thee two broke up in 1978. Cosey and Chris eventually ended up becoming a couple. Needless to say, this caused some tension in thee group (as it was, Chris was the first person to leave TG).

A: Well, my first intentions were to rape her but, um, when I started to, uh, when I grabbed hold of her the sexual, uh, motives just disappeared. I just flipped right out and started strangling her. I pounded her head against the stairs a number of times.
Q: How old was she?
A: She was ten.
Q: Was it something that you wanted to [unintelligible]?
A: No, it was, uh, to have sex was the original motive and I was trying to find someone older, but she was there at the time.
 

Thee Gristleizer

Because the band didn’t have thee most money initially they often had to build their own instruments and effects boxes. These were built for thee band by Chris Carter: two ov his more useful devices were thee tape sample player used by Sleazy and also thee legendary Gristleizer.

Information on thee Gristleizer may be found at this blog:

http://gristleizer.com/

Here is thee original schematic ov thee Gristleizer (taken from Chris Carter’s website):

Quotes From Artists Influenced By Throbbing Gristle

Some copy about why we are important from lots of famous people.

 Recommended Reading

Currently thee most comprehensive book on Throbbing Gristle would be Simon Ford’s Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle (Black Dog Publishing, 1999). This bulky 300 page book is loaded with photographs and data related to TG, and also provides a detailed look back at thee activities of COUM Transmissions. Sadly it’s been out-ov-print for years butter if you can find it at a reasonable price E highly recommend you purchase it, because if you’re a TG fan it’s essential reading. Even harder to find at a reasonable price these days is David Keenan’s England’s Hidden Reverse (SAF Publishing, 2003): even though this book focuses mainly on Nurse With Wound, Current 93, and Coil, Throbbing Gristle is analyzed a bit as well. Also worth seeking out is RE/SEARCH #4/5 (1982), a “special book issue” focusing on William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Throbbing Gristle. This book includes 4 old Throbbing Gristle interviews, along with a chronology and discography ov thee band (now outdated, obviously). Finally, those who love the album 20 Jazz Funk Greats should pick up thee 33⅓ entry on that album (published in 2008). Written by Drew Daniel (of Matmos fame), it provides an in-depth track-by-track look at thee album 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and is littered with interviews with thee band members and interesting quotes from such people as Kurt Schwitters, Ezra Pound, Brian Eno, John Ashbery, Plotinus, Brion Gysin, Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs, Susan Sontag, Lewis Carroll, Colin Wilson, Graham Greene, and Samuel Beckett. Much of thee quotes and data presented in this Report were taken from thee abovementioned books.

On Thee Albums

For thee Throbbing Gristle neophyte, thee best place to start is perhaps one ov their various “greatest hits” collections. Entertainment Through Pain: Throbbing Gristle’s Greatest Hits, is a good starting point: thee 2011 Remastered Edition ov this album is especially recommended over thee 1990 Mute edition as it includes a bonus CD of other “hits.” Mute also released an album called The Taste of TG in 2004 that is a decent collection ov some of the band’s studio/live material, though it does tend to focus more on TG’s poppier/dance material. Those who wish to dig deeper should, at thee very least, get thee four original studio albums (The Second Annual Report, D.O.A, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and Heathen Earth), in particular the recently remastered editions that came out in 2011 as these feature clearer sound and each comes with a bonus CD containing live material and various singles and B-sides. TG’s last major studio album, Part Too: The Endless Not has its moments, and Journey Through A Body is an often overlooked gem in TG’s discography. For thee true TG fanatic, there’s always thee TG24 and TG+ box sets, which collect all ov their live shows from 1976-1981, and, between them, have around 37 CDs worth of material. Also worth looking into is TGV, a limited edition 7 DVD set ov archival footage, mostly some ov thee band’s old live performances.

Industrial Music For Industrial People: Thee Studio Sound Ov TG

Second Annual Report= Propaganda
D.o.A- Third and Final Report= Discipline
Twenty Jazz Funk Greats= Camouflage
Heathen Earth= Ritual
+Sexuality= Power Focus

The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle

Genesis P-Orridge: Bass Guitar, Violin, Vocals
Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson: Tapes, Trumpet Processing
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Raver & Satellite Lead Guitar
Chris Carter: Keyboards, Rhythms, Mixing

Music From The Death Factory

In 1977 TG released their first album, The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle. An extremely lo-fi production (thee entire first side was recorded using a Sony cassette mike and a home stereo Wharfdale cassette, at a cost of 15 pounds: thee tape they used to record thee album on was second hand), it was a mix of live and studio material.

Side A begins with a short piece of accelerating drones appropriately entitled “Industrial Introduction” before going into three different versions of “Slug Bait,” one of TG’s earliest compositions: this track taking its subject matter from an article in thee Guardian (detailing Rhodesian guerillas brutally murdering a husband in front ov his wife at an isolated farm in 1976), and also thee murder ov Sharon Tate by thee Manson Family in 1969.

Genesis explains:

“That was inspired by Rhodesian guerilla activity at the very beginning of the troubles when some black guerillas came to a white farm house and castrated the husband in front of his pregnant wife and then made him eat his own testicles and she had to sit and watch him bleeding to death.

I spliced that image in with the Sharon Tate killing when they actually stabbed her and one of the girls, Sadie, talked about wanting to cut the baby out because it was still alive inside Sharon Tate.

It's two different moments in time and two different motivations or cultures - one primitive, one very, very sophisticated - but also all through history conquering armies have raped, pillaged, castrated and tortured.”

[“Sharon was the last to die,” Susan said with a laugh as she described how Sharon was begging her, “ Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to have my baby. I want to have my baby.”

Susan said she just looked at Sharon straight in the eye and said, “Look, bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You had better be ready. You’re going to die and I don’t feel anything about it...In a few minutes I killed her.”
Susan said she saw that there was Sharon’s blood on her hand and she tasted it. “Wow, what a trip! To taste death, and yet give life.”

Flabbergasted, Virginia asked Susan if it didn’t bother her to kill a pregnant woman.

“I thought you understood. I loved her, and in order for me to kill her I was killing part of myself when I killed her,” Susan explained. She had wanted to cut out Sharon’s baby but there wasn’t enough time. She had also wanted to take out all the victims’ eyes and squash them against the walls and cut off and mutilate all of their fingers, but they didn’t have the chance.”]
After “Slug Bait” there are 4 versions ov thee song “Maggot Death,” three being live performances and one being a studio recording.

The second side of TG’s first LP consists of the long and ambient soundtrack to the film After Cease To Exist, a COUM film shot by thee band in May 1977. This black and white 16mm movie was 15 minutes long, the first and last five minutes being completely blank. E haven’t seen this film myself: according to Sleazy, it involved Chris Carter being tied to a table and then being “castrated” by Cosey followed by Sue Catwoman being tied to an iron bed, with footage ov TG playing live in Southhampton added in.

785 copies of the album were pressed, and by January 1978 they had nearly all sold out. Supposedly Peter Gabriel, Frank Zappa, and, um, Elton John all bought copies ov it.

Upon completing thee album Genesis had thee following epiphany:

“When we’d finished producing the tapes that became Second Annual Report, I remember going outside at Martello Street as a train passed on the railway line, and there was a transistor radio blaring round the corner, and a sawmill cutting up wood, and a dog barking, and I just said, ‘We haven’t invented anything. We’ve just put down what’s here all the time, without knowing it.’ That was when I suggested we should do muzak for factories, using the actual noises of the factory, but making it rhythmic, so that it made the unpleasant noise of the building acceptable, instead of trying to drown it out with disgusting popular music.”

From thee liner notes:

“This report has been assembled from recordings made during the year ending September 3rd 1977, the anniversary of, amongst other things, the approximate formation of the group Throbbing Gristle two years previously. This second year of production has shown a definite move towards establishment of a sound business foundation on which further work involving greater capital expenditure can be based. Considerable progress has been made in the fields of research and development which have enabled us to give live demonstrations in five locations. These being at the I.C.A., The Mall, London on 18th October 1976; at the Nag’s Head, High Wycombe on 11th February 1977: at the Polytechnic, Brighton on 26th March 1977; at Southampton University on 7th May 1977 and at the Rat Club, Pindar of Wakefield, King’s Cross, London on 22nd May 1977. These appearances were seen by audiences varying between approximately 130 (at the Rat Club) and 800 (at the I.C.A.) and their reaction to our work has been similarly variable. We have included the reactions of the audience in Brighton and particularly of the DJ of the disco at that venue as the last track of Side One. It is worth mentioning that overall a very positive interest in our work prevails and a considerable number have expressed a desire to see us perform on subsequent occasions. Simultaneously with our live demonstrations a weekly programme of research and composition has been maintained at the studio of Industrial Records to whom our thanks are due for their support and investment.

One side of this record has been assembled from tapes made at four out of five occasions and at the studio of Industrial Records in London. Side Two consists of the entire original movie soundtrack of a film produced by COUM Transmissions called “After Cease to Exist” premiered in Arnhelm, Holland in July 1977, which Throbbing Gristle were invited to score and perform. It was recorded at the Industrial Records studio. The field of film soundtrack production is one which is most suitable to our methods of work and we look forward to offers of more work in this field.

All recordings were made in one take without any overdubs or any recording treatment other than standard playing procedures that we employ. Within the limitations of the recording techniques used the sound on this record is exactly as it was heard at the moment of its production.

In the forthcoming year we hope to increase the number of live demonstrations and the variety of their locations. We also hope to continue our film work and to extend into a new area of preparing customized tapes of piped music for shops and factories, and finally to continue releasing records for public consumption.”

What the press had to say about it:

“It’s totally unique and committed and deserving of your attention. It challenges all the preconceptions (Aural/Technical) currently held by just about everybody. Even punk-rock maestros know a couple of chords, whereas TG have developed their own standards of musicianship to suit their own needs. No concrete philosophy is put oiver besides an overriding preoccupation with immersing one’s mind with images of grotesque weirdness. It ain’t necessarily nihilistic, it’s just that they have a rampant interest in blurred self-images with forensic overtones… If the Clash are the sound of the Westway, then TG are the Sound of Tesco (with run down batteries)… It ain’t punk rock, it isn’t anything you could name.”

-Sandy Roberston, Sounds (Nov. 1977: 5 star review)

“This record will not be repressed. A neat double edge there… This is a very harrowing record. Darkly subjective. Not for those who feel that they perhaps can’t trust themselves. On some musically historical level (a debased one but an easy hanger), it’s approximately John Cage, Maurice Kagel, Lamonte Young, Terry Riley even. Closer to home, it could be the first Faust album, Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’, Fripp and Eno’s ‘No Pussyfooting’, Cluster and Eno’s recent collaboration or high period Amon Duul 2. Electronics and voice loops, echoes, effects and collage. What is this music exactly? I don’t know.”

-Paul Morley, NME (Feb. 1978)

“So far outside the conventional framework of music do they operate that snappy clichés to pigeon-hole their work do not immediately spring to mind. To me some pieces suggest the dreams of complex industrial machines, the heartbeat of the London underground, the random noise generated by racing back and forth across a short wave radio dial at night. Equally, their film soundtrack would be the perfect aural complement for both Metropolis and Alphaville.”

-Anonymous, Malvern Gazette & Ledbury Reporter (Feb. 2, 1978)

Slug Bait (ICA):

Maggot Death (all 4 versions):

* * * *

The following year saw TG releasing their first single, in May 1978. It featured two songs: on side A was “United” while side B was “Zyklon B Zombie.” “United” was thee most pop-orientated track that TG had done up to that point, though they did manage to incorporate a reference to Aleister Crowley with the lyric “Love is the Law.” “Zyklon B Zombie” was a more punk-inspired number that was musically (and even lyrically) inspired by thee Velvet Ungerground song “I Heard Her Call My Name.” It was meant to sonically simulate thee hysteria one would experience upon being ushered into one ov thee gas chambers at Auschwitz and being exposed to Zyklon B.

United:

Zyklon B Zombie:

(The man taking a shower on thee cover ov thee B-side is Chris Carter).

Later on in 1978, on Dec. 4th, TG released their second album:

D.O.A: The Third And Final Report of Throbbing Gristle

Chris Carter: Synthesisers, Electronic Rhythms, Tapes
Peter Christopherson: Tapes, Machines
Genesis P-Orridge: Bass Guitar, Violins, Vocals
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Lead Guitar, Effects, Tapes

From thee liner notes:

“Thank you for your attention.

Since our last report many things have changed, indeed it would be foolish to assume that it could be otherwise.

On a practical level the demand for “Second Annual Report” and the single release “United/Zyklon B Zombie” that followed it greatly exceeded the supply that we were able to provide, and to all those who were unable to obtain these releases we offer our apologies. Although our financial position is getting stronger it has always been our policy to produce a limited amount of material that is exactly as we want it rather than to sacrifice quality to profit. We hope you will bear with us in this. Our intention is that with this, the third and final report of Throbbing Gristle, any demand will be met.

A few words about this record: for various reasons we have decided to include a solo track by each of the four individual group members. We think you may find this illuminating. The recordings are in stereo throughout and on certain tracks you may find it preferable to listen on headphones, though it is by no means essential. Explanatory details about individual tracks are as follows:

“I.B.M.” was inspired by a found cassette sent to us by Mark Eyles. “Hit By A Rock” was recorded live at Highbury Roundhouse, London in September 1977. “Valley of the Shadow of Death” was recorded by Peter Christopherson. “Dead on Arrival” was recorded live at A.T.C., Goldsmith College, London in May 1978. “Weeping” uses four types of acoustic violin through a space-echo played and arranged by Genesis P-Orridge, the lyrics are co-written by Genesis P-Orridge and Ewa Zajac.

“Hamburger Lady” was inspired by a section of a letter from Dr. Al Ackerman of Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. reproduced elsewhere on this booklet. “Hometime” was played, recorded and arranged by Cosey Fanni Tutti. “AB/7A” was played, produced, arranged and recorded by Chris Carter. “Death Threats” was taken unaltered off our telephone answering machine. “Walls of Sound” was recorded live at five locations during the last year. “Blood on the Floor” was recorded live at Highbury Roundhouse, London in September 1977.

The remaining material was gathered on location or recorded at the studios of Industrial Records, to whom, as ever, our thanks are due.”

-From the liner notes to D.O.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle.

“…By far the worst is the Hamburger Lady, and because of the shortage right now of ‘qualified technicians’ e.g. technicians who can work with her and keep their last meal down. Screwloose Lauritzen and I have been alternating nights with her, unrelievedly. If you put a 250-lb meatloaf in the oven and then burned it and then followed that by propping it up on a potty-chair to greet you at 11 pm each night, you would have some description of these past two weeks. Which is to say the worst I seen since viet napalms. When somebody tells you that there is a level of pain beyond which the human mind cannot retain consciousness, please tell them to write me. In point of fact this lady has not slept more than 3-5 minutes a stretch since she came to us- that was over two weeks ago and, thanks to medical advances there is no end in sight: from the waist (waste?) up everything is burned off, ears, nose etc. –lower half is untouched and that, I guess, is what keeps her alive. I took one guy in to help me change tubes and he did alright, this alright till he came out, then he spotted one of the burn nurses (pleasant smiling zombies) eating a can of chile-mac at the desk, and that did it: he flashed on the carpet. It is fucking insane is what it is.”
-part of a letter sent by Al Ackerman from Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. 1978

D.O.A. was TG’s second major studio album, and in some ways one ov their strangest. Thee first 1,000 mail-order copies included a calendar featuring a colour photograph ov a half-naked little girl sitting on a bed: a pedophiliac parody of the “calendar girl” genre. Thee album begins with thee abrasive “I.B.M.” followed by a live track, thee heavy metal-sounding “Hit By A Rock.” Following a remix of thee single “United” (in which thee song is sped-up to be no longer than 15 seconds, a cheeky prank on consumers who purchased thee album just so they could have thee single “United”) there is Sleazy’s solo piece (a field recording ov negotiations between a young male prostitute and his client entitled “Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death”), followed by another live track, “Dead on Arrival” (a good example ov TG’s early “Tesco Disco”/muzak for factories style) and Gen’s solo track, thee haunting “Weeping” (which utilized 4 different types ov violins: this was also Ian Curtis’ favorite TG song).

Side B begins with thee classic nightmare track “Hamburger Lady” (thee lyrics ov which were inspired by a letter sent to P-Orridge by an American friend of his: this letter has been reprinted above), followed by “Hometime” (Cosey’s solo track), “AB/7A” (Chris Carter’s solo track: a sort ov homage to thee music of ABBA), “Terminal Repression” (a completely silent track save for tape hiss), “E-Coli,” “Death Threats” (simply two actual death threats taken directly off thee band’s answering machine), “Walls of Sound,” and “Blood on the Floor” (thee latter two being live tracks as well).

What thee press said:

“TG takes no sides, leaving pity, shame, disgust and outrage to your decision.”

-John Gill, Sounds (16 December 1978)

“This new album is clear where its predecessor was muddy, dangerously ambiguous; it is conventional where the last was not- recognizable songs, themes and even a ‘normal’ colour cover; TG ‘progress’, which in their case means a more precise expression and orientation of the issues that concern them… The album subtitle is ‘Third And Final Report’; having reported so tellingly, the next step is… action?”

-Jon Savage, Melody Maker (23 December 1978)

“As it stands, the preoccupation with the darker side of life, the more gruesome, taboo happenings have not been dispelled. This is intentionally separate and ‘different’ so should therefore be judged as such. And taken on its own level, D.O.A. works, works perfectly. You can’t dance to it, it ain’t necessarily ‘enjoyable’, and as someone once said… it just is.”

-Chris Westwood, Record Mirror (13 January 1979) 4 star rating

“The murky electronic disembowelments which pass for Throbbing Gristle’s ‘improvised’ music have been heard in previous manifestations where there was more sense of purpose and less pretence. Faust didn’t send out paedophiliac joke postcards.”

-Ian Penman, NME (13 January 1979)

“Monotonous but only half-assed synthesizer white noise, spastic ‘sci-fi’ upchuck; workaday factory cacophony; barely audible production camouflaged vocalizings on thematic grotesqueries like germ warfare and fistfuck rapes in the local men’s room. It’s reliable obnox-noise alright, clinically colored and all that but basically just your standard racket, big deal- where’s all the MENACE?... a music ‘of the future’ that’s intentionally anti-responsive to any of the so-called needs of the human nervous system… TG are the Velvets of the ‘new age’ [had to happen], leaving even Lou’s old crew, who at their most dense/distended at least exhibited a certain pulse, awash in the wake of a strip-mine of bankruptcy of socio-aesthetic adventure once and for all.”

-Richard Meltzer, Village Voice (19 November 1979)

United (the sped-up D.O.A version):

Dead on Arrival:

Weeping:

Hamburger Lady:

AB/7A:

Death Threats:

Walls of Sound:

* * * *

In 1979 TG released thee single “Five Knuckle Shuffle”/”We Hate You (Little Girls).”

We Hate You (Little Girls):

Five Knuckle Shuffle:

TG released their third studio album in December of 1979:

20 Jazz Funk Greats

Chris Carter: Roland Synthesisers, Sequencers, Rhythms, and Vocals
Peter Christopherson: Tape, Vibes, Cornet and Vocals
Genesis P-Orridge: Bass Guitar, Violin, Vibes, Synthesiser and Vocals
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Satellite Lead Guitar, Gizmo Guitar, Synthesiser, Cornet and Vocals

TG’s “commercial album,” it was primarily inspired by a conversation P-Orridge had with his mother, in which she sarcastically asked him, “Why can’t you do something nice? Why can’t you do a nice record, with something nice on it, like flowers? And smile.” P-Orridge saw it as a good way to “wind people up, confuse them, make them angry and play with stereotypes.” As a way to escape from thee “bleak, industrial, dark and somber” image that others had laid on thee band, TG decided that thee album cover art would feature thee group posing in banal clothes in thee countryside, and so chose Beachy Head as thee ideal location: partly because ov its reputation as a famous beauty spot, butter also because it was a favoured location for suicides to jump off thee cliff. As P-Orridge noted, “It amuses us to think that there we were smiling in flowers and everyone says ‘how nice’ and actually we’re smiling where people who are totally in despair commit suicide.”

Thee album beings with “20 Jazz Funk Greats,” a short track featuring a basic drum beat, some bass, Cosey’s cornet work, and Sleazy whispering words such as ‘Yeah” and “Nice.” It is followed by “Beachy Head,” a dark, gauzy and ambient instrumental track with seagull noises taken from a BBC sound effects record. Then there’s “Still Walking,” a chaotic experiment ov lyrical cut-ups that explores Gysin’s ideas on permutation (this track also is one ov thee few that features all four ov TG’s members on vocals). Thee fourth track, “Tanith” (named after a dog owned by Genesis and Cosey at that time: supposedly he was trained so that there was a word that could be used to make him attack someone, butter to this day Cosey refuses to reveal what that word was), is a P-Orridge solo piece, a short and funky instrumental track featuring bass, violin, and vibes. Then there’s “Convincing People,” though this studio version isn’t quite as effective as live versions I’ve heard ov it: it sounds very weedy to my ears. Side A of thee album ends with yet another instrumental, “Exotica,” thee band’s first tribute to Martin Denny.

Side B begins with “Hot On The Heels of Love,” one ov thee few TG songs that feature Cosey on lead vocals. It is a disco-like dance track and one ov thee stronger songs on thee album. Next is “Persuasion,” one ov thee more famous TG songs, in which P-Orridge sings about collecting panties over a plodding bass line and sonically treated voices. Track 9, “Walkabout,” is a cheerful synth-instrumental by Carter, inspired by the Roeg film ov thee same name. Track 10, “What A Day,” another ov TG’s more well-known tracks, has P-Orridge moronically singing thee phrase “What A Day” in an exaggerated British accent over a grinding mechanical beat. Thee album ends with “Six Six Sixties,” another Gen solo track and one ov my favorites: over a drum machine beat and a noisy guitar riff Genesis delivers a number of lyrics derived from a transcription of a séance he took part in in 1967, in which he claims to have encountered a spirit named Mebar. Below is a sketch ov Mebar taken from one ov Genesis’ notebooks:

What thee press said:

“Adam and the Ants and Throbbing Gristle are shadowy extremes, lurking in dark corners, lethargically scratching through their overscrubbed private parts, grinning sweetly at anyone who glances their way. Come here little girl! It’s a dreary indulgence… It’s an unstimulating, inconclusive sound, full of grubby textures and scattered effects, and will satisfy only the most self-conscious… it can be easily flicked away, like a scab, or swept away like the dust it is- not because of any ‘horror’ or nastiness, but because it is patronizing, deceitful, and simply too conservative for a place in rock or art or my heart.”

-Paul Morley, NME (8 December 1979)

“Though the phrase is not mine, ‘the pornography of power’ more than adequately summarizes this writer’s feelings about Throbbing Gristle’s manipulations of their audience, an expensive joke which continually threatens to turn nasty [but never delivers the horrors]… cheap intentions to menace and alienate… I’m afraid it just isn’t possible to insinuate the shock-barrage tactics that work on a captive audience into the living room; in extremis, the volume control and-ultimately- the off switch undoubtedly have the final say.”

-Steve Taylor, Melody Maker (15 December 1979)

“The album is entirely devoid of personality or glamour. It is frighteningly faceless… The band look more like clerks than labourers. There are no potential ‘faces of the decade’ in this line-up.”

-Andrew James Paterson, Fuse (May 1980)

Still Walking:

Hot on the Heels of Love:

Persuasion:

What a Day:

What a Day:

Six Six Sixties:

Question: What exactly is an alchemist?

Answer: It’s somebody who uses self-discipline to develop and maximize what they want to achieve. They take into account what they don’t know as well as what they do know. Part of the idea is that a random factor that you have no knowledge of completes the formula, and that’s how we try and work. We think that including and integrating random chance and intuition is actually the most precise way of working at anything.

Heathen Earth

“This album was recorded on Saturday the 16th of February between 8:10pm and 9:00pm in front of an invited audience at the studios of Industrial Records Limited. The object was to make a record of T.G. performing live without the often unpredictable influence of adverse playing conditions on the music and on the technical quality. In the days following this session a minimum of re-recording was done and the 8-Track master tapes were mixed-down into stereo.”

-from the back cover of the Heathen Earth LP

The original channel allocation on the 8-Track master tapes:

Rhythms (Chris)
Vocals & Echo Effects
Bass Guitar (Gen)
Cornet, Tape (Sleazy)
Cornet, Lead Guitar (Cosey)
Synthesisers (Chris)
Binaural Left
Binaural Right

Sound engineer: Stan Bingo

Present at the recording were:

Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Jonas Almquist, Alan Adams, Rosie Antrobus, Jules Baker, Stan Bingo, Tom Craig, Monte Cazazza, Tana Emmolo, Alex Fergusson, Anthony Murphy, Kim Norris, Sandy Robertson, Geoff Rushton, Jon Savage, Martin Scott, Kevin Thorne, George Valls, Irene Valls, Glenn Michael Wallis, Peter Walmsley

“The voice in the background of the third section of side one says, ‘YOU SHOULD ALWAYS AIM TO BE AS SKILLFUL AS THE MOST PROFESSIONAL OF THE GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. THE WAY BYOU LIVE, STRUCTURE, CONCEIVE AND MARKET WHAT YOU DO SHOULD BE AS WELL THOUGHT OUT AS A GOVERNMENT COUP. IT’S A CAMPAIGN, IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ART.’

The teeth on the front cover are a blow up of a dogs teeth taken from a vetinary book.

“Can The World Be As Sad As It Seems?” is a quote from a song by Charles Manson.

Stan Bingo had never engineered a record before, he was told on the day of the recording to watch all the meters to prevent overloading whilst TG played.

Monte had never made a video-tape before that night. We like to approach things like philistines or Heathens, we have no religious fervor for rock music or its various technical mystiques. We demonstrate that anyone CAN do anything, if you set it up right and chose people and circumstances that tend to generate useful or intriguing results. Our very existence is a profound comment on records, music, and the record Industry. Industrial Records x Record Industry. Another clue..?

The video-cassette is the straight documentation video with extra still and moving images mixed in on computer video-mixing later. It is in full colour.

750 copies were pressed in Blue Vinyl. There were originally 750 of our 1st L.P.”

-from the liner notes to the 1991 Mute re-release of Heathen Earth, originally reprinted from the third issue of Industrial News (1980)

Genesis P-Orridge’s comments on the 8 tracks that make up Heathen Earth:

Cornets (that's all we ever called it on gig sheets etc, boring hey!)

The Old Man Smiled (this is a song I wrote. Originally I was messing about on my own in the Death Factory, at Martello St. I got a rhythm I liked on my COMPURYTHM drumachine. Then a fuzzed lead bass guitar sound. So I recorded it. Maybe 15 minutes or so. One section made it onto 20 Jazz Funk Greats as Six Six Sixties I believe. But I always wanted a longer version. So after I came up with a story telling lyric primarily about William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in Tangiers and their stories of Captain Clark, boys etc I decided to do the NEW song on Heathen Earth. We did it live a couple of times too. At Oundle School for eg.) For Heathen

Earth we used my original cassette as the basic track.

After Cease To Exist (yes, a new version for Heathen Earth)

The World Is A War Film

Dreamachine (Brion Gysin LOVED this track. Said it was best music, equal with The Master Musicians Of Jajouka to use his dreamachine. The rhythm had already existed (one of Chris Carter's gems). So I always think happy thoughts of Brion, Bachir Attar and others listening with eyes closed in Paris at his apartment opposite the Beaubourg Museum in Rue St Martin. Ah, happy daze.)

Still Walking (A permutation of "meaningless" phrases cooked up by myself and Sleazy, that were repeated over and over as the musics rhythm gave shape to the shapeless. Chris and Cosey were shy of vocals at that time. It was partly a formula to get them to begin using their voices that I suggested based on Gysin's theories and my own experiences of gaining confidence with microphones simply by using them.)

Don't Do As You're Told, Do As You Think (To be honest I think this is the weakest vocal track and lyric. Someone, a journalist or Sleazy or both suggested we should have a "positive" message! Ugh! Certainly Sleazy persuaded me to try and this is the resultant track. I still find it embarrassing and wish I'd never listened to him. It would have been better as an instrumental. Ah well...)

Painless Childbirth (Named after a 10 inch vinyl album I found in a junk shop from which the voice was stolen.)

Heathen Earth was TG’s fourth major studio album. The idea behind the album was that, instead of composing, rehearsing and recording each song on a track-by-track basis, TG decided to try to instead capture the excitement of their life improvisatory gigs by recording the album live, in thee studio, before a small audience. This was TG’s only guiding play-list for thee show:

Trumpets 0-5 (Cornets)
666s 5-11 (The Old Man Smiled)
Free-Link 11-17 (Improvisation)
Disjointed fast rhythm 17-23 (The World is a War Film)
Slow Rhythm 30-36 (Something Came Over Me, also known as Dreammachine)
Cosey & Sleazy vocals 36-39 (Still Talking)
Gen comes in 39-44 (Bass)
Trumpet & Tribal Rhythm 44-51 (Don’t Do As You’re Told, Do As You Think)
Sleazy’s tape 51-52 (Painless Childbirth)

Because Heathen Earth is probably my favorite TG studio album, E don’t have anything more to add about it. E will say, though, that E find it very unusual that thee actual song “Heathen Earth” (which TG played live a few times) does not appear anywhere on thee album bearing its name.

What thee press said:

“If Tangerine Dream fans ever have nightmares, then this album is the soundtrack to some of their most unpleasant moments of recurring dread… The album crawls with a dark, malignant weather. Twisted thunderclaps, grating squeals of synth, vicious hails of guitar, cross-channel trumpeting, sodden twilight seashore noises, flash storms like it all might be coming to an end and ominous, hazy lulls like you know it is coming. And out from the unpredictable miasma, doing a hellish rhumba, comes the slave machine-rhythm, lashing at you with scorched guitar and stinging weals of sound… Heathen Earth really reduces ‘rock music’ to its disturbing basics, splitting open a hornet’s nest of contradictory emotions.”

-John Gill, Sounds June 28, 1980: 5 star review

“Musically, it’s evidently obvious that TG, like Cabaret Voltaire, are more successful the further they depart from avowedly ‘avant-garde’ [read: noisy, free-form or formless] music, and the nearer they get to something approximating to the great beast rock and roll [read: possessing a rhythmic core]. They’re also that much more experimental, too, all this avant-garde free-form noise crap having been done to the death years ago by others.”

-Andy Gill, NME, July 12, 1980

“apart from the nauseatingly mundane sleeve the inane pseudocitation on the front the soft focus playboy snapshots and the craclicking namechecks i could still forgive this album if the music was good unfortunately after an encouraging start on side one it degenerates into fifth rate emerson lake and palmer”

-William Bennett, Kata 1980

The Old Man Smiled:

The World is a War Film:

Don’t Do as You’re Told, Do As You Think:

On October 14th ov 1980 TG released 4 singles in one day: “Adrenalin,” “Something Came Over Me,” “Distant Dreams (Pt. 2),” and “Subhuman.” “Subhuman” was described as the band’s “crazy noise aggression side,” “Something Came Over Me” as “a foot-tapping cheeky fun-song,” “Adrenalin” as “a complex mutant disco song,” and “Distant Dreams [Part two]” as “a dreamy hypnotic early-hours of the morning sad romance.”

Subhuman:

Adrenalin:

Distant Dreams [Part Two]:

Something Came Over Me:

(thee inset photograph on thee cover of “Something Came Over Me” was a close-up ov Sleazy’s semen in water).

From Sounds magazine (27 December 1980):

“P-Orridge has been signing autographs in the flesh of juveniles with his commando knife after mutilating himself with it in the interests of equality with the punters… Gen tells us, by the by, that he is miffed to find that he can’t get folks interested in a John Lennon cover version/bastardization of ‘Give Peace a Chance’ titled ‘Give Guns a Chance’, with ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ on the flip side.”

Journey Through a Body

Journey Through a Body is often one ov TG’s more overlooked albums, perhaps because it was recorded towards thee end of their first phase and released a year after they had broken up. Interestingly, although all ov TG’s previous studio albums have recently been remastered and re-released, the same cannot be said for Journey Through a Body (though Mute did release it on CD in thee early 1990s). This album was recorded in March 1981 at thee RAI Studios in Rome, Italy. It took thee band five days to complete, with each track being conceived, recorded and mixed on a separate day. Thematically built around the idea of journeying through a body from birth to death, the album consists of five tracks: “Medicine”, “Catholic Sex”, “Exotic Functions” (another exotica-infused tribute to the work of Martin Denny), “Violencia [The Bullet]”, and “Oltre la Morte, Birth and Death.” In some ways perhaps thee most experimental ov TG’s studio albums, it has some great moments, especially “Exotic Functions,” “Violencia” (one ov thee most abrasive tracks the band ever recorded in thee studio), and “Oltre la Morte,” a lovely track featuring nothing more than some peaceful piano work.

Exotic Functions/Violencia (The Bullet), Oltre la Morte, Birth and Death:

Following Journey Through a Body, many years would go by before the next major TG solo album.
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*

p.s. Hey. Sypha's guest-posts for this blog have always been monumental things -- arguably, or is that inarguably, definitive vis-à-vis their subjects -- and beginning today then continuing though the weekend, we get his amazing opus, introduction to, and widespread coverage of the work of those pioneering and vastly influential music makers Throbbing Gristle. Please live it and learn it today, thank you. And, Sypha, what can I say? Very honored and mega-grateful, man. ** Jeff, Hey. Thanks for the kind words, Jeff. I really appreciate it. ** Wolf, Hugs returned to you two fold. You good? ** Bollo, Hi, Jonathan. Yeah, I thought about you when I heard about Mike's death. I hope you're doing well. Not too late to play the game, no. This means I need to find you a 'thanks' quote, and the choices are getting a little thin. Ha ha, how thin, you ask? Well, ... 'I do that in whatever language of the country I'm in, because the audience appreciate it.' -- Phil Collins ** Jax, 'Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.' -- Voltaire. Thanks for the thoughts too, pal. ** Nipper Dog, Thank you, man. Yeah, see what you think of Mike's work. I hope it gives you something good. ** David Ehrenstein, I'm assuming the consequential complaints to Blogger came from the same whoever(s) who got my blog temporarily (so far) locked out of FB. There are few things worse than a spiteful, self-appointed, interfering moralistic asshole. Wonderful news about the new Whit Stillman. Of course, I'm heavily chomping at the bit for it. Thank you a lot for sharing your thoughts on it, D. ** JoeM, Thank you, Joe. Well, at least now Blogger actually investigates complaints rather than just shutting blogs down automatically when complainers weigh in. You remember the last time that happened, i.e. my first, dead blog. Ah, a Fred entry. Not too late, no. And as for a thanks quote, hm, let me find you something ... 'I don't have a normal job, so I really appreciate having friends who are writers and artists. It's fun to have a group of people you can call in the middle of the day to go for a hike.' -- Natalie Portman ** Tonyoneill, Hey, Tony. Thanks, man, about Mike. A difficult beast, eh? That sounds, you know, obviously, fucking great to me. The weird thing over here, or in France at least, is that the discourse about new literature is really high, but it's so much less accessible or public, and it doesn't happen online here to anywhere remotely close to the degree that it does in the States, which obviously gives it a different shape. And, of course, my speaking French super crappily means that it's all kind of mostly a big mystery to me. Anyway, yeah, give the new novel to the folks over here first, why not? No, I don't know 'The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein' at all, but, whoa, did you just sell me on it, though. And you gotta love that title. Jess Franco made it, huh? Okay, I'll be off hunting for a download post-haste. Thanks, Tony! ** MANCY, Thanks a lot, man. I really appreciate it. The loss of Mike is pretty heavy for everyone. The outpouring from all over has been pretty amazing. I hope you're doing good. ** Empty Frame, Hey. Yeah, thanks. It's interesting how everyone has focused on that Fontana quote about Mike's unhappiness re: what has happened to the art world and its effect on him. Knowing him, I have no doubt that he really felt that way, and his close friend the artist John Miller has recounted a recent conversation with Mike that backs it up. Still, we really just don't know why Mike did what he did, and it's interesting how the narrative of his act now belongs to everybody else. I do think it's very telling that the main quotes about Mike in the initial news reports came almost entirely from Metro Pictures, the gallery he was with for 20 years, and not from Gagosian, whose comments, in contrast to those originating from Metro Pictures, have been brief and official. I always wanted to ask Mike why he went with Gagosian. It really surprised me when he did. The answer could easily be as simple as the added resources he got to make his work as a result. But I do wonder if working in that elite kind of context didn't end up weighing heavily on him. I don't know if we'll ever really know. Anyway, yeah, thanks, man. ** Hyrule Dungeon, Hi, J! Yeah, his mark was pretty vast. ** Kiddiepunk, Hey. I ate too much. Your ATs look really awesome on that site, maestro. Everyone, master artist and so much more Kiddiepunk's new works, titled 'Animal Totems', are amazing if you haven't seen them, and you can, if you haven't, and, well, also if you have, by clicking this which will take you to a array of said works at the blog of Dust Magazine. Please be off with you. ** Sypha, Man, seriously, thank you boundlessly for today and for the upcoming weekend. Words fail. Incredible. ** Rewritedept, Hi, man, good to see you! I hope the busyness is feeding you well. I'm really sorry to hear about your friend's friend (and yours, really) Mark. Even the most technically serene suicide is very violent. No sweat on your needing to be elsewhere. I look forward to seeing you more. ** A.r., Hi, Alex. Yeah, that he went at all plus how he went is so incredibly hard to wrap my mind around. I haven't shaken off the shock at all. I haven't seen Will Oldham live since the Palace days. Oh, wait, I saw him open for Bjork solo, but that was kind of an awful gig and not in an interesting way, and the awfulness seemed to do with the context/juxtaposition basically. I'm curious about the thing you say he does, and why it's so odd. Back in Palace, he just kind of sat/stood there. I think Kiddiepunk saw him live here recently. Maybe he can tell me. Anyway, that's interesting to hear. You take care, my friend. Love, me. ** Jebus, Hey, Jebus! Really nice to see you! That's really beautiful what you wrote about first seeing Mike's work and its impact on you. Thanks a lot. You good? What's going on in your world? ** Heliotrope, Thanks, Mark. Love you too, man. Oh, sure and great about your nephew contacting me. He can write to me at dcooperweb @gmail.com, or I can send you my cell phone number so he can call me. Do I have your email address? I must. If not, shoot me a quick email, and I'll send it to you so you can give it to him. Awesome! ** Steevee, I never imagined Mike being someone who would commit suicide. But I guess, how could you ever know someone that deeply? Sorry about the Fandor top 10 delay, and I hope you get to do the Rollin piece. Very cool that you both got to see 'Botanica' and that you might have found an actor to work with as a result. ** Daveyhoule, Thank you kindly, Davey. ** Brendan, Yeah, please do climb out of that hole, man. I'll email you my Skype account name/number/ID thing today. Early next week sounds great, yeah! ** _Black_Acrylic, I hope the talking goes well tonight with your co-artist. Oh, the deadline approaches yet again. Let me ... Everyone, the totally great Yuck 'n Yum zine, of which d.l. _Black_Acrylic is a co-editor, has the deadline for its next issue coming up (February 24th), and _B_A invites your submissions, and I encourage your submissions to boot, and you can find the details right here. ** Casey McKinney, Hi, Casey. Yeah, some prick or group of pricks has some beef with my blog or with me or something, I guess. Right, the 94 Mike retro, and the first GbV gig! Serious double dawn there. Love to you, bud. ** TIM MILLER QUEER PERFORMER, Hi, Tim! Yeah, man, fuck. Been thinking about you too. You mentioned, I think on my FB, about you and Mike in the Yonemotos' 'Made in Hollywood'. Wow, yeah, that really takes me back. Much love to you, my friend. ** Ken Baumann, Thank you, Ken, and thank you, Aviva. I love you guys. ** Kyler, Nice Artaud quote. I'm hoping your birthday was a pizza-filled blast and that your mysterious pre-day was mysterious with a capital M. ** Chris Dankland, Thank you again a lot for yesterday. Coincidence or not, it was really good timing. Cool that Mike's work has pulled you in. Incredible artist, that guy. They don't make artists like Mike very often every century. ** Alan, That makes two of us. Thanks for the caring. ** Goodfaith, Hey. Thank you. I actually don't know who you are, but my cognitive faculties are often slightly impaired when I'm in p.s.-writing mode. Anyway, thank you again, and thank you for clicking through and coming in. ** Statictick, Hey, N. Yeah, I'm a zombie too. Fuck. I know, we were talking about the Mobile Homestead piece not so very long ago. Yeah, immense, that's the word. Take care, bud. ** Tosh, Hi, Tosh. I had imagined you knew Mike pretty well. He was a regular at Beyond Baroque in the early days, or I mean when I was doing and hosting the events, which I guess wasn't so early as far as BB goes. Wasn't that '3 Blowhards and a Little Lady' benefit show with Mike, Sandra Bernhard, Benjamin, and me on your watch? I get confused. That's wild about Mike and Bryan Ferry. That's a combo if there ever was one. Anyway, yeah, terrible. On a totally different note, your Paris trip was certainly well timed, weather-wise. It's been freezing cold here for the past two weeks. ** Misanthrope, I'm sure that your Fred bit was the final straw for my blog's hater(s). Ha ha, you wish! Thanks for your thoughts, G. I'll take them over the Nobel Peace Prize any day, even though, god damn it, why haven't I won the Nobel Peace Prize yet?! ** Okay, please spend your local time until tomorrow feasting on Sypha's throbbing and gristly TG Day. Thank you! See you tomorrow.