Tag: Archery

Whether it’s at a noise show or a performance art event there’s a small handful of gimmicks you can expect to see from performers hoping to stand out from the crowd: getting naked, cutting yourself, setting shit on fire. There are of course many other possibilities but these three allow the biggest splash for the smallest amount of forethought and preparation – smashing things like televisions is always great but requires things like televisions to smash; contact micing weird stuff is a popular one but requires weird stuff and contact mics.

All you need for the three I listed are your own body, something sharp and something flammable.

For my first U.S. Tour as Bleak End at Bernie’s I was doing a little bit of all three. I never got completely naked but I alternated between wearing scraps of white lace and skimpy black spandex underwear. In an original twist the thing I used to cut myself and the thing I set on fire were one and the same: through my obsession with the traditional magic shops known as Botanicas I had discovered a highly flammable form of wax called camphor. Lighting a cube of it on fire caused it to melt just enough to stay affixed to my knife as I twirled it around in the audience member’s faces.

Seriously cutting myself wouldn’t have been sustainable for the length of an entire tour so most nights I either kept it superficial or skipped it altogether. At one of the earlier shows in Iowa City I absentmindedly slashed toward my stomach and accidentally sliced through the cable of the microphone I had just been singing into. I realized right away that the hoof-handled knife was sharper than I’d been giving it credit for and if the instrument cord hadn’t been dangling in front of my abdomen I might well have spilled out my viscera.

A couple years later at a party called Burning Fleshtival in New York’s Red Light District an artist called Baldy demonstrated the dangers of cutting too deep in the midst of a performance high. I hadn’t been in the basement for his set but the thing everybody was talking about wasn’t the performance itself but the fact that somebody had to drive him to an emergency room immediately afterward. That was the inherent danger of shock theater – at any moment it could cross a line and become a party foul.

I’ve already written a bit about Chris and Bonnie and their band Taboo in the section on the bus and the Living Hell tour. After that first meeting I wanted to get up to Maine every possible chance I had. As luck would have it the 2010 Summer Tour was actually the second time I managed to make it up that year. The first time had been in January while I was traveling with one of the small female singer songwriters I briefly mentioned in the piece called “show cancelled”.

This was the only chance I’ve had to witness Maine deep in the throes of Winter. Skadi and I brought along Ryan Riehle from Boston and Chris took the opportunity to shoot some scenes for a movie about drag queens which, to the best of my knowledge, remains unfinished. Later that same day whatever car the five of us were running an errand in blew a tire.

We must have made a striking sight for any passing motorists – Chris, Ryan and I worked together to change it out with the spare while still dressed in flowing slips with dramatic hair and heavy makeup from the movie shoot. Skadi and Bonnie stood off to the side, smoking cigarettes while dressed in more practical pants and jackets. One of the many moments that make me wish I’d travelled with more photographers as I couldn’t seem to become one myself.

For the Summer show Joel from Generation actually did take pictures. He was able to capture the essence of my performance that night in a photograph so compelling that I specifically joined Facebook that year just to gain access to it. A picture that I will reproduce here:

I felt like every one of my previous performances on that tour had been rehearsals for my set in Maine the night this picture was taken. Like I had been groping toward the representation of a specific form of evil and the moment captured in this photograph represents the closest possible approximation of an untouchable extreme – the “asymptote of evil” as it were. Only a tiny trickle of blood is visible on the edge of the arm holding the goblet but that night’s cuts were the deepest of the tour and the only ones to leave scars.

By the time we were all sound checked and ready to start everybody who had shown up for the show was sitting around a fire pit outside instead of in the basement. Generation was going on first so I still had on the grim reaper’s robe I would wear while pulling on the chains around Reine and Joel’s necks. I announced we were ready by stomping through the fire and kicking burning logs directly toward the party-goer’s faces:

“You better come down and watch us cuz we don’t live in your dead dog state!”

The next morning a girl named Laura who coincidentally also comes from San Diego showed me how to chew up yarrow and apply it directly to my wounds. She mentioned that one of the herb’s common names happened to be “bad man’s plaything” which seemed appropriate as I had definitely been behaving like a bad man.

I’ll leave it to others to assess whether or not I am actually pure of heart but for the duration of that particular party and performance I was very much playing what the theatrical world of wrestling calls a “heel”.

After this night I lost interest in pursuing the extreme and shocking for the rest of the tour – I switched to more casual sets and different set lists and even sat a couple of shows out. More significantly it changed the entire way I conceptualized the act of performing while traveling. Factoring in the detail that Bitchpork never allowed the same project to perform more than once I started writing and performing short musicals for the express purpose of exploring a single character – the Beast from the Grimm Brother’s fairytale, Hamlet and Lucifer from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Maine became the place where these performances would elevate and transcend. On my next couple of visits I got to play at a party called WileyFest or Babylon Bazaar where all the sets were in a huge old wooden barn. It wasn’t just me – the setting seemed to bring out the best performances in everyone. Taboo in particular brought out impressive burning set pieces and feats of pain and endurance from their resident masochist Stefan.

My clearest memories are from the year I performed industrial settings of several soliloquies from Hamlet. I was supposed to be going on next and had been psyching myself up when Bonnie informed me of a last minute lineup change:

“There’s going to be a magician! Isn’t that wonderful?”

Despite my serious stage nerves I had to admit it was. The magician presented a selection of familiar tricks and the self deprecating humor common with practitioners of legerdemain who are approaching late middle age. In the unorthodox setting of an underground music festival, however, these basic illusions felt newly wondrous – a length of rope was cut into smaller pieces and then suddenly made whole again. It was magic!

Finally it was time for me to take the stage. I had written short drum machine sequences to serve as rhythmic backing for Shakespeare’s texts and made myself a wide ruffled collar from black construction paper. For whatever reason the set was beset with technical difficulties. First my vintage Shure 55 microphone gave out on me – probably related to the fact that I had been throwing it through glass mirrors during Castle Freak performances.

I raised my voice louder to project over the sound of my drum machine. During the last selection, Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I, the drum machine also suddenly stopped. Most likely the batteries died. Now with nothing but my unamplified voice with boards beneath my feet and the heat of a single spotlight the material was returned to the theatrical traditions it stemmed from. I hadn’t dropped a word or skipped a beat in reaction to either development so to most observers it probably seemed like the changes had been deliberately choreographed.

I wish I could remember more details from other people’s performances. I think it was the same party where Time Ghost, Adam Morosky from Providence, capped off his noise set by giving himself an inkless tattoo from a contact mic’d tattoo gun. The relative distance and isolation brought the best out of everyone. It could be that I’ve never stayed long enough to allow it to become familiar but to me Maine is always magical.

I don’t know what the entire thought process behind designing The Wheel celebrations was but I’d imagine part of it was a desire to throw an event and bring friends together without having another cookie cutter music festival. I only played at Crissy and Bonnie’s house once and it’s also possible that hosting live bands was causing issues with some of their neighbors. The houses are far apart in that area of Maine but loud sounds travel far in the silence of the countryside.

Most likely it was inspired by the wheel of fortune tarot card and the many related cycles of the natural world – stars, planets, seasons, life and death. I don’t know how many times The Wheel happened but I know that it was observed in both Summer and Winter. The only time I made it out was in the Summer of 2012 so that will be the one I am talking about in this story.

It’s really too bad that Chris and Bonnie never made it out to the Mojave Rave because that event felt magical and bound to a specific space in a manner very similar to The Wheel. It was mostly bad luck and timing – one of the earliest Mojave parties coincided with an already booked Los Angeles show for a Taboo tour and this scheduling conflict led to some minor resentment. I think they might have still tried to come out but gotten lost en route and had to drive on to their next tour date.

Both events depended on being relatively small. Somewhere between twenty and thirty people seems to be the sweet spot where group energy can efficiently be harnessed and focused on creating a very specific experience. Rural phone service and internet wasn’t as strong in 2012 as it is now but even if it had been I don’t think anybody participating in The Wheel would have been distracted on their phones.

It wasn’t that kind of party.

The proceedings did start with a live set from Taboo in the basement. I couldn’t make out the specific words to the long song they played but my guess would be that it was an invocation to The Wheel itself and the entities governing the many cycles of the natural world. Intention is a thing that I played pretty fast and loose with during my own magical career but the members of Taboo are more disciplined workers of magic than I.

Everything about The Wheel felt intentional.

Shortly after the music Chris and Bonnie lit torches and led the celebrants to the forest clearing where the party proper would begin. It was fully dark by this time but more torches and a multitude of candles illuminated a circle of benches and The Wheel itself – a large painted wooden wheel with pegs and a selection of cryptic runes around the perimeter. A sign on a nearby tree provided translations so everyone could interpret The Wheel’s capricious demands.

To set the tone Chris used his torch to ignite a fuse that led to Stefan hanging by his ankles with firecrackers taped all over his body. I think he had been obscured from view when we first walked into the clearing but I forget exactly how. He either fell or pulled himself down when they started to go off inside his jeans and hopped around in pain. They looked like they left bruises but weren’t big enough to cause damage beyond that.

I forget how the order was determined but everybody took at least one spin. We learned almost immediately that The Wheel could be ruthlessly demanding. One of the runes was blood and a sterile pack of razor blades ensured this requirement could be met without danger of cross contamination or infection. The Wheel was especially bloodthirsty this year as this was the only rune to come up multiple times but nobody balked or tried to back out of it.

I mentioned Damian Languell from Twilight Memories of the Three Suns a couple of chapters back and put a picture of him at the beginning of this chapter. Since the events of this story he has moved up to a remote section of Maine himself and even become a local hero when he saved a teenage boy from a burning car wreck outside of his home. Here is a link to the Carnegie Hero Fund if anybody wants to read more about it:

https://www.carnegiehero.org/hero-search/damian-languell/

When Damian spun The Wheel it landed on the rune for archery. He was given a bow and arrow and told to shoot a target about twenty to thirty feet away. He either doesn’t perform well under pressure or is just an awful marksman in general but he missed the target completely. I’ll never know if there was a special prize prepared in case he’d gotten a bullseye but there was definitely a penalty waiting for missing.

The punishment was to be temporarily buried alive. It sounds extreme but The Wheel did seem to have a certain wisdom and I think it was exactly the kind of experience Damian wanted. It’s a little hard to explain but something about his general mannerisms and the way he cuts his hair like a nineteenth century orphan makes me think he derives a certain satisfaction from being in the victim role.

I’ve never asked him about it though, it could just as well have been a terrible and traumatic experience for him.

A large hole was already dug a little farther into the woods and a wooden casket was waiting on ropes to allow it to be easily raised or lowered. I have to wonder what other elaborate preparations might have been waiting in the darkness of the surrounding woods considering the possibility that he might not have missed or the archery rune could have never come up at all.

With Damian laid out in the coffin and six pairs of hands ready to lower the ropes Chris prepared the lid and turned to the crowd:

“Any last words?”

Before anyone else could answer Carlos from Russian Tsarlag yelled out a response:

“Yeah, eat shit!”

With that the lid was closed and a waiting shovel was passed around to throw down a decent covering of dirt. I think he stayed down there for around three hours but my wife thought that sounded too long. It had to have at least been 45 minutes. It definitely wasn’t long enough for there to be any actual danger of him suffocating.

At this point it probably sounds like The Wheel was only designed to dish out suffering but I was just starting with the most shocking and memorable bits. When I rolled the rune came up for mead and another surprise was waiting in the woods. An entire bar had been set up with plenty of cups and a large barrel of freshly brewed honey wine. The group adjourned to the bar for a long intermission.

As drinks were passed around we were instructed to behave like warriors sharing tales of our exploits. Stefan and Asa from Taboo performed a small argument and arm wrestling bout that looked like it had been rehearsed for this exact moment. It was a pleasant change of pace and allowed everyone at the party to spend some time chatting and catching up before everyone’s attention was returned to The Wheel.

The last spin I have a clear memory of is Carlos again. The rune he landed on translated to something like speech or tale. Once again it felt like The Wheel was manipulated by some hidden intelligence as the recent Russian Tsarlag performances had been starting with long free form improvised stories that were as much of a draw as the songs.

He spun a thread about a woman with a delicate, swan-like neck tragically crushed under a falling piano. I debated over whether or not I would include the specific details because it doesn’t sound like much of anything when I write it but the appeal was in how he told it. There were a lot more spins I’m not remembering and eventually the night wound down and everybody went to sleep.

I mentioned it somewhere else but there was actually one person at the party that wasn’t participating in The Wheel and engaging in behavior that was destructive and, no pun intended, taboo. Will Leffleur had picked a spot in the woods across the road to drink by himself and continuously set off bottle rockets. Stefan’s firecracker performance had been relatively early in the night and the rest of the celebrations were comparably quiet. Constant and unnecessary loud disruptive noises was one of the few things that could cause problems with neighbors but Will would not be swayed:

“I didn’t know that this was the kind of party that had rules!”

Chris eventually threw a bucket of water on him, effectively soaking the rest of his bottle rockets. Will held a grudge about this and fantasized about taking revenge for a long time. Most nights where he got excessively drunk, which is to say most nights, the topic would eventually come up for anybody that would listen:

“I can’t wait ‘til I catch the kid who did that! He’s gonna think he’s so cool and everybody likes him and he won’t even know what’s coming…”

There’s little to no chance that Will would have even recognized Chris if he saw him again. I don’t think he ever went up to Maine again.

The next morning everybody cooked a big breakfast and spent some time hanging out before heading on to whatever was next. There was a ton of stuff going on in the Northeast that Summer – both Voice of the Valley and Burning Fleshtival were around the same time. I was really curious to see what a Winter Wheel was like but I never made it out to one.

I think I might have heard through the pipeline that The Wheel stopped happening because the crowd got too big and it was getting harder to focus the collective attention and it felt like people weren’t appreciating it. Maybe I’m making that up and it just pretty much ran it’s course.

When I talked to Ryan recently he said that some mutual friends had been trying to convince him to put on another Mojave Rave but he didn’t think it would be worth the amount of work it would take to make it happen. Certain things just belong to a certain point in time and people either got to experience it or they didn’t. I understand why the people who missed it might want to try to make it happen again but it makes more sense to leave things in the past.

It gives them value.