Tag: Conan

Los Angeles 2011 : “Death Where Is Thy Sting?”

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I didn’t have anything against the members of DADFAG or the band itself but at the same time it was the catalyst for my decision to move away from the Bay Area. They were a punk band of recent emigrees from Athens, Georgia and for my last few months in Oakland they seemed to be playing at every single show I went to on both sides of the bridge. I just felt like every artist I knew in town who was doing anything more experimental or theatrical almost never got asked to play at anything and when you went out it was always punk bands and it just felt monochromatic.

I realize that on paper this is all going to sound like some kind of grievance and it really wasn’t like that. They were my friends, I liked watching them play, I set a show up in San Diego when they came down with Brotmann & Short where the bar owners complained that none of the night’s artists were commercial enough for their regulars:

“That really isn’t my problem. I sent you links and videos for every single artist on the bill tonight. If you had wanted a Top 40 Cover Band you probably should have hired one.”

By the time I headed out from my final living situation in West Oakland to do a US Tour with Generation (then Teen Suicide) in the early summer of 2010 I knew I wouldn’t be coming back. I just didn’t feel like living there as a performing artist anymore. It’s kind of like a relationship – you don’t necessarily think aloud about when it isn’t working for you anymore but you know when you finally realize it’s over.

I spent my 20’s in what was basically a triangle between San Diego, Chicago and the Bay Area. I spent extended periods of time in Providence, St Louis, Portland, New Orleans and New York but I never actually lived in those places. I’d been going to Los Angeles for shows since High School but hadn’t ever thought about moving there. The way I explain it is that the city always made me feel like an astronaut or deep sea diver with only a limited amount of oxygen. It was always fun to visit for a few days or so but eventually I would need to go back to wherever the air was to take off my helmet and refill the tanks.

The very first time I ended up at a show at Women of Crenshaw house I realized that I had found an air pocket in Los Angeles and actually the whole city must be full of air and whenever I was ready to switch cities next I could probably just switch to this one. The first time I was there I think the collective house was headed by Grace and Brian from rose for bohdan and then it was Brian and Eva and finally Eva and Brock. By the time I was looking for some kind of nook or niche that I could maybe move into, there had been a major shift in house dynamics.

There isn’t a pleasant way to say the things that I’m about to say and I’m not going to explicitly throw out names but there is a pattern that I’ve seen repeated in collective houses over and over again throughout the years. When a truly unpleasant person or couple moves in it is a lot more likely that everyone else will just move out or leave instead of ever directly confronting the problem. A big part of this is that a decision like evicting or ejecting a house member generally has to be decided by unanimous vote and the composition of these houses is usually split between people who are super active in the music scene and people who are more caught up in work or school and almost never even around.

The second type of housemate will almost never vote to kick anybody out because they aren’t really around enough to know what’s going on with interpersonal politics and they wouldn’t want anybody to ever vote to evict them.

At Women house the problem was loud emotional abuse that generally manifested after long nights of drinking and the acoustics of the house were set up in a way that it affected everybody who lived there and it was dark and it felt bad. In a way every one of us was in some small degree culpable because we all listened to it night after night and none of us ever said anything. Of course I wouldn’t have learned about this just coming to shows or parties but I had poked around and discovered that I could lay a folded futon mattress through a propped open doorway on a landing that led to the basement and put a curtain in a hallway and call it a bedroom.

The couple in question were happy to rent this formerly unused space to me for one hundred dollars a month but when I talked to my other friends living there I learned that nobody else’s rent had been reduced. The house had always been a collective where all expenses were evenly distributed between housemates but evidently this was no longer the case. There was a big argument over lack of transparency concerning utility bills. The house stopped throwing shows.

I’m not saying all this to be a bitch or to fuck with anybody’s reputation but I also think it’s extremely unlikely that anybody reading this who knows who I’m talking about wouldn’t already know. I’m actually sincerely hoping that things have just gotten better – I know that some health things came up and the drinking had to change. I know that nobody’s relationship is perfect and that if people are committed to positive change it is absolutely a thing that can happen.

I was messing with heroin again when I left for Generation tour and then I was on tour and I’m not usually much of a drug tourist. A friend in Colorado split a 100 mg morphine pill with me but that was it for the tour. I didn’t go out looking for drugs and I didn’t notice being in any kind of withdrawal. In rural Nebraska we stopped in a park to stretch our legs and I picked up a wounded dove that was limping around the park and then I felt bad – like I couldn’t just set it back down on the ground to die.

We already had a dog on tour in the car with us, we were going to deliver Kloot to Dave in Chicago, it didn’t seem like nursing a dove back to health in a shoebox would fit in with the rest of the tour itinerary. The only thing that was open was a gas station so I went in and asked if the town had one of those residents that always likes caring for sick and wounded animals, that sort of thing. Coincidentally it was supposed to be the guy who had just pulled away in a pickup truck the moment before I walked in but you can’t do much with that sort of serendipity.

The bird guy was the local Veterinarian which in that kind of grain belt town meant a tiny building connected to some silos and a fenced off paddock for selling cattle. Nobody was in the office so I put the dove in a cardboard box with a t-shirt to keep it warm and labeled the outside with a felt tipped marker so anybody that looked inside would know what they were in for:

“HURT DOVE”

I figure it probably died in that box at some point in the night but then again it was summer and the nights didn’t get too cold and we left some crumbs and a little dish of water. Maybe it still lives in that office and sits on the truck guy’s shoulder when he walks out to the paddock to try to figure out what just went wrong with somebody’s cow. It was 2010 – how long does a dove live if it was already on the brink of death?

So in Los Angeles I started to get restless and got to looking for heroin but instead found a steady source of prescription pain pills. Purdue Pharmaceuticals had just reformulated the 80 mg OxyContin to the weird plastic texture that makes them harder to abuse and suddenly nobody wanted them anymore so they were cheap and easy to find. The guy I got them from also had really cheap green morphine pills – he worked on my block and could pass me the pills through a shared fence. The whole thing was absurdly easy.

Heroin had been self regulating for me because the culturally stigmatized nature of acquiring and consuming it meant it would pretty much be the only thing I ended up doing on that day and I had to do a lot of other things on days. Pills were different. I could just carry them around and take them the moment I had finished with the responsible or social parts of my day. I would swallow an Oxy 80 as soon as I got done tutoring and end up starting to nod out as I was coasting down the downhill sections of the Ballona Creek Bike Trail.

I vividly remember snapping in and out of consciousness the moment that I would be passing another cyclist or need to suddenly turn on the path. It was reckless. I was lucky I never hurt myself or anybody else.

I lived on Crenshaw and Washington and I worked on Slauson just before the Holy Cross Cemetery and the Fox Hills Mall. I first experimented with every possible route of biking to work including going past the RV that was painted up to advertise colonics at Crenshaw and Slauson that always made me wonder who in their right mind would get a colonic in a random RV. Eventually I started taking Washington to Ballona Creek, getting off at Overland and taking that until I could cut through Holy Cross to Slauson.

Holy Cross has a Grotto which is an artificial cave made of volcanic rock and dedicated to a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary that appeared with yellow roses on her feet to a fourteen year old girl in Lourdes, France in 1858. This was my first Grotto but since this time I have become something of a connoisseur. I went there to shoot photos with Lux for our death-rock band Voiheuristick Necromorph but eventually I just started spending lots of time there: listening to music, reading and eventually praying.

In an earlier piece I referred to a ritualized ceremony I performed to manifest partnership as my first act of fully intentional Magic but now that I think about it praying and participating in a Mass both probably also count as Magic even if that isn’t the name we ordinarily apply to Religion.

I started to realize that it seemed like I was taking pills more often than I might have preferred – my friend Chiara asked me why I was fucked up every single time she saw me and it seemed like she had a point. I think she had a lemon tree in her front yard. The only reason I mention it was that I was starting to notice where the citrus trees were as I biked around Los Angeles and they always seemed like they were around to help.

I can’t remember if I asked for help the first time that I used the Grotto to pray but I do remember exactly what happened the moment that I finally did. I heard a voice in my head answering back, or not really a voice – the thing that’s always in my head. I guess you could just say that it was a thought but it was uncharacteristically clear, direct and unambiguous:

“Then throw away the rest of the pills that you have in your pocket.”

I didn’t do that. I guess that I didn’t want to waste them or I wasn’t ready to stop. I did stop taking pills as frequently as I had been and I continued to spend time in the Grotto and continued to pray. I knew that pretty soon I was going to have to take another shot at it.

There were two different books I was reading at the time that played a major role in what I would decide to do and the way I would decide to do it. Chiara had been kind enough to loan me her extremely hard-to-find copy of Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren. In the book Deren talks about how for the practitioners of Vodou the question of faith is secondary to the reality of service. Essentially that you don’t need to believe in the Religion behind a ritual to benefit from participation in it and you don’t need to believe in a God, Spirit or Saint for that entity to answer your prayers.

The other book was Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. This one was pretty straightforward. I liked the idea of a vow of abstinence with a built in expiration date. I never would have been able to stop the recreational use of opiates if I thought it would have to be for the rest of my life. Even now I haven’t used them for going on four years but look forward in pleasant anticipation to a future day where I might once again have the opportunity.

Any of my readers who are familiar with the novel might find it notable that the title character lost every one of the positive improvements he had made in his life when he reached the end of his vow and resumed his old habits but to me it doesn’t seem terribly important. Life is worth living regardless of what it brings you and I look back on the subsequent years I spent in homelessness and deep addiction as productive and full of beauty.

Anyway I had a specific plan in place: on the Summer Solstice of 2011 I would pray at the Grotto then bike to the Griffith Observatory in time to pledge a year of abstinence from all opiates and kratom to the setting sun from the special balcony that had been marked with its specific position. I had prepared myself – I had weaned myself down on the off chance that I might experience any withdrawal or discomfort and exhausted any surplus supply of the relevant drugs.

I also started going to weekly Mass, usually Roman Catholic, and taking communion as a kind of “spiritual methadone”. I am well aware that the fact that I had never been formally Confirmed in the Church and did not participate in Confessions or any other duties required to be a Catholic in good standing meant that my actions were a mortal sin. I wasn’t particularly worried about it. It helped me reinforce my vow and the commitment to see it through to its conclusion.

I was also about to begin traveling for the Summer and seeking out Sunday services wherever I wound up showed me parts of the world I never would have seen otherwise, especially as I usually had to hitchhike. Some of my favorites were a 16th Century Adobe Cathedral in rural New Mexico, Eastern Orthodox services in Chicago, New York’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, a small Lutheran church near Voices of the Valley in Pentress, West Virginia and a gold-leafed altar in Panama City that had been painted black to protect it from being looted by the pirate Captain Morgan.

I started reading a lot of Corinthians particularly the celebrated passage that begins with 15 55:

“O Death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?

For sin is the sting of Death and the power of sin is the law”

I had enjoyed reading the Bible for most of my adult life even though I had renounced God and declared myself a heathen in the Second Grade. I started to view the Passion as a powerful allegory similar to Enlightenment in Buddhism. Not a literal Resurrection but a conscious decision to renounce mortality and live without the fear of Death. It seemed like all human selfishness stemmed in one way or another from a painful awareness of the inevitability of Death; the idea that anything could be finite…

In this version of Christianity sin was not a specific act but the consequence of spiritually conceding to mortality. In the letter to the Corinthians Paul often talks about how the finite can not inherit the infinite. I saw salvation not as something that happens after death but a beatific state reached by acknowledging the infinite within one’s self while renouncing the finite.

After the first year I renewed my vow in the same spot on the following Solstice but half a year later Mass and Communion weren’t hitting the same and I just stopped going. I ended up in Princeton, New Jersey helping my sister and her husband clear out the house that had belonged to my grandparents. My grandmother had been dragged out by social workers in HazMat suits after she refused to call a plumber out of fear that he would steal the jewelry she had hidden in a couch. With broken pipes she’d started urinating and defecating in buckets full of kitty litter.

I was supposed to get a hotel room but I preferred sleeping in the overgrown backyard and spending my nights wandering Princeton’s parks and swimming its lakes. I found some codeine from the 1970’s in a medicine cabinet and decided to go ahead and take it. The tablets had dissolved into an oddly shimmering crystalline powder but the potency of their constituent chemicals didn’t seem to have diminished.

A year and a half had brought my tolerance down to almost nothing. I got high. I threw up.

For better or worse I was back on my bullshit…

Los Angeles 2012 : “No Weapon Formed Against Me Shall Prosper”

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When I first moved to Los Angeles in 2010 I ended up in the Ojai Hot Springs with some representatives of the “Spooky New Age Chick Community” I’ve referred to in other pieces. Somebody wanted to go check out the Krotona Institute of Theosophy and after a quick tour of the grounds we ended up in the bookshop. I wasn’t expecting to see anything that interested me but my eye landed on an affordable paperback edition of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis Regis or The Lesser Key of Solomon.

I hadn’t actually read the book before and it would end up having a profound effect on my life and the way in which I would come to view the world. My spiritual history is too rocky and complicated to detail here but I had been self identifying as a Witch for several years at this point. I had briefly looked into Wicca when a girl that I had a crush on in ninth grade had told me she was a practitioner. My impression was basically that if I wanted to practice a religion that was cobbled together from a mish-mash of Pagan traditions it would be easier to just become a Christian.

When Magic did become an important part of my life it was kind of like improvised music – I didn’t really have specific source material or role models, I was making it up as I went along. In a way I think it had always been a part of my life: I was named after a mythical bard whose parents were a Giant and a Faerie woman who had been enchanted by a Druid. My dreams were bringing me directly into supernatural landscapes where I made contact with supernatural entities.

I was reading Greek, Norse and many other types of mythology from a young age, I was very influenced by an illustrated copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy that my mother bought me in third grade and adolescence brought on works by John Crowley, Neil Gaiman and other writers from the Vertigo imprint. Magical Thinking and Magical Ideation were part of my internal life but at the same time I wouldn’t have necessarily said that Magic was a thing I “practiced”. The things that brought Magic out of my head and into the physical world around me were LSD and an aesthetic enthusiasm for Folk Magic shops I saw around Chicago called Botanicas.

While I wasn’t working from any kind of concrete guide I realized from the very beginning that there were rules. I didn’t think that it was a good idea to try to use Magic to get anything specific or to make anybody specific change their feelings or behavior in any way. It wasn’t that I didn’t think these things were possible but rather that I didn’t think they were ethical. Another factor is that both sides of my family had instilled in me an insuppressible instinct for thrift and I knew that these types of Magic would simply not be cost effective.

Many practitioners of Magic talk about the importance of “intention” but for most of my practice I basically felt the opposite. If I wasn’t trying to do anything specific it didn’t seem like I should have any specific intention. While I recognize that Magic is fundamentally a tool in my case I was using it for ambience. Older readers will probably remember a form of Christmas Tinsel that I just learned is called Hair Tinsel. It comes in little y-shaped pieces that you can just kind of throw at the tree and they will hook onto the pine needles and put a little shine or glitter wherever they land.

This is the part where I have to admit that I was mostly attracted to and had a passion for Dark Magic. To many people Dark Magic is not and never will be a thing that is okay to do for any reason whatsoever. I figured that if I wasn’t actually pursuing power or trying to harm anybody it could be rationalized. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that it was something I was going to do no matter what so I needed to do it as safely and ethically as possible. I know that for many people this is still all going to sound incredibly irresponsible.

I wrote a song that I came to understand as a curse and performed it over and over again – first in Living Hell and afterwards as Bleak End at Bernie’s. It wasn’t aimed at anybody in particular but was rather a general invocation for suffering, darkness and chaos. Not that I wanted there to be more of these things or that I wanted to upset the balance of the universe in their favor – it was more that I saw these things as indelible and necessary and had felt inspired to serve as a conduit for them:

“Give me blood

Give me loss

Victory at hopeless cost

Wicked shelter

Vicious burden

Let the loose ends twist and tangle”

I had been accumulating amulets and talismans around my neck and somewhere in America a Thrift Store offered up a laminated circular badge with the words “WORLD’S WORST MAGICIAN”. I had been dressing like a cartoon witch, Baroque vampire or an assassin in an Elizabethan Play so the label was coming off a tad more suspect than it would have been perceived on someone with a top hat and sequined bow tie. People would ask me whether it was supposed to mean that I was inept or that I was evil and whether it referred to stage magic or Magic Magic.

The answer to these questions was invariably “both”.

While visiting New Orleans I brought a folding table down to Jackson Square and set up shop by the Palm Readers and Fortune Tellers. A piece of poster board advertised “BAD MAGIC” with bad luck charms, poison your dreams and unfortunate consequences offered on the underlying bullet list. I mostly got dirty looks and people asking me if I was serious or if it was a hidden camera prank show; a few people just wanted pictures as I had gone all out on a particularly colorful witch costume. One Midwestern Tourist actually took me up on it and asked for a bad luck charm. An improvised ceremony centered on wrapping burning hair around breaking twigs transferred the negative energies into a penny.

I told her to keep it in her left pocket until the next truly awful thing in her life happened after which she should throw it away. In a roundabout way I was actually trying to be helpful; we’ve all got bad luck on the horizon with or without a charm but she had a vessel to isolate and dispose of it once it had manifested. It was the most purpose-driven act of my Dark Magic career and the only one for which I received compensation. I told her to pay what she wanted and I can’t remember what she decided on.

The Lesser Key of Solomon changed everything for me. It reformed me and it gave me structure. I began to realize that the Dark Magic could be isolated within characters that I wrote musicals around and performed for brief interludes on stage instead of allowing it to permeate every aspect of my personal life. I didn’t mind talking about Astrology with friends who were interested in it but it had never exactly clicked for me. Classical Astrology was completely different. The supernatural had always presented as chaotic and lawless but I suddenly understood a system of Order presided over by Planetary Daemons and Archangels.

There is Magic in the art of Urban Planning but not all cities are equally occult. Washington D.C. stands out among the cities I have first hand experience of as the most obvious example of this. Streets are laid out in specific shapes for specific reasons and literal Temples are erected for the worship of ancestors and ideas. Los Angeles is a close second. My brother-in-law had given me a heavy beach cruiser bicycle that I inundated with talismans and used to travel at least thirty miles throughout the city on a daily basis.

Los Angeles plays a very specific role in the formation of myths and dreams within the American psyche that would not be possible without the use of Magic. The very name Hollywood refers to principles and practices the Druids had used to organize their world by nurturing spiritual power within sacred groves of trees. Of course Los Angeles is also home to The Magic Castle, the foremost destination for learning, performing and watching legerdemain and the Arts of Illusion.

With my new paperback grimoire as key and legend I was beginning to construct a system of personal wards and sigils informed by my own perambulations through the city. I lived near it’s center on Crenshaw and Washington and worked in a private tutoring center in Fox Hills next to the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. I tried to explore as much of the city as possible but was establishing patterns between Griffith Park, Exposition Park, the La Brea Tar Pits, Culver City and a course that connected my home and place of employment along the consecrated waters of Ballona Creek.

On the corner of West Slauson Avenue and Heatherdale Drive I came upon a collection of buildings I would come to know as The Temple of Mars. An oddly shaped and upwardly sloped patch of asphalt contained a closed down shop with stairs leading to the gravel roof and ritual platform, a wall presumably built for enclosing dumpsters and a double sided billboard. The structures were painted in a bright, martial shade of red and the marquee declaimed “NO WEAPON FORMED AGAINST ME SHALL PROSPER ISAIAH 54:17” to the East and West.

I always presumed that this complex had been most recently used as some kind of church but outside of the Biblical quote there wasn’t actually any evidence for that conclusion. From a utilitarian standpoint it seemed best appointed for a tiny used car dealership. For the two years that I lived in Los Angeles and worked on Slauson it would sit entirely vacant except for brief periods around the Winter Solstice when it was used to sell Christmas Trees.

I should add that it was used by me to conduct secret rituals under cover of night but the property’s owner had not been informed of this particular function and would have most likely not approved.

My years in Los Angeles were among the most creative and outwardly social of my life. I ended up on two complete U.S. tours as Bleak End at Bernie’s and in a short lived band called Dealbreaker but I was also hitting a festival circuit where I explored the theatrical. The solo musicals Castle Freak and Diving God and an Industrial setting of the major soliloquies from Hamlet I called The Chameleon’s Dish. I was happy to be in a good place to harness the creative energy which I believe to have originated from within my fundamental biological drive for partnership.

I came from what would be called an “intact household” which only means that my parents were married and remained so their entire lives. While I don’t idealize this arrangement or disparage other ones in my parents’ case it did seem to be the correct one. The only reason that I mention this is that it most likely played a role in the formation of my romantic perspectives on relationships. I had always dreamed of being married when I was older and in my earliest crushes I would fantasize about the names and personalities of mine and my crush-object’s future children.

I strongly believe in the serial monogamy model for adult romantic relationships and mostly had either closure or civil associations with my previous partners. There was an experience at the end of 2009 that I will get into in other pieces that had left me feeling vulnerable until some time in 2012. I had had a frustrating two years for relationships and it was beginning to erode certain aspects of how I saw myself. There was a woman who I knew socially and was attracted to but hadn’t necessarily thought about in that particular context. One night a show was ending near her home and she asked me:

“Do you have any diseases? I feel like having sex.”

While I’m not opposed to casual sexual interactions the crassness of the proposal and the other things I was experiencing left me feeling wounded. I talked to her about it soon afterwards and she told me that she was acting out of an impression of what men generally find exciting and desirable. She wasn’t expecting me to respond emotionally and in a way that seemed more feminine. We decided to try things afterwards because there was still mutual attraction and it seemed that we better understood each other.

I appreciated that she wore really nice lingerie for the encounter but we ended up not being compatible in that fashion. Touch did not convey intimacy between us but rather left us feeling isolated. She said that when I touched her she “felt like a canyon” – my experience was similar although I wouldn’t have phrased it in the exact same way.

All of this led to me decamping to The Temple of Mars in early 2012 when Venus was bright in the evening sky to perform the most intentional ceremony of my Magical career. I prayed to the planet Venus in the East and toward each of the other Cardinal Directions to manifest stable partnership for the rest of my life.

I carried a Library of Congress Tape Recorder for the Blind everywhere I went so I could listen to music on it’s rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery while I was riding my bicycle. The other elements of the ritual consisted of playing the version of Prologue/Anvil of Crom from the 1982 Conan the Barbarian soundtrack with the spoken monologue and using a cube of camphor to light a knife on fire and hold it aloft as an offering to the heavens…

By the end of the year the tape player had offered itself up as a sacrifice when a car hit me from behind on my bicycle and I was with the woman I have been essentially married to for the last ten years and plan to spend the remainder of my days with.

It is of course debatable as to whether or not the two things are directly related. The secret of every Rainmaker and Weather Magician is that sooner or later it always rains. Questions of Belief and Faith have never been particularly important to me in terms of Spirituality. We shape our world and are shaped by it and nothing happens differently than the way it did in this best of all possible worlds…

When I lived in Chicago I used to go to services at the Christian Science Reading Room because of the way the futuristic building had been designed to amplify the pipe organ. From the outside it looks like an inverted speaker cone and features a small cactus garden. The first time I went to a service the Speaker read some writings by Mary Baker Eddy on the definition of the term “Spirit” in the context of that religion.

On that particular day the words spoke to me but it has been difficult in the interim to relocate the exact passage. Ultimately it was an attempt to use words to create a rough approximation of something that is fundamentally indescribable, much like the familiar story of several blind men describing an elephant. I don’t think it was about the particular words so much as that Spirit was something I felt the Presence of that day.

In my own life these moments are rare and therefore extremely valuable to me. I spent a little over a year as a practicing Catholic but I don’t think that was so much about the power of Spirit as it was about the power of Ritual. There is no way to really know when or if I will have the opportunity to feel the Grace and Presence of Spirit in the future.

I’ve written this last sentence and erased it five or six times now and I think I have to accept that nothing will sound right here.

I can’t describe that kind of state when I’m not in it and if I were in it I probably wouldn’t be able to put it into words.

I’m just going to stop here.