Steve Lawrence – Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America

You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory – Searching for Steve Lawrence

October 8, 2025October 28, 2025 berniebleak1 Comment

[New updates at bottom and in body text]

I’m not 100% certain but I think the first time I met Steve Lawrence was when Amy Cole was having a wedding party in Presidio Park. To be clear this was a party where everybody partnered up and had pretend weddings like we were in Elementary School but most of us were either in Tenth Grade or about to be. I had a big crush on Amy Cole but she was marrying her boyfriend at that moment – an older looking dude who brought along a blanket with crusty/gutter-punk band patches on it.

Anyone without a first pick got raffled off like door prizes and I believe I was paired up with Dena Goldsmith – who I wouldn’t really get to know for some years yet. Even more years later, at John and Dena’s pretend wedding, I was supposed to perform a special rap I wrote for them but I spent the day getting black out drunk before losing my mind on mushrooms in a Gumby costume (with an Israel pin for some reason) and couldn’t remember any of it. I do think I blurted out:

“Dena is the first Jew I ever married…”

*The author at John & Dena’s sham wedding courtesy of Badger*

If this writing project has taught me anything, however, it’s that my memory is not 100% reliable. Anyway back to Amy’s party: Steve came wandering up toward the end, too late for wedlock, and I was immediately taken with his sparkling eyes, aloof grin and impressive bone structure. I only date women but I appreciate men aesthetically and, to put things in perspective, my #1 celebrity crush is Harry Dean Stanton. I think Steve was wearing one of the colorful ‘70s dresses that the Thrift Stores of this era were flush with and may or may not have been in the company of Badger, though I’d usually see them together in the years to come – the original art boyfriend duo.

Steve had a habit of giving people nicknames like Barfdog, Scarfdog, Cowgirl, Sexmom, Nad and probably more I don’t remember or know the provenance of with the same certainty as the aforementioned. As someone who grew up to give a lot of people nicknames I think I understand why now – it’s a masking strategy for social awkwardness and, if you’re a little afraid of people in general, it serves as a Billy Corgan style “get-em-before-they-get-you” stratagem.

It was either this day or one soon after it that Steve attempted to give nicknames to me and François but they weren’t his best work so they didn’t stick. He called me Jebediah because I had long hair and was wearing sandals like a Biblical prophet and he tried to saddle François with Jacques. I would say that names like François and Ossian are just natural nickname kryptonite if it wasn’t for the fact that Badger’s a Reid so nothing’s impossible with a good one.

I started to see a lot of Steve as I switched schools to downtown, got a bus pass and started hanging around an older, cooler crowd like a lost puppy. My recall isn’t enough to put the dwellings in chronological order but I started dropping in at the spot above Golden Dragon, Nina’s mom’s garage, the Manor, the Doomed, Bubba’s spot off Florida, the Bonsalls and probably some more. Sorry this reads like a list – I’m doing it for the people that were there as there’s less and less of us left.

*Badger with Steve’s toys/sculptures. Photo via Badger*

I got to see a lot of Steve’s visionary oil paintings, as he was always working on them, but we also talked a lot about toys, records, cartoons and comic books. The main spot we’d hang out one-on-one in those early days was Nina’s mom’s garage because it was a long trek from Hillcrest and not too many people came over. I remember looking at some Kim Deitch Waldo comics together in a Fantagraphics anthology I’d just scored in one of Hillcrest’s many good used book stores of this era and chatting about how much we both loved early American animation.

There’s no question that Steve was a role model to me and somebody I looked up to. I didn’t care that he did hard drugs and was supposedly, according to my buddy Gabe Saucedo, a “scumbag”. I’d already decided after reading Naked Lunch at fourteen that I was going to be a junkie myself some day but for now I had a few more years of being straight edge to get through. Anyway choice of drugs isn’t really a thing I’ve ever judged people for except for some light tribal disdain for tweakers due to my chosen squad.

The more time I spent with Steve the more he began to let his guard down. One day we were flipping through his seven inches and he started showing and telling me about his twee-adjacent label rugcore and band fugbear:

“See, I used to be a “kid” [he was using this word to mean volunteer underground music scene architect] and care about stuff too…”

The records were decorated with naive visual art touchstones I remembered from my own childhood, like stamps cut from potatoes and crayons melted onto wax paper with a hotplate. I used to have a pretty good rugcore collection from the Off the Record 50 cent bin but life lifed and that’s all gone now. I’m really hoping this helps motivate somebody sitting on any releases, especially fugbear stuff, to digitize and upload what they have.

I started playing bass for The Singles around this time and, as fugbear was only Steve on bass and a girl singing, it was a good early lesson that a music project can be as much or as little as you want it to be. Besides some long lost early noise experiments I never did too much with bass, but fugbear was definitely an influence when I started Bleak End with just vocals and a drum machine. Musically, the bigger influence would be Steve and Badger’s Manor era straightedge hardcore band Stimulated Emissions.

I wrote a paper on lasers in grade school so I got the name’s reference right away [LASER is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation]. There were probably some jokes about doing a bunch of speed in there I wouldn’t have gotten but Stimulated Emissions, and associated label Zhoomp! Records, were the flavor of that Summer. They put out a tape called Future of ‘88 there are almost no copies of anymore – more on that later.

After a couple of semesters at SFSU I moved back to San Diego in the Summer of 1999 and started hanging around the Golden Hills apartment of the Bonsalls – Cassie and Becky. Francois was seeing Becky and I had one of my juvenile crushes on Cassie but she had a thing with the Dancing Lime at this point. I think Little Four had a third bedroom with Nate, who Steve called Baby Huey, and Steve lived in the living room while Badger, me and eventually Joey Casio all just kind of floated.

I could look out the window and see a backyard I used to play in with a pair of sisters from the commune [or at least in the extended hippy network of] I was born on growing up. When you never forget anything the world starts to get crowded with memories.

Me, Little Four and Nate decided to start a grunge band called Guac then pulled off the pastiche perfectly: Nate pawned his guitar and amp to buy heroin and we never practiced or wrote a single song. I was still a virgin on a technicality and one day when a stripper called Mumbles became aggressively horny after shooting dope, Steve tried to leave me alone with her in the apartment and let nature take its course. Instead I annoyed her with conversation and Steve came back irritated and incredulous:

“What!? Why didn’t you lay Mumbles?”

Ah, innocence. I can hold it in my hand like any other memory, more on that later as well, but I can’t go back. There is no there there. Steve was going through a haiku phase and I wrote one about Cassie, sometimes called Carmen Miranda, full of false masculine bravado:

Fuck the Dancing Lime

I’ll swoon Carmen Miranda

And steal all her fruit

*Nad and Cassie Bonsall, photo via Badger*

In reality she never saw me as anything more than a kid. I convinced her to go with me on a “date” to a spot called Homequest: a downtown café for homeless people with .99 cent meals and NA meetings. I should have accepted the inevitable and looked at her as one of my cool “punk aunts” – it would have made me less of a nuisance. She helped me cop dope once or twice when I finally took up the cloth a couple years down the line.

*Image via Nick Feather (RIP) Instagram*

I never got to see Gamelonian LX Cruise Ship – like with Crash Worship before them I was simply never in the right place at the right time. I was on my way out of San Diego again, probably en route to Fort Thunder, when Steve, Badger and Bubba started growing out their hair and moved up to Los Angeles to try to “make it”. Steve was into this band called IOWASKA on Alternative Tentacles and decided if GLXCS stayed “pure” by not working with smaller imprints they’d end up on the label too.

I think it was at the Doomed that Steve showed me the results of plugging Gamelonian LX Cruise Ship into an early online anagram generator. He thought all of the ones that omitted two to three letter words were especially apropos – the one I remember is “miracles explain housing”. Steve had been living on the good grace of the community for as long as I’d known him. Nobody ever expected him to pay rent or sign a lease – just to keep painting and be himself.

I never asked him too much about the process of turning from a kid into a grownup, mostly because I was trying to do that myself, but I have been talking to some folks who knew him when he still went to Point Loma High. Apparently his mom bounced and left him to keep their apartment as long as he could scare up the rent. He moved in a few folks to cover it and made himself a niche under the kitchen table – he only ever needed enough space to paint and keep a few toys and records.

I did ask him if he’d ever had a job before, probably because this was another thing I was trying to learn how to do, and he told me that he did once work for an architect lady making little paper and foam board models of potential houses. He said he liked it well enough but nothing else ever seemed worth the time or money. It only strikes me now how building tiny homes was an ironic omen for somebody who would spend decades of his adult life homeless.

Steve, Bubba and Badger in *Gamelonian LX Cruise Ship* (photo via Badger)

So let’s get to that. GLXCS didn’t get signed to Alternative Tentacles. Their aspirations grew to include Capitol and Interscope: those didn’t happen either. Bubba got sick of being the only person in the band and apartment with a job and working full time to prop up Steve and Badger’s druggy artist lifestyle. [Badger has since told me he also worked and paid rent] According to his earlier friends, Steve had always been schizophrenic but his delusions seemed to be getting more destructive. He thought that Cameron Diaz was his girlfriend but shadowy forces were somehow keeping them apart.

He became a lot to deal with.

Him and Badger fell out. Steve moved full time onto the streets of Hollywood around 2002. I last saw him on August 9th, 2002. I ran into him a few blocks down from the short lived Hollywood Knitting Factory and asked him if he wanted to come sneak in with me to see Lightning Bolt, The Locust, Arab on Radar and Cattle Decapitation for the Oops! Tour. He politely demurred, saying it sounded “kind of cool but mostly really annoying”. I couldn’t argue with that.

Not long after he drifted over to the UCLA/Westwood area and stayed there for the next twenty plus years. My friend Jovi, who kicked off the current search for him, saw Steve emerging from the bushes at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf a little over twenty years ago holding a notebook where he’d written the word “millionaire” over and over again. Around this time Steve started transferring his obsessions from Cameron Diaz to young female baristas and getting banned from coffee shops for stalking and harassing them.

It’s been a long time since the early 2000s. I should have searched for Steve long ago, especially because I was relatively stable with a job and housing in Los Angeles from 2010 to 2012. I think urban life overwhelms me and makes it hard to focus but becoming a rural hermit with my wife has made me more sentimental and memory-oriented. When I do get to socialize at big parties once a year or so it now feels more intense than any of the hard drugs.

Of course I did all the hard drugs too. I was homeless in LA and living in the orbit of a West Adams methadone clinic around 2015 to 2016. This is why I think Steve stopped messing with hard drugs – or at least heroin. Black Tar Heroin tends to be cliquey, especially among the homeless, and I figured if he was still in that world I would have crossed paths with him at some point. One of my dealers in Beverly Hills did mention going to another clinic in Westwood and I should have scoped it out but I was barely holding things together as it was.

Based on available evidence I think Steve’s primary Westwood drugs are caffeine and schizophrenia. This brings us to the current intel on Steve and why we now believe him to be missing. Jovi found a Reddit post about two years ago with Steve’s name, a more recent photo and disturbing accounts of his day to day behavior. Steve has been stalking, harassing and both verbally and physically assaulting female students with a preference for the younger range of this population.

In a roundabout way I found the news about Steve screaming at people strangely comforting. In my time around the methadone clinic I became familiar with several homeless people who seemed to be turning into “human furniture”: they wore matted layers of mouldering garments and stared out at the world, with eyes that seemed to register little recognition, during strangely regular hours from public benches and bus stops. I never saw these individuals using language to communicate with anyone and at times I wondered if they no longer could.

Steve’s habit of berating strangers was a sure sign he still used language, at least offensively, and the comments in multiple threads that calling him by name would make him leave you alone meant he also understood it. I also took solace in how “put together” his clothing, shoes and hair looked in the image I’ve put at the top of this essay. In many ways he looks like the same Steve I knew so long ago.

I know we’re getting to a point socially where many Americans are losing empathy for the homeless – due to both mental health and synthetic drug crises. I want to be clear that I absolutely have empathy for the young women Steve is victimizing and everyone who lives in fear of being victimized by him. One of the things that hits me hardest about this whole situation is that part of Steve being a formative role model for me is the fact that he modeled respectful interactions with younger women.

Of course I only saw things from a limited, male perspective and the above anecdote about Mumbles would hit a lot different if mine and her sexes were reversed, but I never saw Steve being a creep. In the Summer of 2000 me and François moved back to San Diego from Chicago and brought a friend named Marianne. Some fairly square Point Loma kids that Steve knew were having one of those ubiquitous, turn-of-the-milly “Pimp n’ Hoe” parties and we all dressed up to crash it.

Marianne put on lingerie, I tried my best to play the part (but was probably too acute to be pimpindicular) and Steve made up for my deficiencies by Mack-maxxing. The main thing I remember is a pair of pants printed with bright green dice but his whole outfit was on point and topic. We brought along a sandwich bag full of flour and visibly unnerved our hosts by pouring a pile on a glass table then cutting, and offering, lines.

They were not in on the joke.

The evening ended with Steve and Marianne commandeering the tub to take a bath together but it felt palpably innocent – a bit like Christina Ricci and Vincent Gallo in Buffalo ‘66, his later on-screen bathroom behavior notwithstanding. I hate to think about the Steve I knew becoming a predator and menace through a combination of paranoia and sexual frustration but the facts are undeniable. That is exactly what is happening, and has been happening for something in the neighborhood of twenty years.

The *Changing of the Guard* from *The Supernatural Peepshow*

My half baked plan has been this: print out images of Steve’s paintings and trading cards then go down to Westwood and see if these totems can trigger recognition and a desire for change in Steve. It’s not even like I have a place I could bring Steve back to, at the most I’d be able to reach out to my harm reduction contacts to try to find him housing and mental health services. There’s no reason to believe he’d be willing – the last thing I offered him was an invitation to a stressful noise show but other friends have offered meals and showers in their own encounters and unanimously gotten the same refusal.

Jovi has some more concrete ideas for meeting Steve’s immediate needs and Inshallah we’ll get down there and find him.

The unspoken grim footnote is that this mission would not be just for Steve, or even my own sentimentalities, it would be for the young women of UCLA and Westwood as well. Steve has turned into someone nobody should have to tolerate being at the mercy of and, even if I couldn’t convince him to ask “the system” for assistance, I’d want to convince him to get the fuck out of Dodge. No idea how I’d do that, I can’t even drive a car. I’m not much use beyond writing up screeds like this one.

I recently surveyed my former life as a musical dilettante and realized I’ve never been pressed on vinyl but had it on my bucket list. I’m not exactly riding the bucket like dude in the Kafka story, but it still seemed prudent to chase this highly attainable dream sooner than later. Tempus Fugit and all that jazz…

Unlike this essay, my recorded output wasn’t too lengthy. In fact it recently fit on a 3” discography CD with No Sides Records. My tire kicking research seemed to indicate that the price point for double sided 7”, 10” and 12” records would be on a pretty even playing field so I might as well make a big sandwich while I’ve got the appetite. My initial plan was to make a Bleak End/Gamelonian LX Cruise Ship 12” split but I soon realized that, as the pressing would be largely symbolic, I might as well go one track per act and bring along everybody I could – like a Big Boat Buddhist.

*Wingdilly* at *Soul Kitchen,* Nick Galvas on mic, photo via Kristi Beach

Our little San Diego scene lost two friends back-to-back in the Summer of 2002, Nick Galvas and Darryl “Fern” Fernquist, and their bands Wingdilly, Jetset Lipstick, Hide and Go Freak and others never got the chance to see wide release. Most of this music was only distributed on very limited cassette runs and, having long since lost all my physical media archives, I brought the topic up with one of my oldest, dearest friends – Andy Panda.

Here it is: we’ve lost so many people in this story I haven’t even been bothering with RIPs for the most part. Amy Cole is gone, Joey Casio is gone, Nick Feather is gone, Steve Lawrence may well be gone. He is missing from Westwood and UCLA Police last made contact in April of 2024. After twenty years in the same place it isn’t looking good but Jovi and I are trying to search jails and mental institutions as a final Hail Mary of hope. We need Steve’s birthday though and nobody seems to know it.

*Steve was definitely not 45. Flyer by Unknown* *via* *Badger’s collection*

I was talking to Andy Panda about ripping his tape collection for the comp, but also about him coming up to Northern California to visit me. We tried in 2024 but he went to see a girlfriend in Chico and blew his wad at a casino before ever making it my way. Andy didn’t trust banks and chose to conduct a “cash only” lifestyle. The next attempt was on me – he called me about coming up back in January but our (my wife and I’s) house isn’t built for privacy and the weather was too cold for him to stay in any of the unheated outbuildings.

I told him it just wasn’t a good time.

Andy’s brother called me a few days later, Andy had collapsed and was in critical condition. Andy died on January 8th. I didn’t make it down to the funeral. This is the first I’ve really addressed the situation in writing, though I did write about how me and Andy became friends in my piece of the Manor. I have an unconventional relationship with death but I think I need to admit two things: first that it’s taking me a very long time to process that Andy is truly gone and second that my obsession with the past makes it difficult for me to be the best friend to the people I care about in the present.

I’m trying to do better.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Johnny Thunders song I reference in this piece’s title. In one sense, as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t true. I can hold memories in the palm of my hand and subtly shift them to feel their weight, see how they catch the light… I don’t know how differently my mind and memories work from other people’s because I’m trapped alone in here and always have been.

“I was born inside this cage…”

In another sense it is absolutely true. I can’t give Andy a hug, tell him that it’s okay, go back to January and tell him: screw the weather, just get up here. I’ve got you. I don’t know if I, or anyone else, can do this for Steve but once we can’t we can’t. I know I can’t make people care about things but if anyone reading this can figure out when his birthday was, or upload more of his paintings or music. Or if uploading to the internet isn’t your thing, make a book, make a record.

Hell, if you’re reading this Steve, get on the internet, pick up a phone, write me a letter. Tell me off. I deserve it.

*Don Carnage* one of Andy’s many bands in the tape archive (photo via Badger)

That’s what I’ve been trying to do. I’ve been talking to Andy’s brother and I probably need to get down to San Diego and dub some copies of tracks for the comp. Right now it feels like I’ve got all the time in the world but even the world can only hold so much…

[Update: I was able to get a birthday. Steve was arrested by LAPD on a misdemeanor, most likely trespassed from a business, in April of 2024 and released on New Year’s Eve of 2025. Intelligence seems to point to his having left Westwood and possibly transplanted to Sawtelle. I welcome comments from any readers with boots on the ground who can help look.]

Some Interesting Things I Have Recently Received In The Mail

September 29, 2023August 19, 2024 berniebleak4 Comments

I decided to do something a little out of the ordinary with this piece and make it a “mailbag” column. I’d love to actually do a full on letters column but nobody sends them – electronically or otherwise. I barely even get comments and wonder if this format isn’t especially conducive to leaving them as I imagine most of my readers aren’t registered WordPress users.

To be one hundred percent transparent the only reason I’ve gotten these things in the mail is because I’ve ordered them or mentioned not having and wanting them. It would be cool to randomly get stuff as a surprise but I’d have to list a mailing address and I don’t have a PO Box yet. I’d happily give my address to anyone who asked, after quickly vetting that they were neither a nefarious spam-bot or ill-intentioned fellow meat bag, but that kinda ruins the whole surprise part.

Anyway this will be kind of like a review column except for the fact that nearly everything mentioned here actually came out a decent amount of time ago and at least half of it isn’t available anywhere to purchase.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict June-Allison Gibbons : Strange Attractor Press 2023

I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy of this book since I first read Marjorie Wallace’s The Silent Twins around twenty years ago. Thankfully a biopic of the same name, while not making much of a splash theatrically, has ignited a renewed interest in the Gibbons sisters’ literary works and a reprint of Jennifer Gibbons’ Discomania is even slated for release on the same imprint later this year.

For those unfamiliar June and Jennifer Gibbons are identical twin sisters of West Indian descent who were born in Great Britain in 1963. They developed an idioglossia, or secret shared dialect, which they used to communicate with each other while refusing to speak to outsiders or even family members for the early part of their lives. Both of them began writing short novels in their teenage years which they were able to have published through correspondence with vanity presses using their income from England’s version of social security money.

After short and awkward courtships with vacationing American boys they went on a minor crime spree of petty burglaries and eventually arson. This led to them being institutionalized against their will for a decade in a hospital called Broadmoor. Jennifer died of heart failure on the very bus that was transporting them to freedom in 1993 and June has since led a fairly private life with her immediate family.

The writing could be classified as Outsider Art – a field where literature seems to sit in the uncomfortable shadow of visual and musical endeavors. Henry Darger’s impressive works on paper were always intended to accompany his written opus In the Realms of the Unreal as illustrations but while these images have been exhibited and reproduced in multiple volumes the text has not been made as accessible.

The publication of Wallace’s book in 1986, while the twins were still at Broadmoor, introduced small selections from The Pepsi-Cola Addict and other works to a large audience and created a collector’s market for the original printing of the book. The thing that always attracted me to the prose was it’s romanticisation of youth and violence in a way that reminded me of works by both S.E. Hinton and Anthony Burgess.

When you add in the fact that the young writers barely left their own bedrooms, much less visited the locales of their stories, you have imaginative works comparable to Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique.

I used to spend time on dedicated discussion boards searching for scans or pdfs of this book and making pacts with other seekers that if either of us were so lucky as to find a copy we would immediately make it digitally available. Unfortunately actual possession of this prize seemed to have a corrupting influence like Tolkien’s famous rings and every time somebody got their hands on one they’d decide to either keep it for themselves or attempt to recoup their spending with astronomically priced photocopies.

Now that the book is easily available to all and I have my own copy in hand I can report on the actual writing. When I first began reading the frequent use of awkwardly verbose synonyms for common words as well as the kaleidoscopic insertion of colors like amethyst and sorghum could be both dazzling and disorienting in turn. Now that I’m a third of the way through I scarcely notice as I am fully in the grips of the narrative and excited to follow these characters to what will no doubt be tragic conclusions.

If you enjoy any of the works I’ve thrown out comparisons to or find your interest piqued by my description it would be worth your time to secure your own copy or request that it be stocked at your local library.

I was embarrassed not to have seen this – spare yourself worse embarrassment and watch it

Friends Forever – A Documentary Film Ben Wolfisohn : Plexifilm 2003

If you read my chapters on either Fort Thunder or my adventures traveling with this band you’d most likely be surprised by the fact that I’d never actually seen this movie but nonetheless that is the reality. This film does not provide a substitution for actually experiencing one of Friends Forever’s legendary van performance’s in all it’s smoke and spark spewing glory but it does some other things remarkably well.

The first thing that struck me was how tangibly it manifested the feelings and textures of both watching and traveling for underground music in the year 2000. The size and energy of the crowds, the meditation and monotony of long drives in between and the constant waiting in an era when nobody had a cell phone and computers for e-mail were things you had to go to instead of carry with you.

I won’t spoil the exact details but there are some amusing miscommunications that remind me a bit of when I booked a Gang Wizard show in a record store and somehow managed to screw up four different details on a single flyer. Nowadays I would probably end up sharing that kind of thing with a touring artist before I even got around to making photocopies but back then it was common to receive a single ambiguous message and fill in what often proved to be incorrect particulars.

I was reading a 2005 interview with Lightning Bolt from The Wire today and Chippendale said something about the evolution of “the scene” that kind of struck a note with me. To paraphrase:

“When it started out it was just our friends and then it grew to include people in other cities that we didn’t know yet but could be our friends…”

He went on to describe how the whole thing expanded one order of magnitude larger which isn’t to say anything negative about the folks that only learned about this kind of music when it achieved wider appeal but rather that one can only have so many friends and there are palpable differences between close-knit communities and ones in a more open stitch pattern.

The Friends Forever documentary was recorded during 2000 when things were still at that “people in other cities” stage so watching it is a more intimate experience than what you might have gotten if it was recorded even a year or two later. Friends Forever never really grew beyond a certain point because of their dedication to playing in a way that venues could neither legally sanction or often even pay them for but the shows they were playing in front of did eventually get larger.

One thing I am thankful for is the glimpse this movie provides of the interior of Monkey Mania – a storied Denver, Colorado space I never had the good fortune of setting foot inside of. Once I saw the words Providence, Rhode Island on the screen I knew the movie was about to cover my first experience with the band and wondered what Wolfisohn’s camera would make of Fort Thunder.

Imagine my surprise when the on-screen text merely described the space as “a club” and showed some footage of the performance in the alley without even mentioning that the crowd was the largest shown up to that point. It made sense though – traveling with Friends Forever meant hanging out with Nate and Josh in their vehicles with their dogs and one space is the same as any other if you never go inside.

Thinking back I can’t remember either seeing a member of the band inside that night or meeting Ben but I would understand the decision to keep the focus on Friends Forever even if the cameras had wandered in.

Wolfisohn’s decision to make this film feels almost prescient when viewed in context of how common this type of documentary would become over the next twenty years and how much of a fixture documentarians would grow to be in underground spaces. There are a good number of reasons to watch it, including if you happen to be a Troma completionist, and there are a host of online buying options.

Plague TV presents Halloween Special : Cthonic Crystal Video 2023

This is one of the two featured items that any reader can actually buy right this minute with the proper count of e-beans and an acceptable drop box. I’m throwing a link on the bottom so that everybody can get theirs in time for the big spooky celebration.

Nate had marked on the dvd that because it has so much content it might be watched in several seatings but instead I popped in after watching Friends Forever. I was hungry for more in an abstract sense but also a little loopy from my nightly Ambien. I enjoyed the feeling of hanging out with a friend while they put on a sequence of short films and music – nicely in the background of the greater hang “sesh”. Being swaddled in media this way felt safe and reassuring in a way I don’t always get to experience.

A little ways in an automated AI called something like DeathAI is introduced to keep things moving. Something about this one screams “trickster” and we wind up with a bit of back and forth banter in the style of Space Ghost Coast to Coast! Without this touchstone it would be harder to draw a comparison – perhaps the Seder dinners with the ignorant, bad and other types of sons.

It stays entertaining and some interesting music and short films make in into the playlist. With my pills kicking in I didn’t get the most of everything – especially Damon Packard’s Children of the Stones but if you’re planning a casual get together of Halloween film rarity enjoyers who might enjoy both a stern and squirrelly announcer character this could be the night for you!

https://store.cave-evil.com/products/plague-tv-halloween-special

PLAGUE TV: HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

“Filtered through the light of your Envy”

Graveyard Whispers Feel The Wrath : Attention Deficit Black Arts 1998

I covered this band in the recent piece entitled The Loft Intermission and as luck would have it my words reached at least one of the pseudonymous members and my very own copy travelled steadfastly through the night on the wings of a bat to roost within my rural mailbox. You might find it difficult to secure a copy of your own and unfortunately my plans for a rough upload are on hold now that the first listen seems to have cursed the tape deck in my karaoke machine.

It is possible that the device is merely protesting and refusing to play my copy of Duran Duran’s Rio now that I’ve exposed it to true synth darkness with this clearly superior offering and will once again resume turning the moment I reintroduce Feel The Wrath.

(Stand by as I just discovered a forgotten boom box on my back porch containing a copy of Gary Numan’s I, Assassin)

On to the music – most goth bands are a bit self consciously campy but Graveyard Whispers goes for an overtly “fang in cheek” approach. A decent comparison would be fellow San Diegan industrial band Tit Wrench though this latter group doesn’t directly lampoon rivethead tropes in the same way Graveyard Whispers does goth ones. The sound is faithful with some faster aggressive songs like Death Die, Death Die, Black Hair Dye and slower selections like I’m a Moontan Child which works the short prank phone call sketches into it’s remix.

When I first slid the tape out of it’s Manila envelope packaging I thought it was a plain black cassette but closer examination revealed black on black printing. The physical production does not disappoint any more than the music when proper unholy levels are reached. I’m hard at work on an upload but in the mean time some weird collector dudes are unloading recently exhumed dead stock for as low as 80 dollars.

Or you may get a little luckier as I was and be blessed by the night for a bat to flit through your window grasping the recording in it’s formidable talons…

The Super Natural Peepshow Steve Lawrence : [unknown printer circa 1996]

I once had a conversation with my friend Tetsunori about how he used to catch wild beetles in Japan so he could trade them with his schoolmates for holographic and foil stamped trading cards. He described visiting his grandparents in the countryside and spreading out a bedsheet with honey in the center on the edge of a grassy meadow. In a kind of low-tech precursor to Pokémon schoolboys would collect living insects and even battle them against each other.

I was fascinated and asked a million questions about the different species and their relative strengths and weaknesses. At first Tetsunori tried his best to answer my queries but eventually he shouted out in exasperation:

“I don’t know man! I don’t care about fucking beetle I just wanted card!”

The broad appeal of trading cards is responsible for me getting my hands back on this artifact nearly thirty years after it was first printed in what seems like a minor miracle. When my friend Steve Lawrence first converted his oil paintings into this format to sell at the San Diego Comic Con at least one buyer acquired a set out of interest in the trading card in general. Steve has been homeless around Los Angeles for just over two decades and hasn’t been spotted by a friend or acquaintance in at least half of one but a lucky Google search led me to an eBay card-monger across the country with a set to sell.

Steve’s current circumstances are somewhat akin to the quantum puzzle of Schrödinger’s Cat – in the absence of either proof-of-life or it’s morbid opposite it makes sense to assume the best. I’ll be dedicating an entire chapter to Steve, his multiple creative pursuits and the profound influence he had on me as a budding aesthete but for now I’ll focus on his painting work and this card set.

He was a dedicated reader of Juxtapoz and closely followed the associated “lowbrow” art movement – looking back at his work now the influences of Robert Williams and Kenny Scharf are unmistakable. At the same time there is an innocence present in his canvases that hints at his earlier years spent operating a twee-pop record label called rugcore. Considering his laborious process of carefully layering oil paints until patches of color became finely detailed menageries of figures from vintage toys and his own imagination he churned out work at astonishing rate.

In the three or four years following the production of this card set he further honed his visual vocabulary on a handful of canvases that may well be lost to time. These cards are alarmingly flimsy, an issue with either their printing or the photographing of the actual paintings made nearly half of them come out too dark and I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to buy them again.

Some folks who have led lives less chaotic than mine might well still have sets in their possession but I seriously doubt this object will ever be available for purchase anywhere again.

************ BEWARE OF THE EVIL OF ********* ***************SELF PROMOTION**************

Hand tied 81/2” x 7” booklet with hand glued color plates and six song lyrics

DIVING GOD / CASTLE FREAK SOLO MUSICALS : Wicca’d World Press 2023

I made a few of these things earlier this year and sent a few to friends, a zine faire and an online shop. After doing Bleak End at Bernie’s for a while I decided to shift my approach and produce a pair of consecutive musicals in which I’d be the sole vocal performer. In each case I enlisted a group of friends to help with music.

The first is called Castle Freak and examines the period of time where the beast from Grimm’s fairytale is entirely alone. He strikes out at his lavish surroundings with boorish fury, he dreams of the day he was cursed while questioning if his true tormentor ever left his side. He seeks for the innocent maiden that might save him but worries that he will only end up dragging her down into his personal hell.

The music was recorded in New Mexico with Dain Daller, Amander Speer, Sam Giles and a couple of samples for animal and weather sounds. Staging included elaborate makeup, a platter of disrespected grapes and chicken and finally a silver plated goblet to be thrown through a mirror.

The next piece was Diving God – continuing the theme of wretched men alone in exile it features Lucifer from Paradise Lost as he is cast from heaven;

“Prayer doesn’t suit you, you who rebelled. Heaven still bleeds through the hole where you fell. This is your future this is your fate. This is your nature this is your state…

For this one I put together an improvised lounge jazz band in Chicago with Henry Glover – drums, Liam Warfield – bass, Dain Daller – Farfisa, Amanda Speer – saxophone and Jeffrey Rocketmild Jefferson on clarinet with Lucifer on vocals. After two very brief practices we were ready to perform.

Although I had undoubtedly made them this way it saddened me that these pieces would simply cease to exist after as little as one performance. I thought how I might give them new life and decided on illustrated libretto. A big inspiration was a fancy printing of Milton’s Masque of Comus. I thought about packaging them with a recording of an audio rip from spectator’s uploads but went the awkward way of printing links to the actual videos instead.

Someone suggested a QR Code while I was in the copy shop but unfortunately I didn’t think of that.

I have a few copies left of the first run of 25 that can be had for $10 ppd in US with shipping discount for multiple copies. Message berniebleak@gmail.com to claim your copy.

Ok back to The Loft and another gospel next time!