Tag: Taboo

Maine 2012 : “Any last words? Yeah, eat shit!”

berniebleak1 Comment

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.

Maine 2008 : The Bus Part Nine “That Shack’s Got a Lot of A”

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Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

When we played at Waterfall Arts in Belfast a couple came onto The Bus and expressed their disappointment at the treatment we had received from the local authorities. Because of the significant difference in their respective ages I first assumed that they must have been a father and daughter and have to admit that I was being a bit of a flirt. When I apprised the reality of the situation, that these two people cohabitated romantically, I regretted any liberties that I might have taken as I came to regard the gentleman as somebody who, in my own words, would be “capable of indescribable cruelty”.

Speaking of liberties they invited us to bring The Bus to the cannery they lived in that was located in Liberty, Maine where a dinner party would be held in our honor at the museum opposite Liberty Tool. The couple was Dan and Sveya.

The origin story of Liberty Tool was that Dan and it’s proprietor Skip had found themselves regarding both sides of a mid century phenomenon where historic Maine farming families were throwing in the towel just as countercultural back-to-landers were determined to come pick it back up. They were able to acquire farming tools and related implements from this first group at a pittance and then turn around and sell them to the second at a premium. It obviously helped that in those situations where utopian visionaries might end up discovering that they had bitten off more than they could chew there would also be a profitable turnaround on the crumbs.

The part of the story I don’t remember is if the duo had grown up in the area themselves or arrived with an early wave of back-to-landers but either way Dan bought and began renovating the cannery while Skip ran Liberty Tool. The Museum on the opposite side of the street presumably came about in close to the same manner as Bob Cassilly’s City Museum in Saint Louis. Occasionally objects passed through their hands that seemed to be of too great historical and artistic value to just resell and then grew to a large enough collection to be displayed in a museum.

The Bus had been continuing to exhibit engine problems and their had been some discussion of seeing whether or not flushing the radiator might improve things in any capacity over the last several hundred miles. It was decided to use the time at the cannery to undertake this process and John Benson and Dan were brainstorming the most efficient method of going about this. I don’t think I understood what the whole thing actually entailed at this point in time but I wanted to contribute by digging a hole into the ground with a shovel.

I don’t know what I was thinking – maybe to flush the water and coolant into this hole and then bury it? I must have just felt like I wanted the physical satisfaction of exerting myself through labor or another strenuous activity. Rain and I weren’t doing any kind of workouts on this tour although it would become a feature of our next two U.S. Tours together. The hole idea was vetoed and the radiator flush was accomplished with a sequence of buckets instead.

Like every other fluid on The Bus the water that came out was distressingly filthy. Flushing the radiator was clearly a good idea but most likely made little difference as to the ultimate fate of The Bus.

Dan was giving a tour of the cannery. I don’t think I took the entire tour but I saw a lot of the place and remarked about how satisfying it was that everything there seemed to be made of either wood, metal or glass and nothing was plastic. Dan joked that they had a small jar somewhere that they kept all the plastic in to prevent it from contaminating or spreading it’s influence to the more stolid materials. Maybe this wasn’t a joke. There was a bit of talk as to whether or not it would be a good idea to decant what was evidently a very large container of steel cut oatmeal.

Spring had come decisively to Maine and the weather was nice enough for everyone to go to the river to swim. Sveya pointed out some of the wild herbs along the way: Jack-in-the-pulpit and False Seal of Solomon. The Taboo kids had come along and were talking about how their dog Criminy was only ever interested in the largest stick in any given situation. Criminy had growled at me when they picked me up by the graveyard and when I asked them why they said he was a bad dog.

That was refreshing. So many people are quick to explain it away as a superpower the moment their dog doesn’t trust somebody:

“He wouldn’t act like this for no reason. Something must be wrong with you!”

I don’t know if the museum in Liberty was called the Davistown Museum back in 2008 or not. The one display that everybody gravitated toward was a glass case full of unidentified tools. One in particular burned itself into my memory – a piece of hardwood was carved into a cylindrical “T”, almost like a three way dowel. All three terminations were upholstered in ox blood colored leather that was held in place with what looked like furniture tacks.

There is a small section for unidentified tools on the museum’s current website but I couldn’t find a picture of this thing. Maybe that means that between 2008 and now somebody succeeded in identifying what it’s original purpose was. The whole thing looked well worn and I couldn’t help but suspect the leather had been added to soften the wood as all three ends came into repeated contact with something. An improvised piece of machinery? A shoe or furniture maker’s signature leather-smoother-downer?

I definitely wouldn’t mind if somebody who works at that museum see’s this and can tell what I’m talking about and wanted to tell me if they figured out what it was for.

Considering that I had taken acid during our New York show and then taken acid to walk the Liberty Trail in Boston and now I was taking it in Liberty, Maine I had been taking a whole lot of acid. A group of us took it for this dinner party but not any of the other people in Living Hell – me, the Taboo kids and Ryan who had rode along from Boston. I don’t know if this was the moment that Annapurna Hmal Von Wagner and I first laid eyes on each other but it was definitely when we first noticed.

She strode over meaningfully and slammed something into the palm of my open hand while staring directly into my eyes:

“What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you really do?”

If people are going to take psychedelic drugs and believe in magic then who’s to say what’s actually happening ever? I was writing a few pieces ago about the definition of the word Noumena – “things that one becomes aware of the existence of without one’s senses”. It’s a hard word to define but it’s opposite is phenomena. Which one would you call it when people experience a shared hallucination or impression?

I had a dagger that I used to focus intention and energy during Living Hell performances but some train police stole it from me when I was later riding freight to California for our reunion show. I was trying to figure out what I would replace it with for that final concert when I found a conductor’s baton stabbed into the ground at People’s Park in Berkeley. I felt like this represented both a message from the cosmos and a clear sign that I was maturing as a magician.

If we view the magician’s tool as an extension of their will then it can certainly be argued that using a conductor’s baton or wand brings a sense of subtlety and finesse that a dagger lacks.

I used to play a game where I would use the wand to focus energy and intention toward somebody’s back at a crowded show or party and they would invariably turn around. If we go with the supposition that this was more than just a coincidence every time it happened then the only explanation would be that these people were somehow sensing the energy I was directing at them but there’s no objective way to measure this. Whether you believe in it or not it doesn’t exactly make for a headlining act at the Magic Castle.

It felt like Annapurna had captured a live bee or wasp and pressed it into my hand so it would sting me. When I looked down to see what was happening it was only an acrylic prism on a thin ball chain. The stinging sensation was only temporary – a painful shock at the moment of contact. Her expression seemed to be saying:

“Yes, I just did that. That’s a thing I can do.”

I never ended up getting to know Annapurna very well so when I heard that she had ended her own life it more or less came as a complete surprise. I find the idea of wishing you had gotten to know a person better before they die somewhat pedantic and insulting. When one of my friends died of a heroin overdose a girl that I had used to have a crush on told me that she regretted not getting to know him better before his death but added that she didn’t want to make the same mistake with me.

The implication was that I would be dying of a heroin overdose sometime in the near future and she wanted to make sure to get to know me first – kind of like when Netflix or Tubi tell you the shows and movies that they will be losing the streaming rights to in the next week or month so you can prioritize watching them. I was so insulted that I never spoke to that girl again. She also ended up killing herself.

I savor this memory that I do have with Annapurna – the gift of a token of interest and a demonstration of magical prowess. We exchanged contact information and spoke a few times and sated our mutual interest by learning a little bit about each other before getting on with our lives. If I were to hope or wish anything it would be that I hope she was satisfied with her decision to end her life and the method that was available to her to end it. Many of us die by accident or surprise so I’m happy for her that she was able to do so by an informed choice.

One of the girls did the trick at the dinner party where you dip your finger into a wine glass and then move it around the rim until it produces a single resonant tone. It might have been Annapurna but it also might have been Bonnie. I do remember that whoever did it made a self deprecating comment about being a dilettante and this being the single noteworthy thing she was capable of – kind of like when the girl in The Breakfast Club puts the lipstick on with her boobs.

It’s such a beautiful sound. I wonder if I would be able to do it.

I found myself talking to Dan in the deepest throes of the drugs. I forget how we ended up on the topic but he was telling me about how the optimism of his youth was brutally disrupted by the Vietnam War and the lives of so many close to him completely truncated. His skin wasn’t particularly unhealthy for someone of his age but in that moment I saw every mark made by time as a wound of circumstance.

It wasn’t long after this tour that John Benson passed along the news that Dan had taken his own life. This one ddidn’t surprise me in the least.

Liberty is a small town. When you walk down from Main Street and turn onto Water Street there is a small dilapidated shack as you pass the trees – or at least there was in 2008. The dinner party was over and everybody was walking back down to the bus. Party Steve offered some commentary in his “funny” voice as we passed the shack but I’m not sure if it could properly be called a joke:

“That’s an ass shack! That shack’s got a lot of A!”

Most nights on tour I had been sleeping in the hammock at the highest point of the bus but the weather was nice that night and I decided to sleep in the shack. There was a phenomenon around those years that came with taking a lot of psychedelic drugs and believing in magic but basically I experienced a personal pantheon of what I would call Cardinal Deities. The first experience was in San Diego while I was trying to read Under The Volcano.

Very early in the book is a passage about lightning in the mountains to the west. The moment I read that I had a vision – I saw a dark and stormy mountain pass, a crescent moon, a silver dagger and a man with shaggy grey hair and a mustache dressed in dark layered cloaks. My instinctual understanding was that I was seeing a personification of the direction West but the name I knew him as was Silver. I feel like I should mention that I wasn’t under the influence of psychedelic drugs when this happened but I was for the other ones.

I still haven’t actually read much of the book but I’ve heard good things about it and should probably give it another chance.

The next experience came while riding a freight train through Mississippi to New Orleans and taking a lot of acid. The train passed a building called Southern Pipe Supply with a large red stylized “S” that bore a gold crown. In that moment I thought “The South is a Red King” and then I saw him. He was dressed in a long red robe with blonde hair in a grown out page boy (maybe the term Masonna cut will be more evocative for some) and a simple golden crown.

He wore a haughty expression like he had power once but lost it and was biding his time until he might have it again. I saw ravens flying and the circles defined by the edges of their wings like in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by William Carlos Williams. I knew him as South.

Looking out the window of that shack and waiting for the drugs to wear off and to fall asleep I saw the third of the Cardinal Deities who I knew as Maine. One of the trees looked like a human face and two stars shone through it to define his eyes. He had an iron thrall’s collar around his neck and facial hair in the shape of the Greek Letter Omega. His hair was like a short mullet with shaved sides and his nose was long and perfectly conical in shape. His color was green.

I understood that he governed over sex and death.

The final one came a little later and broke the pattern in small ways. While the first three appeared in the sections of the country that corresponded to their cardinal directions this one was in the East Bay rather than the East Coast. In the darkest and quietest part of the night I heard an engine attempt to turn over and die – I had probably been on drugs. I had a sudden vision of that scene in Dumbo where his mother is chained down and you see her tiny eye in contrast to her large body and she’s crying.

I knew her as Strength Succumbs Under Bonds.

Her color was black and her metal was lead. I hadn’t gone out of my way to look for these entities but once I had a full set it felt distinctly satisfying and useful. You could say I invented them or made myself suggestible but for a little while it was my go to organizing principle. I realized they should have elements in a Classical sense instead of just a Periodic Table one so clockwise from West it was Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I might have mentioned using them when haunting a house in 2009 and it was Ghost, Witch, Vampire and Goblin.

It’s interesting looking back at this time and how important magical thinking was in my day to day life. It still is but in a very different way. The Cardinal Deities are still here but they’ve faded into the background and I don’t think about them as much. If they seem useful to you, or real, feel free to use them for anything you want.

Next Part:

Maine 2008 : The Bus Part Eight “Yeah Man, Masturbate in Heaven”

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Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven

It’s been a little while since I picked this thread back up and I won’t be picking up exactly where I last set it down. I think the only show in between Boston and Belfast was Portland. Besides being the largest city in Maine Portland’s biggest claim to fame is that it has the same name as the one in Oregon leading to infrequent scenarios where people might have to ask “which one?” There are also quite a few Oaklands peppered across the United States that are generally good for a passing chuckle through the tour vehicle windshield but these are between shows.

Nobody ever actually plays in these Oaklands or if they do I’ve never heard about it.

I guess I’m actually going to talk about the Portland show. This guy named Ed set it up and his band Stand By Me was playing. I think they would have usually been somewhere on the hardcore to post hardcore spectrum but their singer had lost his voice before this performance so they played with a recording of some Americana type author. I’m just going to say Studs Terkel with full knowledge that this is probably wrong but whoever would know enough to correct me will probably decide it’s funnier this way.

You know that thing where somebody has only seen a word written down and the first time they say it in mixed company they make a shambles of the pronunciation and people laugh at them? I did that with that guy’s name. I said it “STOODS TARE-KELL” like I somehow genuinely assumed that the most unlikely of all possible pronunciations would just be correct.

I mean I did assume. I thought that was how you say it. People laughed at me.

The show was in an open field at the edge of town somewhere. A girl approached me and asked if she might do the dance thing with the spinning fire on top of the bus. I told her that that would not be possible and she conceded that this was probably an appropriate restriction from a safety perspective. I assured her that the decision was purely an aesthetic one.

The next show was up in Belfast. Many of the highway underpasses between Portland and Belfast were on the low side and there was some concern that the bus’s hunchbacked loft might not properly clear them. We were feeling especially cautious after a minor incident in a place called Folly Island near Charleston, South Carolina. We had assumed that some low hanging tree branches would “probably” be fine and ended up breaking a top window and admitting a veritable battalion of tiny spiders.

This had various repercussions. One of them was that the piece of plexiglass that got hastily fastened into place to replace the broken window surrendered to the wind somewhere along our route and only narrowly avoided triggering some larger catastrophe. The other issue was that in Cayce, South Carolina the onboard performance space was permeable to rain – bringing an abrupt conclusion to a performance by a project called Bald Ego featuring Adam Keith from CUBE:

“I gotta stop playing. My Kaoss Pad is soaked!”

All of this meant that the driver wanted to be especially cautious that the island’s folly not be repeated and had been abruptly slowing in order to ensure that each new vertical obstruction could be safely navigated. This was evidently concerning to some of the other motorists and an anonymous Good Samaritan decided to do us the courtesy of calling in the local constabulary. When we saw the familiar lights and pulled off the Interstate we found ourselves on an aptly named county access road called Dyer Strait.

To our good fortune Upper Dave happened to be behind the wheel and it just so happened that some kind of minor and easily remedied oversight back in California had left him with a recently suspended license that he had no knowledge of being a continent away from his mailbox. With the State Motto of Dirigo, or I Direct, embroidered in clear letters on their patches the officers were kind enough to direct him all the way to their county lockup. We rolled into Belfast’s Waterfall Arts Center minus a friend, companion and more relevantly for the night’s Living Hell performance a drummer.

Dan Beckman, whose constantly evolving project name has finally settled as Village of Spaces, set up the show for us and had been working at Waterfall Arts as a janitor. A lot of folks on the bus were long time friends of him and Amy Moon but it was my first introduction. I had been eager to see him play since an experience I had in Chicago the previous Winter.

I had come bursting into the Blog Cabin from a snowy night I wasn’t dressed for with a head full of dark thoughts and acid. A girl named Amanda was listening to his music on the computer and began rubbing the life back into my near frozen hands as the lyrics to a song called Greensboro, NC similarly smoothed the cold and chaos from my thoughts:

“You can walk it off, you can walk on home they swear

You’ll be all right they swear, you’ll be OK”

This show was also my first time meeting Crissy and Bonny from Taboo. The band was in the process of developing their more theatrical style but I was most excited about their personalities. It felt like I had stumbled into a cabal of nineteenth century cartoon villains that I had secretly always belonged to. It got to my head: when I rode along to pick up Dave from the police station I was practically twirling my hair like a besotted schoolgirl:

“Hey Dave, should I move to Maine and live with all the other vampires?”

“Yeah man. Masturbate in Heaven.”

We stayed over at the house called RoHeGe that I’ve always heard is named after three sisters that grew up there but nobody has ever told me when this was or how anybody knew about them. I took a walk alone the next morning and ended up in a small village graveyard looking at colorful turkey tail mushrooms. For most of the tour I was wearing a white rabbit fur coat and women’s corduroy pants so with my long hair I would have been easy to mistake for a woman from behind.

The next Winter in Chicago the Pilsen Police began a campaign of targeted harassment against the women in our subculture who lived in that neighborhood. They claimed to be under the impression that they were working as prostitutes which seems unlikely as I’ve never heard of anybody soliciting from a bicycle in any city on Earth. Anyway it was a common thing that Winter to notice a searchlight on my back as I was biking or walking home only to have the cops speed off the moment I turned around and they saw my facial hair.

I assume that something similar was happening in the Belfast graveyard but I suppose it’s also possible that I actually represented exactly what this person was looking for and they had just been preternaturally lucky: a tall, thin genderqueer glam rocker. Anyway I heard whistling and when I turned to look a generic somewhat older somewhat balding somewhat heavy man was masturbating in my general direction while darting from tree to tree and continuing to whistle. My next move is somewhat mystifying but I will attempt to explain my thought process.

I called the police.

I thought that this person was actually targeting women and was a sexual predator and me alerting the authorities might help make Belfast a safer place for the women that lived there. Obviously the third part is ridiculous. It actually just occurred to me that the graveyard could have been a cruising spot and I might have looked like exactly the sort of person who would have been there to cruise too but even if we accept the first two parts of my statement as true I had already been given ample evidence that the local police had no interest whatsoever in helping or protecting people anything like me.

If I thought that this person constituted an actual threat to women’s safety the best thing I could have done is confront this person myself and try to convey that their behavior was unacceptable through either force or the threat of force. I would have been wearing a dagger on my belt – pointing it in his direction and saying something along the lines of “hey don’t wave your dick at me creep” would have done more to change this person’s future behavior than calling in an authority figure who would never believe me to begin with.

The Belfast Police were clearly more of a threat to women in my community than a random pervert masturbating in a graveyard and the one upside to my calling them is whatever officer responded to my call would have been too busy for the hour or so that this took to otherwise harass, victimize or be a general nuisance to the women, punks, queers or otherwise vulnerable citizens of Belfast.

Be all that as it may I did in fact call the police. I didn’t have a cell phone so I walked to a nearby pharmacy or grocery store and then back to the graveyard to wait. A police officer came and I explained to him what had happened. He looked at me incredulously:

“You sure he wasn’t just taking a piss?”

I offered the universal gesture:

“Do you piss like this officer?”

He rolled his eyes:

“When did you say y’all were leaving town again?”

At that moment the members of Taboo happened to be driving by in a short black bus they had converted to run on vegetable oil so I told him that it wouldn’t be long now and ran over to get a ride. They asked me why the cop had been harassing me and I explained that I had actually called him.

A small epilogue to this incident happened several years later when I was talking up Taboo to a friend and pulled up the first live video I could find on YouTube. I can’t remember if this would have been LaPorsha or somebody else I had a brief romantic fling with or crush on I just remember the clear feeling of having some level of that kind of energy toward the person and pulling up the video in a very “check out my cool friends who also think I’m cool” way only to discover that it was a video of them making fun of me for having called the police.

It’s harder to find things on YouTube than it used to be. Some things got taken down and there’s more stuff up there and maybe in one of their mergers they changed the way the search function works. I only know that a lot of things that used to be easy for me to find on there are impossible to find now. I feel this way about so many things that used to be on the internet between 2000 and 2010: Flickr groups? Old noise forums? Anything that got uploaded to MySpace? It’s all gone now and your odds are better of finding an obscure record that was pressed in the ‘70s than any of this stuff.

Or I’m just stupid and bad at finding things. Anyway I don’t think they had a whole song devoted to making fun of me for calling the police – it was just a really long interlude of between song banter. I think it was one of the performances from the armband era when misguided protestors would try to get their tours and shows cancelled under the assumption that they were at least promoting neofascist imagery if not ideals.

So much wasted and misguided effort: protesting appearances by a band you know nothing about, touring the country in black suits with red armbands in the full knowledge that people will take it out of context and get offended, calling a police department that just arrested your friend in a clear display of contempt for your artistic community and the values you share. I hope that all of us are making better decisions and spending our time in more meaningful ways.

I was reconnecting with an old friend recently when the conversation took an unexpected detour into what sides we might have ended up on in the vaccine debate. I’ve been avoiding whatever the next step is but I’m tired of playing ideological hot lava with Venn diagrams. Obviously there are ideologies and ideas that are objectively horrible but what I’m getting at is I can’t imagine going out of my way to ask anybody if they got a vaccine or not in 2023 but I know I have friends on both sides that this is all still really important to.

I was going to write about going to Liberty, Maine and the tool museum but it got really late so I’ll write about that tomorrow.

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Southern Florida 2008 : The Bus Part Four “There’s A Quarterback In Every Huddle”

berniebleak12 Comments

Part One Part Two Part Three

Last bus chapter I was talking about South Beach but I think I need to dial back a little bit and talk about the Publix between Orlando and Miami. John Benson was the primary architect behind both bus incarnations but he wasn’t always the driver. Almost as often, for both the INC trip and the later Living Hell tour, Upper Dave was the one behind the wheel. He looked good there and had the necessary temperament for maneuvering a vehicle of it’s size: one of the reasons I thought it was hilarious when the comparably nervous and high strung Griffin from Sewn Leather started driving a miniature RV.

Anyway this would have been the reason that some of the other members of Living Hell stole a sign from Wendy’s that said “Dave’s Way” and displayed it in the tiny window usually reserved for route information.

Let’s talk about stealing: it was ordinary for the bus to attract negative police attention just for looking weird and being full of freaks but on this occasion a crime actually was committed, albeit minor. I’ve had enough experience at this point to have the shoplifting conversation before walking into a major grocery chain in mixed company on tour and I’m about to lay out the reasons.

It’s always cheese and it’s always a bigger headache for the companions of the actual shoplifter than it is for the shoplifter themselves. Cheese is a cherished food of early adulthood: high in protein and requiring no preparation it often leads to punk house arguments and creates a universal shiver of excitement when found in a dumpster because it brings life and flavor to the thing there’s always too much of: bread.

It isn’t really important who stole the cheese but because I remember let’s share a chuckle at this person’s expense anyway. It was James: then playing with Lazy Magnet and later in a band called Evil Spirits with the members of Taboo. I haven’t heard anything about James in a few years, hopefully this is just because he’s been living quietly but well and not because somebody is about to let me in on some bad news. James stole cheese from Publix and Publix called the police and the police sat us all down on the side of the bus to be detained and lectured.

There are a lot of reasons why the following encounter felt like we were an errant Kindergarten class that had wandered away from a teacher on a field trip and I’m about to list all of them. The first one was that the cops were going to try to explain elementary ethics to us as if we were toddlers and actually simply did not understand:

“How would you like it if I stole your food? You’ve got food in that bag right there, what if I just took it?”

It was disappointing that they didn’t segue from this into a complete primer on the nuances of corporate personhood. An explanation as to why Publix was the equivalent of a friend and ally when it was time to not steal food from them but would magically transform into an LLC the moment a cleaning product gave their employees cancer or a new location’s construction threatened an endangered species. Give a Publix a fish and it eats for a day…

The next reason was that this stern lecture was interrupted by a Publix employee who was bringing us jars of peanut butter and jelly, a loaf of bread and a twelve pack of root beer. She seemed to understand that we had simply missed snack time and would return to being polite members of society the minute we’d had a PBJ and nap and all of this was seriously eroding the cop’s assertion that we needed to reflect on the error of our ways.

The next reason was that the “time out” they had us sitting in was completely unfair and arbitrary. John Orlando had bought a submarine sandwich from Publix and even had the receipt to prove it. What he didn’t have was a full set of teeth to eat it with and our temporary stewards had forbidden him from going onto the bus to retrieve his partial denture. He said that he wanted to obey their rules but was hungry and he and I came up with a novel compromise. Because he couldn’t retrieve his teeth I would use my teeth to chew up bites of his sandwich for him and spit them into his mouth like a mother bird.

This is especially funny to me because I’ve now lost all of my teeth and have to wear a full set of dentures while I imagine John is probably back to a healthy complete set as he’s no doubt replaced the partial with implants by now. Anyway John got to eat his sandwich without breaking the rule about going back on board the bus but the cops really didn’t like the way he was eating it:

“Stop it! You’re making a scene!”

We all thought that detaining a bus full of weirdos and making them sit in time out in a Publix parking lot was making more of a scene but what could we say? According to the social contract it is the cops who are the arbiters of proper behavior and not the bus full of freaks. The biggest reason that the scenario felt like we were a rogue troupe of grade schoolers is that the cops were only looking for a proper authority figure among us to release us into the recognizance of:

“Look I know you say you’re all artists and everybody’s equal but there’s a quarterback in every huddle. Who’s the Alpha?”

We suggested that they throw a raw steak over our heads and waited to see which of us got it. Eventually somebody was able to call John Benson who had been briefly traveling in a separate car and his full beard and fatherly demeanor seemed to satisfy the peace officers. Maybe it was the subtle shifts in everybody’s body language the moment he arrived: they’d found the Alpha. He was given a stern warning to prevent us from straying or stealing cheese in the future and we were allowed to continue onward to Miami and the International Noise Conference.

The topic of who exactly was the Alpha ended up being discussed with much interest for the entirety of the Conference. Clearly John Benson was the bus-Alpha and Rat Bastard was both the INC and Laundry Room Squelcher-Alpha but we all felt like there was room for other Alphas. Austin from Right Arm Severed was briefly dubbed the taco-Alpha when he left the bus around two in the morning one night with the promise to buy everybody tacos but this status was revoked when he returned having only bought crack from the guy who had been trying to sell everyone a gay porn DVD.

Nobody suggested it at the time but I’d like to retroactively nominate Aaron Hibbs of Sword Heaven as the artistic Alpha of the Conference. Aaron was an almost Ned Flanders-like figure in the American Noise landscape of 2008: he oozed positivity, was good at everything he attempted and of course he had the mustache. I had first met Aaron a year or so earlier when I passed through Skylab in the romantic company of one of his exes and can report that he was nothing but cordial under the circumstances.

His main project with Mark Van Fleet was certainly among the most anticipated of the Conference combining power electronics style noise with both Industrial which would become a bit of a trend in the next few years and a solid performance gimmick which never goes out of style. On this particular year he had also brought a high concept “joke” project: Rage Against The Cage – an a-capella grunge band. Hibbs and company belted out compositions of “uh’s”, “oh-no’s” and other Vedder-isms to the amusement of everybody who was in on the joke.

I realize that this is all making me sound like a super-fan with a mouth full of dick and to some extent this is probably true, Aaron was my inspiration to get into endurance hula hooping a few years later, but I also haven’t actually listened to any of the Sword Heaven records. I really am trying to identify the most hyped creative force of the Conference regardless of my personal tastes. If I was going to talk about the single most anticipated and best received performance it would probably be Justice Yeldham’s bloody mouth-on-glass presentation but Lucas wasn’t presenting different projects every single day of the Conference.

This brings us back to the afternoon at South Beach where a good portion of the crowd was on acid and the beach front condos said “You Deserve To Live Here”. Aaron was standing in the busy intersection in front of these condos and casually tossing water balloons into the air over his shoulder. When they inevitably came back down onto fancy sport’s cars and open convertibles the angry motorists were deflated when they saw the balloons hadn’t been thrown with a specific target in mind.

Or maybe it was just that he was clearly surrounded by comrades who would have backed him up in the event of a conflict. Either way nobody said anything.

I’m not sure if the bit with the balloons was supposed to be part of the following Noumena performance but the main part was on the actual beach. I looked up the meaning of that word in anticipation of writing this piece but it’s a little hard to either explain or understand. Basically while phenomena are things that are known to exist based on our sensory perceptions noumena are that which exists independently of them. I guess you could say that unless you were actually in Miami in 2008 to see or hear the various things I am writing about for yourself all of them are noumena.

The performance centered around a hollow hemisphere made of plaster that was about six feet in diameter. I’d imagine that this performance was at least partially inspired by Matthew Barney due to the focus on body movement and athleticism. I am going to be referring to the cast plaster sculpture as the cup for the sake of brevity. Aaron floated the cup onto the ocean’s surface where he performed an assortment of handstands and other balance exercises on it’s rim. Things concluded with him crawling out of the ocean with the cup on his back like the shell of a sea turtle.

Maybe there was a sonic element to the performance centered on jazz balloon, it seems likely but I can’t remember for sure and I didn’t see a video of the set when I searched for five seconds.

Anyway a lot of people on the bus were feeling burnt out on cop interactions, especially as they were tripping on acid, and thought that the ocean might offer an avenue of escape based on the presumption that the cop is a land animal. This turned out not to be the case. I know that Capricorn is the name for sea-goat but I don’t know what you would call a sea-pig. I only know that they were there, riding jet skis and blowing whistles, and swimming toward deeper water was a bad way to try to get away from them as it was one of the behaviors they were evidently charged to prevent.

It wasn’t a sea-cop but rather a form of transitional sand-cop that saw the Noumena performance as a thing that was in need of policing. I guess you could say that I was the talk-to-cops-while-on-acid-Alpha, when the familiar question of who was in charge was posed everybody instinctually pointed to me. That was fine. I really liked talking to cops on acid in 2008.

The cop wanted to know if we would be leaving and I reassured him that we would eventually need food that wasn’t sand and water that wasn’t salt and would therefore be going somewhere else. There was something else weighing on the cop’s mind but he didn’t quite know how to put it into words. He pointed to the cup:

“And you’ll be taking your…?”

“Our cup? Yes, we like our cup. We’ll be definitely taking the cup.”

I guess I was the Alpha for this brief window of time because the cop took this cursory exchange as due diligence and proceeded to leave us alone.

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