Last of the Evil Beatniks

It was fucking surreal. And by surreal, I mind THE MOST MIND EXPANDING ROCK-N-ROLL EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFETIME.

Check out some pics:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scarymanilow/sets/72157620140213893/

In other news:

I'm shutting my Livejournal down. I really have no time or motivation to keep updating it these days.

If you want to keep up with me, I'll be active on the Spook Lights Livejournal (which is going to get a big overhaul reeeeal soon): http://thespooklights.livejournal.com/

I'm also on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thespooklights
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/scary_manilow
Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/user/thespooklights

So it's not like I'm vanishing off the face of the Earth or anything. Come find me out in the inter-world!

Fare-the-well (for now)...

--Scary M!

It has been presented that what we view as reality is simply a construct, that we interact with a shared intelligence to enshroud ourselves within a prison of symbols. Wiser minds than my own have acknowledged that peering through this veil of symbols is akin to waking from a form of cultural amnesia-- but it requires no small effort to chip through the shell of languages, logos, credos, and gestures that define our species, especially when our senses are constantly bombarded with text messages, reality shows, energy drinks, celebrity gossip, extra value meals, and meaningless political cock-flashing. It's easier to just give in, to absorb the flashing lights around us, and let the talking heads deliver information in tightly controlled bursts.

Priests, politicians, and witch doctors of all stripes have historically staked their claim to the access points of "The Divine," merely adding their own brand of symbology to the mix. In this way, the layers of our reality-construct have become more elaborate, and the greater truths have become more obscured. The hologram of reality is defined by its symbols-- thus, whoever can manipulate these symbols can manipulate reality. This practice is known as "magic," or in some circles, "marketing."

The problem with magic is that our most successful practitioners-- specifically heads of state, business leaders, and clergymen-- only seem to extract the information that benefits them most, that reinforces their power-position in the world. Hence, the Nike swoosh, the Jesus cross, and the printed text in most history books. Your teacher, your pastor, and your nightly newscaster are the only intermediary between the symbol-makers and the symbols themselves. Any actual, meaningful contacts with a "higher reality"-- such as dreams, deja vu, out-of-body experiences, hauntings, extraterrestrial contact, or the occasional psychedelic freakout-- are immediately explained away, filed in the "discard" rack, and summarily forgotten. If it doesn't fit within the parameters of our assured (read: DICTATED) headspace, it didn't REALLY happen. Case closed.

But what happens to this knowledge after we cast it aside? The forbidden history, the forgotten names and experiences, where does it all go when the warlocks-in-charge seal it behind the plaster wall of illusory status-quo? Does it vanish forever? Or does it continue to exist somewhere, in the supercontext beyond this shared hallucination we call "life"?

The answer, I think, is quite obvious. That knowledge is still there. Information never dies. Quite the opposite, in fact-- it grows faster and larger with each ticking second. It remains, sometimes hiding, but always waiting to be absorbed by the right minds. This is the realm of the occult.

I like to peer through cracks in walls. I like to overhear snippets of passing conversations on the street. I love digging through trash for discarded treasures, reclaiming forgotten bits of this world and recycling them into something new. This is a vital part of my daily existence-- I wrap myself in the fringed edges of our culture and crawl through the public eye like a beautiful scab. I pore over record bins and junk drawers in thrift stores in every town I visit. I will bury myself for hours in the dingiest corridors of abandoned buildings, memorizing every layer of graffiti, every ancient shoeprint, every oily rag and empty can. I visit these lost corners of culture and mind and I bring something back every time. Sometimes my brain is so full that is spills over at the sides, staining every lyric I write, every story I tell, every movie I shoot, every drawing, every thought, every movement, every breath. The information I collect is re-introduced into the world, and my reality shifts accordingly. The larger my projects become, the greater my sphere of influence-- you see where this is going?-- until eventually, I hope to channel this information in such a way that the group mind is altered on a mass scale. This is what the Situationists referred to as "seizing control of the Spectacle." I can do this through music, through images, through words. All I need is a little charisma and a willing audience.

Do I consider myself a magician? I am proud to say that I do-- although not in the most traditional sense of the word. To me, books like THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM or THE RE/SEARCH GUIDE TO INCREDIBLY STRANGE MUSIC carry as much esoteric weight as anything churned out by Crowley or Regardie. I derive as much hidden meaning from a viewing of GLEN OR GLENDA as I do from my daily tarot readings. And while I don't hitch myself to haughty, antiquated rituals as a means of directing my will, I do see an immediate correlation between musical performance and spellcasting-- both involve inducing a trancelike mood to bestow information upon the attendant group. Leading a band and screening a movie is just another form of wizardry, in my opinion, and the more practiced I become, the more arcane knowledge I project into my work, the more of a change I can effect on the external world.

CONTINUED IN PART TWO: THE PROGRAM (AND HOW WE GOT WITH IT)!

Yesterday was one of those days, one of those long, wearying days. One of those "strung-out homeless guy comes into the bar on your shift, starts screaming at a customer who politely declined his offer of a free drink, threatens to fight everyone in the bar when you tell him to get the fuck out, so you hose him down with water from the soda gun hoping the merest touch of moisture will cause him to disintegrate but it only pisses him off even more, and while you're on the phone with the cops asking them to come down and arrest him he gets into a fistfight with one of the regulars, so you set the phone down and hop over the bar and help push him outside, but he won't let go of the other guy's shirt so you have to smash his wrists with your elbow until he screams and calls you a faggot and runs away, then you hop back over the bar, accidentally knocking the phone into the sink and destroying it, then get back to pouring drinks for all the shlubs who sat around without offering to help" kind of days. You know the ones I'm talking about.

If I had a readily available turd-on-a-stick next to the beer cooler, these kinds of things wouldn't happen.

Enjoy these stills from "Five Dolls For An August Moon." For some reason, none of our peers seem to find this movie as amazing as we do. I understand it's not Bava's finest, not by a long shot... but it's hardly his worst (that honor belongs to Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, I believe), and even shitty Bava is better than current best-renters like "Shoot 'em Up" or the live-action "Underdog."










Legend has it Bava hated the script but was forbidden by his studio to change anything. So, rather than focus on the schematics of narrative storytelling, he opted to pack every scene with as much stylistic flair as he could muster... What remains on screen is a candy-colored satire of giallo conventions, celebrating the drywall-thin characters and meaninglessly convoluted plot with as much enthusiasm as the ultravivid sets and breezy Eurotrash soundtrack.


CLICK HERE for your listening pleasure!


Again, hardly a "classic" movie, but probably the most delicious slice of pulp trash I've digested in a long time.

Why send your leftover holiday cash to some worthless charity? Dig deep into your hearts and wallets and donate to a truly worthwhile cause-- by making all of my X-mess dreams come true!

Here's what I need to complete my list:

1.SOCK GARTERS



I like to refer to my new fashion aesthetic as "Dangerous Dandy." I enjoy being able to pull off my scarf and gloves the moment I walk through the door, wad them into a jaunty pile, and toss them into the bowels of my upturned top hat. If only I had a slicked-back manservant to accept my coat with a nod of curt indifference, the entire ensemble would be complete... Except for one key unmentionable: SOCK GARTERS. Suspenders and flouncy ties are all well and good, I suppose, but nothing quite says "I'm a deservedly pretentious arse" like a pair of elastic sock garters riding your shins. For a while, I considered just having them tattooed on my legs, but then I realized I would also have to get socks tattooed, and once you've gone that far why even bother donning footwear anymore?

2. RAKISH ACCOUTERMENTS

I might also find it helpful to incorporate the following into my new, dashing lifestyle:



3. A CARTOON SANDWICH



Sandwiches always look much tastier in illustrated form than in real life. Why is that, I wonder? So help me, I intend to find out.

4. A SENSORY DEPRIVATION TANK



What better way to unwind and dwell upon the greatness that is me? If I could spend up to seventy minutes a day absorbed in the womblike blackness of an isolation chamber, my creative nature would flourish, and as a result, all of humanity could be healed by the omnipotent influence of my artistic genius.

5. A WALL SAFE HIDDEN BEHIND A PAINTING OF MYSELF (OR ONE OF MY MORE DEVIOUS ANCESTORS)
I couldn't find a picture to accompany this request, but Google Image Search for "wall safe" produced this astounding (yet inexplicable) piece of work:



6. THE HEAD OF HUEY LEWIS ON A SILVER PLATE



Most of us got over Huey Lewis at an early age. Some of us (myself included) never fell under his spell in the first place. An even smaller percentage of us were born after Huey's reign over the musical charts had come to a screeching halt. Having never been exposed to his particular variety of blues-rock assholery in the first place, they see nothing wrong with the occasional scan of "SPORTS" or "FORE" at top volume in the middle of the day. As you might have guessed, I work with some of these people, and their nonchalant attempts to chip through my crumbling layer of sanity will not be tolerated any longer. If I could only send them a signal-- say, by mounting Sir Lewis's head on a pointed stake outside my workstation-- perhaps these shenanigans would come to an end. I'd hate for this situation to evolve into some kind of headlines-generating shooting spree.

In the midst of fourteen straight days of work (which, between two jobs, grants me precious little time of my own), I find myself clinging to fleeting moments of inspiration to help me maintain some sembelence of sanity. Today, I was granted three such moments...


I received THIS in the mail, which I am incredibly excited about:



I stole the neighbor's paper and saw THIS on the comics page:



I witnessed the aftermath of THIS on my way to Job Number One:



What did I do to deserve such a fun day?

As I've mentioned a few times recently, I'm shooting a movie next spring and I'm very excited about it-- this is gonna be my first REAL solo flight as a director, and the anticipation is really starting to fry me from the inside out.

The script isn't quite finished yet, but everything is pushing ahead at a rapid pace. I already have some of the principal roles cast-- not enough that I feel comfortable posting names in the credits, obviously, but enough to make this project feel solid-- and the opening murder sequence is firmly IN THE CAN.

I had to shoot this scene ahead of schedule because the industrial area I had in mind when I wrote it is scheduled for gentrification sometime next spring... I wanted to make sure I could capture some of that run-down atmosphere in its full glory before The Man swoops in to lay a nest full of condominium eggs. Fortunately, I had a couple of actors ready to go-- thank you to Mr. Franklin and Mr. Cadman, respectively-- and one brisk afternoon, we wisked up a bucket of stage blood and slapped together the following death scene:



Please keep in mind that, being Youtube, this video clip has been compressed to near-incomprehension, so if you blow it up to full screen everything turns to shit.

I did the soudtrack on an old Casio I found at the thrift store for twelve bucks, and I paid my actors in coffee and ginger snaps. Hopefully I was able to milk a little something extra from this no-budget scenario.

I post a link to the script when I finish, just in case someone wants to give me some feedback. It's gonna be a satirical murder mystery-- think Paul Morissey does Giallo thriller-- although I'm pretty sure that sensibility fails to come across in this sequence. I thought it would be best to start things off with a nice, gory murder, hence the title.

Any thoughts/ criticisms?

A few images from my daughter's awesome visit over Thanksgiving:









We had a fabulous time-- making sock puppets, reading scary stories, playing "Centipede," quoting "Airplane!"... All the usual things people do to bond with their children over the holidays.

Four days came and went faster than I expected, though. It never seems like enough time, but it would feel that way to me even if we spent the rest of our lives hanging out together. The clock is always ticking.

In other news, I started shooting my movie! I'll have some footage for you all to gawk at soon...

Well, it's been 12 long years since the day I slipped on my trusty pair of Bad Idea jeans, waltzed into a low-rent tattoo joint, and got this immortal word scarred across the back of my neck:



As a snarling, speed-addled young punk, my nihilistic sentiments seemed perfectly natural: I HATE SOCIETY! AND I'VE GOT THE TATTOO TO PROVE IT!!! Unfortunately, I never foresaw the day that I would blossom into adulthood, develop sophisticated tastes, and adopt a more mature worldview. Does that make me a sellout? So be it.

As of Friday, November 16th, that faded badge of middle-finger posturing was finally raked over for good:




Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of hate to go around. In fact, the list grows longer every day: People who idle their car on the crosswalk. Guys who hold up the line ordering fast food because they can't stop talking on their cell phones. Anyone who has ever willingly listened to an Insane Clown Posse song. Energy drink connoisseurs. College sports superfans. That guy on the infomercials who has question marks all over his suit. The person who invented Go-Gurt. I could go on and on, but the internet just isn't big enough to contain so much scorn.

There's this magazine called DETAILS that has been around forever, but I've never troubled myself to peruse an issue. Until yesterday, that is, whilst lingering in the dressing room area of a local resale shop. Kelly was trying on clothes, I was sitting on a couch, and there was a big stack of magazines sitting on the table beside me. Right on top was an issue of DETAILS. Figuring, What the fuck?, I picked it up and flipped ot a random page.

The article was 10 SIGNS YOUR WIFE MAY BE CHEATING ON YOU. Some of the red alerts on the list included SHE STOPS NAGGING YOU and SHE GETS AN UNEXPECTED WAX JOB. Ya-a-a-wn. I flipped to the next page.

WHEN TO GO ANAL. Subtitled: NOW THAT ANAL SEX HAS GONE MAINSTREAM, MORE MEN ARE STARTING TO DEMAND IT ON THE FIRST DATE... AND HERE'S WHY! This article was illustrated by an image of a woman's ass with a photshopped trail tunnel blasting between the cheeks.

I closed the magazine. In less than thirty seconds, I was able to identify the target demographic for DETAILS magazine: Passive-aggressive closet-cases whose wives are cheating on them because they compulsively force anal sex upon them every night. Am I mistaken about this?

Here's my tentative list for this month's 80'S VHS HORROR FEST... THis isn't set in stone by any means, and I'm certainly open to comments and suggestions!

THE GATE
CHOPPING MALL
WAXWORKS
NIGHT OF THE DEMONS
BRAIN DAMAGE

I kind of blew my load last year-- RE-ANIMATOR,FRANKENHOOKER, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, and MOTLE HELL. How can I hope to match an all-star lineup like that one?