While many of us own an edition or two of the Headpress Journal – the gloriously gory counter-cultural anthology that’s been running since 1992 – fewer are likely to be aware that it was reborn in late 2010 in the form of a completely free, quarterly ezine, alongside a stamped, numbered, fully illustrated hardcover available only from Headpress themselves for a LOL-worthy £10 (US postage just a couple of dollars also)….
This week’s release of the sixth in the series – Headpress 2.6 – enables everyone to get up to speed. It’s a bumper edition, clocking in at over a hundred pages of Grand Guignol mayhem, and featuring articles on the modern horror theatre, Times Square meltdown in the 1970s, Feral House, RE/Search, Philip K Dick, Cracked magazine, and more. (Readers may also come upon the third instalment of my own Nasty Mirrors: Writers I’ve Known series.)
Asked whether Headpress had anything so vulgar as an ethos, editor and co-founder David Kerekes remarked: “Depends what you mean by ethos. Unpopular ideas have always been attractive to me.”
Happy birthday Tom Jones. 72 years old and unstoppable.
This clip is from Sandra Bernhard’s 1992 comedy special Sandra After Dark, which affectionately parodied Hugh Hefner’s similarly titled TV show. Jones and Bernhard cover EMF’s “Unbelievable” and the whole sexy mess IS unbelievable. Jones doesn’t miss a beat as Bernhard does just about everything but suck his coes bach as Lypsinka and Roseanne Barr bob their heads vicariously.
Tom Jones was, is, and will always be, one cool motherfucker!
The last few years have formed a tiny goldmine of music documentaries for fringe music fans, ranging from the previously covered “Bastard Art” to the harrowing Wild Man Fisher film, “Derailroaded” to the Faces-of-Death-trip of the Johnny Thunders documentary, “Born to Lose.” Somewhere in the middle was the Jeffrey Lee Pierce centered work, “Ghost on the Highway” and more recently, is “Autoluminescent,” about the life and work of guitarist, singer and songwriter extraordinaire, Rowland S. Howard.
The figure of Rowland was and forever is, unlike any, in music. The slight, ethereal looking figure, with a shock of dark hair and a cigarette permanently attached to his fingers, approached guitar like a musical whirlwind, sounding almost devoid of any proper musical forefathers. He elevated the Boys Next Door and was the needed catalyst to take them from basic pop-rock to the infernal swamp-rock of The Birthday Party. (A fact that is acknowledged in the film by Nick Cave himself.)
“Autoluminescent” not only documents this, starting from Rowland’s first band, The Young Charlatans all the way to his work with Lydia Lunch, Crime & the City Solution, These Immortal Souls and his own solo career. The later produced two albums, 1999’s “Teenage Snuff Film” and “Pop Crimes,” made ten years later as Howard was dying from liver cancer. What his solo career may have lacked in quantity it is epic in its brilliance. Like a true rock & roll alchemist, the man was able to take a schmaltzy song like “She Cried” (made famous by Jay & the Americans) and make it layered and real.
One of my biggest personal pet peeves with music documentaries is often the lack of actual music. Sometimes it is a legal issue, which was the case for both “Ghost on the Highway” and the Runaways film, “Edgeplay.” That is one thing, but then there are films where they just tease you with scraps, despite the fact that the whole reason you are watching is inadvertently tied to the music itself. Thankfully, that is not a huge issue here, as the balance between the music, interviews and atmospherically poetic interludes is well thought out. (Of course, I wouldn’t have minded even more music, but if it was up to me, all good music documentaries would be 8 hours long. With Rowland S. Howard, we’re talking “Berlin Alexanderplatz” lengths.)
Another thing that is obscenely beautiful about “Autoluminscent” is the way that it is weaved together, merging more traditional documentary elements, like interviews and archival footage, along with the pseudo-cinematic interstitial scenes of smoke and swampy filigree, as Rowland off screen reads narrative bits. The brilliance about this, as well as the marked prominence of the music, is that with artists, the only purely honest truths you are going to get is the art. With anyone, artists and laymen alike, you could talk to eighty different people that know you, but each one of them will get something wrong. It’s rarely an intentional dishonesty but everyone, at one point or time, ends up a victim of round robin.
That said, there are some great interviews here, featuring a veritable who’s who of cool, alternative artists, including Greg Perano from Hunters & Collectors, filmmaker Wim Wenders (whose film “Wings of Desire” featured both Crime & the City Solution and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds), longtime collaborator, member of These Immortal Souls and ex-romantic partner Genevieve McGuckin, Honeymoon in Red collaborator and ex-paramour Lydia Lunch, Birthday Party band mates Cave and Mick Harvey, Barry Adamson and more. There’s also documentary-stalwart Henry Rollins, whom coincidentally appears in about 95% of the documentaries I have seen in my entire lifetime. The most effective out of the great lot, however, is McGuckin and Rowland himself. It is those interviews that reveal Rowland the most as both layered and flawed (as are we all) human and creative force of nature.
“Autoluminscent” will break your heart and though I knew it was an inevitable heartbreak because Rowland S. Howard died only a scant three years ago, the pain and loss are tangible by the end. It doesn’t revel in Rowland’s sickness and keeps an outright respectable distance while still acknowledging the various factors that hindered the man. Anyone dying at 50 is sad but when it is someone as beautiful and brilliant as this man, it just feels like the whole damned world was robbed.
Despite the sadness of it all, at the end of the day what matters is the work and Rowland S. Howard left behind a discography that is timeless, textured and striking. “Autoluminescent” is a fitting film document of a musician that should still be here.
Photographer/filmmaker Sean F. White has created in Terra Sacra (Latin for “sacred earth”) an astonishingly beautiful piece of cinematography that took six years to make and covers seven continents and 24 countries.
White describes the making of the film:
Terra Sacra is a short film featuring time lapse sequences of remote landscapes and ancient monuments from around the globe. These images were photographed during my assignments and personal travels between 2006-2012.
Inspired by Ron Fricke’s Baraka, I combined my favourite shots from these various trips into a brief non-narrative film that touches on a them close to my heart: Sacred Earth.
The visuals are driven by an original score by composer Roy Milner. The six-minute film is a journey through three distinct Acts: (I) Primordial Earth (II) Past meets Present and (III) Eternal Universe.
This film is a personal project to share the beauty and awe I witnessed at these locations. I hope viewers will be moved by the intangible power of our Terra Sacra.
Just as I was about to write ‘em off, Die Antwoord release this slab of fresh hell, “Baby’s On Fire.”
Directed by Ninja and Terence Neale, this video has over 600,000 views on YouTube (in less than two days), which reasserts the notion that Die Antwoord lives or dies by their videos. I’m personally waiting for them to finally do a feature-length film. Though, one wonders if they can sustain the madness over 90 minutes and whether or not viewers could endure it.
What interests Horgan the most pertains to McKenna’s so-called Timewave Zero theory of history, which holds that something “novel” and mind-bending would happen on December 21, 2012. This notion was “revealed” to him by an “alien intelligence” during a psychedelic experiment conducted by McKenna and his younger brother Dennis, in the Amazon jungle in 1971 (Dennis McKenna, today a respected ethnopharmacologist, was the “channel” through which this entity supposedly spoke, has apparently never been much of a believer in his brother’s apocalyptic theories).
The Timewave Zero formula purports to mathematically “decode” the 64 hexagrams of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching into something that graphs fractal patterns of “novelty” and particularly active eras in history, culminating in a singularity point of infinite complexity that he predicted would happen at the end of the 13th b’ak’tun of the Maya calendar.
McKenna believed that all of human history and cultural and scientific evolution were moving inexorably towards a “strange attractor” at the end of time. Timewave Zero was later codified into a software program that seemingly mapped major moments in humanity’s evolution with the Timewave’s peaks and valleys.
McKenna’s theory, as written about at length in his books The Invisible Landscape and True Hallucinations, is a fascinating hermeneutic intellectual construction, and one that allowed for him to spin poetic and truly mind-bending thoughts about history, man’s place in the cosmos and of course, a sort of psychedelically-constructed apocalypticism that kept audiences absolutely spellbound, but rationally speaking, it’s wild-eyed, tied-dyed nonsense for soft-brained people…
John Horgan went to hear McKenna speak at a 1999 talk in Manhattan sponsored by the Open Center (I was in attendance at the talk myself, more on this below) and interviewed the psychedelic spokesman the following day. The object of Horgan’s line of inquiry was, not so surprisingly, to ask McKenna if he was actually serious about his 2012 predictions:
So what did McKenna really think would happen on December 21, 2012? “If you really understand what I’m saying,” he replied, “you would understand it can’t be said. It’s a prediction of an unpredictable event.” The event will be “some enormously reality-rearranging thing.” Scientists will invent a truly intelligent computer, or a time-travel machine. Perhaps we will be visited by an alien spaceship, or an asteroid. “I don’t know if it’s built into the laws of spacetime, or it’s generated out of human inventiveness, or whether it’s a mile and a half wide and arrives unexpectedly in the center of North America.”
But did he really think the apocalypse would arrive on December 21, 2012? “Well…” McKenna hesitated. “No.” He had merely created one mathematical model of the flow and ebb of novelty in history. “It’s a weak case, because history is not a mathematically defined entity,” he said. His model was “just a kind of fantasizing within a certain kind of vocabulary.” McKenna still believed in the legitimacy of his project, even if his particular model turned out to be a failure. “I’m trying to redeem history, make it make sense, show that it obeys laws,” he said.
But he couldn’t stop there. His eyes glittering, he divulged a “huge–quote unquote—coincidence” involving his prophecy. After he made his prediction that the apocalypse would occur on December 21, 2012, he learned that thousands of years ago Mayan astronomers had predicted the world would end on the very same day. “And now there has been new scholarship that they were tracking the galactic center and its precessional path through the ecliptic plane. What does all this mean?” McKenna leaned toward me, his eyes slitted and his teeth bared. “It means we are trapped in software written by the ghost of Jorge Luis Borges!” He threw his head back and cackled. “Tell that to the National Academy of Sciences!”
McKenna, when pressed said to Horgan, “I’m Irish! What’s your excuse!”
Although I have listened to (literally) hundreds of hours of his recorded talks, attended many, many speeches and even a weekend-long seminar (incongruously held on the outdoor “western village” set of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) I can’t claim that I really knew Terence McKenna all that well, but I was most certainly acquainted with him and, in fact, was due to take him over the bridge to meet Howard Bloom in Brooklyn (Bloom was bedridden at the time) later in the very same day that Horgan interviewed him (McKenna cancelled because he was feeling tired; two weeks later he would have seizures and be diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer).
I’ve written before of how Timothy Leary expressed extreme exasperation about McKenna’s theories (In 1996 Leary shouted at me as I tried to defend him, that “Terence McKenna is a High Episcopalian!”) and how coldly dismissive Robert Anton Wilson was of his ideas (Bob would just roll his eyes and shake his head whenever the topic of Terence or 2012 came up). My take on the whole Timewave Zero/2012 thing and whether or not he truly believed it or not, is that “No,” I do not think that Terence McKenna wholeheartedly believed in his own psychedelic blarney. I think that he DID believe it at one time, but from personal observations on several occasions throughout the 1990s, when I would see him after one of his talks and observe his interaction with others, I don’t think this belief stayed with him.
To be perfectly honest, he often felt downright cynical to me when he discussed the Timewave Zero theory because it seemed like he knew he was spouting bullshit and it caused him to be curt, even disrespectful at times, to some of the people—especially the New Age true believer-types—who were in attendance at his talks.
Granted I might have only been around McKenna when he was feeling grumpy or wasn’t up for playing his expected role as a “guru” that day, but this is what I saw with my own eyes.
I’ve been listening to the new Patti Smith album for the past two days and my initial enthusiasm for Banga has only grown stronger. At first I thought my lust for a Smith album that knocked me sideways like Horses was coloring my take on this new one, but I think I can fairly objectively say it is the second or third best album of Patti Smith’s career.
Smith’s voice has never been finer and, unlike many of her albums after Easter, Banga is full of lovely melodies and hooks. Lyrically, the album follows in the spirit of Smith’s memoir Just Kids: ruminative, prayerful, melancholic and hopeful - a delicate, tough and occasionally fierce expression from a spiritual warrior moving forward with grace and determined soulfulness.
Banga was produced by Smith at Electric Lady Studios (where Horses was recorded in 1975) and features her group (Lenny Kaye, Jay Daugherty and Tony Shanahan) in stellar form. Tom Verlaine provides some shards of psychedelia to two tracks and there’s some drumming and guitar work from Johnny Depp on the title track.
For fans of rock legends who still deliver the goods, Neil Young has added Smith to his tour schedule. The Patti Smith Group will open for Young in these cities:
Nov. 23 – Montreal, Quebec, Bell Centre
Nov. 24 – Ottawa, Ontario, Scotiabank Place
Nov. 26 – Boston, Mass., TD Garden
Nov. 27 – New York City, N.Y., Madison Square Garden
Nov. 29 – Philadelphia, Pa., Wells Fargo Center
Nov. 30 – Fairfax, Va., Patriot Center
Dec. 4 – Bridgeport, Conn., Webster Bank Arena
The following video was shot at Detroit Institute of Arts where an exhibition of Smith’s photographs is taking place concurrent with the addition of her late husband’s, Fred “Sonic” Smith, guitar to the museum’s collection.
The song “April Fool” is the opening track of Banga. Accompanying Patti are her son and daughter, Jackson and Jesse.
“Corpsepaint Creatures” by Tokyo-based artist Bunny Bissoux, is an examination of rock bands throughout history who have worn “corspepaint” on their ugly mugs. Screen prints are available for purchase on his her website.
As a side note: Upon further inspection, it looks like Bunny Bissoux forgot to add Soft Machine to her mighty illustration. Surely Kevin Ayers would count?
Here’s a little something new to YouTube: Neil Young and The International Harvesters live on Austin City Limits, 1984.
Neil’s country side is in full force in Texas.
Setlist:
Are You Ready for the Country
Are There Any More Real Cowboys
Comes a Time
Field of Opportunity
Amber Jean, Roll Another Number (For the Road)
Heart of Gold
FIngers
The Needle and the Damage Done
Helpless
California Sunset
Old Man
Powderfinger
Get Back to the Country
Down By the River
Anthony Crawford (guitars, mandolin, fiddle, banjo, vocals), Spooner Oldham (piano, organ), Ben Keith (pedal steel), Karl “Junkyard” Himmel (drums), Tim Drummond (bass) and Rufus Thibodeaux (fiddle).
I can certainly appreciate the swell design of the “Pilule” bag by Christian Louboutin, however, I don’t like it enough to spend $6,995 on it. Yikes!
Christian Louboutin celebrates 20 years of iconic designs with a capsule collection compiled of favorite pieces from decades past. The “Pilule”, constructed in 100% resin, returns with the capsule collection. Produced in very limited quantities, this is your daily dose of Louboutin and it is just what the doctor ordered.
What pharmaceutical product is this capsule supposed to represent, anyways? I don’t recognize it. Is it a “happy” pill or just an antibiotic?
