THE GOBLIN

PORK MAGAZINE!!!

2011-03-21T23:30:00.001-07:00

CHECK IT OUT!!! MY NEW MAGAZINE!!! INTERVIEWS WITH CHARLES KRAFFT, HUNX,ALEX CHIU & PAUL LOUBET!!!

Open publication - Free publishing - More aaberg

AD: PIZZA PARTY CARDS OUT NOW!!!

2010-06-03T14:07:00.000-07:00

Now Available!!!

27 different character cards to collect! 5 cards per pack! Crazy cartoons & a puzzle on the backs of cards. Totally crazy world of the future!

RIP Ronnie James Dio

2010-05-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

I'm not really exploring the Goblin worlds right now, working on lots of other stuff, but i thought i'd just give my respects to a fallen Goblin... Ronnie James Dio.

His records with Rainbow, Black Sabbath & as a solo artist were constant fuel for my fantasy world. I'm very sad to see him go.

AD: SEAN AABERG COLORING BOOK

2010-02-25T08:23:00.000-08:00

SIXTEEN PAGES OF CRAZY CHARACTERS TO COLOR! Half-size. Yours for $3 (USA price, foreign devils add a dollar)

More Demons & Devils for Labyrinth Lord

2010-01-12T13:55:00.000-08:00

Amon

Bael

Imp

Astarot

Horned

Geryon

Vrock

Gerinyes

Succubus

Babau

Quasit

Glabrezu

Balor

Barbed

More Demons & Devils for Labyrinth Lord.

2009-12-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

Dungeons & Dragons could get very weird what with journeying through hell & the planes & everything. Here's more of my demons & devils for Labyrinth Lord.
Nalfeshnee: Nalfeshnees are enormous demons that judge new souls arriving on the Abyss.

Marilith: THe Marilith are cruel & cunning demons that love battle.

Ice: The frigid eighth plane of Hell is populated in the main with ice devils. Being greater devils, they have personal names.

Pit Fiend: Lord of devils, with great strength and deadly power.

Hezrou: Hezrous are obedient demons who are eager to serve more powerful demons and summoners.

Orcus: Orcus is a very old demon. Like many of the most powerful demon lords who struggle for power in the Abyss, Orcus started his existence as a mortal on the Prime Plane. He was apparently a wicked spellcaster of some sort, most probably a priest to some dark deity. After his death, his soul, like the souls of all chaotic evil mortals, went to the Abyss and Orcus began his afterlife as a lowly larva. Orcus proceeded to climb through the demonic ranks in the next several thousand years, going from larva to mane, from mane to dretch, from dretch to rutterkin, from rutterkin to vrock, from vrock to glabrezu, from glabrezu to nalfeshnee and eventually a balor. From there, he ascended to the rank of demon lord, becoming the Prince of the Undead and ruling the layer of Thanatos, the Belly of Death. Even though there are other demon lords aspiring to the title of "Prince of the Undead", Orcus' claim to the title has gone unchallenged for the most part. Ever hungry for more power, Orcus wanted to be recognized as "Prince of Demons", a title held by Demogorgon and coveted also by Graz'zt. As a result, he became the arch-enemy of both demon lords. In time, Orcus also achieved true godhood.

FILL YOUR HEAD WITH TRASH!!!

2009-09-22T12:14:00.001-07:00

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Mind Flayer #1

2009-09-08T11:57:00.001-07:00

A MESSAGE FROM THE PRODUCERS OF THIS BLOG: GOBLINKO

OUT OF PRINT
Mind Flayer #1 is out! 8 half-size pages of small text designed to FLAY YOUR MIND. Dynamic Optimism & Virtue Free From Moralism is the aim, as well as spreading information about the Misanthropic Horror of the Were Trees, the folly of "Social Evolution" theory & Progressive Politics, Jim Jones: Model Communist, Radical Traditionalism, The Swinging Satan's Pendulum, my own "The Emerald Fist" column, hot & not trends for the now & Considering Green Anarchy. About as much jammed into this as your average larger zine. Get yourself this issue & the next issue by mail, for a mere, solitary DOLLAR. You can paypal gogoblinko@gmail.com or you can send us a well-hidden dollar via the post. To Mind Flayer pobox 12044 Eugene OR 97440 USA.
OUT OF PRINT

Coney Island West

2009-09-04T23:44:00.000-07:00

Back in the 80s, the best time to get cool gear like leather gloves & pyramid bracelets was Halloween. In the 80s, lots of kids dressed up like "Punk Rockers", "Metal Heads" & "Rock Stars" using those ridiculous multi-colored Ziggy Stardust mullet wigs as a base. There is something weirdly similar in the old style of novelty & magic shop & the old style of Rock & Roll street gear shop. This all meets in the pages of old Johnson Smith catalogs. Unfortunately, with the economy totally tanking & real world shops being compromised by the internet, those proper old style novelty & gear shops are few & far between. They were usually run by older men who smoked cigars & pipes, in the store. They were poorly lit. Everything looked like it had been made in the late fifties & early sixties, before the Hippies took over, even if it was new.

A big part of this line of thinking for me has to do with how people spend their time & their money. Since it has been so cheap & easy to fly to a foreign country & take a vacation there, lots of money that could be being spent in little shops in the USA is being dumped on cheap drinks & folk arts in other countries. Before jet tickets were so cheap, people took their vacations at sea-side resorts, not the kind where you just sun-tan & snorkel the whole time while 3rd worlders attend to your "needs", no, but sea-side resorts filled with freak shows, Vaudeville acts, dance-halls, candy stores, tattoo parlours, magic & novelty shops, records stores, smoke shops, book stores, bars, restaurants & most importantly: amusement parks, IN AMERICA.

Left wing, right wing, you can stuff the lot.

2009-09-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

"Black man’s got his problems & his way to deal with it. So don’t fool yourself you’re helping with your white liberal shit. If you care to take a closer look at the way things really stand, You’d see we’re all just niggers to the rulers of this land.” ~CRASS

ON SALE IN THE FOYER NOW!

2009-08-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

Sid in Paris with Sex Pistols product commercials. This is the way 50% of commercials & movies should look & sound. Period.

Danny James just reminded me about Bugout Society's "The Saved Sid's Brain" video. I think we had taped it off public access TV. Bugout Society dresses exactly how poor dudes in Eugene dress with those sweatshirt flannel combinations, cheap jeans, sneakers & ball hats.

I'm remembering all of the talk about "Sid Vicious" type Punks & how much shit people would talk about them. Punk was funny because it was like a dog chasing its tail... or more weirdly, an ouroboros. On one hand it supposedly set out to destroy Rock & Roll & everything else, but it was so obviously a complete product of Rock & Roll that you'd get all this contrary insanity. Sid's appeal is obvious. He's a skinny Frankenstein.

2009-08-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

"Sean's art is unpredictable and eclectic by design so perhaps a defining aspect is the shape-shifting "trickster" element that informs his approach. He's not afraid to pull his viewer's pants down for laughs, hit below the cultural belt or call the dreaded tickle police to the scene of the crime. For many years he employed the pseudonym "Goblin" and I think this nickname embodied both the playful and sinister aspects of his work. Imagine the Norse god Loki resurrected as a bubble gum chewing Frankenstein's monster with an army of gremlins that have been fed after midnight at his command. That's Sean's defining aspect." ~Dennis Dread

Plague Ghoul!

2009-08-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

Before you start reading, make sure to start your soundtrack to this blog post.

When i was a kid, there was this store called "Games of Berkeley", which still exists, but it isn't what it used to be anymore. Anyhow, it was long & funny shaped & you'd go in past all of the board games & chess games & kites & puzzles & boring stuff like that to the back part of the store which contained these giant glass cases of miniatures all open & out of their packages with little letter/number codes next to them. You'd write down the codes of the miniatures you wanted & give them to the skinny nerdy white guy with the afro & he'd go get the actual miniatures from the back. They had an INSANE selection. Half of the fun when i was that age was just looking at all the insane crap & trying to figure out how to get as many figures as possible with the least amount of money. There were weird things amidst all of the knights, barbarians, orcs & demons... there were dungeon torture rooms with naked ladies in chains! There were naked ladies being sacrificed on pentagrams! In the 80s, there were an insane number of miniature producers operating, half of them being some guy in his garage with a bunch of molds & melting lead in an old pan. I knew one of those types... i wanted to live in his garage with the awesome bootleg Lord of the Rings miniatures.

Anyhow, when you're a kid you don't entirely appreciate what you're experiencing & maybe get trapped into ideas of "best" & "progress"... because you're growing up. Nothing wrong with that. But looking back, the total chaos of the miniatures world back then was an insanely rich, rotting filth pool of gloriously distorted imagination... complete with sulfurous odors farting out of the murk (started painting figures with ye olde Testors)

Total Death

2009-08-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

There's too much shit out there for our human brains to process in the proper way so things just aren't making sense anymore. If you live in a totally culturally destabilized country like the USA with never ending media streams it's even worse. It makes people retarded. We're still trying to process these media streams from decades ago & that's the people who are even trying. I don't believe in the concept of simplicity, but i do know that control is important for creating stability & that chaos is important for destabilization. Young minds are being completely destabilized by all of this shit.

True Norwegian Black Metal - Part 1
From Vice TV, came up on The Bad Apple.

As the mist clears, Middle Earth appears.

Tolkien on Politics

2009-08-04T09:21:00.000-07:00

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remain obstinate!… Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people… The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity." ~JRR Tolkien

Wunderbar

2009-08-02T00:44:00.001-07:00

If this song came in a can, i'd drink it whenever my energy was low.

One day, maybe they'll have canned Wunderbar by Ed Tenpole Tudor.

Vicious Cycles

2009-07-31T08:57:00.000-07:00

More bikers without bikes here...

Manowar on Awkward Kid's Show Doing Gloves of Metal

2009-07-26T00:26:00.000-07:00

Check out the Ricky Schroedered out host of this show having a hard time talking to Manowar.

Are You Being Served?

2009-07-24T23:31:00.000-07:00

I place a high priority on tradition & properness. I always have, but it's not a standard traditionalism, i make my own rules, they are of course culled from our shared reality, i don't just pull this stuff out of my bottom. Nor should you. All of these traditions & "proper ways of doing things" carry a deeper, hidden code, a way of explaining things without using too many words. So much of what has been introduced to our world through the cold conveyor belts of modernism has been without cultural presentation & is just dumped off into our lives with an instruction manual that only pertains to functional use, not symbolic cultural existence. We are all the poorer for this.

You could build an entire civilization using reruns of "Are You Being Served?" & things wouldn't be too bad, a bit tarty, but that never hurt anyone. You could build an unbelievably pleasant world using the works of Richard Scarry. If you've got a kid, make sure to include as many of his older books in your library as possible, they teach a visual cultural language that is unrivaled in picture books. Even though i grew up in a world that looked very little like that in Richard Scarry's books, i always knew his view was right, was correct & should be emulated!

From the Past Comes the Future

2009-07-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

One of the more unfortunate elements of living in such materialistic times is the general non-understanding of what actual quality of life is about. When the majority of the culture is transmitted by quasi-demonic entities in the mass media whose first job is to control your mind & your time & whose second job is to sell you things, the culture is pretty bad off. Lots of things end up sliding through the cracks & with discipline & vision, one is able to piece something together that actually resembles how we'd like things to be. As a kid, you piece together your own culture with whatever is out there. I was always obsessed with swords & sorcery & even better, when swords & sorcery entered into the post-apocalyptic world, which gave me hope that one day, i'd be able to actually live in such a world.
There is this huge emphasis placed on visual quality & slickness which i find to be so disgusting & obnoxious. What is the point of polishing a turd? It's still a turd, no matter how many pixels it is rendered into, or how shiny & 3-dimensional its soundtrack is. However, a tiny little demon figure, sculpted by some anonymous person & sold on the cheap, or even better, bought in an enormous bag at a used toy store resonates so powerfully with me, as it was a focal point for my mighty imagination.

When all dimensions have been rendered, where is the place for the imagination, for the unknown & for further exploration? When everything is explained, where is the room to move? If all the holes have been filled in, how do we escape from the controlled reality?
This isn't an argument for rawness or unpolished facades as a means to an end, this is about understanding what the actual potential for cultural artifacts is about, as opposed to not being able to see beyond the veneer of the thing. All cultural artifacts should be keys to larger, more meaningful areas of existence, not just pretty things or wastes of time.
I have maintained a deliberately rough style in order to leave that space for imagination & for the importance of the content & for the inspiration to shine through. When everything is given, what more is there for us to do? This is the same argument i have against government handouts. What lacks in the world should be a motivator, not an impediment. People who want everything handed over to them, things done for them & things overly explained are vampiric monsters.
Doing more with less is another key lesson in all of this. Limitations bring the best out in us, as long as we do not resent the limitations. If you don't even understand the idea of limitations, the better you are off. Resentment makes you into a little bitch.
You will find that when people are presented with unlimited choice, they tend to make bad decisions.
More about Fairlight here, including MP3s of the songs.

Who Killed Bambi?

2009-07-18T20:28:00.001-07:00

This song must be played at my funeral as loud as possible.
Murder murder murder
Someone should be angry
The crime of the century
Who shot little Bambi
Never trust a hippie
'Cause I love punky Bambi
I'll kill to find the killer
In that rotten roll army
All the spikey punkers
Believers in the ruins
With one big shout
They all cry out
Who killed Bambi?

Bikers without Bikes

2009-07-06T22:35:00.000-07:00

Growing up in the late 70s & 80s meant alot of media exposure to "Punks as Villains", especially in English media or in movies about the eventual & dark future. Road Warrior is the best example of this. The Cartoon Punk: mohawk or charged hair, combat boots, leather jacket covered with paint & studs & spikes, bullet belt, bondage gear, torn jeans, safety pin through the eye etc, was really just the next stage of the Greaser, with just a crazier version of that type of get up. Bikers without bikes. This style is so visually powerful that it will undoubtedly last forever. There will be kids decked out in all this stuff when we're living on space stations in the Quasar 5 Galaxy. Seriously. BUT, what's kind of amusing to me is that Punk spread through a few different vehicles, & each vehicle has its own kind of adherent. One of the main ones was the written word in Maximum Rockn'Roll, which being a voice specific to the San Francisco Bay Area & all of that place's peculiarities, delivered a certain message & catered to a certain kind of uptight "progressive" record nerd that to me, is contrary to that true Rock & Roll spirit that is found in things like leather pants, razor blades, short skirts & fire. All of that rigid tribalism was really part of the national character in the 80s, but it has all pretty much disintegrated. Anyhow, the first generation of Punks was totally freaked out by this next stage of Punk: the Punk Rocker, the Street Punk, the Cartoon Punk. Thuggish, crazed & free, the working class 2nd wave Punk was a nightmare to the original art school scene. Stan from @//Political tried hard to convince me that Vyvyan from the Young Ones was not a Punk, but was a Metal Head. Gone were the artistic pretenses, obvious creativity was thrown out for a canon of symbolic concepts relating to power, fear, sex & aggression. Out went the connection with the gay scene & in came raging homo-eroticism. In came the uniform, in came tradition, in came codified behavior, all things that original Punk seemed to be against. The revolutionaries & their existencialist crises were swept away by the crazed louts who saw in the freedom of Punk a new opportunity to misbehave. And God bless them for it.
One Way System - Jerusalem & No Return

Broken Bones - Decapitated

GBH - Generals

The Exploited - Dogs of War

Of Import: Punch & Judy

2009-06-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

My hero Punch is a deformed, child-murdering, wife-beating sociopath who commits appalling acts of violence & cruelty upon all those around him & escapes with impunity. The terms punchline & slapstick come from the Punch & Judy shows of old. Unlike so many present-day characters, Punch can be taken up by anyone who wants to use him. He is part of our common western culture. Because of this, what might seem like a very simple character is imbued with layers & layers of historical & cultural resonance. Despite having grown up in Oakland, California, i managed to see quite a few Punch & Judy shows. I honestly have no idea how this happened.

"In my opinion the Street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive. I regard it as quite harmless and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct. It is possible, I think, that one secret source of pleasure very generally derived from this performance is the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstances that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about without any pain or suffering." ~Charles Dickens

Punch & Judy & Christmas. My heart is swelling with good thoughts of childhood.

Pipu's Eye! OUT NOW!

2009-06-26T08:55:00.001-07:00

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Planting the Seeds of Revolution

2009-06-25T23:39:00.000-07:00

In 1997 i played drums for the Baltimore based Peace Punk band A//Political. Even then, when i was still marginally towing the leftist line, it was a funny mix. Musically it wasn't, i'm a great Punk Rock drummer, faster than anyone out there as far as i know. Lyrically, the whole Peace Punk thing is not where i'm at in any way shape or form. Peace Punks are like Skinheads, in that they are programmed to fight each other. Peace Punks fight with political theory, which is more boring than fighting with boots & chains if you ask me. It's also more frustrating. Anyhow, as far as i am concerned, there is nothing more obnoxious than someone telling you how to think or what to do or any of that stuff, that is my connection to anarchism. You want to tell me what to do? Fuck off. Period. Peace Punks are essentially Stalinists in smelly trousers who don't have the balls to actually create the nightmare state which will insure that everyone is mentally healthy, because they know that a nightmare state is a nightmare, so they end up in this cyclical mind-fuck of depression caused by their undeniable failure as a cultural phenomenon, but they have a fetish for the idea of Peace Punk & so they stick to it. One of my other biggest peeves is people who are always being oppressed by everything. A//Political have a song called "Stop Thinking & Pogo" which i suppose is a criticism of the Punks who are into Punk because they want to try to have some fun. They also have a song called Punk is a Ghetto, which is true, but it's a self-inflicted ghetto. Choice. Anyhow, i just wanted to write a bit about this, because i just saw Angel, the founder & lead-guitarist & co-vocalist for A//Political up in Portland. He doesn't like me anymore because of my views & general demeanor i imagine, as i don't tow the Anarcho Communist line & think all of that politics shit is a waste of time anyhow. They had a song called, It's Not About Politics, It's About Life, a sentiment, which i agreed with completely, but once again, friendships were discarded over doctrinaire disagreements more than i've ever seen in that little world. I've known similar people who i thought were friends over the years, who will choose their political convictions over friendship every time. I think they're cowards & possibly the worst kind of people on the planet.
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD & READ MORE HERE... That's a link to the demo i'm playing drums on. I did some song arranging as well.
In the end, it comes down to friendship & character. Here's a lyrical transcription of their song, "Stop Thinking & Pogo", a real anti-fun anti-culture bolshevik call to arms. Reminds of the time we went to go protest a Shriner Circus because it had animals, i was just along for the ride. These black-clad anarcho-commies were handing out propaganda to all these nice little families who just wanted to see the circus. When the head of the circus came out in full clown get-up to plead with them to leave, & i saw the looks of dread on the parents face as the "Punks" handed out PETA coloring books to their kids, i knew i was on the wrong side.

When we went up to Portland to see the Entartete Kunts show & take the boys to the zoo, there was a large mob of PETA people protesting the zoo having elephants. Once again, freakily dressed anti-traditional types trying to ruin the fun of lots of regular old working-class families. These people are the shock-troops of the New World Order, their job is to destroy tradition & to temporarily fill the gap with bureaucratic psychotherapy culture. They are out to weaken us, to take away our traditions, to destabilize the basic organizing unit of tradition, the family & everything else that keeps the general mass from being totally dependent on the state.

The seeds of revolution had definitely been planted in me, i left Baltimore fully understanding that i did not want to have anything to do with the left.

My Anarchist Problem by Bob Black

2009-06-21T00:15:00.000-07:00

"Anarchists may make lousy comrades but they're excellent customers."
As i have faced growing up & becoming responsible while at the same time trying to reconcile my own identity or at least leanings as a Punk Rocker & as an Anarchist, i have made many conclusions quietly & to myself. Old Punks & Anarchists can only maintain their involvement in the scene through some kind of role as a merchant. Anarchists sell books. Punks sell music. This then revealed another obvious but strangely profound fact: Anarchists read books, Punks listen to music & these are the central points to both identities. I never got into Bob Black because of my superficial gleaning of his "The Abolition of Work", which i have profound gut reactions against. Even though i essentially agree with the idea, & i appreciate the swipe at Marxists & there are alot of cherry quotes like this, "All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility." I have also been exposed to this essay's fruits. Anyhow, this particular essay "My Anarchist Problem" makes some excellent observations on anarchism which i found to be wholly comforting in their agreeability.

MY ANARCHISM PROBLEM
by Bob Black

Anarchism has always been problematic for me. It helped me to arrive at an unconditionally anti-statist, anti-capitalist perspective by the mid-1970's, and yet my first public statement from that perspective explained why I did not identify with anarchism. By dictionary definition, I am an anarchist, but the dictionary is only the beginning of wisdom. It cannot bestow coherence where contradictions abound or reduce differences to a unity by calling them by the same name.

Once an idea is launched into history it takes more and more of its meaning from its experience. Revivalist calls to return to first principles prove the point, for they are history too. And just as no Protestant sect has ever really recreated the primitive Church, no subsequent anarchist fundamentalism ever did or could reenact pure anarchism on Bakuninist, Kropotkinist or any other models. Anything which has entered importantly into the practice of the anarchists has a place in the anarchist phenomenon-in-process, whether or not it is logically deducible from the idea or even contradicts it. Sabotage, vegetarianism, assassination, pacifism, free love, co-operatives and strikes are all aspects of anarchism which their anarchist detractors try to dismiss as un-anarchist.

To call yourself an anarchist is to invite identification with an unpredictable array of associations, an ensemble which is unlikely to mean the same thing to any two people, including any two anarchists. (The most predictable is the least accurate: the bomb-thrower. But anarchists have thrown bombs and some still do.)

The trouble with anarchists is that they think they have agreed on what they all oppose -- the state -- whereas all they have agreed on is what to call it. You could make a good case that the greatest anarchists were nothing of the sort. Godwin wanted the state to wither away, but gradually, and not before the progress of enlightenment prepared people to do without it. Which seems to legitimate really existing statism and culminate in the banality that if things were different they would not be the same. Proudhon, who served in the French national legislature, in the end arrived at a theory of "federalism" which is nothing but the devolution of most state power on local governments. Kropotkin's free communes may not be nation-states but they sure sound like city-states. Certainly no historian would regard as anything but ludicrous Kropotkin's claim that medieval cities were anarchist.

READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!

Manowar - Gloves of Metal

2009-06-14T14:55:00.000-07:00

If you want to know what this is all about.

Hear the pounding army of the night. The call of metal summons us tonight
And gather we on this site. To behold the power and the might
We wear leather, we wear spikes, we rule the night.
Off with the lights, hear the screams. See the banging heads awaken to their dreams.
The sound of metal so loud it cracks the beams.
Played by warriors called the Metal Kings.
A hero's welcome for those who heed the call.
We are together, we are all. With hands high fists fill the air
Against the world we stand. Hands high forever we'll be there,
Gloves of Metal rule tonight. Yea. A hero's welcome for those who heed the call.
We are together, we are all. With hands high fists fill the air
Against the world we stand. Hands high forever we'll be there,
Gloves of Metal rule tonight. Yea.
Leather, Metal, Spikes and Chains
Gloves of Metal raised to show the brave.
Into the darkness march the armies of the night. Bound by metal we live the fight.
We wear leather, we wear spikes, we rule the night
With hands high fists fill the air. Against the world we stand.
Hands high forever we'll be there, Gloves of Metal rule tonight. Yea

Apocalypse Punx & Bird-faced Goblin gits.

2009-06-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

John the Cook has put together the Apocalypse Punx Guide to Food Preservation. Unlike most Punk oriented cook-books, this one isn't vegan, because after the bomb, no one is vegan, believe you me. I've come to suspect that promoting veganism amongst the punks is a way to keep them weak either way. Anyhow, i knocked out this cover for the pamphlet which i am very excited to see in the fall.

www.myspace.com/apgfpzine
Motörhead - I Got Mine

This is the soundtrack for today! I found a straight-razor at the flea market. Look out! Katie got me Van Halen & Def Leppard cloissoine pins

No Age Can Destroy It

2009-06-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

Directions, before reading this post, click on the youtube video below of Emperor doing "I am the Black Wizards". This is the theme music for your visit to this blog. Okay, now you can start reading.

"No age will escape my wrath. I travel through time & I return to the future. I gather wisdom now lost. I visit again the eternally ancient caves."
I turned 33 this June 7th. Jesus Christ was crucified at 33, i imagine that this was because he had fully developed his amazing techniques for being a total pain in the ass & the powers that be decided to get rid of him. Of course, killing Christ transformed him from a man into something much more than a man. Anyhow, i realized at some point recently that i had a major Christ complex when i was in high school... Catholic high school. I most have been possessed. Anyhow, Jesus would have definitely not done well in Catholic school either! But now, now that i'm 33 i think Jesus is quite the foolish fellow. I still suffer from prophetic drives, i have the bizarre urge to travel to the top of a mountain & hole myself away in a little shack scribbling away at my Great Work... but either way, i am always spreading my philosophy wherever i go, regardless of whether it is apparent or not. At 33, all of this is definitely burbling out of me at a greater volume than before & i have made an agreement with myself, or is it my other self, to turn that very volume up to 11 & blow out the fucking amplifiers. Goblinism is in the ascendant. I'm quite sure that i don't want to drive this car off the cliff into symbolic existence, but i'm pretty sure i'm going to be close to the edge this year.
Fun reading on the double-headed eagle.

White Dwarf #1

2009-06-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

It doesn't entirely sit right with me that one of my favorite magazines of all time is White Dwarf. This is partially because of the same uncomfortable relationship i have with the world of fantasy & gaming, but these transgressions are redeemed because of WHY i am interested in the world of fantasy & the vehicles that fantasy uses to be expressed in the real world. Just as in the previous Varg Vikernes & John Blanche posts, the world of fantasy is my idealism. It isn't a perfect world, in fact, it is made richer by the types of nasty things that lurk within, but it is a much more romantic & meaningful world than the world in which we live. I spent a while trying to live in the real world, i always try, i'm always making sure i've got a firm footing on the soil of reality, but it is never satisfying. I'm not sure if this is right or wrong, but it's the way it is, & it's the way it has always been for me. The goal is to merge the two, obviously many of the aspects of the fantastic world are impossible, however, alot of them aren't. My dream of having a walled roadhoouse out in the countryside to go drink at & then crash in a simple, unadorned room. Or space travel! Space piracy! These things are all possible. I'm increasingly feeling that i owe it to myself & my sons & you to bring these things into reality. Fantastic games & art & music are the beginning, they are inspirational seeds or tastes of what we could have. Here's White Dwarf #1 in PDF form if you weren't lucky enough to procure an issue for yourself on a raiding mission long ago. Thanks to the characters at The Gnome's Lair for this one!

Varg is Free!

2009-06-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

Varg Vikernes has been released from prison after 16 years. Check out the official website.
Here's why i'm interested in Varg Vikernes.
"In my teenage interpretation I pretty much saw the Hobbits as children or simply boring. The dwarves reminded me too much of greedy capitalist-pigs and they too were pretty boring. Their rules were cool and Moria was a wonderful place, but I disliked their greed vehemently - and who wants to be short anyhow? The elves were fascinating, beautiful and especially their immortality and closeness to nature was cool, but they were kind of dull and they fought for the wrong side. Instead I felt a natural attraction to Sauron, who was the person who gave the world adventure, adversity and challenges in the first place. His One Eye, the One Ring and the tower of Barad-Dur are all attributes similar to those of Óðinn. The One Eye was like Óðinn's eye, the One Ring was like Óðinn's ring, Draupnir ("Dripper"), and Barad-Dur was like the tower or throne of Óðinn, called Hliðskjálf ("Secret Ritual-Site"). His Uruk-Hai and Olog-Hai ("Troll-Race") were like Viking berserkers, the Warges were like Óðinnic werewolves, and so forth. I could easily identify with the fury of the "dark forces", and enjoyed their existence very much because they were making a boring and peaceful world dangerous and exciting.

I grew up reading the traditional Scandinavian fairy tales, where the Pagan gods are presented as "evil" creatures, as "trolls" and "goblins", and we all know how the inquisition turned Freyr (Cernunnos/Dionysus/Bacchus et cetera) into "Satan". Tolkien was no better. He had turned Óðinn into Sauron and my Pagan forefathers into the fighting Uruk-Hai. To me the "dark forces" attacking Gondor were like the Vikings attacking Charlemagne's Christian France, the "dark forces" attacking Rohan were like the Vikings attacking the Christian England. And I may add; the Vikings eventually lost their war as well, just like Sauron and the orcs did - and I didn't mind supporting the loosing part. I have always believed in doing what is right, regardless of the consequences, and if I was fighting for a lost cause it didn't matter. I would rather die fighting for what I believe in, than live for anything else." Check out the library section of the website, lots of good reading to be done there.
The end of this video is like a Northern Heathenist Sesame Street with, "algiz, mannaz, sōwilō".

Entartete Kunts III: Metal & Punk Underground Art show.

2009-06-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

ACHTUNG!

ENTARTETE KUNTS returns to Portland in June 2009! The third annual underground art exhibit curated by Dennis Dread explores the intersection of imagery/sound and celebrates the incendiary art of metal and punk without a trace of irony. "Entartete Kunts” is a bastardization of the German term “degenerate art” and a snide reference to the 1937 Nazi purging of all art deemed objectionable by "Der Führer". An unfortunate pun but strangely appropriate for this gathering of unrepentant iconoclasts who stand boldly "outside" in every way. Entartete Kunts is in fact a very special exhibition that assembles some of the most devoted artists from around the world for a rare glimpse into a thriving and still largely renegade culture. Negative space? This is WAR!

SUPPORT REAL UNDERGROUND ART!

The exhibition will be on display from June 4th through June 30th at The Life Gallery in downtown Portland, Oregon with an official Artist Reception on Friday, June 19. Many of the artists will be in attendance and DJ’s will be blasting vintage vinyl into the Witching Hour! Our allies at The Life Gallery have made special arrangements and will not take any percentage of sales from this show. That means if the artists sell their work, the artists keep all the money. This sort of deal is unheard of in the "art world". So come out for the Artist Reception June 19th and BUY ART! You’ll walk away with a piece of history knowing you did your part to support creative resistance in this age of desperate conformity, impotent angst, and just plain old boring decency.

CHECK OUT THE WHOLE KILLER LINE UP INCLUDING CHARACTERS LIKE NICK BLINKO, S. CLAY WILSON, AWAY FROM VOIVOD, NECROLORD, ROB "BARON" MILLER, DENNIS DREAD & A WHOLE LOT MORE! THIS IS THE ONLY ART SHOW THAT I ENDORSE AT THE MOMENT.

Ian Miller - HP Lovecraft Covers

2009-05-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

UK based Games Workshop did alot of us a favor in the 80s by approaching the production of their games in a totally insane way. Lots of atmospheric source material, fantastic graphic design & top of the line artists, but not "top of the line" in terms of just being good renderers or looking "professional", that's what we've got now, dry & boring, no, Games Workshop artists tended to actually be ARTISTS. Ian Miller was probably the most ART of all of the Games Workshop crew. Honestly, it didn't really make sense to have an artist like Ian Miller doing art for war-games aimed at 12 year olds, BUT, this was an advanced move that has placed that 80s Games Workshop product in a realm of its own, taking it so far beyond the imagined limitations of the medium that those old books & magazines are still some of my favorite cultural art pieces in existence. Miller's style evokes new Philippe Druillet, Ralph Steadman, & old, Hieronymus Bosch, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Brueghel_the_Elder & Albrecht Durer, giving some of the old a blast of the disjointed new & some of the new the resonance & strength of the old. That's how it should be done right? Here are some HP Lovecraft Covers that Ian Miller did.

Hellmouth

2009-05-27T09:44:00.001-07:00

I've been wanting to start a store for a while now... but the whole cyber world & the terrible economy make it almost stupid to start a real world, physical store. Which totally sucks, because a real store is where it's at. Anyhow, i'm gonna start this thing up online first, as a distro for Metal, Punk, Trash Culture & Occult crap. If that works out & i'm pulling money in, i'll open up a storefront & make that shit look wild.

Aeron featured a whole mess of Hellmouths on Monster Brains. CHECK IT OUT!
Here's the argument against online businesses just like that. Presentation. Real world presentation. You can't beat it. You can control the lighting, the smell, the sounds, how stuff is displayed, what people see upon entering, all that stuff. Fire up my smoke machine for special events... weird smelling incense burning all the time. Maybe some retarded black cat lurking around... etc.

Yo, does anyone know what that green monstrous door, i think it's French, from the Art Nouveau period is called? I'm trying to get a good picture of it.

Lest We Forget

2009-05-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

For all those who have served.
Bolt Thrower - Lest We Forget

Bolt Thrower _ Remembrance

From Bolt Thrower's "For Victory", one of the best albums ever recorded.

Sausages

2009-05-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

Otto von Bismarck has a famous quote involving laws & sausages & their unsightly origins, but this has always seemed a slight against sausages. I could definitely do without laws, but sausages... sausages are another matter altogether. Like the pigs most sausages are made from, sausages take substandard food & transform it, almost magically into something delicious & integral to the culture. There is something alchemical about stuffing this meat back into its own intesting, something ouroborotic about it. No? Maybe Bismarck was right though, in that there is a base reality to the sausage, just like laws, because even though i personally can do without them, they are a dirty mechanism for the messy society we live in.

Hans Volzer - Sausage Magnate from a Children of the Moon campaign i'm running.
"The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet." ~Plato

This fantastic piece "Uprising of Sausages & Hot Dogs" is by Sergey Tyukanov.
Everything in life has an end. Only sausages have two.

Highway Star

2009-05-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

The nightmare of Puritan* America & my wet dream...

Deep Purple - Highway Star

One day, i'd like to have a studio/hideaway up on a mountain right at the intersection between the dark woods & some nice bit of green fields with wildflowers & the like. This studio might just have to look something like a Cuckoo Clock. Of course, the studio wouldn't be too far from the enormous Goblinist Monastery/walled city that i'm planning on building or at least designing eventually.

* It's important to note that when i say puritan i don't mean "The Puritans" but rather, the starchy moralistic puritan impulse against fun & the maximumization of the material world we live in. Keep in mind that my own desire for maximum fun is tempered by my Platonic notions of Traditionalism.

Blitzkrieg Buttons!

2009-05-12T23:16:00.000-07:00

Blitzkrieg Buttons have launched on the internet! I've been manufacturing the coolest buttons around for years now but never got the whole operation "online". In the old days, the only way to get my buttons was to happen into a shop i'd just sold them to before they sell out. Blitzkrieg Buttons specializes in "OH MY GOD, WHERE'D YOU GET THAT BUTTON" Buttons. They are also, like me, BIGGER & BALLSIER THAN THE STANDARD, WIMPY 1" buttons! I do 1.5" & 2" buttons, which are $2 & $3 ppd. in the USA respectively. Go to the Blitzkrieg Buttons catalog & GET SOME FOR YOURSELF!!!

Matthew Hopkins - Witchfinder General

2009-05-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

The first book on the occult that i bought was "The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft & Demonology" by Russell Hope Robbins. I loved having it around, it made me feel quite dangerous, especially because it wasn't one of these later-period new age sociable books on how to make love potions & colored candles, this was a straight-forward guide to the roots of Western witchcraft & demonology, straight from the wonderfully distorted minds of medieval European Christians. God bless 'em. It was chock full of old woodcuts from various pamphlets & books, including this fantastic piece depicting Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins interrogating some witches & their various familiars from his pamphlet "The Discovery of Witches". I'm still obsessed with the names "Vinegar Tom" & "Grizzdl Greedigut". Anyhow, Matthew Hopkins was a sadistic son of a Puritan clergyman operating in England during The English Civil War. He is tied to around 200 killings of supposed witches, but not alot is known about him. After attending the Real Witch's Ball/Convention in Columbus, Ohio years ago, looking for something alot more dangerous & exciting than i found, i wanted to become a Witchfinder General myself. Riding a black horse with an even more sadistic side-kick, i would have loved to torture & drown at least ONE witch! ha ha, ahem, but that is neither here nor there.

The Witchfinder General is featured in the fantastic movie by the same name (released as the Conqueror Worm in the USA), starring Vincent Price at his most terrifying as Matthew Hopkins. Check it out if you haven't seen it. Right now.

Witchfinder General is also a pretty good NWOBHM band. Here's their tune "Burning a Sinner". Check them out a bit more maybe.

Matthew Hopkins makes an appearance in Black Adder as Witchsmeller Pursuivant, which is also a band apparently. You'd do well to watch ALL of Black Adder as well. I'm dead serious. I should have mentioned in the last post, you must watch all of the Young Ones also, as part of your Goblinist Initiation.

Bad News: Very Metal

2009-05-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

Bad News were the spoof Heavy Metal band created by Adrian Edmondson (Vyvyan Bastard from the Young Ones) for the Comic Strip. The parody launched before America's "This Is Spinal Tap", which i love, but feel that those guys never really got Heavy Metal. Parody tends to be more dated than the thing it is making fun of, but Bad News hold up quite well. I'm waiting for someone to parody the absurdly pretentious world of Black Metal (outside of the actual Black Metal bands). The saving grace of early Heavy Metal is that it is still rooted in the basic reality of Rock & Roll & sure, it delves into fantasy all the time, but nothing like Dimmu Borgir. Love the detail that they're all wearing white shoes (just like early 80s Motörhead) on the cover. Enjoy.
Bad News Tour

Bad News - Warriors of Genghis Khan

There's more. Just look for it.
Make Bad News your own!

Interview with John Blanche

2009-04-27T23:33:00.000-07:00

Originally published in The Black Library which seems to have become defunct.

"I distinctly remember being told what I liked was all well and good, and I had a romantic spirit, but it would never earn me a living, so there was no point in doing it." So speaks John Blanche. As he is now the Art Director of Games Workshop, you can't help but think his teachers at art college might feel a little foolish now.

John's life is a strange story almost worthy of Dickens, a writer he has a great deal of respect for (like another favourite writer of his, Mervyn Peake, he was an artist too), going from working class kid with a love of toy soldiers to some kind of artistic demiurge.

Among 'shared' fantasy and science fiction universes, those of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 are perhaps some of the most evocative. As an artist and director of artists, John has played a major role in shaping these worlds, or 'alternative histories' as he prefers to call them. Partially owing to his sensibilities, these twin game worlds have become dark and dangerous places, contrary to the glossy, High Fantasy universes favoured by US writers, populated by steel bikini-clad blondes.

Though it was the emergence of role playing games in the 1970s that helped to gave birth to Games Workshop, the men of GW were soon pushing their games away from the sub-Tolkien worlds of roleplaying. Early RPG's were kind of the American dream writ large, cartoon versions of the frontier, where adventurous spirits could wrest vast fortunes from unfortunate Orcs by the application of a big axe, even becoming Gods if sufficient foes were felled. Not so in Warhammer and the science fantasy universe of Warhammer 40,000, places populated by flawed characters, where the only path to glory is dark and diabolical, and the gods are forever hungry.

"To me fantasy is much darker than American High Fantasy, certainly more violent, and more oppressive. But it's also very real," says John. "I didn't see fantasy being occupied by shiny characters, it was all very Dickensian. Fantasy denizens to me all look like Fagin. Everybody has an eye-patch and a wooden leg, dirty fingernails, and worn clothes. And thereby lies the strength of it. It is evocative, there is so much background there, the universes are so strong."

John explains that Games Workshop worlds are inspired a lot by the real world. Further, he maintains that the Games Workshop game worlds are extensions of Northern European culture. "History is fascinating. I constantly find that real life is far more bizarre, far weirder, than what you can conjure up with your own mind. In fact, the resonance isn't just history, or the history of Western Europe, but it echoes through our past, right back to Paleolithic times. It's a very Northern European thing. Skulls crop up all the time, for instance, in Northern European art. Why? These things have always fascinated me, and they find their way into my pictures. You don't see it so much in Southern Europe. If I were better with words, I might write a book about it."

Would Gothic be the right word?

"Yes, and no. Gothic means lots of things. You have the architectural style, from the Early Middle Ages, which then became something else in the Late Middle Ages, and was then reinvented by the Victorians, and they applied to all sorts of stuff. Then we have what we call Games Workshop Gothic, which is inspired by, but is none of these things." The word "Gothic" itself comes from the Goths, a group of ancient Germanic tribes, which brings us neatly back to Northern Europe. John himself is a living extension of this tradition. His major influences include Rembrandt, Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymous Bosch. He even goes so far as to put altered versions of figures from their paintings into his own. "The thing is," he says, "you carry those people with you. I'm not so excited by Bosch anymore, I don't go out and look at his work, but it is part of me, I suppose, these days."

The influences are there to see. For instance, John still rarely uses blue, his works executed in the earthy orange and red tones favoured by his heroes. However, his head is not only turned by the Germanic.

"The best painting I have ever seen in the flesh, and a lot of people look at me aghast when I say this, is the Mona Lisa by Da Vinci. I was astounded because I thought it was so much bigger. It's tiny. They keep it in the Louvre, in this big box, and you have to look through bullet-proof glass at it. You have to push your way through crowds of people. But when I saw it I was transfixed, I thought, ';God that is incredible!' To the same extent I like the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burn Jones. Lawrence Alma-Tadema also. He was a very big Victorian artist, he came from Belgium, but he was actually knighted by Queen Victoria. He was one of the few foreigners to be made a Sir. And I have read accounts of them throwing away his paintings in the 1950's because they regarded them as being purely chocolate box covers! But I've seen a couple. I saw one in a Hamburg museum. You stand 15 feet away and you're looking at a photograph, and you walk up close and you're seeing paintbrush strokes. It is emotional, painterly and textural and photographic at the same time, the guy's a genius! But the person who really had more impact on me than anybody else has to be Rembrandt. He can do the lot. Again, he can paint almost photographically, and at other times he can be very loose and expressive."

This conflict, and its resolution, between emotional expressionism and the painter's craft crops up several times as John talks. In some ways, it seems to have driven his development as an artist. He says that when he was younger he was concerned mostly with photographic realism, but this has changed somewhat.

"Those painterly brush strokes express raw emotion, whereas tight controlled painting is, to some extent, just purely a visual record. To put a bit of emotion into it gives the painting lots of warmth and a dynamic that you don't get from photographic rendering. Once I started to appreciate that in fantasy art... I mean, a person I used to dislike was Frank Frazetta. I used to think, 'It's just done dead quick. He's a great artist but he just doodles them off.' And then, one day I thought, 'Actually, the guy's a genius!' After that I started to look at different things in art. I started to appreciate even some contemporary art, not all of it, because a lot of it's awful. Rather than just look at the surface, I started to look into art and feel some of the emotional values of the artist."

Strangely, neither seemed to be particularly favoured by his teachers at college, which just goes to show that while art is a fundamental part of human life, the people who define it as such are horribly afflicted by fashion.

"They tried to unteach me at art college. I was a working class lad from a council estate. I went to a secondary modern school, and I worked very hard to get into art college. When I arrived there it was full of quasi-intellectuals, and the big word at the time was existentialism. I didn't know what it meant, and nobody would tell me what it meant. I wanted to draw pictures. It was just horrendous. A lot of my colleagues had unhappy experiences at art college, because the teachers tried to steer them towards what they consider to be high art, and the craft, the exercise of rendering, is frowned upon, which is just extraordinary."

This is not something that has held back John, nor the likes of Dave Gallagher, Alex Boyd, Karl and Stefan Kopinski, or Paul Dainton, some of Games Workshop's enormously talented artists. "That leads me to my conviction. I go to a lot of exhibitions and galleries. I don't go to them all, but when I go to them I think there's work that we're producing in our studio now that can stand up alongside some of these great, great artists."

It's this reverence for the output of the Design Studio that has led to the creation of The Gallery at Warp Artefacts; an online repository for the very best Games Workshop artwork. The fine art prints available from The Gallery were personally selected by John and represent both a historical record of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 games and are a testament to the talents of the studio artists.

Still, GW's artists are not entirely free. They can't just make their own stuff up. They are, John says, illustrators, with deadlines to meet. But they are also one of Games Workshop's primary engines when it comes to dreaming up new wierdnesses to unleash on the tabletop, a process that can also be seen at work in the fiction published by The Black Library. They help the worlds live, and more, they are part of what pushes their evolution forward.

"The push and shove of it is those technical restraints, but the pleasurable side of it, the organic growth side of it is trying to make our art visionary, make it lyrical, give it a narrative. That's my personal sort of driver, not just filling spaces in a book with pictures. Recently I went to the Turner exhibition in Birmingham. I love Turner's work, but I'd say 90-95 per cent of it was very dull. I feel I know why. Turner, like everybody else, had to earn a living, so he was doing commissions for wealthy people, classicist pictures showing their estates and their houses and the people around them. Only when Turner had the freedom to truly express himself could he let go. So I was looking at his work and thinking: 'Hey, he'd have loved to have worked for Games Workshop!'"

John now describes himself as living in the worlds he has helped to create. His own time is spent working on sketch books, explorations of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. "So I have something to leave to my family. I was seriously ill a few years ago. It really was a matter of life or death. And as I lay there I thought 'what will I leave behind?' I've done loads of work but lots of it is lost, or kept in a drawer."

Confronted with mortality, John works harder to deepen our fictional universes. A more powerful case for the lure of Warhammer you will not find. Fortunately for us, the man is a genius.

BileZogBug & the Origin of the Goblins

2009-04-23T08:48:00.001-07:00

Deep in the malodorous, cryptic guts of the earth, BileZogBug, a vulgar, bloated, demonic Goblin like entity is slurping from semi-digested piles of rotting human remains. These have been brought to him by the initiates of a unearthly Goblin "Maggot Fly" cult. The mystery of Goblin origin is revealed, as they are expunged as "witch's eggs" by this vile & magic monstrosity, phasing in & out of this plane. The eggs hatch & from them emerge corpulent, glistening & pale Goblin Maggots which, fed on scraps of rotting human meat & bilious earthen slime eventually develop into full-formed Goblins to be whisked away to the surface & away from any memories of their disgusting birth rites.
color version.

My, my, look how they've grown!

Procession of the Solar Cultists

2009-04-19T17:35:00.000-07:00

A nasty bunch of solar cultists taking their sacred cannon somewhere or other. I'm not sure what these guy's whole bag is yet, but it can't be altogether pleasant. I'm using the traditional "baked beans" Punk Fantasy color scheme of master John Blanche.

I Believed In Jimmy When He Told Us To Unite

2009-04-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

About ten years ago, mostly from the pressure of others, i decided to "grow up". It wasn't a bad idea, believe me, i was probably on my way to going bonkers, but either way, i worked my way out of the Punk scene, easing my way through the subcultures, tried out art school, got a regular job at the library, got married, etc. About five years into growing up, i cracked! The crack-up was that i didn't feel that connection to the grown-up world i had joined. Granted, i never felt that connection to the Punk scene either, the moments were few & far between, but there were definitely more. I did a couple of zines, worked in my traditional drawing style, wrote about some things i hadn't written about in older zines, put together a new studded jacket & even went to some shows. BUT, it wasn't there. Whatever i was looking for wasn't there. What i was looking for, was the ecstatic feeling of THE KIDS UNITED, to get charged up into that big feeling of coming together for the similarity of existence. The problem is, i don't think i can be part of the crowd in that way, i can pretend, i can disguise myself, but ultimately, it's not who i am. I don't dislike it, i want it desperately, but it's not in the cards. It makes for a great songs though!
Saxon - Denim & Leather

Sham 69 - If the Kids are United, They Will Never be Divided

A fun little Sham 69 documentary from English Television.

Judas Priest - United

"We don't just say no, we're too busy saying YEAH." An example of the wrong way to bring the kids together. I've been thinking about how to create that feeling for others though, to create some of the institutions that build up that feeling & charge up the kids with meaning in life. I saw alot of that with the Kool-Aid Man's presidential campaign, alot of the desire & alot the actual feeling happening. Of course, the Obama crowd is not even remotely interesting to me & is essentially working counter to my aims so...

Mangelwurzel

2009-04-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

If you're like me, & you obsess over roots & sticks & scarecrows & weird things pertaining to Rustic Dynamism, the mangelwurzel will titillate your tootlehorn. The Mangelwurzel is German for "Chard Root", but is largely an English cultural phenomenon. It has been used for sport (mangold hurling), it has been hollowed out for All Hallow's Eve (the end products are called Punkies), it is great food for animals & can be fermented into a drink. The North Country Scrumpy & Western group the Wurzels take their name from the Mangelwurzel as does Worzel Gummidge. Tolkien fans might note a slight resemblance between Gummidge & Gammidge, as in Hob Gammidge who is some sort of distant relative of Sam Gamgee, thus, Sam Turnip, thus, Sam the country bumpkin.

Worzel Gummidge openers. Dr. Who transformed into a scarecrow with a turnip head.

The Wurzels - I am a Cider Drinker

"Riches more than mind can picture,
Wheat and barley, oats and hay,
Clover, beans and mangel-wurzels
Shall be ours upon that day."
from "Beasts of England" by George Orwell

And how to cook with mangel wurzels "the scarcity root". I'm going to try & procure some mangelwurzel seeds (also known as Swede Mangel) so as to grow my own.

I Loves It, Being a Farmerrrrrrrr.

2009-04-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

After an initial attempt at starting a garden with Eric Radey in me mum's backyard nigh on 15 years ago, & a couple of large buckets with semi-functioning tomato plants in the interim, my dream of having a garden has been realized. I gritted my teeth through the usual table-saw nightmares that i have while cutting wood for the raised beds, day-dreaming of the spinning blade coming undone from the machine & ripping my chest open... It was a particularly moving moment because i ceremonially listened to Chaos UK while hauling seemingly endless amounts of dirt into the backyard. I left the tender-handed job of planting the plants to the wife, but anyhow, it was a glorious moment. So now, we've got three raised beds, a blueberry bush, two cherry trees, an apple tree & an apricot tree in what was originally a very empty plot of land. This was all made extra-satisfying because as the economy collapses & fecal material keeps on making it onto the commercial lettuce, it's nice to have food growing in the backyard! I wanna add a couple of chickens to the mix, but this is a family debate. While i've both romanticized farming & argued that it's passé in the past (it can be both), this spring i have come full circle & become 18 again! Ha ha.

Iron Fist of the Goblin

2009-04-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

Let's get this show on the road.

Motörhead - Iron Fist

Dark night nothing to see
Invisible hand in front of me
Scared to death there's someone near
Scared to move but you can't stay here
You know me, evil eye
You know me, prepare to die
You know me, the snakebite kiss
Devil's grip, the Iron Fist
Flying horse don't make a sound
Flying hooves don't touch the ground
Walk in circle lose you track
Can't go on but you can't go back
You know me, evil eye
You know me, prepare to die
You know me, you can't resist
Devil's grip, the Iron Fist