Coney Island West

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.

"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!

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.

"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!

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

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

“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