Tag: Ceremonial Magic

Detroit 2008 : The Bus Part Thirteen “Blew A Piston…”

berniebleakLeave a comment

I’ve actually already written the Vermont show up so I need to retitle that one so as to throw it into sequence with the rest of these. We took a fairly roundabout way to get to Detroit that took us by Niagara Falls. I can’t remember if this was my only time coming here or if I paid to go on the elevator. The structures that are built around the natural waterfall give me a strong archetypical feeling like maybe I’ve visited them, or structures similar to them, in my dreams.

Sometime between this 2008 visit and this current moment I saw the movie with Marilyn Monroe that is set there. The memory is really hazy, I thought it might have been Lucille Ball or an Alfred Hitchcock picture until I just now looked it up. Anyway I liked seeing the structures like stairs and viewing platforms in the movie – what had changed and what had stayed the same. Some things have probably changed since the visit in this story too.

I don’t know why but all of the utilitarian architecture designed around giving tourists a place to stand while they look at the waterfall is more interesting and compelling to me than the waterfall itself. I remember posing for a photo in front of the waterfall where I pretended to be talking on a cell phone as a crass joke about obliviousness to it’s grandeur and beauty but that isn’t what this is. I’m not trying to only remember cement stairs and coin operated binocular machines to be funny, that’s just the way it is.

It just occurred to me that maybe I just didn’t properly see it. Not long after this Bus Tour I went to see a Spanish Language shadow puppet show that my friend Caryl from the Rafts was involved with in Oakland. For the first time in my life I became consciously aware that the words on an opera screen were too blurry for me to read with my naked eyes – I was nearsighted. It’s hard to say if this change had been sudden or gradual. I went to a lot of operas in High School but since then it was mostly foreign films.

I did learn that if I had to listen to Spanish without being able to read the translations I could follow well enough to understand what was going on. I had taken a few semesters of Spanish in College and spoken it here and there but this was my first experience with “getting pushed in the pool” style fluency. Anyway I also went and got myself glasses and it feels entirely possible that Niagara Falls didn’t make as much of an impression for me because I was squinting at it and it was a blur.

The fastest way to get to Detroit from Niagara Falls would have been to pass through Canada but we weren’t about to test the hijinks potential of trying to pass through an International Border. There is a story about getting hassled at the Canadian Border in the El Rancho chapters but this time around we just took a much longer way. It almost seems unbelievable when you consider how much fuel The Bus required but driving over a few extra hours of road ultimately seemed easier than having every single object on board passed through a colander.

There was a lot going on in Detroit and I almost thought this could have been my first time visiting the city until I remembered that I just wrote about a 2007 trip with Garbaj Kaetz. There was a big electronic music festival going on and the Pistons had just won one of their Playoff games which resulted in a parade. When the bus succumbed to total mechanical failure just outside the Motor City it became a very weak joke about performing fellatio on one of the victorious athletes:

“I went to Detroit and blew a piston…”

Not particularly funny but you have to take into account that it was a dark and depressing time for us and double entendres and dick jokes represented a welcome relief from the grim reality that our ship of dreams had run aground. Still I’m getting a bit ahead of myself – in Detroit none of this had actually happened yet and therefore had no impact on our emotional state whatsoever. We went to Belle Isle and explored an empty factory building and sort of but didn’t really play a show.

Question Mark and the Mysterians were performing at MOCAD. I don’t know how official this whole thing was but to some degree we were allowed to pull the bus up and do a Living Hell set. I think Suzy Poling from Pod Blotz had set this up for us – she had been living in Detroit for a while and was just about to make the big move to Oakland and the West Coast.

I had forgotten that Suzy had performed on The Bus while everybody else explored the abandoned factory until I just now typed her name. It was the kind of site specific performance that The Bus was perfectly equipped but almost never used for. The acoustics worked out in such a way that Pod Blotz could be heard from anywhere inside the multilevel factory. I think it was Suzy’s idea that everybody run ahead and explore the structure while she stayed behind to provide the soundtrack.

It was kind of like how I imagine perfect wine and entree pairings must be for the people who are genuinely into that sort of thing. Industrial decay and the remnants of manufacturing machinery taken in under the sparse illumination provided by cell phones and flash lights while tape effects and synthesizers provided novel juxtapositions of sonic textures ranging from barely audible whispers to deafening shouts.

Many artists in the experimental genre have tackled the idea that simply watching them manipulate their instruments and mixers might not be the most compelling visual accompaniment to the diverse sounds produced but this was the most elegant solution to that question I’ve personally witnessed. As an awkward footnote this entire experience was quite stressful and no fun whatsoever for John Benson as he had to stay behind with The Bus and white knuckle through the attentive lights of a police cruiser while hoping that they didn’t realize a small army was trespassing throughout the empty factory he was parked outside of.

So at MOCAD this legendary garage rock band Question Mark and the Mysterians is playing. I would say that they were the biggest name Living Hell ostensibly shared a bill with but some guys from Matmos who jumped the bill in Providence are a close second. When John asked if they could play Jeremy Harris said “the Matmos?” so obviously they are kind of a big deal. In Detroit it was more like we were jumping the bill.

When I was a young child I was curious about and wanted to experiment with the concept of cooking. My first experiment was to put a slice of bologna in the microwave for about fifteen seconds. It wasn’t very good. Anyway that’s what the singer guy Question Mark’s skin kind of looked like – he was wearing dark glasses and didn’t have a shirt on. They played their one famous song 96 Tears and it was great.

We were super excited to invite them onto The Bus but they were very clear about thinking that the invitation felt like a plot device from a horror movie and they wouldn’t be falling for it. Maybe their days of stepping onto mysterious buses full of freaks were behind them or maybe they would have declined the same invitation in 1962 – I couldn’t really say. What I can say is that the MOCAD crowd was overwhelmingly older and looked to the proto-punk band to set the tone as to how to respond to The Bus.

Maybe one or two people in attendance were feeling adventurous enough to take a look onboard. I can’t remember if we went through with performing a Living Hell set or not. Either way it’s awkward – do you perform for the two people who actually showed up or do you inform them that they aren’t enough of an audience for the thing you just invited them to? There’s no good answer.

Pod Blotz outside of an abandoned factory under cover of night was the perfect act to perform for people who weren’t physically standing on The Bus. Living Hell was not – our spectacle was overwhelmingly visual in nature and we played three different times without The Bus after this night in Detroit that were far more memorable than whatever did or didn’t happen this night.

Detroit was tons of fun besides this. We slept at Dave’s mom’s house which I want to say was on Belle Isle but maybe it wasn’t. We drove over to that neighborhood with the stuffed animals and polka dots on the houses. I met up with a girl named Leg that I used to be in love with and she took me to an African themed bead shop where I might have bought some brass effigy bells.

It was time to hit the road and the road hit back. It was about four hours outside of Detroit when, as the title says, we blew the piston. Was it loud? Was there smoke? Did it smell bad? I just remember that we knew it was the end. There was still some hope that The Bus would ride again but certainly no time soon. The more immediate question was how everybody and their music equipment would be moving beyond the side of the road in Michigan.

Ok, how do I even approach this? I don’t follow any iteration of The Grateful Dead but I like to go places to do things and I can say with no reservations whatsoever that “the road” is a place where miracles happen. Case in point: another empty bus pulls off the highway to see if we might need assistance, it just so happens to belong to a Chicago bicycle racing team and is being brought home to Chicago for this purpose. In fact the home of this team and this particular bus’s destination just so happens to be within a couple miles of Mister City – the art space we are scheduled to play in that very night.

Of course our new acquaintance was happy to give us and our equipment a ride to the place where he was basically already going. It was a lot of conflicting emotions – the thing was broken and something was obviously over and some of us were crying but at the same time Holy Shit! Rolling into our scheduled concert on a different bus entirely it was impossible to avoid feeling like the natural laws governing coincidences weren’t at least a little warped in our favor.

John and Dave stayed behind with The Bus to ensure that it got towed to some form of safe storage. The nearest town ended up being a place called Albion. Not long after John Benson impulsively bought a house there when he saw it listed for next to nothing on eBay. The plan was to use this house as a base of operations while working to get The Bus moving and operational again.

None of that really worked out. I’m sure the house will end up popping into some stories here but other people would have better stories than me and more of them. For now I’ve got this one: The first time John Benson ever set foot in the place he found seven dead starlings. I had been the magic consultant on board The Bus so he texted me to ask what it meant. I figured that the counting rules for crows could be applied to any of the corvidae:

One for sorrow, two for mirth

Three for a death, four for a birth

Five for silver, six for gold

Seven for a secret never to be told

That’s magic for you. You might not get an answer that you can use but at least you always get one. You may be thinking: “what if there were eight starlings? Or nine?”

Simple: it wouldn’t have been magic.

Bus Section Epilogue with Documentary Videos:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/02/22/nashville-2008-the-bus-epilogue-brand-the-dude/

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

New York 2008 : The Bus Part Two “We Know When We’re Not Wanted”

berniebleak1 Comment

The engine troubles that had required the overnight at a Cummins in the small town in West Virginia had not been resolved. In fact we had to stop in another small town in West Virginia where heavy rains had created a temporary chocolate river of muddy water to perform what was essentially a “magical oil change”. As one of the vocalists in Living Hell I had created a character called Deacon Peafowl who was kind of like a revival preacher for the kind of Ceremonial Magic championed by the Order of the Golden Dawn.

I had also been carrying a mummified squirrel in a little red fringed suede purse that had been discovered directly under the bus’s engine the moment it was moved from the backyard spot in Tampa, Florida it had been occupying since the International Noise Conference. There was a running joke that this squirrel had cursed us with it’s dying breath, calling out “nuts to you guys!” as it stiffened with rigor mortis beneath it’s future haunting ground. This joke had seemed innocent enough when just moving the bus from the backyard had caused a valve for the grease tank to snap off and flooded a suburban cul-de-sac with rancid French Fry oil made only more pungent from months of stagnating.

By the time we got to the chocolate river there had been enough mechanical troubles to elevate this idea from joke to valid concern and cast serious doubts as to the wisdom of continuing to carry our own version of the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. It was time to jettison the squirrel and having found ourselves in a near-biblical flood the decided-upon method would be “Viking Funeral”. A small oil can was cut open to serve as boat and a few small tokens were placed along it’s passenger either as offerings or “bad pennies” to be disposed of.

We had been kind of toying with the idea that Living Hell was the evangelical musical wing of an obscure religious cult in different ways: both through vague wording in the mis-information pamphlets I had produced and in the messages within my lyrics and Rain’s spoken word segments. Now that we were making a singing procession to a river bank and reverently lighting a deceased rodent on fire to watch it disappear beneath the swirling waters the lines had been blurred as to whether this was performance, parody or earnest spiritual practice. There is an Igbo expression I am fond of that I read in an essay by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe:

“Let us perform the sacrifice and so leave the blame on the doorstep of the Gods.”

It seemed to have actually had the desired effect – for one or two hundred miles at least. The journey between the chocolate river and New York City was actually devoid of major mechanical issues to the best of my recollection. This changed dramatically on the threshold of that metropolis: the moment we moved to enter through some kind of turnpike or toll-way the bus began violently ejecting hot grease from somewhere it shouldn’t have been that was nearly the same color as the magical river. The attendant quickly closed our lane and asked us to just move along as soon as physically possible without worrying about the toll.

We joked that it would have been a good method for avoiding tolls and tariffs in the future had it not been a portent of serious issues that actually desperately needed fixing.

I can’t remember if we had one or two days in New York before our show at Secret Project Robot but I do remember what the most exciting thing to do in town was. The Whitney Biennial had been a must-see event since the 2002 iteration had given an entire room over to costumes, sculpture, projections and music from the Fort Thunder collective FORCEFIELD. I’ve been to so many of these at this point that I’m almost certain to misplace specific pieces except for the one clear detail that Olaf Breuning’s first home video was on display and everybody was buzzing about it.

I had been wearing a six inch long dagger in a leather scabbard at my waist for the entire tour at this point and had totally forgotten that New York City actually has specific laws against that sort of thing. It was incorporated into the performances as athame with specific lyrics blending the concepts of metal, fire and magical intention:

“Cut the wick, light the spark!

Be the candle, pierce the dark!”

One of the security guards approached me and discreetly pointed to the prohibited weapon:

“That’s a real knife?”

I answered in a completely neutral tone that carefully skirted the division between a clear yes or no:

“Well it’s a dagger.”

Apparently this was the correct answer, he held up the palms of his hands in a conciliatory gesture as he assured me:

“I won’t say nothin’.”

Eventually everybody made their way to Williamsburg for the late afternoon show at Secret Project Robot. I remember hearing that some photos and a review from this show ended up in the Village Voice but this writing project has been unfortunately teaching me that alternative weeklies don’t generally bother with comprehensive online archives. Here’s what I do remember: this was my first time running into my San Diego friend Raul de Nieves in his incarnation as a successful New York artist. There was a group show up on the inside of the space that included a small room painted completely black with an oppressive doom metal soundtrack.

I ended up eating acid again which makes me think it might have been almost a week after the small town in West Virginia with the Cummins but then I lay my memories out and remember that I also ate it to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and go to a dinner party in Liberty, Maine and there’s just no way all of these things were a week apart. I was just eating a lot of acid. With such frequent use it would seem like I would have been developing a tolerance and experiencing diminishing returns but I clearly remember it being potent each of these times so it would either have been really good or I was just to the left of the “overdoing” it line.

This was the only time on the tour that I had taken it just before one of our performances but that’s not too crazy of an undertaking in the dilettante-ish lead vocalist role. We played with one group that had elaborately sculpted costume heads that looked like the figures on totem poles and another group in costumes that played drums with smoke machines and strobe lights. We played with a band that Ned Meiners had at the time called Gold Dust that was probably my first time meeting him. It was maybe a power trio and I really liked it and tried to convince them to just get on the bus and come with us but Ned said he had to work:

“But your job probably sucks and your band is really, really good. This is probably the best band you’ll ever be in.”

I can’t seem to find any recorded music or evidence of this band existing online but I still stand by what I said. CCR Headcleaner certainly had it’s moments but by 2008 I had been to a lot of shows and seen a lot of bands and wouldn’t have gotten this worked up if they weren’t actually great. From 18 to 20 I was probably getting this excited about one or two bands at every show I went to but by 2008 it was one or two bands an entire U.S. Tour.

The show was over and we were packing up to get out of town before it was even dark. Now that the crowds had dispersed and nobody was playing loud music anymore a couple of cops decided that it would be the perfect time to show up and harass us. They were asking really stupid questions about what we were up to as we were clearly doing everything in our power to stop being in their jurisdiction as soon as humanly possible and picking up discarded half empty beers from the ground and asking who they belonged to as if anybody would actually be stupid enough to say:

“Oh, that’s mine. Please write me a citation for an open container.”

This whole time Kloot, a lab-chow mix that Upper Dave travelled with, was losing his shit and barking his head off because he hated people in uniforms. It wasn’t just cops, he also had a deep antipathy for firemen and UPS drivers. For most of the tour this only served to make our frequent police encounters more tense and exhausting but this time around it was actually helpful:

“Ok, we get it. We know when we’re not wanted.”

They got back into their car and left. It was kind of like when an ATM spits out an extra twenty or a hawk swoops down to grab a rat from a crowded street: nobody could quite believe it had just actually happened. It occurred to all of us that if they actually knew when they weren’t wanted it would have to be something they were nearly constantly aware of and it also seemed deeply out of character as most cops nearly always act like they’re God’s Gift to people whose lives are about to get shittier and more complicated.

By now it was dark and we were driving out of New York City. As we were passing under an expressway we either got stuck at a long light or some minor issue needed adjustment or somebody needed to consult a map. I only know that we sat there for a minute and a German girl was staring at our bus in wonder and I hopped off to talk to her. She said that it looked like the train from a German children’s fantasy book called Jim Knopf. She was visibly enchanted, I mean to the extent that her eyes literally sparkled. I fell in love with her a little bit and the entire situation and New York City and us existing like something out of a fairytale for her that suddenly materialized out of the night and would disappear just as quickly.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t know anything about her and would never see her again, it was that the romance of the entire encounter was contingent on those two details.

We parked in a town called Orange, New Jersey at the newly branded September 11th Memorial Scenic Overlook. Everybody was going to sleep but that was out of the question for me. Fortunately the rest stop featured several acres of sprawling forest. I didn’t have a flash light so I walked in the dark until I could see in it. I came across a deer that I must have been upwind of or it was really into grazing or I just walk really quietly. Probably a little bit of all three. Regardless it didn’t notice me until I was almost close enough to touch it and it screamed in horror and ran off into the woods.

I had never heard a deer scream before this point and it isn’t something that I’ve had an opportunity to hear again since. I don’t really know how to describe the sound except to say that it sounded really frightened. One of my cats actually tried to intimidate a deer fairly recently but he didn’t frighten her at all. She stomped her hooves at him and put him in his place so she could go back to eating the grapes in the compost pile.

I walked through the woods until the light started to come and I could finally truly see what the woods I had been walking in for hours actually looked like. At the time I thought it was the most beautiful forest I had ever seen but I wouldn’t say that now. The woods that I own and live in and am the steward of are definitely the most beautiful. I didn’t totally realize this until I had written it all down but it sounds like the LSD had definitely put me in a state where I was falling for Ned’s band and some woods in New Jersey and a German girl that I only met for about thirty seconds. It wasn’t always like that for me but clearly it was this night.

Just before I was finally ready to fall asleep I came across a single, gigantic morel growing under a tree within view of the path. A lot of people I know are afraid of eating wild mushrooms but that isn’t the case for me: morels, boletes and chicken of the woods don’t really look like anything dangerous. There actually is a toxic mushroom they call false morel but it doesn’t convincingly look like the real thing. It must have been at least eight inches tall. I brought it back onto the bus and fell asleep dreaming of cooking it the next time we ended up having access to a kitchen. I slept for two solid days.

When I woke up I found out that somebody thought it smelled rotten and had thrown it away.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/23/miami-2008-the-bus-you-deserve-to-live-here/

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Los Angeles 2011 : “Death Where Is Thy Sting?”

berniebleakLeave a comment

I didn’t have anything against the members of DADFAG or the band itself but at the same time it was the catalyst for my decision to move away from the Bay Area. They were a punk band of recent emigrees from Athens, Georgia and for my last few months in Oakland they seemed to be playing at every single show I went to on both sides of the bridge. I just felt like every artist I knew in town who was doing anything more experimental or theatrical almost never got asked to play at anything and when you went out it was always punk bands and it just felt monochromatic.

I realize that on paper this is all going to sound like some kind of grievance and it really wasn’t like that. They were my friends, I liked watching them play, I set a show up in San Diego when they came down with Brotmann & Short where the bar owners complained that none of the night’s artists were commercial enough for their regulars:

“That really isn’t my problem. I sent you links and videos for every single artist on the bill tonight. If you had wanted a Top 40 Cover Band you probably should have hired one.”

By the time I headed out from my final living situation in West Oakland to do a US Tour with Generation (then Teen Suicide) in the early summer of 2010 I knew I wouldn’t be coming back. I just didn’t feel like living there as a performing artist anymore. It’s kind of like a relationship – you don’t necessarily think aloud about when it isn’t working for you anymore but you know when you finally realize it’s over.

I spent my 20’s in what was basically a triangle between San Diego, Chicago and the Bay Area. I spent extended periods of time in Providence, St Louis, Portland, New Orleans and New York but I never actually lived in those places. I’d been going to Los Angeles for shows since High School but hadn’t ever thought about moving there. The way I explain it is that the city always made me feel like an astronaut or deep sea diver with only a limited amount of oxygen. It was always fun to visit for a few days or so but eventually I would need to go back to wherever the air was to take off my helmet and refill the tanks.

The very first time I ended up at a show at Women of Crenshaw house I realized that I had found an air pocket in Los Angeles and actually the whole city must be full of air and whenever I was ready to switch cities next I could probably just switch to this one. The first time I was there I think the collective house was headed by Grace and Brian from rose for bohdan and then it was Brian and Eva and finally Eva and Brock. By the time I was looking for some kind of nook or niche that I could maybe move into, there had been a major shift in house dynamics.

There isn’t a pleasant way to say the things that I’m about to say and I’m not going to explicitly throw out names but there is a pattern that I’ve seen repeated in collective houses over and over again throughout the years. When a truly unpleasant person or couple moves in it is a lot more likely that everyone else will just move out or leave instead of ever directly confronting the problem. A big part of this is that a decision like evicting or ejecting a house member generally has to be decided by unanimous vote and the composition of these houses is usually split between people who are super active in the music scene and people who are more caught up in work or school and almost never even around.

The second type of housemate will almost never vote to kick anybody out because they aren’t really around enough to know what’s going on with interpersonal politics and they wouldn’t want anybody to ever vote to evict them.

At Women house the problem was loud emotional abuse that generally manifested after long nights of drinking and the acoustics of the house were set up in a way that it affected everybody who lived there and it was dark and it felt bad. In a way every one of us was in some small degree culpable because we all listened to it night after night and none of us ever said anything. Of course I wouldn’t have learned about this just coming to shows or parties but I had poked around and discovered that I could lay a folded futon mattress through a propped open doorway on a landing that led to the basement and put a curtain in a hallway and call it a bedroom.

The couple in question were happy to rent this formerly unused space to me for one hundred dollars a month but when I talked to my other friends living there I learned that nobody else’s rent had been reduced. The house had always been a collective where all expenses were evenly distributed between housemates but evidently this was no longer the case. There was a big argument over lack of transparency concerning utility bills. The house stopped throwing shows.

I’m not saying all this to be a bitch or to fuck with anybody’s reputation but I also think it’s extremely unlikely that anybody reading this who knows who I’m talking about wouldn’t already know. I’m actually sincerely hoping that things have just gotten better – I know that some health things came up and the drinking had to change. I know that nobody’s relationship is perfect and that if people are committed to positive change it is absolutely a thing that can happen.

I was messing with heroin again when I left for Generation tour and then I was on tour and I’m not usually much of a drug tourist. A friend in Colorado split a 100 mg morphine pill with me but that was it for the tour. I didn’t go out looking for drugs and I didn’t notice being in any kind of withdrawal. In rural Nebraska we stopped in a park to stretch our legs and I picked up a wounded dove that was limping around the park and then I felt bad – like I couldn’t just set it back down on the ground to die.

We already had a dog on tour in the car with us, we were going to deliver Kloot to Dave in Chicago, it didn’t seem like nursing a dove back to health in a shoebox would fit in with the rest of the tour itinerary. The only thing that was open was a gas station so I went in and asked if the town had one of those residents that always likes caring for sick and wounded animals, that sort of thing. Coincidentally it was supposed to be the guy who had just pulled away in a pickup truck the moment before I walked in but you can’t do much with that sort of serendipity.

The bird guy was the local Veterinarian which in that kind of grain belt town meant a tiny building connected to some silos and a fenced off paddock for selling cattle. Nobody was in the office so I put the dove in a cardboard box with a t-shirt to keep it warm and labeled the outside with a felt tipped marker so anybody that looked inside would know what they were in for:

“HURT DOVE”

I figure it probably died in that box at some point in the night but then again it was summer and the nights didn’t get too cold and we left some crumbs and a little dish of water. Maybe it still lives in that office and sits on the truck guy’s shoulder when he walks out to the paddock to try to figure out what just went wrong with somebody’s cow. It was 2010 – how long does a dove live if it was already on the brink of death?

So in Los Angeles I started to get restless and got to looking for heroin but instead found a steady source of prescription pain pills. Purdue Pharmaceuticals had just reformulated the 80 mg OxyContin to the weird plastic texture that makes them harder to abuse and suddenly nobody wanted them anymore so they were cheap and easy to find. The guy I got them from also had really cheap green morphine pills – he worked on my block and could pass me the pills through a shared fence. The whole thing was absurdly easy.

Heroin had been self regulating for me because the culturally stigmatized nature of acquiring and consuming it meant it would pretty much be the only thing I ended up doing on that day and I had to do a lot of other things on days. Pills were different. I could just carry them around and take them the moment I had finished with the responsible or social parts of my day. I would swallow an Oxy 80 as soon as I got done tutoring and end up starting to nod out as I was coasting down the downhill sections of the Ballona Creek Bike Trail.

I vividly remember snapping in and out of consciousness the moment that I would be passing another cyclist or need to suddenly turn on the path. It was reckless. I was lucky I never hurt myself or anybody else.

I lived on Crenshaw and Washington and I worked on Slauson just before the Holy Cross Cemetery and the Fox Hills Mall. I first experimented with every possible route of biking to work including going past the RV that was painted up to advertise colonics at Crenshaw and Slauson that always made me wonder who in their right mind would get a colonic in a random RV. Eventually I started taking Washington to Ballona Creek, getting off at Overland and taking that until I could cut through Holy Cross to Slauson.

Holy Cross has a Grotto which is an artificial cave made of volcanic rock and dedicated to a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary that appeared with yellow roses on her feet to a fourteen year old girl in Lourdes, France in 1858. This was my first Grotto but since this time I have become something of a connoisseur. I went there to shoot photos with Lux for our death-rock band Voiheuristick Necromorph but eventually I just started spending lots of time there: listening to music, reading and eventually praying.

In an earlier piece I referred to a ritualized ceremony I performed to manifest partnership as my first act of fully intentional Magic but now that I think about it praying and participating in a Mass both probably also count as Magic even if that isn’t the name we ordinarily apply to Religion.

I started to realize that it seemed like I was taking pills more often than I might have preferred – my friend Chiara asked me why I was fucked up every single time she saw me and it seemed like she had a point. I think she had a lemon tree in her front yard. The only reason I mention it was that I was starting to notice where the citrus trees were as I biked around Los Angeles and they always seemed like they were around to help.

I can’t remember if I asked for help the first time that I used the Grotto to pray but I do remember exactly what happened the moment that I finally did. I heard a voice in my head answering back, or not really a voice – the thing that’s always in my head. I guess you could just say that it was a thought but it was uncharacteristically clear, direct and unambiguous:

“Then throw away the rest of the pills that you have in your pocket.”

I didn’t do that. I guess that I didn’t want to waste them or I wasn’t ready to stop. I did stop taking pills as frequently as I had been and I continued to spend time in the Grotto and continued to pray. I knew that pretty soon I was going to have to take another shot at it.

There were two different books I was reading at the time that played a major role in what I would decide to do and the way I would decide to do it. Chiara had been kind enough to loan me her extremely hard-to-find copy of Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren. In the book Deren talks about how for the practitioners of Vodou the question of faith is secondary to the reality of service. Essentially that you don’t need to believe in the Religion behind a ritual to benefit from participation in it and you don’t need to believe in a God, Spirit or Saint for that entity to answer your prayers.

The other book was Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. This one was pretty straightforward. I liked the idea of a vow of abstinence with a built in expiration date. I never would have been able to stop the recreational use of opiates if I thought it would have to be for the rest of my life. Even now I haven’t used them for going on four years but look forward in pleasant anticipation to a future day where I might once again have the opportunity.

Any of my readers who are familiar with the novel might find it notable that the title character lost every one of the positive improvements he had made in his life when he reached the end of his vow and resumed his old habits but to me it doesn’t seem terribly important. Life is worth living regardless of what it brings you and I look back on the subsequent years I spent in homelessness and deep addiction as productive and full of beauty.

Anyway I had a specific plan in place: on the Summer Solstice of 2011 I would pray at the Grotto then bike to the Griffith Observatory in time to pledge a year of abstinence from all opiates and kratom to the setting sun from the special balcony that had been marked with its specific position. I had prepared myself – I had weaned myself down on the off chance that I might experience any withdrawal or discomfort and exhausted any surplus supply of the relevant drugs.

I also started going to weekly Mass, usually Roman Catholic, and taking communion as a kind of “spiritual methadone”. I am well aware that the fact that I had never been formally Confirmed in the Church and did not participate in Confessions or any other duties required to be a Catholic in good standing meant that my actions were a mortal sin. I wasn’t particularly worried about it. It helped me reinforce my vow and the commitment to see it through to its conclusion.

I was also about to begin traveling for the Summer and seeking out Sunday services wherever I wound up showed me parts of the world I never would have seen otherwise, especially as I usually had to hitchhike. Some of my favorites were a 16th Century Adobe Cathedral in rural New Mexico, Eastern Orthodox services in Chicago, New York’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, a small Lutheran church near Voices of the Valley in Pentress, West Virginia and a gold-leafed altar in Panama City that had been painted black to protect it from being looted by the pirate Captain Morgan.

I started reading a lot of Corinthians particularly the celebrated passage that begins with 15 55:

“O Death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?

For sin is the sting of Death and the power of sin is the law”

I had enjoyed reading the Bible for most of my adult life even though I had renounced God and declared myself a heathen in the Second Grade. I started to view the Passion as a powerful allegory similar to Enlightenment in Buddhism. Not a literal Resurrection but a conscious decision to renounce mortality and live without the fear of Death. It seemed like all human selfishness stemmed in one way or another from a painful awareness of the inevitability of Death; the idea that anything could be finite…

In this version of Christianity sin was not a specific act but the consequence of spiritually conceding to mortality. In the letter to the Corinthians Paul often talks about how the finite can not inherit the infinite. I saw salvation not as something that happens after death but a beatific state reached by acknowledging the infinite within one’s self while renouncing the finite.

After the first year I renewed my vow in the same spot on the following Solstice but half a year later Mass and Communion weren’t hitting the same and I just stopped going. I ended up in Princeton, New Jersey helping my sister and her husband clear out the house that had belonged to my grandparents. My grandmother had been dragged out by social workers in HazMat suits after she refused to call a plumber out of fear that he would steal the jewelry she had hidden in a couch. With broken pipes she’d started urinating and defecating in buckets full of kitty litter.

I was supposed to get a hotel room but I preferred sleeping in the overgrown backyard and spending my nights wandering Princeton’s parks and swimming its lakes. I found some codeine from the 1970’s in a medicine cabinet and decided to go ahead and take it. The tablets had dissolved into an oddly shimmering crystalline powder but the potency of their constituent chemicals didn’t seem to have diminished.

A year and a half had brought my tolerance down to almost nothing. I got high. I threw up.

For better or worse I was back on my bullshit…

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Los Angeles 2012 : “No Weapon Formed Against Me Shall Prosper”

berniebleakLeave a comment

When I first moved to Los Angeles in 2010 I ended up in the Ojai Hot Springs with some representatives of the “Spooky New Age Chick Community” I’ve referred to in other pieces. Somebody wanted to go check out the Krotona Institute of Theosophy and after a quick tour of the grounds we ended up in the bookshop. I wasn’t expecting to see anything that interested me but my eye landed on an affordable paperback edition of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis Regis or The Lesser Key of Solomon.

I hadn’t actually read the book before and it would end up having a profound effect on my life and the way in which I would come to view the world. My spiritual history is too rocky and complicated to detail here but I had been self identifying as a Witch for several years at this point. I had briefly looked into Wicca when a girl that I had a crush on in ninth grade had told me she was a practitioner. My impression was basically that if I wanted to practice a religion that was cobbled together from a mish-mash of Pagan traditions it would be easier to just become a Christian.

When Magic did become an important part of my life it was kind of like improvised music – I didn’t really have specific source material or role models, I was making it up as I went along. In a way I think it had always been a part of my life: I was named after a mythical bard whose parents were a Giant and a Faerie woman who had been enchanted by a Druid. My dreams were bringing me directly into supernatural landscapes where I made contact with supernatural entities.

I was reading Greek, Norse and many other types of mythology from a young age, I was very influenced by an illustrated copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy that my mother bought me in third grade and adolescence brought on works by John Crowley, Neil Gaiman and other writers from the Vertigo imprint. Magical Thinking and Magical Ideation were part of my internal life but at the same time I wouldn’t have necessarily said that Magic was a thing I “practiced”. The things that brought Magic out of my head and into the physical world around me were LSD and an aesthetic enthusiasm for Folk Magic shops I saw around Chicago called Botanicas.

While I wasn’t working from any kind of concrete guide I realized from the very beginning that there were rules. I didn’t think that it was a good idea to try to use Magic to get anything specific or to make anybody specific change their feelings or behavior in any way. It wasn’t that I didn’t think these things were possible but rather that I didn’t think they were ethical. Another factor is that both sides of my family had instilled in me an insuppressible instinct for thrift and I knew that these types of Magic would simply not be cost effective.

Many practitioners of Magic talk about the importance of “intention” but for most of my practice I basically felt the opposite. If I wasn’t trying to do anything specific it didn’t seem like I should have any specific intention. While I recognize that Magic is fundamentally a tool in my case I was using it for ambience. Older readers will probably remember a form of Christmas Tinsel that I just learned is called Hair Tinsel. It comes in little y-shaped pieces that you can just kind of throw at the tree and they will hook onto the pine needles and put a little shine or glitter wherever they land.

This is the part where I have to admit that I was mostly attracted to and had a passion for Dark Magic. To many people Dark Magic is not and never will be a thing that is okay to do for any reason whatsoever. I figured that if I wasn’t actually pursuing power or trying to harm anybody it could be rationalized. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that it was something I was going to do no matter what so I needed to do it as safely and ethically as possible. I know that for many people this is still all going to sound incredibly irresponsible.

I wrote a song that I came to understand as a curse and performed it over and over again – first in Living Hell and afterwards as Bleak End at Bernie’s. It wasn’t aimed at anybody in particular but was rather a general invocation for suffering, darkness and chaos. Not that I wanted there to be more of these things or that I wanted to upset the balance of the universe in their favor – it was more that I saw these things as indelible and necessary and had felt inspired to serve as a conduit for them:

“Give me blood

Give me loss

Victory at hopeless cost

Wicked shelter

Vicious burden

Let the loose ends twist and tangle”

I had been accumulating amulets and talismans around my neck and somewhere in America a Thrift Store offered up a laminated circular badge with the words “WORLD’S WORST MAGICIAN”. I had been dressing like a cartoon witch, Baroque vampire or an assassin in an Elizabethan Play so the label was coming off a tad more suspect than it would have been perceived on someone with a top hat and sequined bow tie. People would ask me whether it was supposed to mean that I was inept or that I was evil and whether it referred to stage magic or Magic Magic.

The answer to these questions was invariably “both”.

While visiting New Orleans I brought a folding table down to Jackson Square and set up shop by the Palm Readers and Fortune Tellers. A piece of poster board advertised “BAD MAGIC” with bad luck charms, poison your dreams and unfortunate consequences offered on the underlying bullet list. I mostly got dirty looks and people asking me if I was serious or if it was a hidden camera prank show; a few people just wanted pictures as I had gone all out on a particularly colorful witch costume. One Midwestern Tourist actually took me up on it and asked for a bad luck charm. An improvised ceremony centered on wrapping burning hair around breaking twigs transferred the negative energies into a penny.

I told her to keep it in her left pocket until the next truly awful thing in her life happened after which she should throw it away. In a roundabout way I was actually trying to be helpful; we’ve all got bad luck on the horizon with or without a charm but she had a vessel to isolate and dispose of it once it had manifested. It was the most purpose-driven act of my Dark Magic career and the only one for which I received compensation. I told her to pay what she wanted and I can’t remember what she decided on.

The Lesser Key of Solomon changed everything for me. It reformed me and it gave me structure. I began to realize that the Dark Magic could be isolated within characters that I wrote musicals around and performed for brief interludes on stage instead of allowing it to permeate every aspect of my personal life. I didn’t mind talking about Astrology with friends who were interested in it but it had never exactly clicked for me. Classical Astrology was completely different. The supernatural had always presented as chaotic and lawless but I suddenly understood a system of Order presided over by Planetary Daemons and Archangels.

There is Magic in the art of Urban Planning but not all cities are equally occult. Washington D.C. stands out among the cities I have first hand experience of as the most obvious example of this. Streets are laid out in specific shapes for specific reasons and literal Temples are erected for the worship of ancestors and ideas. Los Angeles is a close second. My brother-in-law had given me a heavy beach cruiser bicycle that I inundated with talismans and used to travel at least thirty miles throughout the city on a daily basis.

Los Angeles plays a very specific role in the formation of myths and dreams within the American psyche that would not be possible without the use of Magic. The very name Hollywood refers to principles and practices the Druids had used to organize their world by nurturing spiritual power within sacred groves of trees. Of course Los Angeles is also home to The Magic Castle, the foremost destination for learning, performing and watching legerdemain and the Arts of Illusion.

With my new paperback grimoire as key and legend I was beginning to construct a system of personal wards and sigils informed by my own perambulations through the city. I lived near it’s center on Crenshaw and Washington and worked in a private tutoring center in Fox Hills next to the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. I tried to explore as much of the city as possible but was establishing patterns between Griffith Park, Exposition Park, the La Brea Tar Pits, Culver City and a course that connected my home and place of employment along the consecrated waters of Ballona Creek.

On the corner of West Slauson Avenue and Heatherdale Drive I came upon a collection of buildings I would come to know as The Temple of Mars. An oddly shaped and upwardly sloped patch of asphalt contained a closed down shop with stairs leading to the gravel roof and ritual platform, a wall presumably built for enclosing dumpsters and a double sided billboard. The structures were painted in a bright, martial shade of red and the marquee declaimed “NO WEAPON FORMED AGAINST ME SHALL PROSPER ISAIAH 54:17” to the East and West.

I always presumed that this complex had been most recently used as some kind of church but outside of the Biblical quote there wasn’t actually any evidence for that conclusion. From a utilitarian standpoint it seemed best appointed for a tiny used car dealership. For the two years that I lived in Los Angeles and worked on Slauson it would sit entirely vacant except for brief periods around the Winter Solstice when it was used to sell Christmas Trees.

I should add that it was used by me to conduct secret rituals under cover of night but the property’s owner had not been informed of this particular function and would have most likely not approved.

My years in Los Angeles were among the most creative and outwardly social of my life. I ended up on two complete U.S. tours as Bleak End at Bernie’s and in a short lived band called Dealbreaker but I was also hitting a festival circuit where I explored the theatrical. The solo musicals Castle Freak and Diving God and an Industrial setting of the major soliloquies from Hamlet I called The Chameleon’s Dish. I was happy to be in a good place to harness the creative energy which I believe to have originated from within my fundamental biological drive for partnership.

I came from what would be called an “intact household” which only means that my parents were married and remained so their entire lives. While I don’t idealize this arrangement or disparage other ones in my parents’ case it did seem to be the correct one. The only reason that I mention this is that it most likely played a role in the formation of my romantic perspectives on relationships. I had always dreamed of being married when I was older and in my earliest crushes I would fantasize about the names and personalities of mine and my crush-object’s future children.

I strongly believe in the serial monogamy model for adult romantic relationships and mostly had either closure or civil associations with my previous partners. There was an experience at the end of 2009 that I will get into in other pieces that had left me feeling vulnerable until some time in 2012. I had had a frustrating two years for relationships and it was beginning to erode certain aspects of how I saw myself. There was a woman who I knew socially and was attracted to but hadn’t necessarily thought about in that particular context. One night a show was ending near her home and she asked me:

“Do you have any diseases? I feel like having sex.”

While I’m not opposed to casual sexual interactions the crassness of the proposal and the other things I was experiencing left me feeling wounded. I talked to her about it soon afterwards and she told me that she was acting out of an impression of what men generally find exciting and desirable. She wasn’t expecting me to respond emotionally and in a way that seemed more feminine. We decided to try things afterwards because there was still mutual attraction and it seemed that we better understood each other.

I appreciated that she wore really nice lingerie for the encounter but we ended up not being compatible in that fashion. Touch did not convey intimacy between us but rather left us feeling isolated. She said that when I touched her she “felt like a canyon” – my experience was similar although I wouldn’t have phrased it in the exact same way.

All of this led to me decamping to The Temple of Mars in early 2012 when Venus was bright in the evening sky to perform the most intentional ceremony of my Magical career. I prayed to the planet Venus in the East and toward each of the other Cardinal Directions to manifest stable partnership for the rest of my life.

I carried a Library of Congress Tape Recorder for the Blind everywhere I went so I could listen to music on it’s rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery while I was riding my bicycle. The other elements of the ritual consisted of playing the version of Prologue/Anvil of Crom from the 1982 Conan the Barbarian soundtrack with the spoken monologue and using a cube of camphor to light a knife on fire and hold it aloft as an offering to the heavens…

By the end of the year the tape player had offered itself up as a sacrifice when a car hit me from behind on my bicycle and I was with the woman I have been essentially married to for the last ten years and plan to spend the remainder of my days with.

It is of course debatable as to whether or not the two things are directly related. The secret of every Rainmaker and Weather Magician is that sooner or later it always rains. Questions of Belief and Faith have never been particularly important to me in terms of Spirituality. We shape our world and are shaped by it and nothing happens differently than the way it did in this best of all possible worlds…

When I lived in Chicago I used to go to services at the Christian Science Reading Room because of the way the futuristic building had been designed to amplify the pipe organ. From the outside it looks like an inverted speaker cone and features a small cactus garden. The first time I went to a service the Speaker read some writings by Mary Baker Eddy on the definition of the term “Spirit” in the context of that religion.

On that particular day the words spoke to me but it has been difficult in the interim to relocate the exact passage. Ultimately it was an attempt to use words to create a rough approximation of something that is fundamentally indescribable, much like the familiar story of several blind men describing an elephant. I don’t think it was about the particular words so much as that Spirit was something I felt the Presence of that day.

In my own life these moments are rare and therefore extremely valuable to me. I spent a little over a year as a practicing Catholic but I don’t think that was so much about the power of Spirit as it was about the power of Ritual. There is no way to really know when or if I will have the opportunity to feel the Grace and Presence of Spirit in the future.

I’ve written this last sentence and erased it five or six times now and I think I have to accept that nothing will sound right here.

I can’t describe that kind of state when I’m not in it and if I were in it I probably wouldn’t be able to put it into words.

I’m just going to stop here.

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/