video test

This is the first video I have put together with the Harinezumi 2. The music is some stuff I was working on a few months back...

Death's Wives

Mr. Isaac Newton Death was preceded in his actual death by three young wives.

The photographer, high nocturnal style on flickr, has some of the coolest olde-Americana shots I've seen. Looking through his photostream is something I can highly recommend.

Snow Day

Horse Dick

Corey and I have a noise/improv band, and it's called Horse Dick.

We're playing upstairs at the Ottobar in Baltimore on Sunday, Dec 27th with The New Flesh and Microkingdom. Music starts at around 11, and we will occupy the middle slot.

Please come. It's free.

Death and Time

The bald, beefy moderator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in darkness. “It is my revolting pleasure,” he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, “to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who will present his paper ‘The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.’ ”

And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”

From the New York Times, Dec 14th (Continue reading)

6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World

Check this out. No, the guy isn't approaching the subject with a Terence McKenna-style hallucinogenic mushroom angle...it's more of an ecological bent. All in all, the presentation is pretty mind-blowing. One gets the sense that his mouth can scarcely keep up with the ideas flowing out of his head. After I saw it, I immediately got the thought- "how funny would that be if Zach Galifinakis did a parody sketch?". I could imagine him losing his temper and flipping out like he did in the Absolut Vodka ad that he starred in with Tim and Eric...
Anyway, you can see it here.

Sonny Sharrock- Ask The Ages (1991)

This record rules, and I'd never actually heard it until a month or so ago. The lineup is Sonny Sharrock- guitar, Pharaoh Sanders- tenor and soprano saxophones, Elvin Jones- drums, and Charnett Moffett- bass.
Produced by Bill Laswell and Sonny Sharrock, this is the last record of his to be released before his death in 1994.

Tonight I saw "Collapse"

I went down to AFI in Silver Spring to see this movie with a good buddy of mine. Such an awesome film...I found to be tremendously effective at getting its point across, on so many levels. I won't get into a detailed review here- I'll leave that to people who are much more equipped to handle this sort of thing, like for example Roger Ebert.
I will say this, though- I came away from it very impressed with how concise and well-articulated Michael Ruppert's arguments are. The clarity and conviction with which he spoke, along with Chris Smith's directorial and editorial talents, brought a sense of drama and immediacy to the film that were so potent I found myself completely enthralled throughout the course of it.
Aside from all that, though, I got a real sense of warmth from the film that is noticeably absent from other documentaries that have touched on themes such as resource depletion and a critically flawed monetary system, such as Zeitgeist. Collapse is a human story. It's a story about a guy who, like myself, is self-employed and lives alone with his dog, struggling to make rent every month without abandoning his principles and selling out...
After a quick post-screening q&a session, Ruppert was out in the lobby, signing books and talking to people. I spoke with him briefly, introduced myself, and shook his hand. That felt really good- to meet this dude whose work I'd been following for a few years now and who'd turned me on to a whole different way of looking at the world.
What a guy. I hope this movie will not only allow him a certain amount of personal success, but to get his message out to as many people as possible- showing them not only what to look for, but how to look.

Hypothetical Band Name of the Day

The Cruelty's

The Jesus Lizard- Sonar, 11/20

Last night I went to Sonar in Baltimore to see the Jesus Lizard. Those guys still have it- over 10 years after I'd last seen them, and they're still one of the best rock bands on the planet. They played for nearly 90 minutes, and David Yow was in the audience crowd-surfing a good half of the time.
There were, however, these caveats-
(a)Tickets were $22.
(b)Shirts were $25. Since I paid full price at the door, there was no way I was gonna buy one. I don't usually wear band shirts anyway.
(c)The sound was shite. I couldn't hear a lot of the bass licks that, to me, define certain songs. Like that awesome riff in "Fly on the Wall", for example. At one point Duane Dennison went for a solo and I couldn't make out what he was doing at all, just saw his fingers moving.
(d)After the show I got back to my car and found a $205 ticket on my windshield. Apparently I had parked in a handicapped space. I think I might actually have to go to court for that one- hopefully they'll believe my "I just didn't know" excuse, because really, I just didn't know.

Pekzemed

I woke up today with the word "Pekzemed" in my head. Saw it spelled out like that. What the fuck is it? Google found nothing.

Carl Jung's Red Book

 Last week, the New York Times published this article about the upcoming release of Carl Jung's Red Book, a journal he kept to document a series of experiences in which the contents of his unconscious were made visible to him, in a manner seemingly not terribly unlike the visionary episode(s)  that preceded Phillip K Dick's Valis trilogy. It may be interesting to note here that Phillip K Dick "made no secret that much of his ideas and work were heavily influenced by the writings of Carl Jung", according to Wikipedia.

Dragon Dreaming

I just stumbled on this tonight...seems interesting. As far as the name of this blog is concerned, while it does technically refer to a cavalry regiment in the present-day British Army, it's a term that's been used generally to refer to different types and nationalities of cavalries throughout recent history, and "dragoon" itself means "dragon" in French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
I was personally first made aware of the term while taking some Belgian friends of mine to Fort McHenry in Baltimore and liked the way the term looked/sounded, so I thought I'd use it for the title of this blog.

Anyway, back to Dragon Dreaming- this guy John Croft is into some Aboriginal/Jungian/Pre-and-Post-Industrial collapse kinds of ideas. You can look at powerpoint models of his concepts here.

They have nothing to do with the Australian festival of the same name, by the way.

Mark My Words...

This movie is going to be a big deal.

Corolla, NC- 6 am on 9/15