KILLED STONE DEAD

I don’t really know how I feel about this BBC news story sent by Valerie. Brian always seemed to have kind of a death wish, and maybe he should just be left to rest in peace. On the other hand the power of prurience is hard to resist …

“The death of former Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones is to be reviewed following new evidence, it has been revealed. Police in Sussex were handed new information connected to the musician's untimely death 40 years ago. Mr Jones, was found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool at a house in Cotchford farm, Hartfield, East Sussex. An inquest recorded a verdict of death by misadventure but speculation continued that he was murdered. A spokesman for Sussex Police said the force had been handed documents connected with Jones's death, prompting the review. But he added it was too early to launch a fresh investigation. He added: "These papers will be examined by Sussex Police, but it is too early to comment at this time as to what the outcome will be."

The cops do not say if this is another go-round of building contractor Frank Thorogood’s 1993 deathbed confession to Brian’s minder Tom Keylock, (also a key figure at Phun City) that was the basis of Terry Rawlings book Who Killed Christopher Robin? and the movie Stoned. Thorogood is reported to have told Keylock “It was me that did Brian. I just finally snapped.”

A somewhat ugly comment in the online edition of Rolling Stone, however, takes a far more sinister tack...

“This is news to me. i feel as if I’ve stepped into a 1969 time warp. Really, did you say! Murdered, did you say!I’ve believed Keith opted for a murder for hire. I’ve read other stories that Richards had people he didn’t like killed.”

WHILE ON THE SUBJECT OF DEATHBED CONFESSIONS, THOUGH…

...I would find a supreme satisfaction and consummate theory closure if the shooter on the Grassy Knoll decided to confess all at the moment of his or her death.

The secret word is Triangulation

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Euripides and Downie Frozdick had taken fetish to what some considered an absurd extreme.

UNSUSTAINABLE

(Click the pic to see a larger version.)

It’s very easy for the mind to boggle right now. I turn on the TV and find that the LA fires are moving in on Pasadena and Glendale, and a fine layer of ash covers parked cars, plus a hurricane is coming up the Baja where hurricanes aren’t supposed to be. I switch channels and some zombie-Republican asshole in her Sarah Palin glasses is warning me that the environmentalists have to be stopped before they destroy the country. An email comes from my friend Diva warning me that if Mt Wilson burns, large areas won’t have broadcast TV at all. Another news story is that the appliance corp Whirlpool is shipping a shitload of jobs to Mexico.
Hold it!
I’m in overload.
The evidence is the stench of burning in the air. Capitalism is simply not sustainable. It’s no longer a matter of manufacture, sell, and consume. It’s became an arithmetic abstraction. It’s a numerical narcissism the drives corporate executives to strive for annual bonuses worth more than they could spend in a couple of lifetimes.
Chris Hedges – of whom I’m becoming quite a fan – has a rant on this theme on Truthdig

“Globalization and unfettered capitalism have been swept into the history books along with the open-market theory of the 1920s, the experiments of fascism, communism and the New Deal. It is time for a new economic and political paradigm. It is time for a new language to address our reality.” Click here for the rest.

It has long been my contention that the only real counter to corporate globalism is by international alliances of workers, artists, and activists. We all breath the same air, drink the same water, are warmed and cooled by the same planetary thermo-dynamics, and are poisoned by the same pesticides and growth hormones. Confirmation of how important this is comes from Mother and Doctor, our pals in Bangalore, India. See the item below for what they are doing.

The secret word is United

VOICES OF THE WATERS

This arrived this morning…

Chairman Mick -- It's been a busy, busy time in Bangalore and we've been tossed around trying to get together an environmental film festival in the backdrop of the goddamn recession. Fuck the corporates, fuck 'em where it hurts the most. In the end it was the city and its good people who came together from the brink of oblivion we return full-fledged, groovy and green. Chairman Mick we seek your blessings for the festival. --
Mother & Doctor

I'm really not too accustomed to giving blessings, but here they are along with all the dope on the festival.

"Bangalore Film Society in association with Alliance Francaise de Bangalore, Svaraj, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Ithaca College, USA (FLEFF), Charter of Human Responsibilities, Karnataka Chalanachitra Academy, Suchitra Film Society, Federation of film societies of India (Southern Region) and YWCA is proud to present the fourth edition of Bangalore’s biggest environmental Film Festival and the biggest water film festival in the world- Voices from the Waters 2009: 4th International Water Film Festival from the 4th to the 6th September 2009.

"From neighborhood ponds to the holy rivers to the oceans- the images of the acclaimed, feted and riveting films from across the globe will take you on a journey through time, place, memories and civilizations in an attempt to rediscover and celebrate water as the source and origin of our lives. We welcome you to add color and noise to the texture of the festival. Without you it’ll just be another screening of films but it is only with you that it will be what it was always intended to be- ‘a festival’"

Click here for more information

SPACE OPERA

THE VAMPIRE COMPLAINT

“The old neighborhood sure has changed.”

I am very behind with my mail and there are a lot of good friends I should have emailed and haven’t. Much of this neglected mail has been about The Renquist Quartet, my foray into gothic vampire fiction, and how I felt about such a set of highly cinematographic books not being a movie or TV series in this time of so much vampire action in mainstream entertainment.
A couple of weeks ago HCB wrote “I was wondering how you might get your Vamp books revisited in this feeding frenzy.” Around the same time, our pal Peromyscus went even further. “How come you, a man who writes about vampires, is without a book contract in 2009, the year of the vampire? At panels at the Worldcon in 2007, the editors said that vampire-mania had peaked. It appears not. These fads are weird, though. When I was a kid it was all westerns and World War II. Being a kid, I thought that all films and novels had always been westerns and World War II. Now kids must be growing up thinking there are only two kinds of books - ones about young wizards and ones about vampires.”
The answer has to be, of course, that I am not at all overjoyed by the situation, but I’ve been doing this kind of thing long enough to be well aware that sitting around, resentfully fretting about how one isn’t rich and famous after all these years is a short road to madness. The current vampire genre covers a multitude of nosferatu stylings, but far too many are either romance novels with fangs or teen fodder that owes everything to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. This appears to be what sells, and needless to say, I went for something completely different.
In fact, I hurled myself into the four Renquist novels with an inhuman glee, loving the central character and making them a vehicle for exploring a fun spectrum of 20th century folklore that included voodoo houngans, Lovecraftian ancients, Paleolithic alien colonists, Lizard men, Nazi flying saucers, the intelligence community, the hollow Earth, drunken Scotsmen, Marlon Brando, a whole new take on Merlin, and all from the vampires point of view. A pinch of sado-masochism, a new, well researched location for each book, and I figured if folks enjoyed reading the stuff as much as I enjoyed writing it, I had me a winner – even a franchise. I even broke the demarcation between science and magic, espousing the doctrine that magic was only science we had yet to understand. Unfortunately, in so doing, I also broke the arbitrary, publishing house distinction between fantasy and science fiction and this may have been an error.
Maybe I read too much Burroughs and Dick in my formative years, but the publishers started to mutter about how the Renquist books lacked needed teen appeal. I, of course, ignored them. (Teen appeal? Get the fuck outta here.) I preferred to believe the whining was corporate ass-covering of the total lack of promotion and the unholy clusterfuck that had given the books such disastrously lame covers. When I mention the complaint in passing, however, our buddy Faux Smoke responded. “I still think that was some of the stupidest shit I've heard since Bush was still giving speeches... I can hardly believe somebody had the gall to said some bullshit like that to you, if you hadn't wrote it I wouldn't have even entertained the notion.”
I totally agree with him, but it doesn’t change the fact that Johnny Depp isn’t playing Victor in some movie opening Christmas 2009. The Renquist material has been optioned more than once for the screen, but nobody had the juice to get a green-light. (And don’t even mention the studio execs and directors who think it cute to refuse to actually read books.) On the bright side, I have at least been spared the fate of poor old Alan Moore who had to see his brilliant The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen carved to drek in Hollywood. And who knows, maybe I’ll end up the like the revered Philip K. and become rich and famous in the movies a couple of decades after I’m dead.
I hope this does something to clarify matters. (I think I’m allowed to piss and moan every now and then.)

Someone – not me – has created a Wikipedia page for Victor Renquist (Click here)

The secret word is Phlegmatic

THE LAST WORD BELONGS TO HARVEY KURTZMAN

DRY SEASON

Sunday afternoon and LA is doing August – 100F+ and fires in the suburbs. I can only fight it with poetry. This poem is not new. I wrote it in 1997 on a day much like this. It was orchestrated by Andy Colquhoun and released as part of the Deviants’ CD, Dr Crow. It will also appear in my up coming collection of poetry and short writing titled Zone Of Chaos, but more about that in approximately two weeks.

A LONG DRY SEASON

It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains
By the third week, normal sleep had all but become impossible
And, by the fourth, the river was no more than
A sluggish trickle between baking flats of moonscape mud
Dry coughing in dust storms raised by exhausted, brick oven winds
And as the TV gave up the pretense that anything was any more right in the world
Locust cowboys and coyote warriors moved in from the hills
Desperate for a drink
Looking to slake throats of parched and cracked, tooled and studded leather
With the unholy rotgut mescal of the worm
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains

Domestic dogs organized in packs
Feeling no longer beholden to their former masters
While green death and pallid yellow aurora arced at night
Over lovers locked and loaded
With the madness of disease taken in substitute for passion
And that would ultimately end in gunfire heard for miles
As sound that carried to infinity in the alkaline air
Across the flatlands and desiccated towns
Like Gene Autry singing someplace out beyond the Gates of Eden
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains

High wynding howling of evaporated destiny and melted insulation
Under stars without mercy or even interest
While white foam fungoid puffballs drifted from a perpetually cloudless sky
Like snowballs from hell in the red desert Martian heated quiet
Fragmenting as they struck the hard parched earth
Powering to a diaphanous dust that crept and clung
To the electromagnetic static of relentless commercial appliances
Now wholly unwatched by women with blank purple eyes
And yucca flowers in their hair
Who murmured in dreams of reflecting pools and crystal fountains
And men who searched for the impossibility
Of a cool place on the pillow
To the constant drone of a mosquito fan
Only to find themselves thirst transfixed by the Doombeam
In the hands of an apparition of Captain America
It was a long dry season and we prayed to make it to the rains

ALL AROUND MY BRAIN

Yes neighbours, capitalist absurdity knows no bounds. The energy drink audiciously called “Cocaine” was pulled from U.S. shelves two years ago as a result of the FDA's decision that "Cocaine" was "was illegally marketing the drink as both a street drug alternative and a dietary supplement". Since 2007, Cocaine has been on and off sale, a popular campus joke artifact, and now something silmilar is being distributed in the UK. According to the London tabloid The Sun…

“AN energy drink called "Simply Cocaine" was blasted by anti-drug campaigners yesterday. The drink, with a cartoon character called "Charlie" on the bottle, has double the caffeine content of Red Bull. Excess caffeine drinks can trigger heart problems. But Martin Barnes, of the charity DrugScope, is angry over the name. He said: "This is an intentionally provocative and cynical marketing stunt. Making light of an illegal drug that causes harm isn't smart." A company spokesman said: "Our product is 100 per cent legal, which is more than can be said for some of our MPs."

The secret words are The Real Thing

Your soul is now captured.

SPACE OPERA

The last word on Dejah Thoris before we shelve the subject because somehow an arid Martian, two-moon landscape seems to fit with the mood and the climate.