Nik presents … John Fahey Day *

* (restored)

 

INFLUENTIAL AMERICAN artists are often cranks recalcitrant, inscrutable, possessors of a nearly untenable vision. When John Fahey’s recordings of syncopated, finger-style guitar compositions, redolent of old blues, rags and hymns, began appearing in the early 1960’s, he was taken to be an acoustic blues revivalist or a coffeehouse folkie. An early LP cover even confirms the typing a bit, showing him in an honest-looking herringbone jacket and desert boots. But an arrogant look in his eyes seem to dare you to figure him out.

His old fans barely recognized the odd creature on stage one recent evening at the Empty Bottle, a rock club near downtown. At 57, Mr. Fahey is puffy, and his white beard and sunglasses hide his face. He finished a blues dirge by simply coming to a stop and shrugging. His new fans are used to being puzzled; this was a young, intellectual audience who knew that Soundgarden was playing in an arena across town but were too hip for that. It is Mr. Fahey’s moment as he rides back into view as an avant-garde father figure, whom the guitarist Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth has acknowledged as a ”secret influence.”

Mr. Fahey’s music is conceptually slippery: it belongs to no genre. Musicians within folk, neo-acoustic blues, New Age and now, strangely enough, post-everything avant-garde rock have claimed him as an inspiration. A couple of articles by the rock critic Byron Coley — a 1994 Spin magazine profile and an entry on Mr. Fahey’s work in the recent Spin Alternative Record Guide — sparked new interest. Mr. Fahey began getting calls from record companies and musicians, and now he finds himself, to his amusement, the object of much attention.

John Fahey, the son of a United States Public Health Service employee who divorced his mother, grew up desperately unhappy and glued to the radio in Takoma Park, Md. In 1954, he heard Bill Monroe’s version of Jimmie Rodgers’s ”Blue Yodel No. 7.” That experience changed him, as did his first exposure to Blind Willie Johnson’s ”Praise God I’m Satisfied,” which, he has said, made him weep. He soon became a record collector and dedicated himself to playing guitar. Using money he earned pumping gas, he made his first recording in 1959 and had 95 copies of it pressed; one side of the plain white sleeve read ”John Fahey” and the other, ”Blind Joe Death,” an invented blues singer about whom Mr. Fahey devised an entire mythology. That started his career at Takoma Records, his own label, which he ran until the mid-1970’s, when he sold it to Chrysalis.

His old albums, like ”Requia” and ”Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes” are dense with eccentricity; for a piece called ”The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tenn.,” he stood under a bridge, recording the sounds of cars passing overhead. The records featured liner notes with track-by-track musicological analyses and surreal stories about the meaning of the music. They were signed with names like Chester Petranick (the name of a music teacher from Mr. Fahey’s childhood) and Elijah P. Lovejoy; it was all Mr. Fahey.

He did spawn a line of finger-style acoustic guitar composers, one of whom, Leo Kottke, has been much more successful than Mr. Fahey. But he did not join the acoustic blues revival by copying the old styles as other young white musicians did in the early 60’s. (Mr. Fahey hears grief and despair in his own music as opposed to what he perceives as humor and anger in the blues.) He wasn’t a hippie; he calls Jerry Garcia a ”psychic vampire” and never took LSD, he says.

But hippies were his audience in the 60’s and 70’s, and he denied them the groovy time they wanted. ”He was the only artist I ever worked with whose sales went down after he made public appearances,” remembers the blues historian and producer Samuel Charters, who worked with Fahey on two records in the mid-60’s. ”Most people assumed he was a ‘head.’ What they didn’t understand was that John was a drunk. So there would always be this stunned moment when they would look at John sitting up on stage with a quart of Coca-Cola and a bottle of whisky.”

-New York Times

 

 

Interview by Jason Gross (October 1997):

PSF: The last few CD’s that you’ve done have been a real departure from your earlier work. How do you see this?

I’ve done stuff like that a long time ago in ’64, ’65. I did sound effects and collages on a few records. Most people didn’t like it, so I didn’t do it again for a long time, until recently. Then the next time out, there was this new music scene going on. I didn’t know anything about it. Then suddenly, BANG, I found out about it. And I’ve been experimenting privately for years and years and years. So, it’s nothing new to me. It’s working out pretty good. A few of the old fans want me to play stuff that’s thirty, forty years old. I just tell ’em to go to hell. I’m picking up more of an audience from younger people who have an open mind, who are more into experimentalism. I don’t want to live in the past.

PSF: What were you listening to that gave you encouragement to do this?

Cluster, Bang on a Can, Sonic Youth. Some of the classical people like Stockhausen. Jim O’Rourke was doing was really crazy stuff. Loren Mazzacane Connors, who’s a good friend of mine.

PSF: What did you find appealing about this?

It’s more fun. You don’t have to stay in such a rigid structure. You can branch out and experiment and have more fun. Sometimes it works real well and sometimes it doesn’t. Now people respect you than they ever did before for experimentalism, even if it doesn’t work that well. There are more record companies, more distributors than there ever have been.

PSF: Looking at your whole career, how do you judge this part of it now?

As far as I’m concerned, this is the apex of my career. I’m really tired of the old stuff. I was getting sick of it. I didn’t know I could get away with anything else (laughs).

PSF: In some of your recent writing, you were saying how you felt you had more in common with the punk and alternative crowd than with the hippies and the folk crowd.

Yeah. I never thought I had anything in common with them. I didn’t like them. I was never a hippie. They picked up on my music and they thought I was one of them. They thought I shared their value system and I took LSD and so forth. They just didn’t understand me. But they bought my records and I had to play for them. Secretly, I always hated them. Now you can see what they’re really like. I always knew that they were control freaks. Like that chick, they want to control everything, control me- they don’t want anybody to be free. This new group is all for freedom. That’s one hell of an improvement. With the alternative people, there are some social do’s and don’t’s. But in comparison, it shows that the hippie movement was always quite rigid even though it was always talking about freedom. It was phony.

PSF: Some people found that there was some kind of spiritual element to your work. Do you think that’s accurate?

That was a misconception that people were reading into it. I really don’t understand that. I wonder what they’re talking about. I don’t know what YOU’RE talking about, no offense.

PSF: Where do you get inspiration for your work?

Oh, I sit down, improvise and try to open up the unconscious. As soon as the unconscious opens up, something’ll happen. I’ve done this for a while now. It takes a certain amount of planning once you get to the recording stage, if you’re going to do duets and collages and so forth. Even then, if you’re unconscious is about to come out of there, it’s interesting. Some guitar players don’t pay attention to how they feel so it sounds phony. If you’re seperated from your feelings then it’s not very interesting.

PSF: You studied German philosophy a while ago. Did that have any bearing on your work?

I took the wrong fork. I should have gone into psychotherapy. I did do that for about 10 years (1970 – 1980) and that’s what I was really trying to learn about. I just went to the wrong place (laughs).

PSF: So you think that it helped you a lot?

Oh yeah. It saved my life.

PSF: What do you think about the work of some of the people you’ve worked with before like Leo Kottke and George Winston?

I’m not really interested in what Kottke is doing. I don’t even know what he’s doing. George is a good friend of mine. I don’t know what he’s doing though. I see that there’s kind of a culture war going between polite middle class people who listen to and like that light woe-begotten stuff and then there’s alterative people. Kottke hasn’t come out to that yet. George probably knows about it. He’s more of a rebellious type. When he was in high school, he and his friends decided that they wanted to destroy a talk show in Florida. They recorded about 90 minutes of lunatic phone calls that they made and they’re funny as hell. Even though George plays nice, passive dinner music on stage, backstage he’s really good. He plays really good guitar too. There is a lot of rebellion in him- he just doesn’t show it onstage.

PSF: Could you talk about the Takoma label? You started that yourself, right?

Yeah, I did. The reason that I got rid of it was almost everybody in the office started taking cocaine and I couldn’t get rid of it. We weren’t losing money or anything. We were still selling records. I made the terrible mistake of giving stock to the employees so I couldn’t fire them. The only thing I could do was to dissolve the company. While I was doing that, Chrysalis offered to buy it and I said ‘sure, take it.’

PSF: What was your original idea behind the company?

It was to record people like myself and alternative people and blues and ethnic stuff.

PSF: I’ve heard that you used to go record collecting door-to-door. You still do that?

(laughs) No, not anymore. Record stores are very useful. Everyone has yard sales now too.

PSF: When you first started out with music, you were really unique with what you were doing. No band, no lyrics, just solo guitar. How did you decide on that?

I tried to sing but I’m a terrible singer. So, I wrote guitar songs.

PSF: What were you listening to then?

I was listening to a lot of Bartok and Shostakovich and bluegrass of the time. Harry Smith stuff and other similar records. I tried to syncretize all that into one guitar style and I think I succeeded pretty well.

 

His Songs:

if fahey knew anything it was how to fucking own your little brain with his guitar. – guiltyalexis

On the Banks of the Owchita

 

On the Sunny Side of the Ocean

 

Bean Vine Blues

 

Composed by Fahey in late 1962 or early 1963 after driving from Albuquerque to Berkeley. Fahey was impressed by the contrast between this enormous edifice, the smoke which poured from it and the surrounding green hillsides. Upon arriving in Berkeley he took a bath, had Pat over for dinner and composed it in her presence later in the evening. – “Days Have Gone By” Liner Notes

The Portland Cement Factory

 

Night Train to Valhalla

 

The keen-eyed cineaste will be intrigued to note that the green-tinted cover of this album is plainly visible in a record shop window seen in the notorious movie “A Clockwork Orange” by the late Stanley Kubrick. Whether personally selected by Kubrick, whose eye for detail was well documented, must remain a matter of conjecture. – johnfahey.com

I Am The Resurrection

 

Red Pony

 

Sail Away Ladies

 

The Yellow Princess

 

The late 60s dragged its feet towards the 70s, like it was reluctant to grow up. John Fahey was busy as ever. In 1969 he married Jan Lenbow, his first wife. She was far more excited than her new husband when Italian arthouse director Michelangelo Antonioni flew him to Rome to compose the soundtrack for his anti-American hippy movie Zabriskie Point — and she was more upset than Fahey when it ended with the American composer and the anti-American film maker aiming to punch each other out. – The Wire

Dance of Death

 

Dvorak

 

America

 

Sunflower River Blues

 

The set closes with one of his truly magical works, “Dry Bones in the Valley (I Saw the Light Coming Shining ‘Round and ‘Round)”, which was a gateway for many through the cover version exacted with Tony Conrad on Gastr del Sol’s Upgrade and Afterlife set. The effects are off, the session musicians sent home, and it’s a beatific example of Fahey’s opened steel strings resonating into the infinite, droning yet with numerous emotional contours unfurling in the chiming notes. – Pitchfork

Dry Bones In The Valley (I Saw The Light Come Shining ‘Round and ‘Round)

 

“I remember the first time I ever heard him, I thought they’d turned the record from 45 to 33 or something, ’cause I couldn’t believe how slow he played.” – Chris Darrow, session musician

Song

 

 

His Epics:

Out of all the songs I ever wrote, I consider only two of them ‘epic’ or ‘classic’ or in the ‘great’ category and they are both on this record. It’s taken me more than five years to complete these – John Fahey

Voice of Turtle

 

Mark 1:15, for the curious, reads: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye, and believe the gospel.” This verse is considered by theologians to be the irreducible essence of the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth.” – John Fahey

Mark 1:15

 

“Fare Forward Voyagers” is dedicated to a swami/guru dude of Fahey’s and in a 1994 interview, the maestro had this to say: “Probably the primary reason I got involved with [Yogaville West] was that I fell in love with Swami Satchidananda’s secretary Shanti Norris. So I was doing benefits for them, hoping to score points with her, and along the way I learned a lot of hatha yoga.” – Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches

Fare Forward Voyagers

 

When The Fire and the Rose are One

 

Edited together from several pieces, the 19-minute “The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party” anticipated elements of psychedelia with its nervy improvisations and odd guitar tunings.” Fahey himself called it “a histrionic, disorganised outpouring of blather”[2] although he had kind things to say of some of the other songs. Unterberger also states “Despite Fahey’s curmudgeonly dismissal of the record several decades later, it’s an important, if uneven, effort that ultimately endures as one of the highlights of his discography. – Allmusic

The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party

 

Q: What is the City of Refuge?
JF: It was a place my parents took me to when I was a child. It was along the Atlantic Ocean somewhere, and we ran out of food and water and we went into this mysterious city. It was just so weird. There were no people, but there was a big factory. I had a recurrent dream about it that my parents had planned to take me to the city to chop me up and consume me. But the factory communicated with me and warned me what they were planning, and me and the factory consumed my parents instead.

City of Refuge

 

 

His Orchestra:

Although Fahey had very occasionally recorded with other musicians during the previous decade, this marked his first album to feature accompanists — no less than seven altogether — on much of the material. Too, it was his first venture into major-labeldom, as the first of a pair of LPs he did for Reprise. Any suspicions of sellout were dispelled by the result, which expanded his sound while retaining the languid, dark, and mysterious moods he had explored on his numerous prior acoustic solo guitar releases. – “Of Rivers and Religion” Liner Notes

Dixie Pig Bar B-Q Blues

 

Om Shanti Norris

 

Lord Have Mercy

 

March! For Martin Luther King

 

Old Fashioned Love

 

 

Christmas Tunes:

“Well, the arrangements are pretty good, but on the other hand there are more mistakes on this album than on any of the other 17 albums I’ve recorded. And yet, here’s the paradox… this album has not only sold more than any of my others, I meet people all the time who are crazy about it. I mean really love it. What can I say. I’m confused.” – John Fahey

Medley: Hark, The Herald Angels Sing / O Come All Ye Faithful (Instrumental)

 

Christmas Carol

 

Yes! Jesus Loves Me

 

Joy to the World

 

 

His Experiments:

A Raga Called Pat Pt. IV

 

“The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee” is a musical collage done with the collaboration of Barry Hansen. The two had worked on sound collages on Fahey’s prior Vanguard release, Requia.[ Fahey commented that “I didn’t know how to mix things on tape recorders and make edits. Barry was more knowledgeable and intelligent than me.”[ The recording utilizes a two-minute section from a recording of “Quill Blues” by Big Boy Cleveland. – Wikipedia

The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee

 

Sharks

 

Our Puppet Selves

 

Red Cross Disciple of Christ Today

 

 

Bonus:

Live 1969

 

Live 1978

 

Live 1981

 

Live 1997

 

Fahey Singing

 

Joe Bussard on recording John Fahey in 1958

 

70’s Interview

 

80’s Interview

 

Dance of Death Book Review

 

IN SEARCH OF BLIND JOE DEATH: THE SAGA OF JOHN FAHEY Trailer

 

 

Fiction:

How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life Paperback
– April 15, 2000

A collection of fictional but semi-autobiographical stories, this work comes from one of the most influential guitarists in music history. The tales are recalled in a conversational, feverish tone, following the musician in his childhood and young adulthood in post-World War II suburbia, pausing along the way for moments of clarity and introspection. The stories resist categorization—part memoir, part personal essay, part fiction, and part manifesto they simply stand alone, having their own logic, religious dogma, and mythological history.

 

Excerpt:

One day in 1954 or 55 I was listening to the radio station WARL, Arlington, VA.
This station blanketed Washington D.C., and suburban MD and VA.
Now it has different call letters.
When I first started listening to this station there was an afternoon show called Town and Country Time. The DJ played country-western records. Emphasis on western and electric.
Eddy Arnold, Webb Pierce.
People like that. No bluegrass. None.
I was still innocent. I didn’t know about bluegrass music.
Yet.
I liked Webb Pierce a lot.
And Hank Snow.
I was still reasonably happy.
Even though I was unhappy.
I hadn’t heard any bluegrass music yet.
I was loved. I had friends. I was one of the crowd.
All of us united all day long. When we weren’t separated by artificial things like school.
That sorta’ stuff.
We were all terribly lonely. And we were all excessively social. We were aggressively social.
We were compulsively social.
Yes.
There was nothing we could do about it.
Divorces, mainly divorces.
But some of our parents were criminals. They got locked up sometimes and we didn’t see them for a long time.
Didn’t have anybody to counsel us. To understand us. To commiserate with us. To give advice to
— HELP
us.
Some parents were sick or out of work. Things like that.
But mostly divorces.
Yes.
When we got together— us kids — we were all in our ‘teens — when we got together and managed to get away from the adults, what we did was, we got together and talked about the hillbilly hit parade we heard on WARL.
Some of us sang and played on guitars.
Anyway, radio station WARL and that show were very important to us. It is hard now, for me to believe just how important that show really was to us.
You see, next to each other, WARL was the only thing we had that kept us from going nuts from loneliness and pain cause by our
— PARENTS.
Or step-parents or relatives or whatever they were.
There was a lot of incest going on.
Know what I mean?
All of us were severely unhappy because of lack of attention and love from our elders.
I mean, you know, you call sex with them love???????
I’m not joking. My parents were in the early stages of this long-suffering disease.
I mean divorce.
Not incest.
We all knew about that.
That was tolerable as long as you didn’t talk.
But divorce?
That was much worse.
Much.
I felt lousy all the time.
So, you might say that me and the other kids were “thrown” together. (Heidegger.)
WE all needed each other. And a connecting link.
WARL was that connection.
Glue.
That’s how important it was.
I’m perfectly serious.
And you could say that the reason we took the music and the personas so seriously — the reason why we discussed the virtues of this or that record was to feel something good. Rather than despair we felt as a result of
the stupid and reckless activities of Mom and Dad. The lack of attention they paid to us.
WARL helped us escape the terrible sad we all felt.
Yes, that’s how it was.
Pretty bad, all things considered.

***

Anyway, one day the format changed.
WARL hired a new guy named Don Owens. AND the programming changed.
On the morning show we now heard country music.
Yes.
That’s what they called it back then.
Prior to the advent of Don Owens, the morning show DJ played white, popular music.
And white, popular music was running out of steam. It was dying and taking a very long slow time to expire.
In the 40’s popular music was great. But it ran out of life.
In the early 50’s
It was inane and insipid.
Ridiculous
— BIPPITY BOPPITY BOO
Know what I mean?
Cute.
—Kitsch.
— Krap.
Worse, even, than “easy listening music.”
And even now, a lot of people don’t understand why punk and industrial and noise and alternative and noise and grunge and Sonic Youth and Throbbing Gristle and the German Shepherds and ———
Sorry. I got carried away.
You know.
Anyway, WARL wasn’t the only station that changed. WGAY changed. WTOP changed.
WWDC changed.
WRL changed. WOL changed. WMAL changed. WDON changed.
WQQQ changed its call letters to WGMS. Ha.
Washington’s Good Music Station.
Good music.
Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Rimskey Korsakoff, Ipolatoff-Ivanoff, Khataturian, Gliere, Glazonoff, Kalinikoff, Tchaikovsky, Rachminoff, Mussorgsky, Kabalevsky, Borodin, Qui, Scriaben, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky.
And on and on and on and on and on and on and on ——.
Russians. All Russians.
The radio station was Communist.
Everybody knew it.
What the hell could you do?
All these stations started playing rock and roll music by black people.
WE didn’t know that they were black.
No joke.
We assumed that these guys were white. Crazy as hell but white.
Boy, what a shock we all had when we discovered reality.
Most of us were prejudiced against black people and black music.
We learned it all from our parents.
One day, WARL DJ Mike Honey Cut put on an obviously black record, played it for
about 45 seconds, then took it off and abruptly said
— NO, NO. WE DON’T PLAY THAT KIND OF MUSIC ON THIS
— RADIO STATION.
What the hell did he do that for?
Honey Cut didn’t know anything about country music.
All he knew about was popular music.
So, Don Owens did the selection.
So, all day long we heard music chosen by Don Owens.
I know all this because my father was a friend of Honey Cut’s and helped him out a lot.
Mike had a big problem with alcohol. A big Jones.
He was a great talker.
But nothing about music. Nothing.
Now, thinking back, I wonder who programmed the anti-black music episode.
Neither Don Owens nor Mike Honey Cut
— CUT CUT CUT
were like that.
— BOOM BOOM BOOM
No.
Owens did an interesting and very perverse thing.
He changed his music. But he did it slowly and gradually.
So you didn’t notice.
Until well after the fact.
Know what I mean?
— SNEAKY — GRADUALISM— HEH
HEH HEH
He started playing more and more bluegrass and other acoustic, country music.
In fact he started each show with a Bill Monroe record.
He played Molly O’Day a lot. Grandpa Jones. Carl Story. Jimmy Murphy. Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper. Flatt and Scruggs. Jim Eans.
People like that.
But we didn’t notice.
I mean, for example, he had a kind of short mini-atrocity. A saccharine-sweet, nostalgia campaign for Hank Williams.
Every day!
Wow.
And gradually Webb Pierce, Eddy Arnold, even Ernest Tubb disappeared.
He liked Hank Snow. But electricians other than Snow and Hank Williams simply disappeared.
It was as though they had never existed.
And by the time us kids noticed the change, Owens had gotten us used to, familiar with the bluegrass and
acoustic sound. And the high, tenor voices of folks like Stanley Bros. and Reno and Smiley and people like that.
But I didn’t care about the change. I hardly noticed it.
Until one day Owens did this crazy thing which I could in no way have anticipated.
It was a dirty trick on me and on others but I didn’t know it at the time.
Hell, it changed my life.
Permanently.
Isn’t it weird how somebody like a DJ who you don’t even know and have never ever seen can do some
apparently trivial thing — at least that’s what you think at the time — and it changes your entire life for the rest of your life?
Wow.
Yes, Owens and another guy ruined my life.
I’ll get around to the other guy in a minute.
Just wait.
Owens: “Well, friends, this is a very old record and it has a lot of scratches on it and it’s
heard to hear but it’s such a good record that I’m gonna’ play it anyway. Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys doing Jimmy Rodgers’
— BLUE YODEL NUMBER SEVEN.”
Christ.
You’re not safe anywhere.
Not from bluegrass music.
No.
Then I heard this horrible crazy sound. And I felt this insane mad feeling. Neither of which was I in any manner acquainted. It was the bluesiest and most obnoxious thing I had ever heard. It was an attack of revolutionary terrorism on my nervous system through aesthetics.
It was blacker than the blackest black record I had ever heard. It reached out and grabbed and it has never let go of me.
I went limp. I almost fell off the sofa. My mouth fell open. My eyes widened and expanded. I found myself
hyperventilating. When it was over I tried to get up and go and get a paper bag to restore the correct balance of power between oxygen and carbon monoxide. I screamed for help but nobody was around and nobody came. I was drenched with sweat. It was like I had woken up to a new and thrilling exciting horror movie.
Nothing has ever been the same since then.
You see, I had gone insane.
And I didn’t even know about it.
Wow.
I had to hear that record again. It was madness and I knew it would get me in trouble and it did get me in trouble but I couldn’t help it I was out of control.
So I went to the record store in Silver Spring, Maryland, the name of which I forgot. It was at the intersection of Georgia Avenue, and Colesville Road.
Right around the corner from the Silver Theatre.
I asked the man behind the counter about that record. He was a “nice guy.” He looked it up in some great big yellow catalogue and actually found it.
But, it was out of print. And there wasn’t one on the shelf.
“Sorry, kid, I don’t have one and I can’t get you one.”
“But, I’ve got to hear it again. I’ve got to.”
“Listen kid” he went on. “that record is no good. In fact it is evil. It caused a lot of trouble while it was around. Women left their husbands. Husbands left their wives. Children ran away from home and were never seen again. There were sunspots on the moon. Revolutions started, massacres happened, suicides and alcoholism went sky high, wars started, monsters were seen on the Edge, it was bad kid. Maybe it would be better for you if you didn’t hear it again. I mean I just feel I gotta’ tell ya’ that kid. It’s dangerous for anybody your age to get interested in things like that.”
“I don’t care,” I said, “it must be fate.”
“Fate schmate. I gave you a warning. But if ya’ don’t take it the only thing I can do is tell ya’ this. You gotta’ find a record collector. Chances are a record collector would know about it.”
“You know any of those guys you are talking about?” I asked.
“No, I don’t hang out with weirdoes like that. But they’re around. And I’ll pray for ya’ kid. I’ll pray for ya.”
“Thanks a hell of a lot. I may need it.”
“Oh, you’re gonna need it alright.”
I was more than heartbroken. I was thoroughly confused because I didn’t understand this new and rebellious emotion I had heard. I had to get in touch with it again. I had to.
Yes, it had woken me up.
But it had also turned me into a monster.
But, I didn’t know it yet.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Your weekend sounds like a cinematic masterpiece. The heatwave is kaput at long last! Thank you for the  well wishing. We’re having some formatting issues, so it’s needed. Love making my facial hair stop growing, G. ** Probably, male, Hi, man! I did like the ‘Fight Club’ novel. I think I blurbed it. I think his early books are his best. He started writing more quickly as time went on, and the prose is less attended to, I think. But he’s good. I haven’t read his last eight or so books. ‘Survivor’ is good. I don’t think I ever had a brutal fight if you mean physical fight. One time at a Melvins concert these two guys attacked me and a friend of mine and beat us up and ripped our clothes half off. It all happened in about thirty seconds, and I barely remember the attack. Otherwise, my fights have all been just verbal. What about you? ** _Black_Acrylic, Russell was on ‘Celebrity Big Brother’?! Weird. Go Scotland, of course! ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Skellster. Thanks, pal. And last Friday was nothing but a G thing. ** Telly, Hi! Awesome about the Zine Fest! I’m really happy you got such deserved props. I don’t think people will correlate your Cooper with me. But Sandoval is nice. Dilemma. What’s your current thinking? Monster horror, awesome. You know, your writing is probably better than you worry it is. That’s my instinct. Great that you’re being a scribe. You sound good. Oh, that ‘Mike Robarts’ piece: I think I wrote it at 16. I wrote this huge novel that was my imitation of Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’ and I used boys any my school and the teachers as the characters, and the teachers gradually sexually slaughtered all the boys. I found out that my mother was snooping around in my bedroom, and I got scared, so I burned the whole novel so she would never find it. A few years later I was going through my stuff and found one page that somehow escaped the fire, and that’s the page I found verbatim. Mike Robarts was my best friend at that point and a huge secret lust crush object. I haven’t looked at it in years, but I guess my hope would be that it’s charmingly incompetent and sincere? Thanks for asking. ** 2Moody, Hi. I haven’t seen the last, gosh, maybe five or six Almodovars, so I need to catch up too. I would say in fact this is a resounding YES on your Xmas gift proposal. Thank you for sussing out my secret wishes. Anyone who wears a hat in a movie theater is pretty safely a selfish jerk, no? Our heat died a sudden death last night. I hope yours is seriously contemplating suicide. I don’t have health insurance, which is very stupid of me, but just to say you have temporary company. Thanks for the film wishes. It’s been kind of technically tricky so far, so much needed. xo. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, that did seem to be the case, yes. It’s still so weird to me that Larry Kramer wrote ‘Women in Love’. Based on his other writings and having known him a little. ** Chris Kelso, Hi, Chris. Really nice to see you! Thank you in multiplicity. Oh, cool, about the curious student. Thanks, and thanks for telling me. I used to know Irvine a little back in the day. Very nice guy. The music project sounds fascinating. Do keep us/me informed. Best to you, buddy. ** Steve Erickson, Thanks, pal. Awesome that you had the Russell in-person experience. Great luck with The Wire. My fingers are ultra-crossed. ** Matt N., Hi. The ‘audio novel’ will take some time, it’s pretty complicated, but not as lengthy a process as making a film, I think, I sure hope. It’ll be performed by a number of people playing the different characters. No, I haven’t seen ‘Secret Behind the Door’. I guess I should probably? Strangest person? In what sense of strange? I’ll have to think about that as I’m heading off soon. But I will. Any luck with the difficult scene? My week is all film work, I think. The great writer/my friend Dodie Bellamy is reading here on Saturday, so I’ll take a break to go to that. Have an excellent one. ** TJ Sandel, Hey. Icy hugs about the melting. We just stopped melting here last night. I hope you get to join in the luxurious chilliness pronto. Interesting question about ‘on track’. Hm. I pay a huge amount if attention to the style and the structure and to the dynamics and stuff. I always think about charisma. Things can be technically imperfect, but as long they’re charismatic, the reader is drawn in and keep wanting to be in the experience of reading, I think. But determining if something is charismatic takes a weird kind of objectivity or attempted objectivity. I think I gradually figured out a way to look at my fiction that way, but it’s hard to explain. Obviously the characters have to move forward intriguingly though, since most readers see the characters as the main entrances to the novel. It’s tricky. What are the problems you’re having more exactly, if you can describe? ** Travoveda, Hi. Nice to meet you. Thank you coming inside. Wow, thank you for your interest. That’s exciting. I’ll write to you in the next day or so. Thank you again! ** oliver jude, Evening! I look forward to mine. Thank you a lot about ‘PGL’. Almost all of the performers in the film were non-actors. The guy who played ‘Tim’ was an actor. He was in a Larry Clark film, but that’s it. They were great, yeah. I love working with non-actors. They dedicate themselves to the characters in a really sincere way. I wrote the script, and Zac assisted me. I wrote it in English, and it was translated. Exciting about your script. Obviously it sounds very enticing. If you have the ending that’s a pretty good start. I usually have the endings in mind when I write our scripts. Cool. I thought Jon Moritsugu directed ‘Mod Fuck Explosion’? Was Todd Verow the cameraman? Yeah, I like that film. Fun indeed. Say more about your script/film if you feel like it. I’m interested. ** Bill, Howdy Bill! I don’t know ‘August Blue’, but I do like what I’ve read of Levy. Hm. Thanks for the film wishes. What are your current goings on? ** Cody Goodnight, HI. I’m happy because it’s cooled down here. My favorite Russells? Mm, ‘The Devils’, ‘Women in Love’, and ‘Savage Messiah’, I think? I haven’t seen ‘Perfect Blue’, no. I’ve read the manga, which is strange because I rarely read mangas. I bet I can find it. Will do. Have a rich day out there, my friend. ** Okay. Today I’m restoring an old post that a blog reader once made about the sublime guitarist/ composer genius John Fahey. If you don’t know his work, this is a great way in. See you tomorrow.