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Time, Flies

Blogging about how long it's been since you updated your blog is the equivalent of, 15 years ago, kicking off the new issue of your fanzine with: "I'm at Kinko's. It's 3AM...."

A decade and a half of new and ever multiplying irritants, and it's the oldies that still get my blood pressure doing a jig.

I did launch Rock Trauma, and I am regularly pumping out McBeardo@MrSkin pieces.

All that counts for something. HAH?

My Bloody Valentine in 3-D is good. Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3-D on DVD is good, too. This weekend, I'll be taking in The Stewardesses 3-D DVD, likely tripping in the wake of wisdom tooth extraction. And you can read all about that in my next Mr. Skin column (granted: if I live).

My beloved Rachel Doughty celebrates a birthday on Saturday. The present I got her is a humdinger. You will read about that on Facebook, because that's what we do, Rachel and me. And you, too. And people from grade school you can't believe you now engage in daily interactions.

Six months ago, I was nauseated and infuriated by anything bloggish. Now I'm nauseated and infuriated by anything anti-bloggish.

How much of my life has played out that way?

How much is all?

Boop Your Last Boop!

Ramping up into 2009 is steeper going than I’d anticipated.

The Mr Skin office is on fire with a welcome, if management-enforced, “start-up attitude”. It's necessary and, lord, does it beat last year’s proposal of rewarding super-achievers with “Skin Bucks.”

My plan to launch a second blog, focused on a single topic, is daunting, but it's actually coming off (without totally coming apart). Witness me commit to this: if I don’t get Rock Trauma really going by January 16, no My Bloody Valentine 3-D for me next weekend. And My Bloody Valentine 3-D is pretty much the only thing I can think about.

On a related note (in the opposite direction), brace your balls for the Last House on the Left remake trailer. David Szulkin, please do me the honor of venting in my comments section.

Depressing on a level on par with the Last House Redux (and Pee-YUW!) trailer are the largely enthusiastic comments regarding it at Ain’t It Cool News. The PG-13 Horror Generation has risen to power. I pray for their NC-17 en masse demise.

It just occurred to me that, as a vocalist, Buzz Osbourne is severely underrated. Actually, make that heavily underrated. Ha and ha.

The debate tonight is whether to see Frost/Nixon or Gran Torino. I’m leaning toward the former, based largely on the fact that the latter is only opening today here in the hillbilly hinterlands of the nation’s third largest city (just remember what the credits of Welcome Back, Kotter taught us: Brooklyn is #4).

This is the most freakifying thing I’ve witnessed of late:

Requiem for a Heavy Breather: Bill Landis, 1959-2008

Former HAPPYLAND publisher Selwyn Harris pays proper, over-the-top(less) to (really) former SLEAZOID EXPRESS publisher Bill Landis.

Contains nude boobs, Nekromistress, Alix Lakehurst naked with a hard-on, and Meg McCarville's hairless vagina.

Have at:

http://tinyurl.com/sleazoideulogy

Then dig all my Mr Skin columns:

http://www.mrskin.com/mcbeardo

Sleazoid Mourning Has Broken; Jingle Smells LES/NYC

Bill Landis has ditched The Deuce once and forever, now, and it feels as though the shit-storm that was Mr. Sleazoid’s life (and, let’s presume, death) is only going to start coming to light – like a subterranean tsunami of unsanitary intercourse, three-on-a-needle highs, and apocalyptic paranoia that, once its source has been extinguished, is finally erupting to the surface to mow down all comers for decades hence.

I’ll be writing a fittingly complicated tribute to this most underappreciated trash culture giant and most anti-endearing fuck-up in my regular McBeardo column at MrSkin.com this Thursday.

Christmas in New York supplied a mixed bag of tenderness and toxicity. The weirdest moment occurred while Rachel and I were walking around the Lower East Side, waiting for The Wrestler to start at the Sunshine (which gets big props for featuring Year of the Dragon as a weekend midnight movie).

An unexpected emotional flashback suddenly overwhelmed me as the barkers hustled leather on Orchard Street and the fluorescent headache of Katz’s hummed up ahead. It plunged me back to a wretched four or five month period in late 1997/early 98 when I actually lived on wretched Attorney Street, on the fifth floor of a walk-up with a lesbo broad I wanted to fuck, a hippie broad I didn’t, and one fancy-coiffed abortion who would go on to compose the screenplay for a lovey-dovey Will Smith knee-slapper that was originally titled The Last First Kiss (which should prompt The First But Not Last Projectile Vomit from you as you ponder such an atrocious assemblage of words).

I was pretty fresh off drugs and alcohol and, for various reasons that ultimately proved unsound, this seemed like a better atmosphere for me than toughing it alone in Brooklyn.

The fact that the Attorney Streets occupants booted out a lovely lady with whom I had only semi-completely-broken up and then invited me to live in her old room didn’t strike me as problematic until I got all settled in (my plan had been to hightail back to L.A. after a few months, which never happened).

The fact that only after I carted my shit up five flights of stairs did the two broads inform me that they’d also asked the faux-hawked infection who was co-editing a blight on human discourse called Black Book magazine to live with us as well did rub me the wrong way pretty quick. But everybody was sober, so … heh.

The fact that Hollywood Hairdo and I were paying the entirety of the rent didn’t dawn on me until after I moved out in the spring, and had to maniacally negotiate with the lesbo for the return an $80 deposit.

She told me I could have the dough in exchange for giving her head for an hour. Naturally, a cold sore had just erupted on my lip, and I wasn’t angry enough to take her up on that offer and leave any lifelong reminders.

The lesbian is now married to a man, and I think the hippie might be, too. I already mentioned what happened to Monsieur Mousse-Head of the NoLita Elite, but that came after he was working for another magazine, where he encouraged me to pitch ideas, and then swiped one from me and ran it uncredited (the subject was Huck Butko’s Graham Cracker Cream Pie, and if you’re homosexual enough, you can read all about it in a 1998 edition of Details, somewhere in the front-of-the-book section).

For whatever inexplicable reason, the second time I got off booze and narcotics, I did it in the company of these academic literary types – you know: my enemies. I have affection for these people because they put up with my bombastic rages and random tantrums, but I still shake my wang in fury at God (or, you know, Whatever) for casting me among them just then, and for that purpose.

One do-gooder became hellbent on getting me to go back to school and catch up on those last few classes I needed – all three-and-a-half-year’s worth – so I could earn a degree. He even dragged me into the admittance office of Hunter College and made me fill out forms. He really helped me immeasurably in other areas (and he continues to, for which I love him), but I may have to wing down to Indianapolis some time just to give him such a pinch over that one.

Let me make one thing clear: in a life laid end-to-end with horrifically horrible days, none is more disastrously dire than the morning my parents dropped me off in kindergarten.

Every nanosecond in a classroom was a jail sentence from then on. All I wanted to do (and all ever I did do) was cheat to achieve the minimum scores necessary to maintain a solid D-minus average in all classes from first grade until high-school graduation so I could continue getting pushed through the mangler right on schedule. College lasted three semesters. Then I became a janitor. And it was better … I was better!

So skulking those dank streets of Manhattan, which is now just a propped-up corpse with a corporate logo smile, all this came rushing back and knocked me for quite a loop.

Time was I vented my distaste for supposedly sophisticated Gothamites by pissing and defecating all over any surface that wasn't the toilet in the bathroom of the upstairs café at the Angelika Film Center. Now the shitty city is emptying its foulness right back on me, and non-stop.

All you jerkoffs who moved there from a decent place like, say, New Jersey (or Brooklyn!) can have that Vile Isle … what’s left of it anyway. Which is nothing. Just like you.

The Road to Death Metal is Paved With Butthole Surfers

Bloviating more on the topic of the previous post no longer appeals to me. I imagine that puts me squarely in the boat with you as a reader, Dear Reader.

Hence, this compression:

1995
Allan MacDonell hit me up to hit up Gerard Cosloy for free tickets to see The John Spencer Blues Explosion (who were on Cosloy's Matador record label) in Hollywood. I did, and we all went to the show and I watched the band's namesake frontman -- who had been what I believed was a crucial element of a prior ensemble for which I felt profoudn affection, pussy Galore -- up on stage, all hips a-shakin' and lips a-flappin' and mojo a-workin' and all I could think was: "For the love of fuck, you are a GROWN MAN! Stop that!"

As a direct result, I listened to no new rock music for the next eight years.

2003
Sitting in Sir Lord Brian Puberty's car, I remarked favorably on whatever CD was pouring out of his ultra-powerful 1992 Toyota Tercel speakers. "That's Bobby Conn," he told me. "He sounds kind of like glam-rock, but with disco, and also kind of like Jesus Christ Superstar. He's playing Thursday. I'm going."

I was going then, too, and I did and Bobby Conn, for lack of a less diseased term, rocked.


Shortly thereafter, I witnessed Sir Lord's musical combo Gays in the Military perform. They reminded me of the Butthole Surfers and Flipper a lot, and even Pussy Galore somewhat, and Melvins-brand heavy metal a little too, but with an obnoxious brilliance all their own. This was a cause for which I had to enlist. And so I did.

When Chicago's Metal Haven record store stocked the 2005 Gays in the Military release People Is Beautiful in their Noise section, my interest in all mayhem metallic ignited as never before.

And now here we are. And now this weekend I'm going to Kuma's Doom Fest at the Double Door. Whoop-de-deee!

How I Ditched Punk for Metal and Made Rock Okay-ish Again (For Me), Part 1

Hostility toward punk-rock occurred early on for me, almost as early, in fact, as my affection for the form in its initial late-1970s New York City outburst.

My introductory exposure to punk came via daily guest bands on New Jersey’s legendary Uncle Floyd Show, where The Ramones were virtually full-time cast members.

Bear in mind that I was years away from popping out pubic hair numero uno and my milieu was working-class ethnic-Catholic Brooklyn, so my outward commitment to punk was relegated largely to a couple of records each Christmas and Easter (as long as they were available at the Sam Goody in Kings Plaza), and writing Cheap Trick, Sparks, and Joan Jett in ballpoint pen on my Pro-Keds (one of the swellest things about punk’s primordial incarnation was that its rag-tag umbrella could be stretched to encapsulate such now seemingly disparate stylistic combos).

Mostly, I was addicted to the radio, having just leapt from Top 40 WABC and WNBC on the AM-band to WPLJ and WNEW-FM. But I played that Rock-N-Roll High School album all the time, too.

Then I crossed the mighty East River to Manhattan for real high-school and noticed that the kids wearing Sex Pistols tee-shirts and decorating their expensive skateboards with Dead Kennedys stickers were, in fact, listening to Depeche Mode and Duran Duran and The Thompson Twins and thinking that they were all the same thing.

Decades and countless rock-critic douchings (many composed by me) later, I could possibly entertain some cockamamie explanation of how they were right, but not then. No way.

My move was to embrace whatever those trapezoidal-hair-do’d panty-waists were against. That meant Dirtbagism. That meant into my Walkman went Pink Floyd and Rush and, even though they petrified every fiber of my Jesuit-educated soul, Black Sabbath.

I tried really hard to become a Led Zeppelin devotee, too, but it just never took. And I lied about liking The Who. I hated the goddamned Who from the first time I saw Eddie Demarquez pump his fists in time to the opening of “Baba O’Reilly” at the 8th grade graduation dance, and forever after that, any time I’ve ever heard them.

Pay attention: no one who has ever survived crib death is as stupid as Peter Townsend, and certainly not in such a thoroughly charmless way.

Eventually, marijuana burnout among my Zep-worshipping brethren turned me off to all forms of rock music that anyone anywhere might take seriously, and my early college experience was devoted to the Monkees, 70s Elvis, novelty records, surf instrumentals and pre-fab bubblegum. I still consider that to be the height of my taste.


Suicidal depression and desperation to share my boner with someone got the best of me, however, and soon I ventured out into the realm of New York hardcore in particular and punk in general, donning a requisite motorcycle jacket, worn just inches above an ass that has been astride a motorcycle exactly once, when I was eight years old.

The Clash pretty quickly pooped my punk party. How I hated that band. How I still do. How I can’t conceive of anyone ever feeling any differently about them. When The Who embarked on their first faux farewell tour, who opened for them? The Clash, of course. And why? Because they’re a perfect fit.

For years I seethed that there was a reason that The Clash was the only punk act to successfully make the Classic Rock Radio cut. Because they suck like that. The Clash codified punk in sound and aesthetics, injected left-wing politics and infantile idealism into what might have been the greatest channel ever concocted by humanity for mass cultural secession and living free of anyone’s expectations and, what’s worse, they composed and performed laughably shitty songs while doing it.

Then I happened upon the Butthole Surfers with their psychedelic Sabbath and Grand Funk and Guess Who covers, unsanitary sexuality, racial insensitivity, and apocalyptic garbage dump explosion vibe, and punk again sort of defined my Rock of Choice for a spell. But that was only because the Butthole Surfers were filed in those bins.

From there it was not much of a leap back to Ozzy, Tony, Geezer, et al, along with Neil Young and Mountain and T. Rex and KISS, and I wasn’t the only former purple-haired, safety-pinned mosh-goof going that route, as was proved when that first Mudhoney EP came out (actually, it was proved even earlier by Green River, but I hadn’t heard of them).

More’s coming, but the point I’m working toward is that "Jimi" by The Butthole Surfers eventually turned me into the Death Metal dingus I am today. Enjoy it here, slow (above), fast (in the middle), and live (below).