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Primary planets normally cross the sky in prograde motion, west to east. Sometimes one will slow down and start moving in a retrograde motion, west to east.
Then is when Urania, muse to astronomy, makes notations on the planetary pantheon map as one by one, immortal hands open again doors it had just closed.
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In the scheme of things, across the Sky, it has come to pass that these retreats now incl. primordial-god Uranos, who begat the titan Saturn, who begat olympian bros Pluto, Neptune and Jupiter, who in turn sired Venus, Mars and Mercury.
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Ceres, wounded, is marooned in the Asteroid belt. The goddess of the hearth carries still an eternal flame, but in her present mood not willing to stay this year longer than is warranted, when light dims and a chasm opens to view – around July 11. Then is when fire signs should stay away from matches.
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•
Venus Rx
Throwing on a summer dress does not become Venus, as she falls prey to a virus of coarseness and she knows it. Two weeks on, the goddess of sex will either have been innoculated or has resorted to hitting reset. She expects relapses lingering into autumn.
•
Uranus Rx︎
Having taken four steps into 2020, dispirited Uranus already finds business so unsettling that the progenitor of goddesses and gods retreats. This primordial-god knows full well that his eminence is not well suited for this coming storm.
•
Saturn Rx
Entering 2020 w/ a gleam in his eye, by the time Saturn pays attention to where he’s stepping he has already tripped into the Underworld. Worse yet, the god of duty has taken ill, and will take ’til mid-autumn to recover.
•
Pluto Rx
Pinned under mother Earth, marinating in generosity and greed in equal measure, lies Pluto. The god of the dead has been in and out of this jam going on 12 years now, and it empties out the last drops of his innocence.
•
Neptune Rx
Visiting minor divines during the summer trigger ripples enough to unhinge placid Neptune. The sea-god turns, and at zenith becomes porous and releases light enough a glimpse of the chasm will occur.
•
Mercury Rx
By mid-spring the god of communication is already spent, and falls into the sea of unreason. For two weeks, Mercury is an empty vessel swimming w/ a complex school, shoring up so as to deliver many messages in one staggering trip.
By summer solstice the god of commerce’s winged feet give out again. The delay will cost the god of divination three weeks in hyper-objective contemplation amidst messy domesticity.
During autumn equinox the god of travelers gets to show off his good manners, yet manages instead to incur unhappiness. The shepherd of souls to the Underworld will then have to unclog his cluttered brain and reset his god-given intuition.
•
Mars Rx
Taking a two-week break before the harvest moon, Mars seeks help from his two sons. While Deimos holds a lit torch, Phobos takes out 13 stitches on the arm of the god of war. What should be simple morphs instead into a delicate operation filled w/ iffiness.
•
Jupiter Rx
Having to spend early summer ’til harvest moon upside down, Jupiter is mighty discomfited. The king of heaven is undergoing a rite to counter moral degradation, imbuing light into the chasm by sticking his head in there.
|¶|
Hot rods still drive on N Virginia Street, where the original casinos roamed.
▶ 1850s
Reno came into its own in the 1850s when a few pioneers arrived and the beginnings of a settlement evolved. Perhaps they were prescient. In 1859, when silver was discovered in nearby Virginia City, a log-toll bridge was built across the Truckee River to give easier access to the California Trail. This crossing then became Lake‘s Crossing, and the surrounding area became a town, and changed its name to
Reno.
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The First Transcontinental Railroad made it a stopover, and the Lincoln Highway used it as a layover.
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There is color footage of Reno 1953 (00:06:08).
✈¦ Monterey Bay
• ASILOMAR
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Stone wall inside Merrill Hall.
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Painting of the Engineer’s Cottage, where architect Julia Morgan stayed while building Asilomar.
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Back door to the Engineer’s Cottage.
▶ Julia Morgan
Conceived of as a summer conference center for the Young Women’s Christian Association in Pacific Grove, then into the Asilomar State Marine Reserve, and becoming part of an ocean-health program from Pigeon Point to Point Conception on the California coast, and where an undersea kelp forest thrives.
✈¦ Northern California
• SEA RANCH
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Standing in front of Condominium One in 1991 is the team that made this habitat in Northern California overlooking the Pacific Ocean a reality: Richard Whitaker, Donlyn Lyndon, Charles Moore, William Turnbull.
✈¦ California
• SACRAMENTO RIVER
|¶|
Guiding gold miners since 1848. The discovery of gold in the 19th century brought prospectors by the hundreds to follow the river and its tributaries to the California Trail and the Siskiyou Trail, and where gold fields awaited. Communities came into being along this river, and the City of Sacramento became its most important home.
▶ Into the blue again
Rising in the Klamath Mountains in the north, then travelling 257 miles to reach a delta where it is joined by the San Joaquin River and begins this final leg of its journey to the San Francisco Bay and becoming the largest river in California,
✈¦ San Francisco
• OCEAN BEACH
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Treacherous due to strong and cold rip currents, lashed by waves coming from the Pacific Ocean, this parcel on the west coast of San Francisco forms part of the rugged ribbon the National Park Service has made of the California coastline.
✈¦ California
• SANTA CRUZ
|¶|
Sixteen square miles of beach front property makes Santa Cruz the northern-most beachtown guaranteeing a proper California summer. This coastal community has a plan to adapt to climate change, incl. relocating infrastructure and buildings to higher ground due to expected degradation beginning at the shoreline.
✈¦ Four Corners
• MONUMENT VALLEY
|¶| Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park is in Monument Valley, near Four Corners and along the Arizona and Utah borders.
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It forms a quadrant of the Navajo Nation Reservation, whose name for this land is Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii, valley of the rocks.
Illustrated w/ collages, drawings, maps, paintings, photographs, prints and quotes
|⁋|
Out west, when 1848 was only twenty-four days old, mechanic James Marshall was making a routine inspection on the grounds of a sawmill he ran for his employer. That was when the New Jersey native noticed some odd-looking ore in a water channel of the South Fork of the American River. It was “... bright, yet malleable. I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.”
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Nine days after Marshall emerged from the waters w/ his find, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, transferring a large tract of Mexico to the United States.
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These concurrent events together precipitated the California Gold Rush of 1849, when folks came from all over, bringing dreams while praying to the god and goddess of wealth for a show of “colour”
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The first came from Monterey, San Francisco, San Jose and Sonoma: when clerks, doctors, laborers, lawyers, mechanics, rancheros left their jobs. Sailors deserted their ships. Soldiers deserted the Mexican War. As word spread more came from Hawai‘i, Mexico and Oregon.
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Gold seekers showing up near the sawmill of John August Sutter, where gold was first discovered, had no need for milled lumber, and his business went into decline. All the while, a new settlement grew across the Ameircan River to become Coloma, the first gold rush town. Nearby stands a monument, by the Native Sons of the Golden West, to mark the grave of James Wilson Marshall, the “discoverer of gold.”
One can cross Panama to get to California rather than sail around Cape Horn. Up Chagres river to the town of Culebra; then donkeys to Gulf of Panama, eleven miles away.
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Maps were consulted and what became the California Trial began w/ existing routes. Emigrants showed up along the Missouri river and towns in Illinois or Iowa. Wagon trains hitched, they headed out, crossing landscapes of grasslands, prairies, steppes, valleys and rivers to Wyoming and Fort Laramie.
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The only way to cross the Rockies was a corridor beyond Fort Laramie, level and broad. South Pass afforded several routes passage to California. At a fork in the road soon after, the Oregon Trail veers right while the Mormon Trail turns south toward Fort Bridger.
|⁋| Overland travelers chose routes dependent on starting point and final destination. Other factors were the condition of their wagons, livestock, and the availability of water.
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From California, one can get to Oregon on the Applegate Trail (1846), an alternative to the hazardous last leg of the Oregon Trail.
|⁋| The Oregon Trail begins in Missouri and leaves either Fort Leavenworth, Independence or Saint Joseph for a two thousand mile trek to the Oregon Territory. Past the Great Plains, then the Rockies, heading west northwest to the Snake river, Fort Boise, Witman Mission, The Dales, Fort Vancouver, the Columbia river, and the coast.
The Santa Fe Trail starts off in Missouri, rolls through Kansas and a corner of Colorado. Crossing the Arkansas river before dropping to New Mexico, the trail loses its identity somewhat in Santa Fe, where it is braided to the Gila Trail, a local 16th-c. commerce and travel high road, bringing trade from inland to the coast.
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The Mormon Trail, gathers in Illinois and wends by Iowa and Nebraska before joining established trails in Wyoming. Together they cross the Rockies, then the Mormon Trail continues south southwest to Utah Territory to end up in Los Angeles. Besides the overlanders there were also seafarers.
|⁋| An eight-month sea route from New York to San Francisco would involve a harzardous rounding of Cape Horn.
A 49er carries pickaxe, shovel and pan. Can add a rocker and a hopper; some also conduct hydraulic experiments. A water wheel would be jim-dandy, to pick up individual quantities of gold-bearing gravel and sand.
|⁋| Personal gear: pair of blankets, frying-pan, flour, salt pork, brandy (or other sanctifying spirit). Field gear must-haves: pickaxe, shovel and pan. Some procure a mule.
|⁋| Gold miners w/ no financial backing learn to congregate along mountain roads and wait for supply wagons passing through, bringing food and tools and carrying out gold dust. Saturday nights were for salooning and carousing. Sunday is a holiday – laundry, tool repair, swapping stories, writing letters, napping.
|⁋| A twelve inch shallow sheet-iron pan to rinse soil w/ water and locate the gold.
|⁋| A rocker is a rectangular wooden box mounted on two rockers and set at a downward angle.
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The hopper is a box sitting on top of the rocker, lined w/ a sheet of perforated iron. Beneath is an area called the “riddle-box.”
|⁋| The long tom is an improved rocker plus hopper, reaching to twenty feet in length. A long sheet of perforated iron lines the bottom and beneath that iw the riddle-box.
|⁋| Women too had gold fever, coming from Mexico, Chile, Peru, England, France, New York and New Orleans.
|⁋| Depicted in history as adventuress, courtesan, harlot, pickpocket, prostitute and the demimonde, these women were also bookkeepers, cooks, laundresses, shop-keepers, maids, wives. When mountain roads improved sufficiently to make travel btw. towns feasible, they set forth as performers.
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Mrs Clappe came west in 1851 w/ her husband. In her letters home she gives an account of the era, about geology and a visit to a rural doctor’s rude office of pine shingles and cotton cloth.
|⁋|Yerba Buena was a hamlet on the San Francisco peninsula w/ an excellent harbor. The Spaniards established a maritime trading post and built the Mission of San Francisco de Asis. Ships docking in its cove discharged sailors to a Spanish-style plaza known as Portsmouth Square.
|⁋| On arrival gold seekers rented lodgings in shanties and tent towns, and stayed long enough to buy tools and provisions before heading out.
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Brought over from Australia to perform labor, English convicts deserted en masse and instead formed a gang. Soon a frontier patch of lawlessness, Sydney Town, sprouted at the base of Telegraph Hill. The Sydney Ducks preyed on people and property, augmented by a gang of lady pickpockets, and willingly committed murder to survive.
|⁋| The embers of Sydney Town rekindled and gave birth to the Barbary Coast, chock-a-block w/ bars, saloons, brothels, concert halls, dance halls; where “getting shanghaied” was first rehearsed. Survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, by 1917 the red-light district was no more.
Sutter’s Mill on the South Fork of the American River.
|⁋|Coloma, next to Sutter’s Mill, was the first gold mining town. A post office and jail were added in 1852 – both proved popular. Gold mining also took place north at Bidwell’s Bar, Cut Eye Foster’s Bar, Downieville, Dutch Flat, Goodyear’s Bar, Grass Valley, Helltown, Illinoistown, Iowa Hill, Kanaka Flat, Lousy Level, Marysville, Murderers Bar, Nevada City, Plumas City, Poker Flat, Rough and Ready, Washington, Whiskey Flat, Wisconsin Hill, and You Bet.
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South at Angels Camp, Chinese Camp, Dogtown, Fair Play, Hornitos, Jackson, Mokelumme Hill, Mormon Bar, Rawhide, Rich Gulch, Shaw’s Flat, Sonora, Volcano.
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Gold was found along tributaries to the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. At Auburn, Diamond Springs, Grizzly Flats, Missouri Flat, Placerville.
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Home to Native Americans incl. the Miwok, the Sierra Nevada was rudely affected by the Gold Rush. In 1849 an incident occurred along the Middle Fork of the American River when some 49ers died and some indigenes killed. An uneasy truce obtained when Native Americans were hired on as laborers and paid in tin, but by 1900 their population had declined to only ±16,000.
|⁋| Before James Cagney was the Frisco Kid and Edward G.
Robinson dramatized life in the Barbary Coast era, there was a 1913 feature, The Last Night of the Barbary Coast, now a lost film.
The 1849 state census counted 42,000 overlanders and 35,000 seafarers caught up by gold fever; together w/ 3,000 sailors who had deserted ships. |⁋|
Coloma is now a ghost town inside Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.
Like all who seek a better tomorrow, the Chinese too came to the California Gold Rush, formed a fraternity in Coloma, squatted spent claims and worked as a team over the “tailings” left behind. In 1880 this gold-mining Chinatown was lost to fire.
“As revealed in the song
Ziggy Stardust, Ziggy was not
a spider - he was the fly.”
-- Steele Savage
Outside the musical world he inhabits, David Bowie can usually be found in the company of artists.
These adventures through the art world found an expression in the early 1990s while playing around on his computer; he came up w/ the tale of a diary concerning blood and art. This having only recently chatted w/ Brian Eno on the possibility of launching several investigations into the malaise that is fin-de-siecle culture - the last five years of the 20th century - and what that might be like. In 1995, Bowie took this short story into the studio and, w/ Eno's involvement, produced a concept album concerning "this rather dark, satirical idea of where art could go." While Eno fiddles w/ the elusives and imbues the proceedings w/ propositions and strategies, Bowie massages words into music, seeking for fits or juxtaposition til a composition can cohere. At the same time, musicians are taking cues from Eno into which meadow the sound ought to and can roam.
Lyrics eventually separate and become voices, and the voices beaome, among others, particular characters: a detective following a lead, a victim who is murdered and turned into art, an assortment of suspects, and a minotaur. Having ironed out the inequities as well as iniquities, what emerges is the album 1.Outside, a disjointed and disjunctive dystopia involving violence and death, sex and rock 'n roll.
-|- FIVE YEARS
The cosmic Chameleon and the chance Corinthian lash themselves together, in the lab – on the slab – and bring forth “… a gothic drama hyper-cycle”.
❝ [Brian and I] had already started a whole set of improvisations in the studio around March, 1994. Out of that came dialogue and landscape that was tied together, not even tenuously. All the elements were fairly disparate. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, by a narrative device, to chronicle the final five years of the millennium. The over-ambitious intention is to carry this through to the year 2000.
❝ What Brian and I are trying to do is develop a series of albums. [Outside] is the first in this cycle of albums. [The diary is] only the subject matter, it’s not the content of the album. The content is very much the atmosphere and texture of the music, that strange place that music indeed puts you which cannot be articulated. The story itself is semi-linear, so if you want to, follow it in a linear fashion, but it”s not absolutely necessary.
The pieces themselves can be autonomous, they are pieces of music on their own.
❝ Well, Brian, very cleverly, because of being what he is, which is basically a conceptualist, turned everything into a series of games once we got into the studio: To allow the musicians to not be who they are for short periods of time. He would create little flash cards for them in the mornings. He would create situations they would have to put themselves in mentally, intellectually, and then start playing from that point of view. On each one, a character was written, like (You are the disgruntled member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that were suppressed). ... Because that set the tone for the day, the music would take on all those obscure areas. And it would very rarely lapse into the cliché. So we changed the status of the beginning of these pieces and they came into them like aliens from another place. It opened up a whole area of improvisation. ... It’s very hard to explain [laughs], you should have been there.
A piece that shows the extreme it could get to is A Small Plot of Land. That piece in particular was a first class indication of what happens when you put people in a strange place like that.
❝ As for musicians, it was important to choose those who were not weighed down with musical cliché, who had terrific control over their abilities. Yet were a bit loony.
❝ The lyric writing itself was fairly hazardous. What I did, I took a lot of areas of subject matter I’m interested in and wrote short paragraphs or pieces of poetry around those subjects and fed them into this Macintosh computer I have. I have a random key on it and it will randomize what I have written. So it was basically the Macintosh’s choice that it was New Jersey. But it was also a bit of England, too, with New Oxford Town. [Then decide] whether I was going to sing, do a dialogue, or become a character. I would improvise with the band, really fast on my feet, getting from one line to another and seeing what worked.
❝ There’s no intent in it, there’s no meaning. I’m not a meaner. I don’t have this great thing that I have to say. It’s a collection of fragments of information, of ideas, that are assembled and produce a certain atmosphere.
❝ Next year, we’ll develop a whole new slew of other characters or maybe re-introduce some of these or even negate some of them. Maybe we’ll never find Baby Grace. Maybe [Detective Nathan] Adler will become the next victim. I don't know. And that’s what’s kind of interesting. Maybe we’ll just get bored with murder as art and move into another area of our society. It’s all up for grabs. So I‘m quite interested in the future of this thing.
❝ I think [the album is] a confluence of events. First, we definitely perceive murder now as entertainment. It’s used to a massive extent in cinema. And pretty much it’s a space filler in TV. There’s the whole gladiatorial arena spectacle of somehow appeasing gods or looking at the fears and anxieties of the public.
❝ The momentum gathers as we approach the end of this cycle of 100 years, a huge anguish that everything will change. I wanted to make a record that reflected those anxieties, a state of moral, spiritual and emotional panic. With people breaking off into small groups to feel some sense of community.
❝ I think the idea of becoming comfortable with the idea of chaos is how we are progressing – that life and the universe are extremely untidy. Anything that pulls back the veil on that chaos is a step nearer a more realistic understanding of what our state is – so I embrace chaos. I’m a child of the ’70s, remember. I’m pluralistic by nature. I always had the unfortunate facility of being able to see both sides of every picture. It wasn’t a question of not being able to determine which side I was on, but seeing that things didn’t have sides. It wasn’t as simple as that.
❝ Oh, I’ve got the fondest hopes for the fin de siecle. I see it as a symbolic sacrificial rite. I see it as a deviance, a pagan wish to appease gods, so we can move on. There’s a real spiritual starvation out there being filled by these mutations of what are barely remembered rites and rituals. To take the place of the void left by a non-authoritative church. We have this panic button telling us it’s gonna be a colossal madness at the end of this century.
❝ Plus this growing momentum in body art, which has been precipitated over the last 15 years or so with people like
Kiki Smith and
Damian Hirst and
Ron Athey and
Chris Burden. The idea of using the body as yet another medium, like wood or metal or glass or stone – almost the politicizing of the body itself.
Almost extrapolating on that in an allegorical fashion to have this rather dark, satirical idea of where art could go.
❝ About 20 percent of what I put in [the album] are fictional and the rest are real, but it’s very hard to tell the difference. But the most surprising one, like the Korean cutting off pieces of himself in the late ’70s in New York, was not apocryphal. I checked back with Art Forum.
❝ The morality of any society is quite strange. In the finality, it’s decided by law what happens. People change their network of comfort by changing laws to make things acceptable or unacceptable.
| OUTSIDE RESOURCES
▶ [1] The Diary of Nathan Adler
THE ART-RITUAL MURDER OF BABY GRACE BLUE — aka THE DIARY OF NATHAN ADLER ¶ It was at precisely 5:47am on the morning of Friday 31 of December 1999 that a dark spirited pluralist began the dissection of 14-year-old “Baby Grace.”
The arms of the victim were pin-cushioned w/ 16 hypodermic needles, pumping in four major preservatives, colouring agents, memory information transport fluids and some kind of green stuff. From the last and 17th, all blood and liquid was extracted. The stomach area was carefully flapped open and the intestines removed, disentangled and re-knitted as it were, into a small net or web and hung btw. the pillars of the murder-location, the grand damp doorway of Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts, New Jersey. ¶ The limbs of Baby were then severed from the torso. Each limb was implanted w/ a small, highly sophisticated, binary-code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb. The self-contained mini amplifiers were then activated, amplifying the decoded memory info-transport substances, revealing themselves as little clue haikus, small verses detailing memories of other brutal acts, well documented by the ROMbloids. ¶
The limbs and their components were then hung upon the splayed web, slug-like prey of some unimaginable creature. The torso, by means of its bottom-most orifice, had been placed on a small support fastened to a marble base. It was shown to varying degrees of success depending upon where one stood from behind the web but in front of the museum door itself, acting as both signifier and guardian to the act. It was definitely murder – but was it art?
¶ All this was to be the lead-up to the most provocative event in the whole sequence of serial-events that had started around November of tha same year, plunging me into the most portentous chaos-abyss that a quiet lone-hacker like myself could comprehend. ¶ My name is Nathan Adler, or Detective Professor Adler in my circuit. I’m attached to the division of Art-Crime Inc., the recently instigated corporation funded by an endowment from the Arts Protectorate of London, it being felt that the investigation of art-crimes was in itself inseparable from other forms of expression and therefore worthy of support from this significant body. ¶ Nicolas Serota himself had deemed us, the small-fry of the division, worthy of an exhibit at last year’s Biennale in Vencie, three rooms of evidence and comparative study work which conclusively proved that the cow in Mark Tansey’s “The Innocent Eye Test” could not differentiate btw. Paulus Potter’s “The Young Bull” of 1647 (exactly 300 years before I was born, incidentally) and one of Monet’s grain stack paintings of the 1890s. The traditional art press deemed this extrapolation “bullshit” and removed itself to study the more formal ideas contained in Damien Hirst’s “Sheep In a Box.”
Art’s a farmyard. It’s my job to pick thru the manure heap looking for peppercorns. Friday - 12-31-99 – 10:15a¶ As in any crime, my first position is to peruse the motive-gag. The recent spate, thru ’98-’99, of concept-muggings pretty much had me pulling breath for an art-murder. It was a crime whose time was now. The precedents were all there. It had probably its beginnings in the ’70s w/ the Viennese castrationists and the blood-rituals of Nitsch. Public revultion put the lid on that episode, but you can’t keep a good ghoul down. ¶ Spurred on by Chris Burden’s having himself shot by his collaborator in a gallery, tied up in a bag, thrown on a highway and then crucified upon the top of a Volkswage, stories circulated thru the nasty-neon of NY night that a young Korean artist was the self-declared patient of wee-hours surgery in cut and run operations at not-so-secret locations in the city. If you found out about it, you could go and watch this guy having bits and pieces removed under anaesthetic. ¶ A finger-joint one night, a limb another.
By the dawning of the ’80s, rumour had it that he was down to a torso and one arm. He’d asked to be left in a cave in the Catskills, fed every so often by his acolytes. He didn’t do much after that, I guess he read a lot. Maybe wrote a whole bunch. I suppose you can never tell what an artist will do once he’s peaked. ¶ Round this same time, Bowie the singer remarked on a coupla goons who frequented the Berlin bars wearing full surgery regalia: caps, aprons, rubber gloves and masks. The cutting edge. ¶ Then came Damien Hirst w/ the Shark-Cow-Sheep thing. No humans, palatable ritual for the worldwide public. The acceptable face of gore. Meanwhile in the US, 1994, I was in town on the night of the Athey scarifications. Thursday - 10.27.94 – 122 E. Village, Manhattan¶ Ron Athey, performance artist not for the squeamish - former heroin addict-HIV positibve, pushes what looks like a knitting needle repeatedly into his forehead, a crown of blood, must hurt like hell. Stream red dribble-dribble. No screams. Face moves in pain. Carried upstage and scrubbed down in his own blood. Then water. Now dresses in nice suit and tie. Now in the black T-shirt and jeans, carving, w/ a disposable salpel, patterns, into the back of Daryl Carlton, a black man. Bloody blotted paper towels then hung on a washing line suspended over the heads of the audience. Blood-prints from life. An extremely limited edition. When it was first performed back in March, “Four Scenes in a Harsh Life” exploded controversy shrapnel through-out the National Endowment for the Arts. “We have taken every precaution w/ our disposal systems,”
An Athey spokes-person said. “The towels containing the blood are immediately deposited in hazardous-waste bags. Each evening, the material will be driven to a hospital for final disposal.” Athey says he is dealing w/ issues of self-loathing, suffering, healing and redemption. Friday – 12-31-99 – 10:30a – Museum of Modern Parts¶ I’m drinking up the Oxford Town. New Jersey fume. Salty and acid. Maybe I can get a handle on this thing back in Soho at the bureau. It used to be Rothko’s studio, now the playground for all us Art-Crime folk, AC’s or “the daubers” as we’re dubbed. Rothko himself, in a deep-dark-drunk one night, carefully removed his clothes, folded them up neatly, placing them upon a chair, lay upon the floor in a crucified position and after several attempts, found the soft blue pump of his wrists and checked out He’d held the razor blades btw. wads of tissue paper so that he wouldn’t cut his fingers. Deep thinker. Always was. 11:00am - “Dauber” HQ, Soho¶ The only names the Data bank can associate w/ Baby Grace are Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone and Algeria Touchshriek. The rundowns are brief but not to the point: ¶ [- RAMONA A. STONE: Female. Caucasian. Mid-40s. Assertive maintenance interest-drug dealer and Tyrannical Futurist. No convictions. Contacts: Leon Blank, Baby Grace Blue, Algeria Touchshriek. -] ¶ [- LEON BLANK: Male. Mixed race. 22 years. Outsider. Three convictions for petty theft, appropriation w/ plagiarism w/out license. Contacts: Baby Grace Blue, Algeria Touchshriek. -] ¶ [- ALGERIA TOUCHSHRIEK : Male. Caucasian. 78 years. Owner of small establishment on Rail Yard. Oxford Town, NJ. Deals in art-drugs and DNA prints. Fence for all apparitions of any medium. Harmless, lonely. -] ¶ Small cog, no wheels. Not much to go on but R.A. Stone weighs heavy on my memory. No problem, it’ll come back. Best thing to do now is feed all relevant pieces into the Mack-Verbasiser, the Metarandom programme that re-strings real life facts as im-probable virtual-fact. I may get a lead or two from that. ... 11:15a¶ Jesus Who. I hate typing. Anyhow, we’ve got some real interesting solvents from Mack-random. How about this! Verbasiser down-load, first block: No convictions of assertive saints believed Caucasian way-out tyrannical evoked no images described – Christian saints questions no female cristian machine believed no work is caucasian assertive saints believed female described christian tyrannical questions – R.A.Stone convictions martyrs and tyrannicals are evoked Female described sado-masochist questions – I am suicide described the fabric machine – Slashing way out saints and martyrs and thrown downstairs. ¶ Now the swirl begins. Now the image stack backs up and takes center stage. Ramona A. Stone, I remember this thickness, this treacly liquid thought. But wait, I’m ahead of myself. 6-15-77 – Kreutzburg, Berlin¶ It’s two in the morning. I can’t sleep for the screaming of some poor ostracised Turkish immigrant screaming his guts out from over the street. His hawking shriek sounds semi-stifled like he’s got a pillow over his mouth. But the desperation comes through the spongy rubber like a knife. It cuts the breeze and bangs my eardrums. I take a walk past the fabric machine, turn left onto a street w/ no name. The caucasian suicide center, naked and grimy, silhouetted by fungus yellow street lamps female slashing way-out saints for a dollar a time thrown downstairs if you can’t take any more. Pure joy of retreat into death, led by the shepherdess. Anti mixed-race posters pasted upon their altar of pop-death icons party people.
¶ A zero w/ no name looks dull-eyed to Ms. Stone, the drone that says “in the future, everything was up to itself.” Yea. ¶ I remember Ramona. She set herself up as the no-future priestess of the Caucasian Suicide Temple, vomiting out her doctrine of death-as-eternal-party into the empty vessels of Berlin youth. The top floor rooms were the gateways to giving up to the holy ghost. She must have overseen more than 30 or 40 check-outs before the local squad twigged what was going down. 10-28-94¶New Yorker magazine, advance copy celebrating fashion. It’s a first of its kind since Tina Brown took over as editor. One look is all it took. It took the look and wrote a new book on what sophi-staplites would take and bake. Guy Bourdin featured heavily in this new eDISHion. Since the advent of AIDS and the new morality, and, of course his death, his dark sexy fatal style had fallen out of Vogue.
¶ An uncompromising photographer, he had found a twisty avenue through desire and death. A white female leg sticking gloomily out of a bath of black liquid enamel. Two glued up babes covered in tiny pearls. The glue prevented their skins from breathing and they pass out. “Oh it would be beautiful,” he is to have said, “to photograph them dead in bed.”
¶ He was a French Guy. He had known Man Ray. Loved Lewis Carroll. His first gig was doing hats for Vogue. He’d place dead flies or bees on the faces of the models, or, female head wears hat crushed btw. three skinned calves heads, tongues lolling. What was this? Fine Arts? The surrealists might even think his work passé. Well, it was the ’50s, that's what it was. The tight-collar ’50s seen through unspeakable hostility. He wanted but he couldn’t paint. So he threw globs of revengeful hatred at his nubile subjects. He would systematically pull the phone cord out of the wall. He was never to be distrubed. Distrubed. Never. Everything and everyone died round him. ¶ One shoot focusing upon a woman lying in bed was said to be a reconstruction of his estranged wife’s death. Another picture has woman in a phone booth making some frantic call. Her hand is pressed whitely against the glass. Behind her and outside are two female bodies partially covered by the autumn leaves. His dream, so he told friends, was to do shoots in the morgue, w/ the stiffs as mannequins. I don’t know. I just read this stuff. Now his spirit was being resurrected. We’re mystified by blood. It’s our enemy now. We don’t understand it. Can’t live w/ it. Can’t, well ... y’know? Friday - 12-31-99 - 11:30a¶ After surgery and investment in a bullet-proof mask, Ramona turned up in London, Canada as owner of a string of body-parts jewellery stores. Lamb penis necklaces, goat-scrotum purses, nipple earrings, that sort of thing. The word on the street, however, suggested that it was not in the best of interests to become one of her clients as occassionally, a customer would step into her shop and not come out again.
¶ The whistle blew after a much-loved and highly respected celebrity, known for being known, failed to show for a gallery-hanging of her mirrors. Other celebrities, equally known for being known, some only to each other, thought it the most profound exhibit in years and couldn’t take their eyes off the works. All the pieces sold within an hour, many for record prices. ¶ When the critic for Tate magazine asked for an interview / the celebrity-artist, the gallery owner recalled that he hadn't seen her since earlier that day. She’d mentioned that she would be going shopping for a diamond-encrusted unbilical cord as a celebratory thing to announce her pregnancy. She would be back in an hour. Just a quick stop at the “Gallstone.” ¶ 1986. That pregnancy would have been produced a being that would be around 14 years of age. If it was still alive. ¶
To be continued...
-|- Read
The Annotated Diary of Nathan Adler ▶ [2] Genesis
The concept album 1.Outside aka Outside is based, in part, on a diary that Bowie kept over the course of a 2-week spell and, found wanting for publication, instead turned it into a short story about taboo. Revisiting the cut-up method, pioneered by the Dadaists of the 1920s and later deployed by
Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs to disrupt a linear progression, Bowie stitched together another kind of diary: kept during the course of a murder investigation. Bowie claimed that it took about three and a half hours of using the cut-up method to create “virtually the entire genesis” of the album. He had just stepped away from finishing the soundtrack to 1993’s Buddha of Suburbia mini-series for BBC Televsion. -|-
Bowie on death, violence and chaos in his 1995 concept album Outside [-12:50-] ▶ [3] ContaminationOutside was just one of several albums, a set, that Bowie started to work on w/ Brian Eno. The next one was to be Contamination, peopled w/ “17th century characters”. The day after Bowie’s death, Eno recalled: “About a year ago [David and I] started talking about Outside – the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that.” -|-More ▶ [4] 1.Outside-|- Producers: David Bowie,
Brian Eno-|- David Richards (co-producer) -|- Mixing and additional treatments: David Richards, David Bowie -|- Mastering: David Richards, Kevin Metcalfe -|- Assistant Engineers: Ben Fenner, Andy Grassi, Jon Goldberger, Domonik Tarqua -|- Album Design & Image Manipulation: Denovo -|- Photography: John Scarisbrick -|- Stylist: Jennifer Elster -|- Recorded at Mountain Studios, Switzerland. -|- Mixed and Additional Treatments by David Ricahrds, Assisted by David Bowie. -|- Mastered by David Ricahrds and Kevin Metcalfe at The TownHouse Digital Mastering Studios, London.
-|-The Leon Suites Complete 1994 [-1:11:14-] ▶ [5] Musicians-|- David Bowie: vocals, saxophone, guitar, keyboards -|- Brian Eno: synthesizers, treatments, oblique strategies -|- Reeves Gabrels: guitar -|- Erdal Kızılçay: bass, keyboards
-|- Mike Garson: grand piano -|- Sterling Campbell: drums
class="red">-|- Carlos Alomar: rhythm guitar -|- Joey Baron: drums -|- Yossi Fine: bass -|- Tom Frish: additional guitar on “Strangers When We Meet” -|- Kevin Armstrong: additional guitar on “Thru’ These Architects Eyes”
-|- Bryony, Lola, Josey and Ruby Edwards: background vocals on “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson”
and “I Am With Name”
-|-Listen to full album online [-6:22:01-] ▶ [6] Outtakes
Includes, among others: “Enemy is Fragile” – “I’d Rather Be Chrome” – “Dead Men Don’t Talk” – “Inside the Motel” – “Baby Fingers” – “ I Am w/ Name” – “Hide Me We Creep Together Part 1” – “Hide Me We Creep Together Part 2 – “The First Time” – “Hello Leon” – “OK Riot”.
-|-Leon - The Outside Outtakes – 2016 edit [-1:09:45-] ▶ [7] Tour
On the Outside tour,
Bowie and his band would come onstage while opening act Nine Inch Nails was finishing, and both bands performed “Subterraneans”, “Hallo Spaceboy” and “Scary Monsters”,
followed by 2 NIN songs (“Reptile” and “Hurt”), after which NIN decamped and Bowie’s set proceeded. -|-David Bowie + Nine Inch Nails – Dissonance Live 1995 (HD) [-45:16-] ▶ [8 Lyrics] Leon Takes Us Outside: Leon Blank
Valentines Day - 25 - June - 16th - Wednesday - July 6th - 20 - 0 - 20 - 15 - Martin Luther King Day - June 18th - June 6th - Wednesday - August 18th - 9th - 1999 - 12 - Nicholas - August - Wednesday - 13th - Sunday - 5th - March - October - January - October 13th - Wednesday - Martin Luther King Day - Afternoon - In view of nothing - 20 - 0 - 1 - Late winter - Martin Luther King Day - 12 - 16 - August - Wednesday - 13th - Friday - 7 - June.
-|-Leon Takes Us Outside / Micah P. Hinson – The Dreams You Left Behind [-4:51-] ▶ [9 Lyrics] Outside: Prologue
Now. Not tomorrow. Yesterday, not tomorrow. It happens today, the damage today. They fall on today - they beat on the outside, and I'll stand by you. - Now. Not tomorrow. It's happening now, not tomorrow. It’s happening now. The crazed in the hot-zone. The mental and diva’s hands. The fisting of life to the music outside, to the music outside. It happens outside, the music is outside.
It’s happening outside, the music is outside. It’s happening now, not tomorrow. Yesterday. Not tomorrow. The music is outside. It’s happening outside. The music is outside. Outside. -|-Reddit - Official Album Discussion #25 - 1.Outside 1995
▶ [10 Lyrics] The Heart’s Filthy Lesson: Detective Nathan Adler
(Heart’s filthy lesson) There’s always the Diamond friendly, sitting in the Laugh Motel. The Heart’s filthy lesson, with her hundred miles to hell. Oh, Ramona, if there was only something btw. us, other than our clothes. Something in our skies. Something in our blood. Paddy, Paddy, who’s been wearing Miranda’s clothes? It's the Heart’s filthy lesson - falls upon deaf ears. (Heart’s filthy lesson) Falls upon deaf ears. (Heart’s filthy lesson)
Oh Ramona, if there was only some kind of future. And these cerulean skies: Something in our skies - Something in our blood. Paddy, Paddy? Paddy, oh Paddy, I think I’ve lost my way. (Heart’s filthy lesson) I’m already five years older I’m already in my grave. (Heart’s filthy lesson) Will you carry me? Oh Paddy, I think I’ve lost my way. Paddy, what a fantastic death abyss. (Heart’s filthy lesson) It’s the Heart’s filthy lesson. Tell the others. -|-The Heart's Filthy Lesson – David Letterman Show 1995 [-5:03-] ▶ [11 Lyrics] A Small Plot of Land: Citizens of Oxford Town
Poor soul. Spit upon that. Poor soul, he never knew what hit him - and it hit him so. Poor dunce. He pushed back the pigmen. The Barbs laughed - the fool is dead. Poor dunce. - He’s less than within us. The brains talk but the will to live is dead. And prayer can’t travel so far these days. The talk of your life, standing so near - to innocent eyes. Poor dunce. Swings thru the tunnels and claws his way. Is small life so manic? Are these really the days. Poor dunce, poor soul. -|- A Small Plot of Land - Live Wembley 11-15-1995 [-6:55-] ▶ [12 Lyrics] (Segue) Baby Grace (a Horrid Cassette): Baby Grace Blue
Test, testing, testing - This, hmmm, Grace is my name - And and I was...um... - It was that photo... a fading photograph of a patch..., a patchwork quilt. - And they’ve put me on these ... - Ramona put me on these interest drugs - So I’m thinking very too bit too fast like a brain hatch - And ah they won’t let me see anybody - If I want to sometimes ... and I ask - I can still hear some pop...popular musics and aftershocks. (Ahhh-choo) See I’ve been watching a television of um... in the homelands - That’s the new homelands and um that’s all I can remember - And now they just want me to be quiet - And I think something is going to be horrid. -|-(Segue) Baby Grace (A Horrid Cassette) – By bowiechick [-1:30-] ▶ [13 Lyrics] Hallo Spceboy: Paddy
(Hallo) Spaceboy - you’re sleepy now - Your silhouette is so stationary - You’re released but your custody calls - And I want to be free - Don’t you want to be free - Do you like girls or boys - It’s confusing these days - But Moondust will cover you - Cover you - This chaos is killing me - So bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - Bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - This chaos is killing me - And the chaos is calling me - Yeah bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - Bye bye love - Good time love - Be sweet sweet dove - Bye bye spaceboy - Bye bye love. -|-Hallo Spaceboy – Brit Awards '96 w/ Pet Shop Boys [-2:47-] ▶ [14 Lyrics] The Motel:
Leon Blank
For we’re living in a safety zone don’t be holding back from me. We’re living from hour to hour down here and we’ll take it when we can. It’s a kind of living which recognises the death of the odourless man. When nothing is vanity nothing’s too slow. It’s not Eden but it’s no sham. There is no hell there is no shame. There is no hell like an old hell. There is no hell and it’s lights up, boys. Lights up boys. Explosion falls upon deaf ears while we’re swimming in a sea of sham. Living in the shadow of vanity - a complex fashion for a simple man. And there is no hell and there is no shame and there is no hell like an old hell. There is no hell and the silence flies on its brief flight. A razor sharp crap shoot affair and we light up our lives. And there’s no more of me exploding you. Re-exposing you. Like everybody do. Re-exploding you. I don’t know what to use. Make somebody move. Me exploding. Me exploding you. -|-The Motel – Live Rotterdam 2003 – A Reality Tour [-6:07-] ▶ [15 Lyrics] I Have Not Been to Oxford Town: Leon Blank
Baby Grace is the victim, she was 14 years of age. And the wheels are turning, turning, for the finger points at me. All's well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all’s well no I have not been to Oxford Town. Toll the bell pay the private eye. All’s well - 20th century dies. And the prison priests are decent, my attorney seems sincere. I fear my days are numbered - Lord get me out of here. All’s well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all’s well but I have not been to Oxford Town. This is your shadow on my wall. This is my flesh and blood. This is what I could’ve been. And the wheels are turning and turning, as the 20th century dies. If I had not ripped the fabric, if time had not stood still, if I had not met Ramona, if I’d only paid my bill. All’s well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all’s well but I have not been to Oxford Town. This is my bunk with two sheets, this is my food though foul, this is what I could have been. -|-I Have Not Been To Oxford Town – Audience-recording – NEC Birmingham 12-13-1995 [-4:23-] ▶ [16 Lyrics] No Control: Detective Nathan Adler
Stay away from the future, back away from the light, it’s all deranged - no control. Sit tight in your corner, don’t tell God your plans, it’s all deranged - no control. If I could control tomorrow’s haze, the darkened shore wouldn’t bother me. If I can’t control the web we weave, my life will be lost in the fallen leaves. Every single move’s uncertain, don’t tell God your plans, it’s all deranged - no control. I should live my life on bended knee if I can’t control my destiny. You’ve gotta have a scheme, you’ve gotta have a plan, in the world of today, for tomorrow’s man. No control. Stay away from the future, don’t tell God your plans, it’s all deranged - no control. Forbidden words, deafen me in memory - no control. See how far a sinful man burns his tracks, his bloody robes. -|-No Control 1995 [-4:12-]
▶ [17 Lyrics] (Segue) Algeria Touchshriek: Algeria Touchshriek
My name is Mr. Touchshriek, of Touchshriek, with mail over and fantasy. My shop sells egg shells off the shesores and empty females. I’m thinking of leasing the room above my shop to a Mr. Walloff Domburg - a reject from the world wide Internet. He’s a broken man; I’m also a broken man. It would be nice to have company. We could have great conversations. Looking through windows for demons, and watching the young advance in - all electric. Some of the houses around here still have inhabitants in them. I’m not sure if they’re from this country or not. I don’t get to speak much to anyone or that sort of thing. If I had another broken name - oh, I dream of something like that. -|-(Segue) Algeria Touchshriek – Matt Chamberlain as Algeria Touchshriek 1-18-2016 [-3:56-] ▶ [18 Lyrics] The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty): Artist / Minotaur
I shake - at the mother’s brutal vermin. I shake - and stare at the watery moon. With the same desire, as the sober Philistine. And I shake (turn and turn again) worm, the pain and blade - turn and turn again. The screw is a tightening atrocity - I shake. For the reeking flesh is as romantic as hell. The need to have seen it all: the voyeur of utter destruction - as beauty. I shake - turn and turn again - I shake - turn and turn again - I shake. Research has pierced all extremes of my sex. Call it a day - call it a day. Needle point life blinds the will to be next - call it a day. Today. -|-The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty) – Live Loreley 1996 HQ [-50:40-] ▶ [19 Lyrics] (Segue) Ramona A. Stone / I Am With Name: Ramona A. Stone + her Acolytes
I was Ramona A. Stone. I started with no enemies of my own. I was an artiste in a tunnel. But I’ve been having a mid-life crisis, and I’ve been dreaming in a sleep. And ape men with metal parts, I’ve spat upon deeply felt age. I’ve hid my hearts in, and I hate the funny colored english. We’ll creep together you and I, for I know who the small friends are. I am with name, I am with name, I am Ramona A Stone. A night fear female. Good timing drone. I am with name, I am with name, I am Ramona A Stone. (She should say: twitch & stream - it’ll end in chrome - night of the female - good time drone.) A person who loses a name, feels anxiety descending. Left at the crossroads, btw. the centuries - a millenium fetish. (Give it to me one more time!) Anxiety descending. -|-Ramona A. Stone - Fluxus open [-4:07-] ▶ [20 Lyrics] Wishful Beginnings: Artist / Minotaur
Cruising around me - the flames burn my body. Wishful beginnings - does this remind them again and again? You’re a sorry little girl. You’re a sorry little girl. Please hide - for the pain must feel like snow. You’re a sorry little girl. Sorry, little girl. Please hide from the kiss and the bite - shame burns. Breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in only doubt - the pain must feel like snow. I’m no longer your golden boy. Sorry little girl, I’m sorry little girl. The pain must feel like snow, there you go. Cover me, cover me. We flew on the wings. We were deep in the dead air, and this one will never go down. We had such wishful beginnings, but we lived unbearable lives. I’m sorry little girl. Sorry, little girl. So so sorry little girl. The pain must feel like snow. There you go, there you go. -|-Wishful Beginnings (a Bowie a day) 2016 [-6:33-] ▶ [21 Lyrics] We Prick You: Members of the Court of Justice
White boys falling on the fires of night
(I wish you’d tell). Flesh punks burning in their glue. Revolution comes in the strangest way (I wish you’d tell). I’d rather be inside you. Tell the truth - we prick you. (You show respect even if you disagree - you show respect.) Mama can I kiss you daddy can I ***you (We wish you well). Innocence passed me by. Wanna be screwing when the nightmare comes (I wish you well). Wanna come quick and die. All the little rose-kissed foxy girls - shoes, shoes, little white shoes; where have all the flowers gone? All the little fragile champion boys - toys, toys, little black toys; dripping on the end of a gun (Even if you disagree).
-|-We Prick You - Unreleased version 1995 [-4:14-] ▶ [22 Lyrics] (Segue) Nathan Adler: Detective Nathan Adler
Old Touchschriek was the main nameserver. Suspected of being a shoulder surfer, but he didn’t know from shit about challenge response systems. Now Ramona A Stone we know was selling interest drugs. She got males all hung up on her mind filters. She was if you don't mind me saying so an update demon. Now Leon, he couldn’t wait for 12 o’clock midnight. He jumps up on the stage with a criss criss machete and slashes around cutting a zero on everything. I mean a zero - in the fabric of time itself. Was this a suspect? I says to myself - Woa! “Quelle courage!” - Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to when it all began– -|-David Bowie as Nathan Adler [-1:13-] ▶ [23 Lyrics] I’m Deranged: Artist / Minotaur
Funny how secrets travel, I’d start to believe - if I were to bleed. Thin skies, the man chains his hands held high. Cruise me blond cruise me babe. A blond belief beyond beyond beyond. No return no return. I’m deranged. Deranged, my love. I’m deranged down down down. So cruise me babe cruise me baby. And the rain sets in, it’s the angel-man - I’m deranged. Cruise me cruise me cruise me babe. The clutch of life and the fist of love - oer your head - big deal Salaam. Be real deranged Salaam, before we reel. I’m deranged. -|-I’m Deranged - Outside mix version [-5:18-] ▶ [24 Lyrics] Thru These Architect’s Eyes: Leon Blank
Stomping along on this big Phillip Johnson, is delay just wasting my time? Looking across at Richard Rogers, scheming dreams to blow both their minds. It’s difficult you see, to give up baby, to leave a job, when you know you know the money’s from day to day. All the majesty of a city landscape. All the soaring days in our lives. All the concrete dreams in my mind’s eye. All the joy I see thru these architect’s eyes. Cold winter bleeds on the girders of Babel. This stone boy watching the crawling land. Rings of flesh and the towers of iron. The steaming caves and the rocks and the sand. Stomping along on this big Phillip Johnson, is delay just wasting my time? It’s difficult you see to give up baby, these summer scumholes, this goddamned starving life. -|-Thru These Architects Eyes - By Anna Dennis [-4:11-] ▶ [25 Lyrics] (Segue) Nathan Adler: Detective Nathan Adler ▶ [26 Lyrics] Strangers When We Meet: Leon Blank
All our friends now seem so thin and frail. Slinky secrets - hotter than the sun. No peachy prayers, no trendy rechauffé. I’m with you, so I can’t go on. All my violence raining tears upon the sheet. I’m bewildered for we’re strangers when we meet. Blank screen TV, preening ourselves in the snow. Forget my name, but I’m over you. Blended sunrise, and it’s a dying world. Humming Rheingold, we scavenge up our clothes. All my violence raining tears upon the sheet. I’m resentful ror wevre strangers when we meet. Cold tired fingers, tapping out your memories. Halfway sadness, dazzled by the new. Your embrace was all that I feared. That whirling room, we trade by vendu. Steely resolve is falling from me. My poor soul, all bruised passivity. All your regrets ride rough-shod over me. I’m so glad that we’re strangers when we meet. I'm so thankful that we’re strangers when we meet. I’m in clover for we’re strangers when we meet. Heel head over, but we're strangers when we meet. -|-Strangers When We Meet - Top of the Pops 1995 [-4:03-] ▶ [27 Credits]
Based on reports from, among others,
Nick DeRiso,
David Fricke, Kev Geoghegan, Paul Gorman, Edna Gundersen, Larry Katz, Peter–R. Koenig, George A. Paul, Chris Roberts, Emma Saunders, Steele Savage, and Internet searches. Thank you
bowiesongs, The National, Jason Lundberg, One Half of the Bowlettes, lo-fi noise makers, wn, john b, Mauro B. C., sonyakossta, Timetakesafag, SenseOfDoubt1, bowiechick, Beco2103, theMusicofmyLife1, BOWIElover,
Jorge Gago Lopez, Matt Chamberlain, joymarr, KyOdar, BlueM2012, Halloweenjack84, Anna Dennis, david bowie tin machine.
▶
[28 Postscript]
David Robert Jones aka David Bowie died from liver cancer two days after his 69th birthday, on January 9 2016. His ashes were scattered on the island of Bali, in a Buddhist ceremony. He left behind his wife Iman Muhammid Abdulmadjid, teenage daughter Alexandria, adult son Duncan Jones, Duncan's ex-nanny Marion Skene, and long-time personal assistant, Corinne Coco Schwab.
▶ “Good heavens! What a terrible curse!”
(1932) The horror of ungodly love is released when members of the British Museum’s 1921 field expedition season opens in Egypt. Boris Karloff is the mummy Imhotep, awakened by tomb-hunters and pursuing the reincarnation of his princess Anck-es-en-Amon in flapper-era London.
Employ|
▶ “I don’t understand.”
(1940) When mid-century archaeologists in Cairo come across a map leading to the long-dead princess Ananka, they locate the tomb, break the seal of the seven jackals, and unleash a terror that had waited three thousand years to be reborn. Tom Tyler is the mummy Kharis, and Eduardo Cianelli the high priest.
Embalm|
▶ “I can’t believe in a live mummy!”
(1942) Revived using tana leaves, Lon Chaney Jr begins his three-movie stint as the mummy Kharis, hell bent on killing all those who have desecrated the tomb of his princess Ananka. Turhan Bey is Mehemet Bey.
Embark|
▶ “We know that he still lives.”
(1944) Lon Chaney Jr returns as the mummy Kharis, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to court Ramsay Ames, reincarnation of the princess Ananka. John Carradine is Yousef Bey, and George Zucco is Andoheb.
Embrace|
▶ “I can never get too much sun.”
(1944) Lon Chaney Jr rises once more as the mummy Kharis, who has reason to journey into the Louisiana bayou, where a crypt holds the remains of his beloved Virginia Christine, the princess Ananka. Peter Coe is Dr Ilzor Zandaabm, and Dennis Moore is Dr Halsey.
▶ “… a few murders here and there.”
(1933) A scientist’s unholy experiments into invisibility is successful and he has reason to regret it. Claude Rains is the Invisible Man, slowly turning homicidal due to the formula’s side effect. Gloria Stuart as his fiancee, E.E. Clive the constable, and Una O’Connor the innkeeper.
Sequel|
▶ “I can’t find peace in the underworld.”
(1940) Scientist-bro of first Invisible Man re-creates the wonder formula and sets an innocent free so that the condemned man may pursue the real killer. Vincent Price is the second Invisible Man, co-starring w/ Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Napier, Nan Grey.
Screwball|
▶ “I’m nothin’ but a nothin’.”
(1940) This time a woman is offered the invisibility diet when she becomes a volunteer to a scientist. Blackie and his gang get word and become interested. Kitty Carroll is the Invisible Woman. With John Barrymore as the mad scientist, and Oskar Homolka, Shemp Howard, Maria Montez, Anne Nagel.
Spy|
▶ “I can’t tell you people apart.”
(1942) When axis agents try to steal the formula, grandson to the Invisible Man runs off w/ the original notebooks, then parachutes into Berlin to defeat the nazis. Jon Hall is the invisible agent. With Peter Lorre, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Albert Basserman, Ilona Massey, J. Edward Bromberg, Key Luke. Screenplay by Curt Siodmak.
Scion|
▶ “Pioneers have always to contend w/ fools.”
(1944) Ghoulish revenge is meted out to a scientist who succeeds in stabilizing the formula. Jon Hall returns again as the invisible one. John Carradine is Dr Drury, w/ Gale Sondergaard, Lester Mathews, Halliwell Hobbes.
m | “I wanted to give you a ghost for your birthday.” ▶ Sylvie et le Fantõme (1946)
Ghost story set inside a vast house (ghost dog anyone?). The owner’s daughter is about to turn sixteen, and the father wants to give her a fake ghost for her birthday. The house is already haunted by a ghost, so what could go wrong?
| • |
Odette Joyeux as the birthday girl, and Jacques Tat as the ghost (first role). Joining in this frothy pastisch are Marguerite Cassan, Paul Demange, Jean Desailly, Gabrielle Fontan, Pierre Larquey, Claude Marcy, Francois Penier, and Raymond Rognoni.
| • |
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara, screenplay by Jean Aurenche, cinematography by Philippe Agostini and the just-right music by Rene Cloerec. A pastiche of Old Dark House.
| • |
• WHIMSY DOUBLE FEATURE: The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
m | “Laughter is the argument of idiots against every new idea!” ▶ Woman in the Moon (1929)
Willy Fritsch and Gustav von Wangenheim build a rocket and both love the same woman, Gerda Maurus. They can only make their dream of going to the moon real if they accept finance, and so it comes to pass that Fritz Rasp comes along for the ride as the on-board agent, while Gustl Gstettenbaur is a stoaway no one was expecting.
| • |
It turns out that our satellite is actually ovoid in shape and has an atmosphere. Otherwise this description of a trip to the moon in 1929 does not age. It remains still a précis on the spirit of space flight, “… spreading imaginative splendours and romantic sweep.” There are many firsts in this film, e.g., the countdown sequence.
| • |
Directed by Fritz Lang from a script by Thea von Harbou, based on her novel >The Rocket to the Moon.
| • |
Emil Hasler, Otto Hunte and Karl Vollbrecht were responsible for the look, employing special effects by Oskar Fischinger and Konstantin Imen-Tschet, and seeking out rocketry assistance on how to arrive at production models of liquid-fired rockets. Responsibility for capturing it all on film went to Curt Courant, Oskar Fischinger, Konstantin Imen-Tschet, and Otto Kanturek.
| • |
The only full-length silent scifi film. The restored version runs to three hours and 40 minutes, w/ the opening dinner scene alone clocking in at 45 minutes. The original score is by Willy Schmidt-Gentner.
| • |
• MOON DOUBLE FEATURE: The Astronomer’s Dream (1898) by Georges Méliès
m | “… add to man’s dream of truth.” ▶ Madame Curie (1943)
Fictionalized account of the challenges and triumphs of Marie and Pierre Curie, winners of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.
| • |
The screenplay by Paul Osborn, Hans Rameau, Walter Reisch and Aldous Huxley, is set in Paris in the 1890s, and unfurls slowly to depict the tedious tasks of research science. In this case delving into radioactivity, and grasping that certain states can cause changes on photographic plates, that uranium and thorium can separate, and all this can lead to a new discovery.
| • |
The cavernous and detailed sets is by Edwin B. Willis and Hugh Hunt, w/ art direction from Cedric Gibbons and Paul Groesse. All this finesse is carefully photographed by Joseph Rutenberg, who is probably doing this while listening to a recording of the musical score by Herbert Stothart. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon star as the brilliant and shy physicists. Quietly directed by Mervyn LeRoy.
| • |
• FAME DOUBLE FEATURE: Miracle Woman (1931)
m | “You know what you are? You’re a man w/ his shirt off!” ▶ Stranded (1935)
The three themes of ambition, greed and love are braided together to tell the story of the building of a bridge at Golden Gate. It culminates inside Worker’s Hall where mob justice takes all. Before that happens there are others taking place at the Builders Protective League, Bureau of Missing Persons, Municipal Lodging House for Women, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
| • |
George Brent is a no-nonsense foreman and luminous Kay Francis as the woman who believes in him.
| • |
Directed by Frank Borzage from a screenplay by Delmer Daves, based on Frank Wead and Ferdinand Reyher’s story “Lady w/ a Badge.”
| • |
Threading throughout the movie is documentary footage of the actual bridge build, when union wages were $11 a day, and nets laid underneath to catch falling workers. The build had zero fatalities until the last day of construction, when about eighteen workers fell. The nets saved some but not all. Built to hold up to ten bodies only, the netting broke and took some to their deaths.
| • |
The Golden Gate Bridge opened for traffic in 1937.
| • |
• LABOR DOUBLE FEATURE: Native Land (1942)
m | “I just love insects, because they never lie.” ▶
Genocide (1968)
Mankind’s reckless experiments triggers a revolt by winged insects, incensed w/ heat-death and nature unbalanced, and is over w/ in 84 minutes.
| • |
Progenitor of a J-branch into eco-horror, the corrosive script is by Susumu Takaku, who writes dialogue for the insect-mind: “The Earth does not belong to human beings alone. We don’t care if mankind destroys itself w/ nuclear weapons, but we refuse to let you take us w/ you. Destroy the human race! Genocide! Exterminate all humans!”
| • |
An absurd, disturbing, phantasmagoric, prickly, profound, topical, and wacky film released in the U.S. as War of the Insects.
| • |
• APOCALYPSE DOUBLE FEATURE: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
m | “… may be too late.”▶
The Ugly American (1963)
Marlon Brando is the newest member of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Southeast Asia, walking through an uneasy dream. Set in the 1950s in a volatile country in descending into civil war.
| • |
Directed by George Englund, from a screenplay by Stewart Stern, and based on a 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer.
| • |
• VIETNAM DOUBLE FEATURE: Indochine (1992)
m | “It is going to be a happy time in England, this year in the future.” ▶ Privilege (1967)
Set in a “…near future,” where a pop celebrity becomes a tool of the State and his life micro-managed by his handlers in government and the church.
| • |
The meltdown begins to be apparent when a christian rock group gets to perform “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Jerusalem.”
| • |
Paul Jones portrays the idol as an internee, singing "“I’ve Been a Bad, Bad, Boy” and “Free Me” to his enraptured audience. (Jones is also the real-life lead singer of Manfred Mann 1962 to 1966.) Jean Shrimpton plays a fellow celebrity, who comes to paint his portrait.
| • |
Cinema verité film by Peter Watkins. Screenplay by Norman Bogner, from a Johnny Speight story. Mike Leander did the music and Peter Suschitzky handled cinematography. The art direction by Bill Brodie was abetted w/ costumes by Vanessa Clarke.
| • |
• SIXTIES DOUBLE FEATURE: Lonely Boy (1962)
m | “… go for a walk.”▶ King and Country (1964)
Tom Courtenay is the World War I private accused of desertion during battle, and Dirk Bogarde his military defense attorney who must guide his client to a dark place.
| • |
Directed by Joseph Losey from James Lansdale Hodson’s novel, which turned into a play by John Wilson before becoming a script by Ean Janes.
| • |
• WWI DOUBLE FEATURE: Journey’s End (2017)
Illustrated w/ collages, drawings, maps, paintings, photographs, prints and quotes
|⁋|
Out west, when 1848 was only twenty-four days old, mechanic James Marshall was making a routine inspection on the grounds of a sawmill he ran for his employer. That was when the New Jersey native noticed some odd-looking ore in a water channel of the South Fork of the American River. It was “... bright, yet malleable. I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.”
|⁋|
Nine days after Marshall emerged from the waters w/ his find, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, transferring a large tract of Mexico to the United States.
|⁋|
These concurrent events together precipitated the California Gold Rush of 1849, when folks came from all over, bringing dreams while praying to the god and goddess of wealth for a show of “colour”
|⁋|
The first came from Monterey, San Francisco, San Jose and Sonoma: when clerks, doctors, laborers, lawyers, mechanics, rancheros left their jobs. Sailors deserted their ships. Soldiers deserted the Mexican War. As word spread more came from Hawai‘i, Mexico and Oregon.
|⁋|
Gold seekers showing up near the sawmill of John August Sutter, where gold was first discovered, had no need for milled lumber, and his business went into decline. All the while, a new settlement grew across the Ameircan River to become Coloma, the first gold rush town. Nearby stands a monument, by the Native Sons of the Golden West, to mark the grave of James Wilson Marshall, the “discoverer of gold.”
One can cross Panama to get to California rather than sail around Cape Horn. Up Chagres river to the town of Culebra; then donkeys to Gulf of Panama, eleven miles away.
|⁋|
Maps were consulted and what became the California Trial began w/ existing routes. Emigrants showed up along the Missouri river and towns in Illinois or Iowa. Wagon trains hitched, they headed out, crossing landscapes of grasslands, prairies, steppes, valleys and rivers to Wyoming and Fort Laramie.
|⁋|
The only way to cross the Rockies was a corridor beyond Fort Laramie, level and broad. South Pass afforded several routes passage to California. At a fork in the road soon after, the Oregon Trail veers right while the Mormon Trail turns south toward Fort Bridger.
|⁋| Overland travelers chose routes dependent on starting point and final destination. Other factors were the condition of their wagons, livestock, and the availability of water.
|⁋|
From California, one can get to Oregon on the Applegate Trail (1846), an alternative to the hazardous last leg of the Oregon Trail.
|⁋| The Oregon Trail begins in Missouri and leaves either Fort Leavenworth, Independence or Saint Joseph for a two thousand mile trek to the Oregon Territory. Past the Great Plains, then the Rockies, heading west northwest to the Snake river, Fort Boise, Witman Mission, The Dales, Fort Vancouver, the Columbia river, and the coast.
The Santa Fe Trail starts off in Missouri, rolls through Kansas and a corner of Colorado. Crossing the Arkansas river before dropping to New Mexico, the trail loses its identity somewhat in Santa Fe, where it is braided to the Gila Trail, a local 16th-c. commerce and travel high road, bringing trade from inland to the coast.
|⁋|
The Mormon Trail, gathers in Illinois and wends by Iowa and Nebraska before joining established trails in Wyoming. Together they cross the Rockies, then the Mormon Trail continues south southwest to Utah Territory to end up in Los Angeles. Besides the overlanders there were also seafarers.
|⁋| An eight-month sea route from New York to San Francisco would involve a harzardous rounding of Cape Horn.
A 49er carries pickaxe, shovel and pan. Can add a rocker and a hopper; some also conduct hydraulic experiments. A water wheel would be jim-dandy, to pick up individual quantities of gold-bearing gravel and sand.
|⁋| Personal gear: pair of blankets, frying-pan, flour, salt pork, brandy (or other sanctifying spirit). Field gear must-haves: pickaxe, shovel and pan. Some procure a mule.
|⁋| Gold miners w/ no financial backing learn to congregate along mountain roads and wait for supply wagons passing through, bringing food and tools and carrying out gold dust. Saturday nights were for salooning and carousing. Sunday is a holiday – laundry, tool repair, swapping stories, writing letters, napping.
|⁋| A twelve inch shallow sheet-iron pan to rinse soil w/ water and locate the gold.
|⁋| A rocker is a rectangular wooden box mounted on two rockers and set at a downward angle.
|⁋|
The hopper is a box sitting on top of the rocker, lined w/ a sheet of perforated iron. Beneath is an area called the “riddle-box.”
|⁋| The long tom is an improved rocker plus hopper, reaching to twenty feet in length. A long sheet of perforated iron lines the bottom and beneath that iw the riddle-box.
|⁋| Women too had gold fever, coming from Mexico, Chile, Peru, England, France, New York and New Orleans.
|⁋| Depicted in history as adventuress, courtesan, harlot, pickpocket, prostitute and the demimonde, these women were also bookkeepers, cooks, laundresses, shop-keepers, maids, wives. When mountain roads improved sufficiently to make travel btw. towns feasible, they set forth as performers.
|⁋|
Mrs Clappe came west in 1851 w/ her husband. In her letters home she gives an account of the era, about geology and a visitto a rural doctor’s rude office of pine shingles and cotton cloth.
|⁋|Yerba Buena was a hamlet on the San Francisco peninsula w/ an excellent harbor. The Spaniards established a maritime trading post and built the Mission of San Francisco de Asis. Ships docking in its cove discharged sailors to a Spanish-style plaza known as Portsmouth Square.
|⁋| On arrival gold seekers rented lodgings in shanties and tent towns, and stayed long enough to buy tools and provisions before heading out.
|⁋|
Brought over from Australia to perform labor, English convicts deserted en masse and instead formed a gang. Soon a frontier patch of lawlessness, Sydney Town, sprouted at the base of Telegraph Hill. The Sydney Ducks preyed on people and property, augmented by a gang of lady pickpockets, and willingly committed murder to survive.
|⁋| The embers of Sydney Town rekindled and gave birth to the Barbary Coast, chock-a-block w/ bars, saloons, brothels, concert halls, dance halls; where “getting shanghaied” was first rehearsed. Survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, by 1917 the red-light district was no more.
Sutter’s Mill on the South Fork of the American River.
|⁋|Coloma, next to Sutter’s Mill, was the first gold mining town. A post office and jail were added in 1852 – both proved popular. Gold mining also took place north at Bidwell’s Bar, Cut Eye Foster’s Bar, Downieville, Dutch Flat, Goodyear’s Bar, Grass Valley, Helltown, Illinoistown, Iowa Hill, Kanaka Flat, Lousy Level, Marysville, Murderers Bar, Nevada City, Plumas City, Poker Flat, Rough and Ready, Washington, Whiskey Flat, Wisconsin Hill, and You Bet.
|⁋|
South at Angels Camp, Chinese Camp, Dogtown, Fair Play, Hornitos, Jackson, Mokelumme Hill, Mormon Bar, Rawhide, Rich Gulch, Shaw’s Flat, Sonora, Volcano.
|⁋|
Gold was found along tributaries to the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. At Auburn, Diamond Springs, Grizzly Flats, Missouri Flat, Placerville.
|⁋|
Home to Native Americans incl. the Miwok, the Sierra Nevada was rudely affected by the Gold Rush. In 1849 an incident occurred along the Middle Fork of the American River when some 49ers died and some indigenes killed. An uneasy truce obtained when Native Americans were hired on as laborers and paid in tin, but by 1900 their population had declined to only ±16,000.
|⁋| Before James Cagney was the Frisco Kid and Edward G.
Robinson dramatized life in the Barbary Coast era, there was a 1913 feature, The Last Night of the Barbary Coast, now a lost film.
The 1849 state census counted 42,000 overlanders and 35,000 seafarers caught up by gold fever; together w/ 3,000 sailors who had deserted ships. |⁋|
Coloma is now a ghost town inside Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.
Like all who seek a better tomorrow, the Chinese too came to the California Gold Rush, formed a fraternity in Coloma, squatted spent claims and worked as a team over the “tailings” left behind. In 1880 this gold-mining Chinatown was lost to fire.
“As revealed in the song
Ziggy Stardust, Ziggy was not
a spider - he was the fly.”
-- Steele Savage
Outside the musical world he inhabits, David Bowie can usually be found in the company of artists.
These adventures through the art world found an expression in the early 1990s while playing around on his computer; he came up w/ the tale of a diary concerning blood and art. This having only recently chatted w/ Brian Eno on the possibility of launching several investigations into the malaise that is fin-de-siecle culture - the last five years of the 20th century - and what that might be like. In 1995, Bowie took this short story into the studio and, w/ Eno's involvement, produced a concept album concerning "this rather dark, satirical idea of where art could go." While Eno fiddles w/ the elusives and imbues the proceedings w/ propositions and strategies, Bowie massages words into music, seeking for fits or juxtaposition til a composition can cohere. At the same time, musicians are taking cues from Eno into which meadow the sound ought to and can roam.
Lyrics eventually separate and become voices, and the voices beaome, among others, particular characters: a detective following a lead, a victim who is murdered and turned into art, an assortment of suspects, and a minotaur. Having ironed out the inequities as well as iniquities, what emerges is the album 1.Outside, a disjointed and disjunctive dystopia involving violence and death, sex and rock 'n roll.
-|- FIVE YEARS
The cosmic Chameleon and the chance Corinthian lash themselves together, in the lab – on the slab – and bring forth “… a gothic drama hyper-cycle”.
❝ [Brian and I] had already started a whole set of improvisations in the studio around March, 1994. Out of that came dialogue and landscape that was tied together, not even tenuously. All the elements were fairly disparate. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, by a narrative device, to chronicle the final five years of the millennium. The over-ambitious intention is to carry this through to the year 2000.
❝ What Brian and I are trying to do is develop a series of albums. [Outside] is the first in this cycle of albums. [The diary is] only the subject matter, it’s not the content of the album. The content is very much the atmosphere and texture of the music, that strange place that music indeed puts you which cannot be articulated. The story itself is semi-linear, so if you want to, follow it in a linear fashion, but it”s not absolutely necessary.
The pieces themselves can be autonomous, they are pieces of music on their own.
❝ Well, Brian, very cleverly, because of being what he is, which is basically a conceptualist, turned everything into a series of games once we got into the studio: To allow the musicians to not be who they are for short periods of time. He would create little flash cards for them in the mornings. He would create situations they would have to put themselves in mentally, intellectually, and then start playing from that point of view. On each one, a character was written, like (You are the disgruntled member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that were suppressed). ... Because that set the tone for the day, the music would take on all those obscure areas. And it would very rarely lapse into the cliché. So we changed the status of the beginning of these pieces and they came into them like aliens from another place. It opened up a whole area of improvisation. ... It’s very hard to explain [laughs], you should have been there.
A piece that shows the extreme it could get to is A Small Plot of Land. That piece in particular was a first class indication of what happens when you put people in a strange place like that.
❝ As for musicians, it was important to choose those who were not weighed down with musical cliché, who had terrific control over their abilities. Yet were a bit loony.
❝ The lyric writing itself was fairly hazardous. What I did, I took a lot of areas of subject matter I’m interested in and wrote short paragraphs or pieces of poetry around those subjects and fed them into this Macintosh computer I have. I have a random key on it and it will randomize what I have written. So it was basically the Macintosh’s choice that it was New Jersey. But it was also a bit of England, too, with New Oxford Town. [Then decide] whether I was going to sing, do a dialogue, or become a character. I would improvise with the band, really fast on my feet, getting from one line to another and seeing what worked.
❝ There’s no intent in it, there’s no meaning. I’m not a meaner. I don’t have this great thing that I have to say. It’s a collection of fragments of information, of ideas, that are assembled and produce a certain atmosphere.
❝ Next year, we’ll develop a whole new slew of other characters or maybe re-introduce some of these or even negate some of them. Maybe we’ll never find Baby Grace. Maybe [Detective Nathan] Adler will become the next victim. I don't know. And that’s what’s kind of interesting. Maybe we’ll just get bored with murder as art and move into another area of our society. It’s all up for grabs. So I‘m quite interested in the future of this thing.
❝ I think [the album is] a confluence of events. First, we definitely perceive murder now as entertainment. It’s used to a massive extent in cinema. And pretty much it’s a space filler in TV. There’s the whole gladiatorial arena spectacle of somehow appeasing gods or looking at the fears and anxieties of the public.
❝ The momentum gathers as we approach the end of this cycle of 100 years, a huge anguish that everything will change. I wanted to make a record that reflected those anxieties, a state of moral, spiritual and emotional panic. With people breaking off into small groups to feel some sense of community.
❝ I think the idea of becoming comfortable with the idea of chaos is how we are progressing – that life and the universe are extremely untidy. Anything that pulls back the veil on that chaos is a step nearer a more realistic understanding of what our state is – so I embrace chaos. I’m a child of the ’70s, remember. I’m pluralistic by nature. I always had the unfortunate facility of being able to see both sides of every picture. It wasn’t a question of not being able to determine which side I was on, but seeing that things didn’t have sides. It wasn’t as simple as that.
❝ Oh, I’ve got the fondest hopes for the fin de siecle. I see it as a symbolic sacrificial rite. I see it as a deviance, a pagan wish to appease gods, so we can move on. There’s a real spiritual starvation out there being filled by these mutations of what are barely remembered rites and rituals. To take the place of the void left by a non-authoritative church. We have this panic button telling us it’s gonna be a colossal madness at the end of this century.
❝ Plus this growing momentum in body art, which has been precipitated over the last 15 years or so with people like
Kiki Smith and
Damian Hirst and
Ron Athey and
Chris Burden. The idea of using the body as yet another medium, like wood or metal or glass or stone – almost the politicizing of the body itself.
Almost extrapolating on that in an allegorical fashion to have this rather dark, satirical idea of where art could go.
❝ About 20 percent of what I put in [the album] are fictional and the rest are real, but it’s very hard to tell the difference. But the most surprising one, like the Korean cutting off pieces of himself in the late ’70s in New York, was not apocryphal. I checked back with Art Forum.
❝ The morality of any society is quite strange. In the finality, it’s decided by law what happens. People change their network of comfort by changing laws to make things acceptable or unacceptable.
| OUTSIDE RESOURCES
▶ [1] The Diary of Nathan Adler
THE ART-RITUAL MURDER OF BABY GRACE BLUE — aka THE DIARY OF NATHAN ADLER ¶ It was at precisely 5:47am on the morning of Friday 31 of December 1999 that a dark spirited pluralist began the dissection of 14-year-old “Baby Grace.”
The arms of the victim were pin-cushioned w/ 16 hypodermic needles, pumping in four major preservatives, colouring agents, memory information transport fluids and some kind of green stuff. From the last and 17th, all blood and liquid was extracted. The stomach area was carefully flapped open and the intestines removed, disentangled and re-knitted as it were, into a small net or web and hung btw. the pillars of the murder-location, the grand damp doorway of Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts, New Jersey. ¶ The limbs of Baby were then severed from the torso. Each limb was implanted w/ a small, highly sophisticated, binary-code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb. The self-contained mini amplifiers were then activated, amplifying the decoded memory info-transport substances, revealing themselves as little clue haikus, small verses detailing memories of other brutal acts, well documented by the ROMbloids. ¶
The limbs and their components were then hung upon the splayed web, slug-like prey of some unimaginable creature. The torso, by means of its bottom-most orifice, had been placed on a small support fastened to a marble base. It was shown to varying degrees of success depending upon where one stood from behind the web but in front of the museum door itself, acting as both signifier and guardian to the act. It was definitely murder – but was it art?
¶ All this was to be the lead-up to the most provocative event in the whole sequence of serial-events that had started around November of tha same year, plunging me into the most portentous chaos-abyss that a quiet lone-hacker like myself could comprehend. ¶ My name is Nathan Adler, or Detective Professor Adler in my circuit. I’m attached to the division of Art-Crime Inc., the recently instigated corporation funded by an endowment from the Arts Protectorate of London, it being felt that the investigation of art-crimes was in itself inseparable from other forms of expression and therefore worthy of support from this significant body. ¶ Nicolas Serota himself had deemed us, the small-fry of the division, worthy of an exhibit at last year’s Biennale in Vencie, three rooms of evidence and comparative study work which conclusively proved that the cow in Mark Tansey’s “The Innocent Eye Test” could not differentiate btw. Paulus Potter’s “The Young Bull” of 1647 (exactly 300 years before I was born, incidentally) and one of Monet’s grain stack paintings of the 1890s. The traditional art press deemed this extrapolation “bullshit” and removed itself to study the more formal ideas contained in Damien Hirst’s “Sheep In a Box.”
Art’s a farmyard. It’s my job to pick thru the manure heap looking for peppercorns. Friday - 12-31-99 – 10:15a¶ As in any crime, my first position is to peruse the motive-gag. The recent spate, thru ’98-’99, of concept-muggings pretty much had me pulling breath for an art-murder. It was a crime whose time was now. The precedents were all there. It had probably its beginnings in the ’70s w/ the Viennese castrationists and the blood-rituals of Nitsch. Public revultion put the lid on that episode, but you can’t keep a good ghoul down. ¶ Spurred on by Chris Burden’s having himself shot by his collaborator in a gallery, tied up in a bag, thrown on a highway and then crucified upon the top of a Volkswage, stories circulated thru the nasty-neon of NY night that a young Korean artist was the self-declared patient of wee-hours surgery in cut and run operations at not-so-secret locations in the city. If you found out about it, you could go and watch this guy having bits and pieces removed under anaesthetic. ¶ A finger-joint one night, a limb another.
By the dawning of the ’80s, rumour had it that he was down to a torso and one arm. He’d asked to be left in a cave in the Catskills, fed every so often by his acolytes. He didn’t do much after that, I guess he read a lot. Maybe wrote a whole bunch. I suppose you can never tell what an artist will do once he’s peaked. ¶ Round this same time, Bowie the singer remarked on a coupla goons who frequented the Berlin bars wearing full surgery regalia: caps, aprons, rubber gloves and masks. The cutting edge. ¶ Then came Damien Hirst w/ the Shark-Cow-Sheep thing. No humans, palatable ritual for the worldwide public. The acceptable face of gore. Meanwhile in the US, 1994, I was in town on the night of the Athey scarifications. Thursday - 10.27.94 – 122 E. Village, Manhattan¶ Ron Athey, performance artist not for the squeamish - former heroin addict-HIV positibve, pushes what looks like a knitting needle repeatedly into his forehead, a crown of blood, must hurt like hell. Stream red dribble-dribble. No screams. Face moves in pain. Carried upstage and scrubbed down in his own blood. Then water. Now dresses in nice suit and tie. Now in the black T-shirt and jeans, carving, w/ a disposable salpel, patterns, into the back of Daryl Carlton, a black man. Bloody blotted paper towels then hung on a washing line suspended over the heads of the audience. Blood-prints from life. An extremely limited edition. When it was first performed back in March, “Four Scenes in a Harsh Life” exploded controversy shrapnel through-out the National Endowment for the Arts. “We have taken every precaution w/ our disposal systems,”
An Athey spokes-person said. “The towels containing the blood are immediately deposited in hazardous-waste bags. Each evening, the material will be driven to a hospital for final disposal.” Athey says he is dealing w/ issues of self-loathing, suffering, healing and redemption. Friday – 12-31-99 – 10:30a – Museum of Modern Parts¶ I’m drinking up the Oxford Town. New Jersey fume. Salty and acid. Maybe I can get a handle on this thing back in Soho at the bureau. It used to be Rothko’s studio, now the playground for all us Art-Crime folk, AC’s or “the daubers” as we’re dubbed. Rothko himself, in a deep-dark-drunk one night, carefully removed his clothes, folded them up neatly, placing them upon a chair, lay upon the floor in a crucified position and after several attempts, found the soft blue pump of his wrists and checked out He’d held the razor blades btw. wads of tissue paper so that he wouldn’t cut his fingers. Deep thinker. Always was. 11:00am - “Dauber” HQ, Soho¶ The only names the Data bank can associate w/ Baby Grace are Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone and Algeria Touchshriek. The rundowns are brief but not to the point: ¶ [- RAMONA A. STONE: Female. Caucasian. Mid-40s. Assertive maintenance interest-drug dealer and Tyrannical Futurist. No convictions. Contacts: Leon Blank, Baby Grace Blue, Algeria Touchshriek. -] ¶ [- LEON BLANK: Male. Mixed race. 22 years. Outsider. Three convictions for petty theft, appropriation w/ plagiarism w/out license. Contacts: Baby Grace Blue, Algeria Touchshriek. -] ¶ [- ALGERIA TOUCHSHRIEK : Male. Caucasian. 78 years. Owner of small establishment on Rail Yard. Oxford Town, NJ. Deals in art-drugs and DNA prints. Fence for all apparitions of any medium. Harmless, lonely. -] ¶ Small cog, no wheels. Not much to go on but R.A. Stone weighs heavy on my memory. No problem, it’ll come back. Best thing to do now is feed all relevant pieces into the Mack-Verbasiser, the Metarandom programme that re-strings real life facts as im-probable virtual-fact. I may get a lead or two from that. ... 11:15a¶ Jesus Who. I hate typing. Anyhow, we’ve got some real interesting solvents from Mack-random. How about this! Verbasiser down-load, first block: No convictions of assertive saints believed Caucasian way-out tyrannical evoked no images described – Christian saints questions no female cristian machine believed no work is caucasian assertive saints believed female described christian tyrannical questions – R.A.Stone convictions martyrs and tyrannicals are evoked Female described sado-masochist questions – I am suicide described the fabric machine – Slashing way out saints and martyrs and thrown downstairs. ¶ Now the swirl begins. Now the image stack backs up and takes center stage. Ramona A. Stone, I remember this thickness, this treacly liquid thought. But wait, I’m ahead of myself. 6-15-77 – Kreutzburg, Berlin¶ It’s two in the morning. I can’t sleep for the screaming of some poor ostracised Turkish immigrant screaming his guts out from over the street. His hawking shriek sounds semi-stifled like he’s got a pillow over his mouth. But the desperation comes through the spongy rubber like a knife. It cuts the breeze and bangs my eardrums. I take a walk past the fabric machine, turn left onto a street w/ no name. The caucasian suicide center, naked and grimy, silhouetted by fungus yellow street lamps female slashing way-out saints for a dollar a time thrown downstairs if you can’t take any more. Pure joy of retreat into death, led by the shepherdess. Anti mixed-race posters pasted upon their altar of pop-death icons party people.
¶ A zero w/ no name looks dull-eyed to Ms. Stone, the drone that says “in the future, everything was up to itself.” Yea. ¶ I remember Ramona. She set herself up as the no-future priestess of the Caucasian Suicide Temple, vomiting out her doctrine of death-as-eternal-party into the empty vessels of Berlin youth. The top floor rooms were the gateways to giving up to the holy ghost. She must have overseen more than 30 or 40 check-outs before the local squad twigged what was going down. 10-28-94¶New Yorker magazine, advance copy celebrating fashion. It’s a first of its kind since Tina Brown took over as editor. One look is all it took. It took the look and wrote a new book on what sophi-staplites would take and bake. Guy Bourdin featured heavily in this new eDISHion. Since the advent of AIDS and the new morality, and, of course his death, his dark sexy fatal style had fallen out of Vogue.
¶ An uncompromising photographer, he had found a twisty avenue through desire and death. A white female leg sticking gloomily out of a bath of black liquid enamel. Two glued up babes covered in tiny pearls. The glue prevented their skins from breathing and they pass out. “Oh it would be beautiful,” he is to have said, “to photograph them dead in bed.”
¶ He was a French Guy. He had known Man Ray. Loved Lewis Carroll. His first gig was doing hats for Vogue. He’d place dead flies or bees on the faces of the models, or, female head wears hat crushed btw. three skinned calves heads, tongues lolling. What was this? Fine Arts? The surrealists might even think his work passé. Well, it was the ’50s, that's what it was. The tight-collar ’50s seen through unspeakable hostility. He wanted but he couldn’t paint. So he threw globs of revengeful hatred at his nubile subjects. He would systematically pull the phone cord out of the wall. He was never to be distrubed. Distrubed. Never. Everything and everyone died round him. ¶ One shoot focusing upon a woman lying in bed was said to be a reconstruction of his estranged wife’s death. Another picture has woman in a phone booth making some frantic call. Her hand is pressed whitely against the glass. Behind her and outside are two female bodies partially covered by the autumn leaves. His dream, so he told friends, was to do shoots in the morgue, w/ the stiffs as mannequins. I don’t know. I just read this stuff. Now his spirit was being resurrected. We’re mystified by blood. It’s our enemy now. We don’t understand it. Can’t live w/ it. Can’t, well ... y’know? Friday - 12-31-99 - 11:30a¶ After surgery and investment in a bullet-proof mask, Ramona turned up in London, Canada as owner of a string of body-parts jewellery stores. Lamb penis necklaces, goat-scrotum purses, nipple earrings, that sort of thing. The word on the street, however, suggested that it was not in the best of interests to become one of her clients as occassionally, a customer would step into her shop and not come out again.
¶ The whistle blew after a much-loved and highly respected celebrity, known for being known, failed to show for a gallery-hanging of her mirrors. Other celebrities, equally known for being known, some only to each other, thought it the most profound exhibit in years and couldn’t take their eyes off the works. All the pieces sold within an hour, many for record prices. ¶ When the critic for Tate magazine asked for an interview / the celebrity-artist, the gallery owner recalled that he hadn't seen her since earlier that day. She’d mentioned that she would be going shopping for a diamond-encrusted unbilical cord as a celebratory thing to announce her pregnancy. She would be back in an hour. Just a quick stop at the “Gallstone.” ¶ 1986. That pregnancy would have been produced a being that would be around 14 years of age. If it was still alive. ¶
To be continued...
-|- Read
The Annotated Diary of Nathan Adler ▶ [2] Genesis
The concept album 1.Outside aka Outside is based, in part, on a diary that Bowie kept over the course of a 2-week spell and, found wanting for publication, instead turned it into a short story about taboo. Revisiting the cut-up method, pioneered by the Dadaists of the 1920s and later deployed by
Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs to disrupt a linear progression, Bowie stitched together another kind of diary: kept during the course of a murder investigation. Bowie claimed that it took about three and a half hours of using the cut-up method to create “virtually the entire genesis” of the album. He had just stepped away from finishing the soundtrack to 1993’s Buddha of Suburbia mini-series for BBC Televsion. -|-
Bowie on death, violence and chaos in his 1995 concept album Outside [-12:50-] ▶ [3] ContaminationOutside was just one of several albums, a set, that Bowie started to work on w/ Brian Eno. The next one was to be Contamination, peopled w/ “17th century characters”. The day after Bowie’s death, Eno recalled: “About a year ago [David and I] started talking about Outside – the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that.” -|-More ▶ [4] 1.Outside-|- Producers: David Bowie,
Brian Eno-|- David Richards (co-producer) -|- Mixing and additional treatments: David Richards, David Bowie -|- Mastering: David Richards, Kevin Metcalfe -|- Assistant Engineers: Ben Fenner, Andy Grassi, Jon Goldberger, Domonik Tarqua -|- Album Design & Image Manipulation: Denovo -|- Photography: John Scarisbrick -|- Stylist: Jennifer Elster -|- Recorded at Mountain Studios, Switzerland. -|- Mixed and Additional Treatments by David Ricahrds, Assisted by David Bowie. -|- Mastered by David Ricahrds and Kevin Metcalfe at The TownHouse Digital Mastering Studios, London.
-|-The Leon Suites Complete 1994 [-1:11:14-] ▶ [5] Musicians-|- David Bowie: vocals, saxophone, guitar, keyboards -|- Brian Eno: synthesizers, treatments, oblique strategies -|- Reeves Gabrels: guitar -|- Erdal Kızılçay: bass, keyboards
-|- Mike Garson: grand piano -|- Sterling Campbell: drums
class="red">-|- Carlos Alomar: rhythm guitar -|- Joey Baron: drums -|- Yossi Fine: bass -|- Tom Frish: additional guitar on “Strangers When We Meet” -|- Kevin Armstrong: additional guitar on “Thru’ These Architects Eyes”
-|- Bryony, Lola, Josey and Ruby Edwards: background vocals on “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson”
and “I Am With Name”
-|-Listen to full album online [-6:22:01-] ▶ [6] Outtakes
Includes, among others: “Enemy is Fragile” – “I’d Rather Be Chrome” – “Dead Men Don’t Talk” – “Inside the Motel” – “Baby Fingers” – “ I Am w/ Name” – “Hide Me We Creep Together Part 1” – “Hide Me We Creep Together Part 2 – “The First Time” – “Hello Leon” – “OK Riot”.
-|-Leon - The Outside Outtakes – 2016 edit [-1:09:45-] ▶ [7] Tour
On the Outside tour,
Bowie and his band would come onstage while opening act Nine Inch Nails was finishing, and both bands performed “Subterraneans”, “Hallo Spaceboy” and “Scary Monsters”,
followed by 2 NIN songs (“Reptile” and “Hurt”), after which NIN decamped and Bowie’s set proceeded. -|-David Bowie + Nine Inch Nails – Dissonance Live 1995 (HD) [-45:16-] ▶ [8 Lyrics] Leon Takes Us Outside: Leon Blank
Valentines Day - 25 - June - 16th - Wednesday - July 6th - 20 - 0 - 20 - 15 - Martin Luther King Day - June 18th - June 6th - Wednesday - August 18th - 9th - 1999 - 12 - Nicholas - August - Wednesday - 13th - Sunday - 5th - March - October - January - October 13th - Wednesday - Martin Luther King Day - Afternoon - In view of nothing - 20 - 0 - 1 - Late winter - Martin Luther King Day - 12 - 16 - August - Wednesday - 13th - Friday - 7 - June.
-|-Leon Takes Us Outside / Micah P. Hinson – The Dreams You Left Behind [-4:51-] ▶ [9 Lyrics] Outside: Prologue
Now. Not tomorrow. Yesterday, not tomorrow. It happens today, the damage today. They fall on today - they beat on the outside, and I'll stand by you. - Now. Not tomorrow. It's happening now, not tomorrow. It’s happening now. The crazed in the hot-zone. The mental and diva’s hands. The fisting of life to the music outside, to the music outside. It happens outside, the music is outside.
It’s happening outside, the music is outside. It’s happening now, not tomorrow. Yesterday. Not tomorrow. The music is outside. It’s happening outside. The music is outside. Outside. -|-Reddit - Official Album Discussion #25 - 1.Outside 1995
▶ [10 Lyrics] The Heart’s Filthy Lesson: Detective Nathan Adler
(Heart’s filthy lesson) There’s always the Diamond friendly, sitting in the Laugh Motel. The Heart’s filthy lesson, with her hundred miles to hell. Oh, Ramona, if there was only something btw. us, other than our clothes. Something in our skies. Something in our blood. Paddy, Paddy, who’s been wearing Miranda’s clothes? It's the Heart’s filthy lesson - falls upon deaf ears. (Heart’s filthy lesson) Falls upon deaf ears. (Heart’s filthy lesson)
Oh Ramona, if there was only some kind of future. And these cerulean skies: Something in our skies - Something in our blood. Paddy, Paddy? Paddy, oh Paddy, I think I’ve lost my way. (Heart’s filthy lesson) I’m already five years older I’m already in my grave. (Heart’s filthy lesson) Will you carry me? Oh Paddy, I think I’ve lost my way. Paddy, what a fantastic death abyss. (Heart’s filthy lesson) It’s the Heart’s filthy lesson. Tell the others. -|-The Heart's Filthy Lesson – David Letterman Show 1995 [-5:03-] ▶ [11 Lyrics] A Small Plot of Land: Citizens of Oxford Town
Poor soul. Spit upon that. Poor soul, he never knew what hit him - and it hit him so. Poor dunce. He pushed back the pigmen. The Barbs laughed - the fool is dead. Poor dunce. - He’s less than within us. The brains talk but the will to live is dead. And prayer can’t travel so far these days. The talk of your life, standing so near - to innocent eyes. Poor dunce. Swings thru the tunnels and claws his way. Is small life so manic? Are these really the days. Poor dunce, poor soul. -|- A Small Plot of Land - Live Wembley 11-15-1995 [-6:55-] ▶ [12 Lyrics] (Segue) Baby Grace (a Horrid Cassette): Baby Grace Blue
Test, testing, testing - This, hmmm, Grace is my name - And and I was...um... - It was that photo... a fading photograph of a patch..., a patchwork quilt. - And they’ve put me on these ... - Ramona put me on these interest drugs - So I’m thinking very too bit too fast like a brain hatch - And ah they won’t let me see anybody - If I want to sometimes ... and I ask - I can still hear some pop...popular musics and aftershocks. (Ahhh-choo) See I’ve been watching a television of um... in the homelands - That’s the new homelands and um that’s all I can remember - And now they just want me to be quiet - And I think something is going to be horrid. -|-(Segue) Baby Grace (A Horrid Cassette) – By bowiechick [-1:30-] ▶ [13 Lyrics] Hallo Spceboy: Paddy
(Hallo) Spaceboy - you’re sleepy now - Your silhouette is so stationary - You’re released but your custody calls - And I want to be free - Don’t you want to be free - Do you like girls or boys - It’s confusing these days - But Moondust will cover you - Cover you - This chaos is killing me - So bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - Bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - This chaos is killing me - And the chaos is calling me - Yeah bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - Bye bye love - Good time love - Be sweet sweet dove - Bye bye spaceboy - Bye bye love. -|-Hallo Spaceboy – Brit Awards '96 w/ Pet Shop Boys [-2:47-] ▶ [14 Lyrics] The Motel:
Leon Blank
For we’re living in a safety zone don’t be holding back from me. We’re living from hour to hour down here and we’ll take it when we can. It’s a kind of living which recognises the death of the odourless man. When nothing is vanity nothing’s too slow. It’s not Eden but it’s no sham. There is no hell there is no shame. There is no hell like an old hell. There is no hell and it’s lights up, boys. Lights up boys. Explosion falls upon deaf ears while we’re swimming in a sea of sham. Living in the shadow of vanity - a complex fashion for a simple man. And there is no hell and there is no shame and there is no hell like an old hell. There is no hell and the silence flies on its brief flight. A razor sharp crap shoot affair and we light up our lives. And there’s no more of me exploding you. Re-exposing you. Like everybody do. Re-exploding you. I don’t know what to use. Make somebody move. Me exploding. Me exploding you. -|-The Motel – Live Rotterdam 2003 – A Reality Tour [-6:07-] ▶ [15 Lyrics] I Have Not Been to Oxford Town: Leon Blank
Baby Grace is the victim, she was 14 years of age. And the wheels are turning, turning, for the finger points at me. All's well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all’s well no I have not been to Oxford Town. Toll the bell pay the private eye. All’s well - 20th century dies. And the prison priests are decent, my attorney seems sincere. I fear my days are numbered - Lord get me out of here. All’s well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all’s well but I have not been to Oxford Town. This is your shadow on my wall. This is my flesh and blood. This is what I could’ve been. And the wheels are turning and turning, as the 20th century dies. If I had not ripped the fabric, if time had not stood still, if I had not met Ramona, if I’d only paid my bill. All’s well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all’s well but I have not been to Oxford Town. This is my bunk with two sheets, this is my food though foul, this is what I could have been. -|-I Have Not Been To Oxford Town – Audience-recording – NEC Birmingham 12-13-1995 [-4:23-] ▶ [16 Lyrics] No Control: Detective Nathan Adler
Stay away from the future, back away from the light, it’s all deranged - no control. Sit tight in your corner, don’t tell God your plans, it’s all deranged - no control. If I could control tomorrow’s haze, the darkened shore wouldn’t bother me. If I can’t control the web we weave, my life will be lost in the fallen leaves. Every single move’s uncertain, don’t tell God your plans, it’s all deranged - no control. I should live my life on bended knee if I can’t control my destiny. You’ve gotta have a scheme, you’ve gotta have a plan, in the world of today, for tomorrow’s man. No control. Stay away from the future, don’t tell God your plans, it’s all deranged - no control. Forbidden words, deafen me in memory - no control. See how far a sinful man burns his tracks, his bloody robes. -|-No Control 1995 [-4:12-]
▶ [17 Lyrics] (Segue) Algeria Touchshriek: Algeria Touchshriek
My name is Mr. Touchshriek, of Touchshriek, with mail over and fantasy. My shop sells egg shells off the shesores and empty females. I’m thinking of leasing the room above my shop to a Mr. Walloff Domburg - a reject from the world wide Internet. He’s a broken man; I’m also a broken man. It would be nice to have company. We could have great conversations. Looking through windows for demons, and watching the young advance in - all electric. Some of the houses around here still have inhabitants in them. I’m not sure if they’re from this country or not. I don’t get to speak much to anyone or that sort of thing. If I had another broken name - oh, I dream of something like that. -|-(Segue) Algeria Touchshriek – Matt Chamberlain as Algeria Touchshriek 1-18-2016 [-3:56-] ▶ [18 Lyrics] The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty): Artist / Minotaur
I shake - at the mother’s brutal vermin. I shake - and stare at the watery moon. With the same desire, as the sober Philistine. And I shake (turn and turn again) worm, the pain and blade - turn and turn again. The screw is a tightening atrocity - I shake. For the reeking flesh is as romantic as hell. The need to have seen it all: the voyeur of utter destruction - as beauty. I shake - turn and turn again - I shake - turn and turn again - I shake. Research has pierced all extremes of my sex. Call it a day - call it a day. Needle point life blinds the will to be next - call it a day. Today. -|-The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty) – Live Loreley 1996 HQ [-50:40-] ▶ [19 Lyrics] (Segue) Ramona A. Stone / I Am With Name: Ramona A. Stone + her Acolytes
I was Ramona A. Stone. I started with no enemies of my own. I was an artiste in a tunnel. But I’ve been having a mid-life crisis, and I’ve been dreaming in a sleep. And ape men with metal parts, I’ve spat upon deeply felt age. I’ve hid my hearts in, and I hate the funny colored english. We’ll creep together you and I, for I know who the small friends are. I am with name, I am with name, I am Ramona A Stone. A night fear female. Good timing drone. I am with name, I am with name, I am Ramona A Stone. (She should say: twitch & stream - it’ll end in chrome - night of the female - good time drone.) A person who loses a name, feels anxiety descending. Left at the crossroads, btw. the centuries - a millenium fetish. (Give it to me one more time!) Anxiety descending. -|-Ramona A. Stone - Fluxus open [-4:07-] ▶ [20 Lyrics] Wishful Beginnings: Artist / Minotaur
Cruising around me - the flames burn my body. Wishful beginnings - does this remind them again and again? You’re a sorry little girl. You’re a sorry little girl. Please hide - for the pain must feel like snow. You’re a sorry little girl. Sorry, little girl. Please hide from the kiss and the bite - shame burns. Breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in only doubt - the pain must feel like snow. I’m no longer your golden boy. Sorry little girl, I’m sorry little girl. The pain must feel like snow, there you go. Cover me, cover me. We flew on the wings. We were deep in the dead air, and this one will never go down. We had such wishful beginnings, but we lived unbearable lives. I’m sorry little girl. Sorry, little girl. So so sorry little girl. The pain must feel like snow. There you go, there you go. -|-Wishful Beginnings (a Bowie a day) 2016 [-6:33-] ▶ [21 Lyrics] We Prick You: Members of the Court of Justice
White boys falling on the fires of night
(I wish you’d tell). Flesh punks burning in their glue. Revolution comes in the strangest way (I wish you’d tell). I’d rather be inside you. Tell the truth - we prick you. (You show respect even if you disagree - you show respect.) Mama can I kiss you daddy can I ***you (We wish you well). Innocence passed me by. Wanna be screwing when the nightmare comes (I wish you well). Wanna come quick and die. All the little rose-kissed foxy girls - shoes, shoes, little white shoes; where have all the flowers gone? All the little fragile champion boys - toys, toys, little black toys; dripping on the end of a gun (Even if you disagree).
-|-We Prick You - Unreleased version 1995 [-4:14-] ▶ [22 Lyrics] (Segue) Nathan Adler: Detective Nathan Adler
Old Touchschriek was the main nameserver. Suspected of being a shoulder surfer, but he didn’t know from shit about challenge response systems. Now Ramona A Stone we know was selling interest drugs. She got males all hung up on her mind filters. She was if you don't mind me saying so an update demon. Now Leon, he couldn’t wait for 12 o’clock midnight. He jumps up on the stage with a criss criss machete and slashes around cutting a zero on everything. I mean a zero - in the fabric of time itself. Was this a suspect? I says to myself - Woa! “Quelle courage!” - Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to when it all began– -|-David Bowie as Nathan Adler [-1:13-] ▶ [23 Lyrics] I’m Deranged: Artist / Minotaur
Funny how secrets travel, I’d start to believe - if I were to bleed. Thin skies, the man chains his hands held high. Cruise me blond cruise me babe. A blond belief beyond beyond beyond. No return no return. I’m deranged. Deranged, my love. I’m deranged down down down. So cruise me babe cruise me baby. And the rain sets in, it’s the angel-man - I’m deranged. Cruise me cruise me cruise me babe. The clutch of life and the fist of love - oer your head - big deal Salaam. Be real deranged Salaam, before we reel. I’m deranged. -|-I’m Deranged - Outside mix version [-5:18-] ▶ [24 Lyrics] Thru These Architect’s Eyes: Leon Blank
Stomping along on this big Phillip Johnson, is delay just wasting my time? Looking across at Richard Rogers, scheming dreams to blow both their minds. It’s difficult you see, to give up baby, to leave a job, when you know you know the money’s from day to day. All the majesty of a city landscape. All the soaring days in our lives. All the concrete dreams in my mind’s eye. All the joy I see thru these architect’s eyes. Cold winter bleeds on the girders of Babel. This stone boy watching the crawling land. Rings of flesh and the towers of iron. The steaming caves and the rocks and the sand. Stomping along on this big Phillip Johnson, is delay just wasting my time? It’s difficult you see to give up baby, these summer scumholes, this goddamned starving life. -|-Thru These Architects Eyes - By Anna Dennis [-4:11-] ▶ [25 Lyrics] (Segue) Nathan Adler: Detective Nathan Adler ▶ [26 Lyrics] Strangers When We Meet: Leon Blank
All our friends now seem so thin and frail. Slinky secrets - hotter than the sun. No peachy prayers, no trendy rechauffé. I’m with you, so I can’t go on. All my violence raining tears upon the sheet. I’m bewildered for we’re strangers when we meet. Blank screen TV, preening ourselves in the snow. Forget my name, but I’m over you. Blended sunrise, and it’s a dying world. Humming Rheingold, we scavenge up our clothes. All my violence raining tears upon the sheet. I’m resentful ror wevre strangers when we meet. Cold tired fingers, tapping out your memories. Halfway sadness, dazzled by the new. Your embrace was all that I feared. That whirling room, we trade by vendu. Steely resolve is falling from me. My poor soul, all bruised passivity. All your regrets ride rough-shod over me. I’m so glad that we’re strangers when we meet. I'm so thankful that we’re strangers when we meet. I’m in clover for we’re strangers when we meet. Heel head over, but we're strangers when we meet. -|-Strangers When We Meet - Top of the Pops 1995 [-4:03-] ▶ [27 Credits]
Based on reports from, among others,
Nick DeRiso,
David Fricke, Kev Geoghegan, Paul Gorman, Edna Gundersen, Larry Katz, Peter–R. Koenig, George A. Paul, Chris Roberts, Emma Saunders, Steele Savage, and Internet searches. Thank you
bowiesongs, The National, Jason Lundberg, One Half of the Bowlettes, lo-fi noise makers, wn, john b, Mauro B. C., sonyakossta, Timetakesafag, SenseOfDoubt1, bowiechick, Beco2103, theMusicofmyLife1, BOWIElover,
Jorge Gago Lopez, Matt Chamberlain, joymarr, KyOdar, BlueM2012, Halloweenjack84, Anna Dennis, david bowie tin machine.
▶
[28 Postscript]
David Robert Jones aka David Bowie died from liver cancer two days after his 69th birthday, on January 9 2016. His ashes were scattered on the island of Bali, in a Buddhist ceremony. He left behind his wife Iman Muhammid Abdulmadjid, teenage daughter Alexandria, adult son Duncan Jones, Duncan's ex-nanny Marion Skene, and long-time personal assistant, Corinne Coco Schwab.
The 1849 state census counted 42,000 overlanders and 35,000 seafarers caught up by gold fever; together w/ 3,000 sailors who had deserted ships.
Like all who seek a better tomorrow, the Chinese too came to the California Gold Rush, formed a fraternity in Coloma, squatted spent claims and worked as a team over the “tailings” left behind. In 1880 this gold-mining 
