Now Take Them Out, Devils

[hunter-s-narc-blog]

Record store in Berlin.

[nowtakethemoutdevils-blog]

Ran across your review of 1.Outside, absolutely dead-on. Love seeing someone share the love despite some of the pretensions. I think what Bowie and Eno really needed on this one was a producer who was capable of actually saying, "you're indulging a bit too much here, nip and tuck and edit this down and cut that." That aside, it's funny how much I go to this album, really is addictive and gets right under the skin. The Motel in particular, like an older man's version of a "Lady Grinning Soul.

Thanks, man. I'd go as far as to say that this paragraph of analysis is better than my entire essay, tho.

[nowtakethemoutdevils-blog]

Your analysis of Outside is terrific.

Thank you so much!

[nowtakethemoutdevils-blog]

CRISIS ON AN AS-YET UNDETERMINED NUMBER OF EARTHS!

  Our hero, the dashing, dauntless and borderline psychotic Hermes Paradigm, has just returned to his psychedelic retrofuturist pad in Ur-Manhattan’s Lower Hudson Village after a long, needlessly complicated and absurdly violent jaunt in one of our Universe’s innumerable possible futures, only to find that he had forgotten to stop mail delivery while he was away and he can’t open his door due to piles and piles of perverse fanmail.

A SAMPLE:

DEAREST UNKNOWABLE HERMES,

I HAD THAT DREAM AGAIN LAST NIGHT. YOU WERE TIED TO MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOUIS XIV FOUR-POSTER BED WITH ROPE FASHIONED FROM INTERWOVEN WHALE TENDONS AND I WAS SHAVING YOUR CHEST WHILE RIDING YOU LIKE A CHOCOBO. AND THEN NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF WALKED IN, BUT HE WAS ALSO OLLIE NORTH, AND HE WAS WEARING THIS REALLY COOL LOOKING STRAP-ON DESIGNED BY LOCKHEED-MARTIN.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN???

  Cutting the door off its hinges with his trusty pocket lasertorch, Hermes makes his way to his glistening, ostensibly unused kitchen, pops himself a brew and relaxes on his Le Courbusier designed couch and flips on his newest bit of futureswag: iWear, a nifty pair of white Wayfarer’s that contains a CPU that makes Deep Blue look like a dinky solar-powered calculator. Right now, checking his email in one lens while watching the fourth season of Arrested Development in the other, Hermes Paradigm is the spitting image of hip in the year 2036; the envy of scenesters that haven’t even been born yet.

  HE’S MUCH COOLER THAN YOU! OBVIOUSLY!

Hermes Motherfucking Paradigm: Interdimensional Man of Mystery. Superspy, chessboxer, consulting detective, comic book writer/artist/colorist, Jungian therapist, notary public and the best DJ on four worlds. Some say he’s a telepathic clone created by the government’s top-secret Camus Project to subjugate Earth and instill the New World Order. Some whisper that he’s from the far-flung future and that he’s part of a race of superhumans that can control their body temperature at will (this seems to be reinforced by the fact that he is frequently seen sporting a velvet blazer and waistcoat well into the middle of August). Still others say that he was born next to the frozen beef pies at Gristedes. The only thing known for certain is that he’s the man who stole Morrissey’s virginity.

BONA TO VADA, INDEED!

[nowtakethemoutdevils-blog]

Exchanging cigarettes for lighters and furtive glances for innocuous shrugs (as if anything could ever be more innocuous than a shrug, a gesture bound to a lack of commitment) like bunker soldiers feeling the shockwaves of rapidly enclosing mortar fire, we stood there, on the corner of eighth and sixth, as the craft began to dominate what was left of a Manhattan sky. Gargantuan and weightless, the ship sat in the muddy midnight clouds and gazed down at us, judging us lazily with a hipster’s flippancy; if this thing was sentient, and it gave off the impression that it was, it didn’t give a shit about us, the human race, the world, one way or another, and if it was forced to come up with at least a semblance of an opinion RE: us, it would probably be one of mild disgust and disappointment.

And we felt the same way about It, so whatever. We hung around outside Gray’s Papaya, sipping on Styrofoam cups and flicking butts into the drains, while It hung around outside the ionosphere, probably doing the cosmic equivalent. We pretended to ignore each other.  After a while George and I finally acknowledged its presence, albeit grudgingly and in hushed, bar-bitchy tones. What the fuck was it doing here? How big was it, exactly? Was this the first time a ship like this had passed our planet, or were we a small town on some intergalactic trade route? Were we supposed to see it? Was its cloaking system fucked up or something? Were we being invaded?

“And why,” George finally let himself say, albeit with a self conscious snort, “does it have to look like… like that?”

The ship had shown up in the sky less than a half hour ago, popping into existence with an immediacy that gave everyone in the Western hemisphere the pissshivers, and while it initially seemed to be getting closer, it now looked like it was to be moving away, albeit almost comically slowly.  The cable news channels couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with it, deviating from their usual three-part harmony of bullshit to deliver a squawking, anarchic cacophony that probably had more truth to it than anything they had reported in the last ten years.

[nowtakethemoutdevils-blog]

The Girl From A.R.T.E.M.I.S.

In traditional Western occult symbolism, the gateway to the lunar realm of imagination is flanked by twin pylons, or towers. If you look at most versions of the tarot trump card number 18, the Moon, you will see these towers. They represent the door that separates the world of fantasy from material reality.

 The descent of the kabbalistic thirty-second path of the tree of life describes an apocalyptic event involving the merging of two distinct spheres: the earthly and the lunar. The lunar sphere is the imagination, the world of thoughts and dreams. The earthly sphere is of the mundane, solid and heavy. In short, not only does real life become more like a story, stories must pay the price of this exchange by becoming more real and allowing the rules of the material world to impinge upon their insubstantial territories.

–Grant Morrison, Supergods

“You stole the Moon from us, you bastards!” I scream, emptying my standard ARTEMIS-issue pseudorifle into yet another nondescript G-man. It’s hard to have any sympathy for an enemy that seemed to have designed its flunkies to be this disposable; dark suits, dark sunglasses, short back and sides.  Each one of these men falling in front of me is undoubtedly someone’s son, someone’s father, but they’re all so ubiquitous and featureless that you begin to see them as a unit, a seething hive-mind of jet black and walkie talkies and elbows, and you surprise yourself every time you stop caring.

Clones. They could be clones. That’d be nice. Reproduced human tissue with no emotions, incapable of feeling pain, just programmed with a rudimentary subroutine that makes them walk from one point to another and shoot at anything that looks weird. Yeah. Don’t feel to bad about all this, they’re probably all clones.

Probably wouldn’t be screaming like that if that were the case, though.

I reload and dive right under the closing blast doors, echoes of Star Wars. I am cooler than Bruce Lee, Kathleen Hannah, and Nick Fury combined. I’ve got Pylon’s “Stop It” screeching from my inner earphones. My jumpsuit’s liquid Kevlar took most of what was thrown at me, but I’ve still got a .38 slug stuck in the meat of my thigh, and the only thing keeping me upright is adrenaline and an absurd amount of caffeine.

I also seem to have about 2 minutes and eighteen seconds left to save the world.

No sweat.

I make an awkward, wounded mad dash towards Central Command, calling up the disarm key on my iWear, which is running a bit slow due to the fact that 6G wireless is notoriously shitty on the moon.  Just when I’m about to start thanking Goddess that the rest of the G-men are on the other side of the blast door a good baker’s dozen pop out of nowhere in front of the main doors to CenCom. I scramble for cover and toss a flash, which disorients them long enough for me to step in and unceremoniously murder each and every last one of these (probably) sentient and (possibly) well-intentioned cannon fodder. I slide into CenCom like Goldfrapp, clearing the room tediously yet swiftly, and step up to the nearest interface so as to input the 256-digit sequence that has finallydownloaded onto the display of my Ray-Bans.

I punch in the code.

It doesn’t fucking work.

So here I am, stuck on a moon that’s about to explode with the force of the entire nuclear stockpile back on dear old Earth in about, oh, forty five seconds.

And all I can think of is the way that awful boy at the Jawbone & Air-Rifle smiled at me.

[nowtakethemoutdevils-blog]

David Bowie's '1. Outside' and Why You Need to Get Off Your Ass and Listen to It, Already

The first real gig I ever went to was Bowie at Madison Square Garden back in 2003. It was one of his last full sets he would ever play in New York*, but no one knew that at the time. He started big, with the fuck-you rollercoaster version of "Rebel Rebel" he'd been perfecting the past few years, and managed to hit as many high points, fan-favorites and greatest hits as he could in two hours time. We watched a master at work that night, weaving a narrative out of his oeuvre, imbuing it with new meaning while reminding us why we loved it so much in the first place.

Halfway through the set the lighting darkened, all purples and blues, and the band sat back for a second. Bowie makes his way up the runway-esque stage and addresses the audience:

"I'd like to do a song, now, a song we haven't performed in quite some time. It's not a popular song, but it's a song that has always meant a lot to me. Let me ask you: who here has heard of an album called... Outside? [A murmur of screams and applause, including mine] Yeah, all 20 of you. [Laughter] Well, this is a song from that record."

And then the band went into "The Motel," a haunting, lonely song that quieted an audience hungry for Ziggy Stardust. Its icy charms hung in the air like your breath in February, threatening to turn just another concert at MSG into something very, very different. Thirtysomethings stashed their old one-hitters. Bridge and tunnel weekend warriors managed to shut the fuck up for like a few seconds. By the time the song exploded into coda, the crowd was hypnotized by a nearly ten-year old song by their favorite artist that they had somehow never listened to.

People have a tendency to ignore any Bowie albums that came out between Let's Dance and Heathen. Now, overall, this isn't the worst idea: outside of a few singles, everything from the eighties that isn't on Let's Dance is pure shit , Tin Machine seems more like a punchline to a flagging career than anything else, and the genre experiments of the '90s are usually regarded as the detritus of Bowie's Aging Hipster Syndrome. But while the House re-imagining of a Scott Walker song might not have been the best idea ever, there's actually a lot of great work hidden in these problematic '90s records, and nowhere is this more evident on one of my favorite Bowie records, 1. Outside.

1. Outside is the first album of a three part collaboration with Brian Eno that was to be, I suppose, an update of the classic Berlin Triptych**; however, the boys never got around to recording parts two and three, despite a decades worth of smoke being blown up music journos ass about the project. The original Triptych found its influences in Punk, Krautrock and World musics, and in doing so shaped the sound of Post Punk, New Wave, and a good whopping chunk of '80s Pop. Bowie and Eno attempt to do the same here, drawing from Industrial Rock, Drum 'n' Bass and Ambient Techno; unfortunately, Outside is not Low, and lacked its world-shaping brilliance. The record is proggy and sprawled out, confusing, unfocused, full of Cyberpunk pretensions and, on occasion, is kind of unpleasant. However, it maintains an explicit beauty, and its ambition is a virtue unto itself. 1. Outside takes the "Concept Album" to it's logical conclusion and becomes an album about concept, and conceptual art in particular. It's narrated by a number of artists: Nathan Adler, a Detective Professor of Art-Crime (his diary, AKA "The Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue," dominates the liner notes); Ramona A. Stone, a suicide-inducing "Tyrannical Futurist"; Leon Blank, an appropriation and graffiti artist and probably the sanest and saddest person in this whole mess (his songs are the most down to earth and sentimental); Algeria Touchshreik, a decrepit, lonely Art-Drug dealer who lives out in a railyard; and the Artist/Minotaur, the... thing who murdered Baby Grace and turned her into a work of art, her body now coursing with binary haikus and glowing green fluid. He is a shadowy, deranged figure that haunts the album like Communism spooked Europe, and we're never far away from the deranged detritus of his mind. 

While the short story included in the liner notes (Adler's aforementioned diary, written by Bowie) does very little to flesh out the story, a rough idea of what's going on can be pieced together using the liner notes, the "Heart's Filthy Lesson" video (sorry it's a bit outta sync), and the, er, songs themselves. There's a lot going on: insanity, idealism, cruelty, regret, beauty, and Art. I can't be certain, but it seems as though Leon, an Outsider with a well defined sense of beauty, ends up being framed for the murder and is given up by another suspect, the dispassionate Ramona, and is either incarcerated or executed. Meanwhile, the "HFL" video seems to imply that Adler's been the Minotaur all along, but that could just be me reading way too into this, which is a definite possibility.

Listen, there are some great Pop songs here; from better known ones like "Strangers When We Meet" and "Hallo Spaceboy" to deep, amazing cuts like "The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)," "We Prick You" and "The Motel." And yeah, there are some parts that are oblique, ridiculous and utterly pretentious, but if you're adventurous, open minded, or just a fan of what Nathan Rabin likes to refer to as "Fiascos," then you'll get a real kick out of 1. Outside. It's fucking monolithic. C'mon.

*If you're reading this in the future and Bowie has managed to stop dying, get his shit together, release a new album and tour for all of 2015, then I apologize for the falsehood of the above statement.

** There's a reference in the liner notes to an incident in Kreuzberg in 1977 that seems to support this.

[nowtakethemoutdevils-blog]

I thought this would make a good first post for my writing blog, despite the fact that it's not my own words at all. However, I share most, if not all, of the sentiments shared in this interview, and many of the things discussed by the Mindless Ones and Grant Morrison will be talked about here with what I hope will be referred to as "alarming frequency."

This is an interview about optimism, comic books, music, neophilia, magic and the purposes thereof, friendship, frustration and loss. This blog is also about these things. Welcome to the conversation.