Part 1 of the Mushroomhead Interview, for part 2, see the bottom of the post
Good evening children, I come to you yet again blathering however it’s not complete nonsense, this one actually has some thought behind it that doesn’t involve tearing out the asshole of a pop culture icon (since most of the opening acts nobody knows.) A couple weeks ago I contacted Sir Jeffery Nothing from the masked Ohio metal band Mushroomhead for two purposes — for him to take a small part in my short film, and to do an interview promoting their new DVD Mushroomhead, Vol. 2
due out October 28th. And instead of saying “Ew, no, queer. Hurry up, the wife’s coming home soon,” he said that he would take part. The interview was a concept that came later, I figured since the segment for the film wouldn’t take very long (recorded two shots collectively spanning just under 10 minutes) why not a little bump for something they got coming out. Plus I have my system all worked out where this time I can actually interview him on camera and publish the footage. I had interviewed him about a year and half before at their show in Portland, Maine but I couldn’t extract the footage from the DVD where I burned it. Now I can do it but damn it takes a long time.
So I truck out an hour and a half away from home for day two of the Rock & Shock Festival, a three day event that compiles two things that work together beautifully — balls to the wall metal and pure unadulterated violence. The headlining acts for the second day were Mushroomhead (who got second billing, they were on before the main act) and Gwar. However before they took stage I realized something, opening acts are kinda like sex — in that you start out dry jerking, then next time you do it with lube, then you cum, then head, go through a couple skanks just to grease the wheels further and then finally you’re in a broom closet with Heidi Klum or Margaret Cho because you’ve had about six scotches and can barely operate without causing harm to yourself. The first band was a complete scream band, basically taking heavy double-bass drums and doing a shitty Dr. Claw impersonation to it. Second band was a bit better, still in the vein of screaming surpassing actual music all while the vocalist had a very Vince Neil/Nikki Sixx rip-off kinda hair-do. Let this be a lesson to you kids, an aggressive voice isn’t the focal point when it comes to metal music. Any 14 year-old girl with a vocal box can make that guttural sound no problem, but those who can balance between that and singing, more respect to them than anything.
Skip a band or two later a band called Kingdom of Sorrow takes over which is more or less a super-group featuring a bassist who did a tour with Black Label Society, a guitarist from Type O Negative, and I believe the vocalist from Hatebreed with two other guys. In comparison to the acts before Mushroomhead and Gwar these guys were actually good since they did balance the music well, the vocals were mostly screams but they were coherent and had a range in sounds. Also one thing I tip my hat to about them was the fact that the vocalist had showmanship, interacted with the crowd whereas the prior acts were like, “Fuck it, we only get 30 minutes and you probably won’t remember our names after because we didn’t actually say it.” Now the band that went on before Mushroomhead and after Kingdom of Sorrow, I gotta tell you, FUCKING SUCKED!! Imagine if you will a skinny Hot Topic kid with gauges, skin tight clothing over his skeleton-like body, and nose length hair dancing like a constipated gorilla while screaming high pitched sounds that would make a bat want to slit it’s wings open and attempt to fly through the air with the wind gliding into the wound so as to nose dive into a vat of salt, all of which is considered a blessing than to rather listen to one of Suicide Silence’s “songs.” (Damn, that was verbose.) I had never heard them before then and I don’t intended to listen to them ever again unless I’m getting a full frontal lobotomy without anesthesia, in which case I’ll blast that shit that way it numbs my brain right up. To those of you who liked Suicide Silence, please consult an abortionist immediately for your future hell spawn just to cover yourself.
Half hour after the sonic rapists leave the stage Mushroomhead takes a hold of The Palladium, which from where I was premium. For those who have never been to The Palladium, let me give you a lay of the land. Imagine the store from Empire Records if it was slightly more broken down, featured a bar and was retrofitted as a theater. So it has a very interesting design which given the event seems both juxtaposed and also disturbingly appropriate. If it were being filmed for a DVD I’d almost think that David Fincher was making it since it has quite the similar tones to it’s lighting and architecture. Prior to Mushroomhead taking the stage I went to see them across the street at the DCU center where the other half of the Rock & Shock event took place, with many booths with lovely schwag such as bootleg DVDs (there wasn’t a single DVD that didn’t look like a bootleg), shirts, patches (I picked up a Stark Industries patch, one for S.H.I.E.L.D. and one for Blue Sun which is featured in the realm of Firefly and Serenity), and anything your heart could desire. They were there at 7:00 to do a signing for fans, and hearing about it I jumped right into line and managed to make it back to the venue with time to spare. For things to get autographed I brought a poster I made almost a year or two ago which has the members of the band rotoscoped and they all loved it. One of the singers, Waylon, virtually froze upon seeing it he liked it. If it weren’t for the contacts he was wearing I would’ve thought his eyes went white naturally. Got a couple pictures from the signing, some schwag then cut back to two and half hours later they take charge of the stage.
This is the third time I’ve seen Mushroomhead perform live, first in late October of ‘06 at Mark’s Show Place near Manchester, NH, then in February ‘07 at The Station in Portland, ME. Both really small venues and both purely great shows. As I told Jeff in our first interview in Portland, they’re a band who can make a closet-sized place like The Station (which it very much was) and make it seem as if the crowd was never-ending. This time it was almost the opposite, while the venue was considerably larger than the previous two it actually felt a whole lot smaller. Maybe due to the mass chaos and six foot males gently gliding near my head toward the stage. Starting off with a heavy hitter “12 Hundred” the audience is immediately whipped into a frenzy as the band creates fire and sweat while they play. Shortly before Jeffery Nothing’s part kicks in he arrives on stage with a new type of make-up that is a hybrid of his long-going outfit known as The Butcher with this Butcher-Devil-Heath Ledger Joker type of deal. And it looked gorgeous. Periodically throughout the show I would watch Jeff virtually transform himself into the character he was on stage, as if he was channeling the presence of Ledger’s Joker through him. As I said, it was pure serenity. And with the benefits of a larger venue come little games like stage diving and moshing, both which took place from the crowd and members of the band. They did a couple songs I’ve never heard them play live such as “Xeroxed” and their cover of “When Doves Cry” by Prince. Closing out with “Solitaire Unraveling” the show was an overall powerhouse as expected. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see Gwar (probably good because from my understanding everyone in the crowd got spewed with movie blood and fake semen. Yummy.) After I got out me and my co-conspirator Some Guy Named Al trekked over to the bus area, interviewed Jeff and filmed his segment for my short film. The events that unfolded from the interview follow in the video below. The events from the film will come later. Enjoy, and until next time, I’m Sketch E Whiteface reminding you to control the overpopulation, kick a skater in the balls.
=Sketch/Ed
Mushroomhead signing at the DCU Center
Mushroomhead autographing my self-made poster. They loved it.
Screen capture from my interview with Jeffery Nothing. There are several moments like this. Not sure what we were looking at.
Jeffery Nothing in a promo pic for the upcoming short "This Side Up: Omerganite."
It’s rare that I decide to comment on political matters, or politics in general. I find the entire subject fraught with philosophical dead ends and sand pits. Politics deals with handling the issues of large numbers of people by trying to make decisions that effect the masses while pleasing as many of them as possible. In short, a Sysiphean task of mind-bogglingly awful proportions that no one will ever do “right” no matter how great or wise they may be.
At the end of the day “Republican” and “Democrat” are just words. Just ideologies of people whose decisions may effect systems that do directly effect our lives, but do not run our lives any more than we allow them to do so. It’s the beauteous terror of what is still more or less a free country that our success, or failure, is still mostly within our own hands, and the hands of those we trust most. If those hands you trust most are those belonging to strangers in the national government, you should be prepared at any time for disappointment.
That said, I am now and always will be a cruel advocate for self-sufficiency and not living beyond one’s means. This does not mean separatism, rigorous self-denial, working one’s self to death, etc are the best or only options. That kind of pessimism comes from the blissful, privileged innocence in which most of us were raised.
The short version of that is: Fuck the system, take care of you and yours and things will probably turn out ok.
Despite my recent splurge on a new phone, and my recent decision to maintain my technicolor hair professionally, there are many aspects of my life related to spending and saving money that I don’t share. Most of those things consist of ways I cut corners, entire categories of Things I Simply Don’t Do Because They Cost Too Much(tm), and my recent commitment to agressive debt reduction and budgeting.
All that said, here are some articles from a terrific blog about getting a freaking grip on the root of all evil.
And an idea that I am getting more excited about the more I think about it: Buying into a local farm for fresh produce, eggs, meat, and dairy all year. (Or at least all spring, summer and fall!)
A clear and flagrant disrespect for all things was extruded from the two young men chatting back and forth on the mostly empty train car and left the air palpably unclean. Crisp suits, slick and greasy hair, shifty bright eyes, and utter animal stupidity were readily apparent upon a quick glance. Typical upper-class white boys with no sense of purpose beyond where their dicks will be by the end of the night or who they can roll under the bus to get the next raise. No love except the long-since-abandoned love for mother, and a lust for money and the status associated with it that they assume is love. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night and well into today has been a flight of extreme fantasy, not all of which was enjoyable, but all of which has left me thinking. Unfortunately I’ve waited too long to write this all down, so some details will inevitably be lost in the rapid cognition thought-shuffling of daily life.
At some point, I woke up and said “Ok, that’s it, no more Howlings before bedtime.” The series of dreams felt like a test. Felt like a warning as well. A test of my mental strength and a warning not to meddle carelessly in affairs which are far larger and more powerful than I have previously taken them to be. It’s true, all throughout the documentary by Poke Runyon, discussing the methods by which they employed the Goetic techniques to summon, and to scry, I (drunkenly) scoffed at the notion of some of the scraping and bowing, and alternately at the idea of binding and domineering these unseen spiritual forces. (It should be noted that while the Goetia is amply available[pdf], I have yet to read the work itself.) While reading Howlings, likewise I took a skeptical attitude towards some of the methodology, considering it to be somewhat overcautious and paranoid. Some have argued that the Goetic (among other) spirits are sovereign beings, and some have argued that these works are exercises in confronting one’s own inner labyrinth. (Think highly aware self-hypnosis and play acting as a form of therapy or mental/spiritual growth, if you will.) Either way, those that have studied these things have preached caution, and some have issued threatening warnings regarding the dangers of treating these things lightly and carelessly.
I have always been a skeptic of sorts, and perhaps a bit overeager and zealous when it comes to the thought of finding proofs to these claims and methods. Last night’s dreams felt like a deeply detailed experience designed to caution me against doing or saying things which may ultimately land me into very hot water.
Yet I digress, these dream logs aren’t intended for me to get into the whys and the wherefores, but to chronicle the dreams themselves for future reference and entertaining reading. Read the rest of this entry »
Some kids play in the sandbox. We play in the.... litterbox??? The RKNet staff is pleased that you decided to stop by. Currently this is a multi-author project, with a rotating cast of totally kooky characters. Contact giania [at symbol] gmail [dot] com if you'd like to play here too.
