The Best - Dragnet's take on drugs....

A word on makeup for men...

Gee, I wish I were in a situation that I could wear makeup everyday. Not like being a drag queen, but makeup like that of rock stars in the seventies. Just think about it - coming to get my next advisee in the Advising Office with King Diamond-esque makeup on. I would want to be advised by me! That is one of my complaints about history - no theatricality! We need makeup, otherworldliness, to get our message to the people! Like Bowie said in "Diamond Dogs," "This ain't rock and roll...this is GENOCIDE!" I need to cut back on the caffeine, I think...

Revisitng an old favorite of mine...maybe it will become one of your's, too!

Anyone that has not experienced the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis should. Here is their magnum opus from that era, "Supper's Ready," in three parts IT is worth the time investment...
Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Enjoy - supper's waiting for you!

Of all the things to see when you are sick...

Those of you that know me know of my like for the Flaming Lips. I have seen them in concert, which were some of the most amazing musical experiences I've ever had. I have nearly all of their recorded output, which seems to have been getting better year after year. I have been praising them for quite some time, with good reason.

But, their latest album was not so great, mainly as it seemed to be a retread of many of the ideas from the album before. And, very peculiarly, I have been noticing the Lips' music accompanying different commercials. A lot of them. As I lay on my sofa, troubling deaf heaven with my bootless cries and cursing my intestinal fate, I saw a commercial for Kraft Salad Dressing that had Flaming Lips' music as its soundtrack. I thought it was a fever dream. But, I saw it again today and am saddened.

I realize that their music is their's to do with as they wish. If they want to shill for salad dressing, then they should should shill for salad dressing - I would rather hear them than yet another commercial with Katrina and the Waves "I'm Walking on Sunshine," after all. But, there is just something disconcerting about how music so quickly departs from being sublime to being subservient to the capitalist juggernaut. I'm still going to listen to the Flaming Lips, to be sure, but this whole episode has given me pause. What is next? The Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" used for a Tampax commercial?

A remembrance of things past

For some reason, I was thinking about traveling recently, especially those travels back in my youth. My sister, who shares my whacked sense of humor for things a bit askew, used to listen with me to tapes on our Realistic tape recorder on many family trips throughout this great land of ours. We would be in the back of the station wagon with the seat down, un-seatbelted of course, drawing on old computer print-out paper from my dad's office and reading comic books and playing Simon and Merlin and card games, all the while listening to Bible stories narrated by Burl Ives and various other tapes my parents had to make us tolerable during the trip. I don't know if she remembers, but we used to giggle and giggle in evil glee at some of the songs on a compilation tape of oldies that my parents had. There was "Que Sera Sera" sung by Doris Day. Mitch Miller did "The Yellow Rose of Texas." But, the one that really got us cackling was "Hey, There (You with the stars in your eyes)," sung by Rosemary Clooney, George's aunt. The way it was recorded, she would sing the chorus (Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes...) in one channel and then speak a reply in the other channel (Are you talking to me?). This was too funny for the both of us, and we would laugh and laugh and laugh and hyperventilate and laugh and laugh and eat some Trix cereal and laugh and laugh and rewind the tape and listen to this again and again and laugh and laugh and laugh until we were at the beach or West Virginia or wherever we were going. This video I have posted is probably from a Karaoke machine, so it has no pictures. However, I think that you will agree, as my sister and I believed and still believe, that this remains either very funny or very disturbing. Maybe even both! My sister has since gone on to be an amazing mother of four (I am her oldest) and I hope that she will one day pass this song on to her other kids as some sort of legacy that will either slightly scar their psyches or make them continue to enjoy drawing pictures of purple dogs and orange trees.

Enjoy!

1970s Soft Rock - why the mundane can be frightening...

Having recently admitted my love and secret shame of MOR seventies soft rock, I have been, as I often do, hyper-looking at and listening to videos and songs of this genre. I must be OCD when it comes to music, because I get fixated on something like "sunshine pop" and then, for 3 or 4 weeks, can do nothing but download and listen to this type of music. And, as before, my new obsession has become seventies soft rock, and I have been sucking this stuff down like an opium addict. HOWEVER, this video by the band Exile has kinda creeped and freaked me out.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the disembodied lips on the wall and on the floor. Maybe it's the lead singer's rough androgyny that makes him/her look like a man, then a woman, then a man in such a way that makes me wonder if he is a demonic entity - the dance gyrations don't help. Maybe it is the singluar theme of the lyrics, which proclaim that the only focus of the protagonist will be to get his baby and kiss her all over, all over, all over, again and again - not that I am against kissing or kissing all over, for that matter, but the band's singleminded focus on this particular activity make me wonder if there might be tentacles and spinal fluid sucking involved. Maybe it is the fact that the band is, in my opinion, WAY to into their music, as if they are heralding a new age of utopian revolution or that their music rocks in a similar way as, say, the Ramones. Maybe I'm just overanalyzing it, but you have to admit that they don't make bands like this anymore, which might be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Either way, enjoy!

Vote on T-shirt Designs

Well, true believers, here are the finalists for Variegated Brainstem's t-shirt design. We have been searching and crafting and pondering what a t-shirt design should mean for us. We still don't really know, but these are some of the proposed designs:

Feedback? Enjoy!

A crooner for the ages - who will be our pick?

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, as many of you know, is one of our favorites here at the Veeb. The Captain has a 5 octave vocal range and a penchant for screaming, grunting, and growling his way through electrified blues and into your heart, head, and mind. We provide for you (above) a selection from his first LP, Safe As Milk, entitled "Electricity!"

Unlike the Captain and his friends, Scott Walker started as a crooning pop singer with a group called the Walker Brothers, a popular band during the 1960s British Invasion. After going solo, Scott Walker began to sing increasingly darker and disturbing songs about prostitutes, homosexuals, communist dictators, and torture interagators, ultimately producing albums of high-pitched falsetto singing about urban decay and despair over top the sounds of orchestras, industrial noises, and metallic destruction. This video gives an example of the first type of music Scott Walker was involved with:

On a side note, I had a weird dream last night that I thought was interesting: a panther was running around my backyard, scaring black cats that were running away and jumping up in the air - which made me laugh out loud. An Eskimo ran in with a pine tree branch and wounded the panther in the side. I screamed "No, no, Nanook!" As he lay dying, the panther looked up at me and simply asked," Why?" What does this mean?

My nose hurts and my eye has started twitching again! Bah-humbug!

I can't get into the spirit of the season. My sickness, my impending Group Two exam, my lack of anything exciting to give to anyone for Christmas, our death culture of plasticity - all these conspire to make me a melancholy Dane. What's a man to do? Ho freaking ho!

Jerry and Hef together - only in the sixties, man!

"Well, so there we were. There was six of them, seven of us, armed to the teeth with buck knives..." Even if you don't like the Grateful Dead, you have to like the fact that Jerry can hang with anyone, even the ubercool and hip crowd at Playboy After Dark. Jerry stays easy going with Hugh Hefner and doesn't miss a beat with his "Absolutely NOT!" comment before joining the band for some grass-fueled jamming. Their playing of "St. Stephen" rocks, and notice the offbeat dancing of the bunnies and the mod stiffs in the audience. Enjoy!

SHAKE! SHAKE! SHAKE! and BAKE! BAKE! BAKE!

Enjoy!

Dily Lama - an arresting update

After further investigation, I have discovered, and I am sad to report, that Dillard Clark has passed on to his final reward. I was unaware of this, having not visited with him for years. I was reminded that he used to tell me to keep my aftershave in the fridge to keep it potent. And, as my sister pointed out, he was a member of our church and contributed an original recipe to the church cookbook for cantaloupe pie. We have decided to make it, despite our hatred of cantaloupe, in honor of the man. I've included a video of the Beatles, Dillard's favorite band, here for all of us to remember him by as we get ready to make his unique pie. So, here's to you, Dillard, and hope you have found peace as much as you gave to others!


I also include "Legend of a Mind" by the Moody Blues - you'll understand why if you don't already.

Enjoy!

Are you kind? Cuz it just felt like a Dead kinda day!

Gosh, the Grateful Dead in 1970 were so cute! They seemed so alive and into their music, even if they just kinda stood there and gazed off into space. The crowd sure was into their music, even if most of them had no rhythm whatsoever. This is when I like the Dead the best, before all the drugs made them too jazzy and less R&B-y. Indeed, Rhythm and Blues and Blues is my latest obsession du jour. So, expect more of that for a while until I lock onto something else. Enjoy!

A blast from my past and my only degree of separation from Timothy Leary

When I was in high school, several of my left of center friends always sported cool and trendy haircuts that made me jealous. I so wanted to be like them, at least folliclely. That is when John Cate, a fellow drummer in the marching band and a source of cool music, mentioned that he got his hair cut by Dillard Clark, a father of two members of the high school band who were always so hip, fashionable, and cool looking. Nervously, I decided to go to Dillard for a haircut to see what might happened. As it turned out, he was a dyed in the wool hipster who loved all things exotic and interesting and was more than happy to help with my quest to reach hairdo perfection, although his end results were frequently the cause of much debate and anguish between my mother and myself. But I digress...

After leaving Kingsport for college, I lost touch with Dillard. I heard that he had opened a shop to sell new agey items on the city limits, appropriately named the Dilly Lama. In a recent fit of boredom and backwards lookingness, I chanced upon his Myspace page and was amused to find that he had embraced his inner visions to finally become who he had always been - a devout Hindu, the Dilly Lama himself. As you can see, Dillard reached out to touch and meet other inner travelers of the Third Eye Express such as Dr. Timothy Leary (though I doubt that picture was taken in Kingsport). So, while I don't know that I'll ever require his services again, or even know if Dillard still cuts hair, I nevertheless embrace him as an influential visionary in my life who found the beauty of living in a town that smelled of dogshit 9 months out of the year. He knew joy and it was contagious. Take care and thanks for the perms!

This was going on in my brain when I was on drugs back when I used to do drugs...

Now you know, and knowing's half the battle. Enjoy!

Some observations about vampires after an evening of gin and tonics

We went to the World Grotto on Market Square last night and were sitting there enjoying our drinks and the rain storm on the square as the staff were decorating the establishment for Halloween. They were putting up several black and white prints of several scantily-clad and buxom lasses with fangs. Most of the women were affiliated with the World Grotto in some capacity or another, but were most probably concubines of the soooooo egoistic tatooed and goateed bartender, who was in several of the photos with the women. Don't get me wrong - I like buxom and scantily clad women. And, we like that particular bartender because the women all want to jump his bones, he wants to jump their bones, and we want alcohol, which makes him impatient to keep us occupied with REALLY strong drinks so that he isn't interrupted in his true quest by annoying customers wanting more alcohol.

However, all the vampire stuff was soooooo overwrought that it got me to thinking: what the freak is up with everybody loving vampires? They seem so 1980s / 1990s to me. I mean, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was okay, I guess, but everyone makes such a big damn deal about it - I just don't see it! Anne Rice novels - boring! It has all been so overdone to me and it also seems like people that like vampires REALLY like vampires (not that that is a bad thing - it's just not my thing). I suppose, I'm just trapped in my own uncreative and limited Weltanshaung of non-vampirism. But, Mike, you don't understand the hunger...always the hunger! Gimme a freaking break and fix me another gin and tonic, Lestat...

Sunshine Pop - a secret shame that freaks me out - part 1

This is the Free Design. They are a band from the sixties. I like them a lot. I like their song "Make the Madness Stop" and their song "Kites are Fun." Someday, when I grow up, I'm going to have a suit just like the guy on the right, as well as a vandyke beard with cool sideburns.

The Free Design make life a lot more colorful, with their cool harmonies and their technicolor music. They know about living with head injuries, even though they never ate fistfuls of STP-laiden sugarcubes.

These guys like the Free Design, too. I think they are okay, even though it's obvious that they were eating fistfuls of STP-laiden sugarcubes when they made this.

Enjoy!

Things that used to (and still) freak me out...part 1

The 1970s was a difficult time to grow up. Sure, the intense racial antagonism in the United States had ebbed considerably. The Vietnam War was in its final days. Women's liberation made for the genesis of "girl power." The flower power movement had been replaced by increasingly plastic and disposable culture. And the creators of youth-targeted products must have been burning through their remaining mountains of mind-altering chemicals, because they produced several things that still can evoke moments of shear terror in me even today.

For example:

I was never, ever, ever tempted to drink drain cleaner because of this tripped out take on poison ingestion. Apparently, the makers of this commercial had experienced a horrible acid trip where the cleaning product bottles spoke to them and urged them to drink their contents. I hated this commercial and as a result I will not, to this day, drink Mr. Clean.

Similarly, this documentary on milk production from Sesame Street drove me f-ing insane then and now:

I guess the sense of urgency that all the people showed getting the little girl her milk struck me as being overly dramatic - looks like they're scrambling for a freaking national civil defense emergency. Not that I would claim that I was an early advocate for the return to breast feeding, but I suppose that I hated this because I knew there were alternate (and more healthy) sources of milk that might have been explored to quiet the little girl's despair. Likewise, the pseudo-prog rock inspired theme music with the annoying female singer seems to be the pinnacle of bloated rock excess that caused the angry reaction of punk music later in the decade. I guess that everything in the 1970s was exacerbated in our national consciousness due to Watergate - blame it on Nixon!

My ultimate solipsistic enterprise - Mike's Super Seven, the heaviest rock band in the entire universe!

My parents recently gave me some old pictures that I drew as a wee lad. Among the silliness was this one, circa probably 1977:Apparently, my conception of rock and roll at that time included the notion that capes were very important to rock bands, as well as a thunderbolt motif (probably influenced from the Shazam television show I religiously watched on Saturday mornings). I don't know exactly what type of music this band was playing, but I assume it was The Carpenters + Kiss + Queen + Manfred Mann's Earth Band. I would like to think that I was drawing a Roxy Music / MC5 type band with an intense political anarcho-syndicalist message incorporated in their searing lyrics, but they really have an Osmonds vibe going, don't you think? My secret shame...

This blogging makes my brain hurt...

...especially as all 4 of my readers expect, nay, DEMAND pointed observations, cogent commentary, and biting yet witty satire. How can I keep up? I could open up the recesses of my darkest desires and most apocalyptic visions, but then who would want to read about that? Shall I provide a journal of fever dreams, or would that be more likely to frighten than enlighten? Take from the following video what you will, and journey into the blackest corners of my soul...