Jeff VanderMeer is a diabolical villain and other fun things

Last month I finally went to see Ivy Ford at the North Street Cabaret.

Holy cow, can she play a mean guitar!

I'd been meaning to go to a show of hers for a few years after seeing her on a bill at the Red Rooster and other joints around town. She plays blues in an Albert Collins/B.B. King vein - more or less - with forays into something more like blues-inflected rock, perhaps a bit Hendrixy.

Great stuff.

Maybe a week ago I finished reading Absolution.

The first thing I thought upon reading the final words was "I should have re-read the first three books." I think a lot of what happens here is mentioned in the original series but I have forgotten so much as it's been years since I took them in.

Absolution has 3 parts. The first section is called "Dead Town" which describes the fate of an expedition in the Forgotten Coast some 20 years prior to the formation of Area X and serves as a prelude to the horrors to come.

"Dead Town" is as chilling and uncanny as anything in the original Southern Reach books. The carnivorous rabbits made the simple act of mastication into a nightmare and were disturbing enough on their own but then they are slaughtered with ruthless efficiency via flame throwers making for a genuinely horrific scene in which I could almost smell the burning flesh and fur. Just when I thought it was safe to take a breather, we get the scene wherein the Rogue visits the biologists and it was simply disturbing and twisted - diabolical even. I could just see Jeff VanderMeer twirling his moustache and laughing as I realized that there was no going back, that I'd been beset by an uneasiness that I would not, could not shake until days after having finished the book. When that scene was done, I had to stop and think about it. Recover, in a way. I wasn't quite sure what had happened to the expedition in it but it was all bad.

The biologists had reached the white rabbits and did not care or notice that they trampled blackened corpses and living creatures both, weapons slack at their sides like a muscle memory that was amnesia, this onrushing surge toward the Rogue behind his veil of silver. Nor did the living rabbits care if they were trampled.

...

Now the Rogue kept opening his mouth wider and wider and the words came out louder and more brutal above the downpour. Those words could not be extinguished by the rain. Those words rose and permeated and cascaded outward and around the Rogue - even as the first wave of biologists surging against that "fey weaponry" crumpled, fell to their knees, slid down on gurgling mud as if they could evade the fire "that called our names"...except it kept calling and each time the desolation within became more final and complete.

The second section, "The False Daughter", concerns Old Jim, a retired(?) Central operative who is lured back into service for one last job. He is estranged from his daughter and, quite disturbingly, Central casts a younger agent to play the role of his daughter which makes for a weird plunge into Old Jim's psyche. For his part, Old Jim has been sent to the Forgotten Coast to investigate the strange happenings there which are related the expedition from "Dead Town". He is obsessed with finding the Rogue and encounters the Tyrant, an alligator that the biologists let loose nearly 20 years prior to his mission. The Tyrant has grown quite large and seems to have become sentient. The mere potential of the gator still being alive is enough to loosen the veteran agent's grip on reality.

This section ended with a Solaris (the film) vibe for me with Old Jim seeming to return to the "normal" world of the Forgotten Coast but I wasn't convinced. The camera could have pulled back and shown Old Jim at the Village as merely some twisted diorama sitting alone amid alien corn. It reiterated what "Dead Town" revealed to us: whatever alien or intelligence or force is loose in the Forgotten Coast, we humans are unable to divine its purpose or makes sense of its methods.

The book closes with "The First and the Last" which takes place a year after the border that defines Area X has descended. We witness the first expedition into Area X from the point of view of Lowry who drops hundreds, if not thousands of f-bombs. I found his dialogue to be annoying but eventually got used to it.

We know the mission failed and here we get a glimpse of madness settling in and members dying one by one as flesh melts into hazmat suits and other dreadful and bizarre happenings befall the crew.

Absolution was a great read. VanderMeer nails the cosmic horror thing perfectly as people descend into madness before an incomprehensible presence.

Last weekend my ladyfriend and I went to see The Claudettes, Chicago's premier band who does what The Claudettes do. It was the Madison release party for their new album Garage Glamour and the show was sold out. Also there was Hannah, The Leaf Queen, who shared her photos with me. She was seated right up front while I was off to the side and so her pics are better than mine.

Liz Ele is the new drummer having replaced Michael Caskey earlier this spring.

She seemed to be more of a rock drummer and she drove the songs forward with her steady push. She added a controlled manic energy to the music.

It had been a while since I'd seen the band perform and singer Rachel Williams has settled into being the frontwoman. Her performance that night had more energy and, for lack of a better way of saying it, she put on more of a show. When I last saw the band it was shortly after she had joined and she seemed to be reacting to the music onstage then but now she is part of it, as if the beat was emanating from the movement of her lithe figure, her singing tacking a course for the melodies.

The new album really puts her range on full display. There's the pleading of "(You Are My) Whole World", the sultry seduction of "Touch You Back", and my favorite at the moment, the Zack de la Rocha-like delivery on "Don't Give It Up to the Thieves".

Johnny Iguana's piano was as bracing and melodic as ever while Zach Verdoorn effortlessly alternated between bass and electric guitar. Plus I think he sang more that night as well.

A great show.

Also thanks to Rachel for helping me clean up a spilled beer.

I have visited the planetarium a couple times recently. The first was for a screening of Beyond Our Senses: Bank Swallows.

Directed by Wisconsinite David Andrew Busse, it portrays colonies of bank swallows who migrate to the shores of Lake Michigan just south of Milwaukee. We witness males on the prowl for mates, the youngins hatching and growing quickly to become fledglings.

Busse was on hand for the screening and he talked about how the idea for the movie developed from observing the birds on walks and wanting to know more and to document what he was witnessing.

Not only was this a fascinating look at an animal that I knew nothing of until watching this, it was really neat to see the birds in action on the full dome of the planetarium. There's much more happening there than just stars in the night sky. (Which are really hoopy, don't get me wrong.)

More recently I was at the planetarium to take in a screening of Sounds of the Oceans.

It's not really a documentary and is more of an immersive experience. We are shown footage of orcas and whales and dolphins as they glide through the ocean waters. Their calls are mixed with music and the combination makes for a relaxing journey beneath the waves.

While there was definitely a New Age vibe to be had, I found it an interesting impressionistic ride. What were the animals' calls about? Were they having a chat or trading insults about the diver with the camera?

The movie ended with suggestions for how to be kinder to the oceans and their inhabitants. Is chilling out your audience to the graceful movements of some ocean life the best way to build empathy for them and to lead folks to action? I don't know. Nonetheless Sounds of the Oceans is a serene getaway from the workaday world that invites viewers to seek kinship with the life beneath the waves.

My ladyfriend and I went to see Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Comic Mystery last weekend down at the Bartell.

It was great fun and, truth be told, I was surprised at how old fashioned its comedic attitude was. I know nothing about the history of this play but it felt very old school to me. Its humor was for all ages and there was lots of Watson making faces at the audience and faux mistakes that let the audience know the characters knew they were in a play.

Fun was the watchword instead of grand themes.

Last weekend a friend and I went to the Gamma Ray to see Souled American, a pioneering alt-country band from Chicago. I heard about them briefly on Sound Opinions shortly before seeing that they'd be stopping here in Madison and figured we had to go.

Joe Adducci and Chris Grigoroff were joined by an unknown (to me) guitarist and they proceeded to play some stripped down, country-inflected balladry. 

I thought the tunes had strong Townes van Zandt vibes. (It's snowing on Elston. Ha!) They seemed to have a fatalism to them. The music may have been sparsely arranged but the bare bones aesthetic combined with gritty performances for an achingly genuine experience.

I watched Errol Morris' latest documentary, CHAOS: The Manson Murders. It was really neat for me as I knew only the barest of details of the Manson Family and their deadly exploits.

In classic Morris style, the truth behind the Manson madness and the hideous murders is called into question. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (who was a resident of Hibbing, MN at the same time as Bob Zimmerman) put forth the idea that Manson wanted to start a race war in his book Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders. Here Tom O'Neill's book, which gave the movie its title, calls that into question and throws in CIA involvement along with a mind control conspiracy.

Bugliosi's hypothesis is further brought into question by former Manson follower Bobby Beausoleil who paints a more mundane picture of Manson. It's one of a scorned wanna be musician turned maniac and not a fiend bent on bringing to fruition some crazed apocalyptic vision of interracial strife.

The movie does a good job of giving the details of Manson's life and the sordid, murderous affairs he was involved in. Plus it ponders just how a crazy man who lived on the fringes of society when he wasn't in jail could command a commune and convince his followers to commit those sadistic murders in the summer of 1969.

I also appreciated the use of Manson's music. It fits into the narrative, yes, but it had been a long time coming for me. Guns N' Roses covered one of his songs on their album "The Spaghetti Incident?" and I recall well the uproar that caused. And so it was just interesting for me to finally hear Manson performing his songs at long last.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 119: Hark Chazen, hark!

(Watch the prelude.)

(late March 2024)

The past couple of months have been up and down. My Frau’s chronic pain problems have gotten steadily worse. Add in some food allergies that have suddenly appeared and she is depressed and often in a rather foul mood. I suppose I cannot blame her, though. If I had to endure what she does, I’d probably be in a bad mood most of the time too.

Because of her suffering, I’ve been largely sticking close to home. She doesn’t like to go out very much and I want to be close by her instead of gallivanting around town. Well, most of the time.

Last month I went down to the Chazen Museum of Art to check out their exhibition called “Art of Enterprise: Israhel van Meckenem’s 15th-Century Print Workshop”.

van Meckenem was a German goldsmith and printmaker from Bocholt. Today the city is in northwestern Germany but I am not sure what state or principality it belonged to 500 years ago long before there was such a thing as a country called Germany. A placard at the exhibit described him as “a fifteenth-century media influencer and entrepreneur.” I found the application of the rather new meaning of “influencer” to a medieval figure to be cringe-worthy. Perhaps it is not altogether wrong but the phrase conjures in my mind images of scantily clad young women offering their opinions on a disposable, mass-produced something or other made in China as their breasts threaten to burst from their restraints.

Using his goldsmithing skills, van Meckenem created engravings and became the first printmaker to use his own name as a brand, often copying the works of others and pawning them off as his own after some alterations.

For example, here’s a print called The Promenade by the legendary artist of the Northern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer:

And here is van Meckenem’s reimagining which retained the title: 

Apparently only a small number of his actual engravings survive and a handful were on display.

Here’s a print where you can see his initials rather easily:

That “I.M.” became a brand, of sorts, and he would go on to mass produce his prints. Well, as mass produced as you could get in the second half of the 15th century.

The exhibit drew parallels between van Meckenem’s appropriation of others’ works in a pre-intellectual property age and the situation today where the concept of intellectual property struggles against digital technologies which make it a snap to coopt the work of others and repurpose it.

It would have been interesting to know what the people whose works he copied thought of his appropriation. Flattered? Or perhaps they were aggrieved at the theft. Did the original artists view it as just how human culture gets propagated or resent loss of prestige and income? Speaking of income, did the folks who bought these prints mistake van Meckenem’s (unsigned) works for Dürer’s?

A neat exhibit which indulged my love of all things medieval.

********

In February some of A24's movies returned to theaters in celebration of St. Valentine's Day. The Lighthouse is a love story - kinda sorta. I mean, it features two characters who, I suppose you could say, have feelings of some kind towards one another and the film details their relationship. It quickly became one of my favorite movies of all-time back in 2019 and I jumped at the chance to see it on the big screen once again.

The first time I watched The Lighthouse I was mesmerized by the stark black & white cinematography and took in the period dialogue and all the weirdness and just let the whole thing wash over me in an impressionistic kind of way. I didn't worry about plot details too much and just allowed the eldritch mood sink into every pore. On this viewing I would try to pay more attention to all the crazy stuff and figure out how everything fits together. Well, I could try, anyway.

The film opens with a ship out in rough waters. It brings two lighthouse keepers, a.k.a. - wickies, Ephraim Winslow and Thomas Wake to an island somewhere off the coast of New England. The two keepers they're replacing walk past them without so much as making eye contact. It's as if Winslow and Wake aren't even there. The outgoing men each hold onto one handle of a chest between them while Winslow and Wake carry only their own gear. Arriving at the lighthouse, the fresh replacements stop at the door and stare at the camera briefly as if they were having their portrait taken. It's an unexpected moment of breaking the fourth wall and it had a vague Wisconsin Death Trip vibe to it.

In certain ways and most proximately, the film is about, as George Steiner put it, one of the "principal constants of conflict in the condition of man", namely the conflict between age and youth. Wake is the veteran wickie while Winslow is a newbie. The grizzled Wake walks with a limp and unabashedly farts whenever and wherever he cares to. He wastes no time in putting his young protege to work doing the dull, repetitive, and sometimes physically demanding maintenance tasks. This involves things such as lugging large cans of kerosene up from the ground floor to the area just beneath the lantern room as well as painting the exterior of the lighthouse while sitting in a swing dangling over the side with only Wake's steady hand keeping him aloft. (Tellingly, Wake agitates Winslow so much that he falls from the swing.) Basically everything but dealing with the lamp. Wake makes it perfectly clear that the lantern room is his domain and his alone.

Winslow finds a mermaid scrimshaw tucked into a rip in his mattress. A simple token left by his predecessor? Or perhaps a talisman? Either way things get weird really quickly. He notices that Wake likes to wander the lighthouse's gallery deck free from the burden of clothes when he tends to the lamp. And then the mentee has visions of a mermaid. In addition, he is plagued by a one-eyed seagull.

I paid closer attention to Wake's dialogue this time around and I noted just how prescient it was. At one point Winslow asks Wake what happened to his predecessor and the elder wickie tells him that the man went mad. He ranted about merfolk and thought that the light was enchanted. The men struggle to get along even at dinner and it is during one of these meals that Wake gives his classic curse on Winslow. The scene never fails to send a shiver down my spine.

"Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Winslow! HAAARK! Hark Triton, hark!"

In it he mentions "Black waves teeming with salt foam", something Winslow has seen. Wake describes Triton "crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard", a vision that Winslow shall have later. Wake also mentions Winslow's viscera being for "the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon", he having explained that the souls of dead sailors inhabit the seagulls, and that is how the film ends.

Director Robert Eggers and his brother Max wrote a fantastic screenplay that at once puts Winslow's decent into madness on display but never fully explains why he does so nor ever absolves Wake. Did the grizzled veteran leave that mermaid mojo in the mattress? Is it responsible for Winslow losing touch with reality as he claimed? Or has his mental state been adversely affected by deadly combination of Wake's antagonism along with the intense isolation?

The imagery of the film is great with a black & white pall hanging over everything and shadows everywhere. I also adored that scene that illustrates Winslow in the grip of madness and him blaming Wake for his predicament. Winslow comes across a body on the gallery deck and, upon turning it over he finds it is himself. (Echoes of Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway here for me. "Something's changed, that's not your face/It's mine, it's mine!") We then quickly cut to that scene based on the 1904 painting, "Hypnosis", by Sascha Schneider. In the film, a naked Wake looms over a kneeling Winslow as a beam of light emanates from his eyes and illuminates the face of his youthful assistant. But they are on the land somewhere, not high above on the lighthouse.

Oh, and I also noticed that homage to The Shining where we see Wake, axe in hand, running after Winslow just like Jack Torrence in a very Kubrickian tracking shot.

Sitting in the theater, I found myself at times caught up in trying to link Wake's dialogue to events onscreen and note Kubrickian flourishes. But I couldn't help myself from getting lost in the film's atmosphere - the sense of impending dread and the horror of witnessing Winslow lose his grip on reality. The antiquated dialogue, the sepulchral texture of the film, and the boxy aspect ratio which gave the film a cramped verticality instead of the breathing space of widescreen - all lured me in hook, line, and sinker.

********

OK, onto something more pleasant – food.

Because it was winter, I needed something hearty like gołąbki soup.

It turned out pretty well and I think my babcia would have been proud. For dessert I continued my cooking dalliance with rye and made rye chocolate chip cookies with cardamon.

I was combining a couple different cookies recipes here and I think that I needed to adjust the flour to liquid ratio a bit and to also use fewer chocolate chips. At the end, a bunch of them were strewn about at the bottom of my mixing bowl along with some small clumps of dough.

Having said that and noting that they don’t look perfect, I will say that they tasted absolutely fantastic. That earthy rye flavor along with luscious dark chocolate accented by just the right amount of cardamom. Oh mama, they were good!

Continuing in a food vein, I want to show you something that someone brought into the office recently.

Rather than a simple sweet treat, it turned out to be a confectioner's version of Russian roulette. You give the spinner a whirl and then grab one of the beans with the appearance of the one in the spot that the arrow landed on. Let’s say it lands on the orange bean with red spots. With no small amount of trepidation, you grab one from the dish because you don’t know if it will taste like peach…or barf. Is that green one juicy pear or booger?

Good times at work.

********

March began with a trek down to our local planetarium.

On offer was a screening of the fulldome experience of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album. Back in 1973 there was a promotional event at the London Planetarium to celebrate its release where images of the cosmos were projected onto the screen as the shiny, new record was played.

But 50 years later a new set of images was constructed to be shown in planetaria along with the music. Although Madison’s planetarium isn’t as large as, say, the Adler in Chicago, it uses the same grade of projection equipment and it features surround sound courtesy of a new stereo system bought especially to accommodate the Dark Side of the Moon experience.

The place was packed with folks old and young alike. Looking around, I highly suspected that several of my fellow attendees, especially the ones with grey pony tails and beards, had smoked a joint and/or popped a tab of LSD before the show. My suspicions were proven correct on at least one count when I someone walked past me who smelled of a certain green, leafy substance.

The show looked a bit like this:

Dark Side of the Moon is not an album I listen to much these days as it was overplayed in my youth. I recognize it for the landmark that it is and adore some of the songs but there's just something too slick about it and too familiar. In some ways, I prefer the embryonic version of it that audiences in early 1972 heard at gigs such as this one. I miss the rough edges of earlier Floyd and the weirder tributaries they took me down on Meddle and Atom Heart Mother.

Regardless of my history with the band, the dome show was a hoot! The visuals were a blast and the surround sound was just great. It was neat to hear the voices so clearly – not the singing, but rather the voices of people answering various questions posed to them at the studio and that are interspersed throughout the album. For instance, at the end we hear Gerry O'Driscoll, the doorman at Abbey Road studios, say, "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark."

“On the Run” was the highlight for me with synthesizer patterns zipping around my head while the visuals went into manic overdrive as we went through a 2001-like stargate made of triangles and lights streaming headlong towards us. One of the great things about the program was that we all listened to an album from start to finish without the distraction of a phone or a computer screen. These days it seems that music is usually an accompaniment to other things we do, such as destroying our brains on social media, and not given the attention that it deserves. I just sat back and enjoyed the show and didn’t look to see if anyone had texted me and my email went unchecked throughout too. It was simply wonderful to get lost in the album - something I used to do rather often but now, sadly, I have to pay someone $25 and leave home to do it.

Here's the trailer:

 

 

On my way out, I stopped to buy a pair of solar glasses so I could observe next month's solar eclipse.

********

In the middle of this month I took a short vacation in Chicago. The occasion was to see the Bay Area band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. I'd been aware of SGM for 15+ years but only ever ventured to listen to song or two every once in a while. I have no recollection of how I'd heard of them and I suspect that my first listen to their avant-garde heavy metal or whatever genre you think best classifies their music proved to be a bit more than I could chew and so I put investigating them further on indefinite hold.

I had no idea that they'd called it quits in 2011 when I read earlier this year that they had reunited and were going on tour once more with the closest stop in Chicago. And so I made the trek down to Lincoln Park on a Wednesday evening.

They were to play at Lincoln Hall, a venue I’d never been to, and so I booked a room at the Chicago Getaway Hostel just 3 blocks or so from the venue.

Stepping inside, I appeared to be the eldest guest as small groups of kids in their 20s were wandering the halls and hanging out in the lobby. My room was small and on the spartan side but that’s all I needed, really. It had a half bath which meant I’d be competing with other guests for a shower stall in the morning.

After dropping off my bag, I headed to Lincoln Avenue in pursuit of dinner. While I never spent a lot of time in the neighborhood, I would occasionally go to the Wax Trax! record store there with a friend back in the late 80s. Little did we know that Al Jourgensen and the rest of folks in the band Ministry were upstairs recording albums that would define the subgenre that is industrial metal. I don’t think the store is around anymore but I believe it was somewhere near Lincoln Ave. and Fullerton – right where I was that evening.

I ended up at a trendy Mexican place. My waitress had this odd habit which I’ve noticed in more than a few 20-something waitstaff: she replied to most things with “awesome”.

It was awesome that I was doing well that evening; it was awesome that I ordered an unsweetened iced tea to drink; it was awesome that I ordered a burrito to eat. It was just weird. English seems to have lost all words that express having a feeling of awe that actually have the letters a-w-e in them.

Just one store front down from the restaurant was the Biograph Theater and I hadn’t been there since I was a boy. A mural on the building next door noted the historic significance of the place.

Lincoln Hall is just across the street from the Biograph. The interwebs tell me that the FBI agents who shot Dillinger were lying in wait on its roof. These same interwebs also tell me that Lincoln Hall was called the 3-Penny Cinema back in the 70s when it made Chicago history by being the first joint in town to screen the infamous adult film, Deep Throat.

Today it’s a really nice little venue. Intimate but not cramped.

It reminded me of the High Noon Saloon here in Madison.

Two Chicago bands opened the evening: Dead Rider and Cheer-Accident. Both were good. Dead Rider was the odder of the two with guitarist/singer Todd Rittmann almost rapping once or twice and songs alternating between those with Rittmann playing some more straight forward licks with a flying-V guitar and those with a heavy synthesized rhythm track. Cheer-Accident had a fuller sound as it was more of an ensemble. They started off a bit on the heavy side but quickly changed gears as the horns kicked in with a blast of something vaguely like you'd get from a marching band to send the opening tune on a wonderfully crazy tangent. The band showed it was willing to throw in every twist and turn they could with a dose of lighthearted silliness.

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum took the stage in costume with some of the members donning face paint. I am only slightly more familiar with their music now than when I was at the show. Very slightly. But I was thrilled when they played "Phthisis", one of 2 or 3 of their songs that I actually know. While there were moments of peace with a bucolic sounding flute adding mellow vibes, most of the time these folks were rocking hard. (Pictures by Jeffrey McDonald.)

Bassist Dan Rathbun looked like Egon from Ghostbusters to me. For one song he played what looked like an oversized pedal steel guitar but I think it was a homebrew contraption consisting of a 2"x4" about 8 feet long with strings running the length and some C clamps acting as capos. He alternated sliding drumsticks along the strings and hitting them as if this weird instrument was made of piano viscera wrenched from the case.

Matthias Bossi and Michael Iago Mellender frenetically added all manner of percussion while Nils Frykdahl conjured aural chaos from his guitar as he spat out his vocals. Rounding things out was Carla Kihlstedt who sang and added her often martial sounding violin to the highly melodic pandemonium.

SGM’s set was usually heavy, often chaotic, and the band liked to fuse a classical ethos with a generous dose of industrial thrash setting the music off in different directions with tempos changing often. But there was always at least a sliver of a melody for me to hang onto. Their music is heavy and I can’t help but adore the drama of it all. There's an operatic quality to it, if we're talking about an opera based on the Book of Revelation.

It was a great show! The staccato beats of “Phthisis” were a real highlight for me. I just adore how the violin keeps a melody going underneath the thundering percussion and slashing guitar chords.
I hope they don’t go into hibernation once more as I’d love to see them again.

Their performance that night was recorded.

 

********

As winter was giving way to spring, I trekked out to my beloved Acewood Conservation Park to see how things were coming along.

Not exactly verdant but the snow was gone and the woods were alive with the sounds of red-winged black birds who had returned.

They held court in branches where they were hanging out with grackles.

In the water, Canada geese and mallards were leisurely swimming in the chilly water and occasionally took a break on the shore.

Despite the bare trees, there was the odd bit of life here and there on the ground.

Soon enough the arch would be decked with green.

********

Bonus photo! Here’s Piper looking all cute as she prepares for winter by shedding her warm weather coat on our couch.

 

 

(Listen to the postlude.)