Review of Military Pizza

Review of Burn Your Eyes Inside, Military Pizza. No label, 2013. 33 min.

It was only recently that I picked up a hand-labeled copy of the first self-published album by “surrealist rock” band Burn Your Eyes Inside—although to be fair I think Ceci n’est pas une musique was more of a demo CD, and the copy I acquired may have been either bootlegged or from an A&R rep’s discarded collection. Still, I was impressed by the classic psychedelic quality, the unashamed naïvety of 60s dark/high fantasy themes, and the sheer silliness of the vocal and musical interaction.

Having enjoyed the first “album,” when I learned that the second Burn Your Eyes Inside release was now available not only as “pay what you like” MP3, but could be ordered as a home-pressed CD via Paypal, I took a leap of faith at the chance to pick that up too. I’m listening to it now, although it reminds me of the Captain Beefheart tapes that are in a box under my bed somewhere, which I might have to dig out and listen to for the first time in ten years.

I don’t want to flatter BYEI that they have singlehandedly awakened in me a love of free-form or surreal musical styles; if anything it’s remembering that Beefheart did this shit better. But this second album departs so wildly from the psych-rock pastiche of Ceci n’est pas… that for a while I wondered if I hadn’t inadvertently picked up a demo by a different band of the same name. Where the former teased and titillated us with childish terrors and drug-induced tomfoolery, Military Pizza disorients and discords our senses with clunky refrains and technically ugly jazz virtuosity. To the untrained ear, there’s little to link these two albums on the musical level.

What convinced me that I had not made a mistake even before my first listen to Military Pizza, however, was the clear and consistent horror aesthetic that pervades the œuvre. Where Ceci n’est pas… gave us rabbit holes and snow witches and transvestite crusaders, claustrophobia and cannibalism and war crimes, the nightmares in this new collection are more fuck-you, more psychological, inward-facing and contemporary. Night terrors, asylum imagery, hallucination and dysfunctional families all make an appearance, although the lyrics are rarely the most prominent part of any of the songs.

The opening track, “Milk Safe,” is an obvious homage to Beefheart, at least in title and in eccentric mixing, although his obsessive repetitive refrains are more evident in the long and electronic “Pepper On I’?” whose beat is almost as migraine-inducing as the faux-Brit-punk voiceover. “Don’t Believe Me” is an Evanescence-inspired mental-health industry nightmare, which becomes muted, cloudy and cotton-wool smothered mid-way through to represent the progressive sedation of the protagonist. An instrumental piece, “Rain Night,” features electric piano and woofed-base mixed hard to the left, and acoustic guitar and hand-drums mixed all the way to the right, so you feel almost like you’re sat in a concert hall with competing bands on opposite stages. It’s a better idea than it is a song, but it grows on you (and if you don’t sit right between the speakers it’s not quite so much of an ear-fuck).

Slightly longer than Ceci n’est pas la musique, which would have fit on one side of a 12” vinyl disc back in the day, Military Pizza runs to 33 minutes of oddly-mixed music. While I didn’t love it as much as the earlier album, which sometimes spontaneously makes it onto a Friday night playlist, this more experimental outing is worth a listen, and might even be useful in setting the atmosphere for certain types of especially pretentious poetry gatherings. I’ll be super careful before shelling out for anything Burn Your Eyes Inside bring out in future though, if they keeping pissing with our expectations like this.

Chisel me all the ways

In Montréal, the happy agglomeration of muraille and graffiti:

Zoom in on this—it really is a lovely piece of work. All the more striking for the smoky bubbles of crude tags forming a cloudy bed of dry ice below the main figure (and if you could reach a position where the garish ice cream advertisement on the shop downstairs wasn’t overshadowing the mural, it would be better).

Our hero lies on his back, deconstructed and re-folded with all his faces showing in best cubist fashion; his arms are folded on his chest, as if staring restfully at the sky, or as if laid to rest in a monumental tomb. He lies on his front, face resting on his hands, fingers interlinked forming a barrier before his mouth a reminder to speak no evil, knees tucked up comfortably as he stares down at the world. Eyes open, alert but weary, expressive but vacant.

Simultaneously, four bent and haggard figures are chiseling our hero from a single megalith of gray stone. Hunchbacked, bald-headed, faces covered with kerchiefs to keep the stone-dust from infecting their lungs as generations of miners have learned with endemic breathing disorders, they wield their stonemasons chisels and large hammers wearily, as if they’ve been at it for weeks. (By the time this photograph was taken, they probably had!)

At once a classic ecphrasis, capturing the essence of a granite sculpture in monochrome paints; and a fine cubist unraveling, showing the hero as in passage, the simultaneity of several actions and perspectives in the single shot; and an Esher-esque optical illusion, as both the sculpture and the movement are impossible in anything but 2D. As cubism, this work owes more to the chunky sensuality of André Lhote than it does to the smoky mysticism of Georges Braque or the busy mechanised tropes of Fernand Léger, but it feels more like an early work than the product of an artist who has been through the gauntlet of the futurist critics or the breeding ground of the Salons. One wonders how this would fare on the streets of Paris today; is this only good enough for provincial Montréal, or could it hold its own in the home of the art form it pastiches?

Response to Hutcheson

It pains me to do this, as it would sadden me to chasten an adorable puppy that had shat in my slippers, but it is against my religion to leave a moronic, erroneous, slanderous and ad hominem review unanswered, however hapless the culprit.

In the unedited “public responses” of last month’s Bamfette, diminutive septuagenarian Millie Nash Hutcheson (I’m guessing her age, but when I briefly met her at the Alberta Poetry Festival about five years ago she was bubbling excitedly about her impending retirement, and rather quaintly assuming anybody gave a shit) exposed her complete ignorance of any poetic developments later than her 10th birthday via a criticism of my performance at the annual Jackson Frière memorial slam last April. It will be instructive to quote her salient words in full here, interspersed with my replies.

1. I was looking forward to seeing our enthusiastic, amateur, native poet Silver Debuse take the stage a little before midnight,
1. Amateur, Millie? As opposed to you who’ve never been paid a penny for your work, I understand. (And it was nowhere near midnight. You must have been drunk.)
2. for while I've never dug out his self-published books myself, I have heard good things about his creativity and his performance.
1. What about the six volumes of my poetry published by traditional houses, Millie? Ever think of reading something yourself rather than relying on reports from moronic critics?
3. Unfortunately the work he chose to read for us on this somber occasion
1. I did not read, I performed. Why should a slam be somber? We remember Frière with joy, not with po-faced priggishness.
4. was a sonnet about sex with animals, not terribly well put together,
1. It was not a sonnet. Have you never read poetry?
5. and I'm afraid the poor man forgot his lines, because it barely rhymed at all,
1. No, Millie, you're a moron.
6. and the meter, what you could detect through his stammering, monotonous rendition, was by no stretch of the imagination iambic pentameter.
1. No, Millie, you're a moron.
7. It was rather embarrassing for everyone concerned.

I can stop there, I think.

Make no mistake...

Dark of the Heart (1998)

On the recommendation of at least two "friends" (one of whom I suspect was winding me up, the other is only a "friend" in the sense that taking a shit in your own back patio is a "party") I had the misfortune of sitting down to watch a 1998 "classic" low-budget horror movie, Dark of the Heart. If not entertained, I expected at least to be mildly amused and titillatingly grossed out. I'd probably have had more fun watching an imbecilic episode of Doctor Who.

Directed by the otherwise unknown to me Stuart Emersen Cade, this DVD came with a label that looked like it had been hand-printed. I think that's the budget rather than a pirate copy, but it is quite hard to tell. The movie bills itself as "hilarious", "homage" and "cult", but those aren't the words that came to my mind. (They might rhyme with them.) There are quite obvious references to the classic movies, and more importantly the cinematic styles and trademark cheapness of directors like Bava, Romero, Argento, and all the low-budget masters of '70s Italian horror. The trouble is, Cade imitates without improving, pastiches without critiquing, borrows from without any self-awareness, irony, humour, or--saddest of all--talent whatsoever. To take a single example, Dark of the Heart is as sexist, gratuitous, misogynistic and soft-pornographic as the most tasteless of the European classics, not as a critique of the now horribly dated tradition, but unimaginatively and gratuitously in its own right. Pretty much every scene is an excuse for half- or fully naked women to run screaming or expose their tits on a mortuary slab. Of course, this lack of self-awareness or self-respect describes most cheap horror films made in in the 1990s or even today.

The storyline is nonexistent; I have no idea whatsoever why Squire's camply villainous doctor is after the girl's heart. I have no idea why the two sisters (played by Valentina Vitalia and Luce Antonini, who look entirely unalike, and I suspect at least one of them was only pretending to be Italian) came to a creepy, apparently non-functioning surgery and take off all their outer clothes. Vitalia then spends half the film running out while doffing and donning random items of clothing as she does so, while Antonini is either in a stupor, drugged, unconscious, undergoing surgery (suddenly conscious again and of course screaming) and eventually dead, all while showing her admirably immobile breasts from various angles.

I understand that this production was not actually short of funding, but that the low-budget effects were meant to imitate the classic horror films of the genre. That turned out to be pretty stupid, as all it did was fail to draw attention from the director's complete lack of talent, the laxness in scriptwriting, the soporific behaviour of the "actors", and the sheer stupidity of the whole exercise. Every squirt of ketchup or pasta sauce (at one point you could actually see the zucchini and melanzane pieces dripping down Antonini's enhanced cleavage), every camera cut from human to wax dummy, every mistimed scream or in-shot microphone boom just made the viewing more tedious.

Perhaps the most bizarre failure of the production is the lack of basic props. In one scene, Vitalia and Antonini and their partners are drinking in a sophisticated lounge, mixing expensive cocktails and bantering about the more expensive malt whiskeys, but they appear to be drinking out of paper cups, have no access to ice or fruit, and have mismatched chairs in a room with no carpet or wall-hangings (all filmed from a single angle, of course).

I fully expect that Cade will die in the obscurity he deserves, having never again been given the budget or the authority to fuck an audience in the eyes by making a turgid piece of crap like this. He'll be missed about as much as a used paper cup stained with cheap piss-coloured whiskey. Fuck you. Give me my two fucking hours back.

Who is this squid...

...and how does he know Yuri?

Dr Abel

Under the water, everyone was the same. A shadowy torso, arms and legs that move too slowly, clumsy thrashing like infants, clouds and bubbles scattering as they bob between the competing pressures to float and be sucked down, faces blurred and puffy, so serious. You’d think they were trying really hard, except that they aren’t really going anywhere. Leaking from pores in their skin, from tiny lesions and larger orifices, you can smell them an hour away. My sisters gather, circle, stare; we’ve never really figured out what they’re doing here. Not that it matters. Now everyone’s here, we feed.

Revision...

Kill it.

Kill it with fire.

Let beauty blossom from the ashes.

The street-art is listening to you!

A very nice mural reported this morning by Street Art News, who ascribe it to English artist Banksy. Click through for a higher-quality image, and more photographs, but in short this piece incorporates a classic British telephone box (vandalized, graffiti-daubed and piss-stained, but unusually not festooned with postcards advertising prostitutes and escorts) and externalizes the lack of privacy in Western telecommunications. Surrounding the box are three men dressed as stereotypical 1950s spies, complete with trench coats, hats and dark glasses, using various archaic technologies to eavesdrop on the conversation in the booth and transmit them to GCHQ in Gloucestershire. I don't expect many people use phone boxes in England these days, which is in one sense a shame, because this artwork would look even better captured with various people making calls from inside the box over the course of the day. The workmanlike expressions on the faces of the spies would then be especially apt: they're doing their jobs, without shame or regret, but also without prurient interest or enthusiasm; they are technicians. The upper figure on the right shows a small amount of discomfort, but that's more due to his position, reaching up with a small satellite transceiver, shoulders hunched, fedora dislodged by large headphones and resting awkwardly on his glasses. The lower right-hand figure, crouching like a plumber or electrician working in your house, looks especially bored with his work, recording telephone conversations onto an old-fashioned tape deck, and does his job uncomplainingly only out of thorough professionalism. Even the spies hacking into our telephones and email accounts, blackmailing our Web service providers, sabotaging Internet security and watching us masturbate on Yahoo webcams, don't give a shit about us.

Silver reviewed in CROSS

By chance I learned yesterday that my book of butchered poetry published last year was reviewed in the "literature" section of the Cultural Review Of the Society for the Sanctity of the family, a flimsy journal with the somewhat creative acronym CROSS, published somewhere in the darks of fuckin' Newfoundland.

The idiocy starts in line 1 of the review:

We were, perhaps inadvertently, sent this galley volume of animal-slaughter themed poetry by the publicity department of a deservedly obscure and ill-organized press called Fallen Albatross Books.

(I count seven errors in that sentence alone.) We can only imagine our erstwhile reviewer Reginald May's growing confusion as he passed the first 55 pages of the collection without coming across a single reference to animals, abattoirs, or the sale or consumption of meat. Assuming he read the book any more than skimming the back cover and two or three randomly selected pages. Assuming he can read at all, or understands that poetry is not just prose with a ragged right margin, or knows that the garlicky piss spewing from his mouth is not the same as the considered opinion of a trained literary critic.

He misunderstands the very concept of a poetry collection:

The selection of poems in this volume, all by a single author of clear counter-cultural proclivities but with no unity of purpose, plot, theme or style, defeats all comprehension.

Even the closing words of the review fail to engage in any way with the literary merit, cultural context, generic conceits or thematic content of my book, the words and poems therein, or even any recognition of the talent and history of the author. His criticisms, while I really do take them as a compliment, are so banal and inept as to beggar belief:

To be perfectly frank, the work lacks dignity, gravitas and taste, not to mention the kind of social responsibility that we at CROSS like to endorse.

To be perfectly frank, Mr May, I wouldn't shit in your mouth unless it were from a great height and I had some assurance of protection against splash-back.

Chewed by Jack

On a trip to the Big City last week, I passed by one of the nicest examples of street art I've seen in a long time, and as Fate would have it, my camera is still in the shop being repaired, so I wasn't able to get a photo of it. I'll try to paint you a picture here, although I fear I won't do the artists justice (and it won't be there for long, for obvious reasons).

On the side-facing wall of one of the large bank offices off the main street this huge mural is executed in spare, bold lines and blocks of incompletely shaded colour, as if hastily drawn, but with a balance and verve that belies the casual execution. This is rather the faux sloppiness of a Klee painting or a Latin American stencil collage: sketched with confidence and power over a vast canvas by expert hands. Especially impressive for what must have been a collaborative work; I wish I knew the graffiti scene in this city well enough to identify the artists, who deserve accolade for this. The paints are all metallic shades of car spray paint, in blue, red and aluminum-speckled black, with a few details strategically picked out in black sharpie or silver touch-up pen.

The subject of the mural, the protagonist, as it were, is an abstract figure resembling a red marshmellow man or a stylized fist holding a short dagger, perhaps a prehistoric bone knife; both the blade and the knuckles are chased in a simple zigzag filigree, shadowed to look like channels chiseled in stone. Although standing boldly and uncowed, this figure is completely overwhelmed by the rest of the image, as though about to be devoured by a giant antagonist or sucked into the monstrous background.

The gaping maw threatening our hero is a beautiful distortion of the colours and form of the Royal Union Flag, the blue triangles of St Andrew forming wicked vampire fangs, the red George and Patrick cross-bars vivid tongue or lips, and drooling blood respectively. This colonial monster wears reflective aviator shades, has fine Victorian walrus whiskers and muttonchops, and has skin puckered with acne and shattered glass. A sea of roughly squared blue strokes underfoot suggest to me discarded and worthless $5 notes, but may just as easily be broken fangs or rough mosaic flooring.

Most intriguingly, the upper approximately 1/5th of the mural shows a different approach to the canvas. Although there is clearly a unity of purpose and of mind, strokes curve downward rather than upward, there is more dripping as though more time was taken over each pass, and tellingly the blue is a different shade, one without the metallic note of the rest of the work. Without a doubt, the painter of the upper part was suspended upside-down from the brim of the roof, most likely held by the ankles by two trustworthy collaborators, while she executed the part of the design out of reach of the artist standing in the alley below. This spirit of team-work makes this a true urban artwork, a community statement that I hope was enjoyed and well-photographed before the corporate drones came along and whitewashed it within the requisite three working days.

A dab of rabble

Doors lock. I fastkey twelve digits and thermal sealant fuses the bolts. Only one way out of here now. Two sirens and three failsafes kick in, but I’m a step ahead of them, bypass all subroutines. My krack wears away at the toughest crypt, getting closer, derandomizing keys, factoring primes. Seven minutes til dayshift starts and keys reset again, but the krack doesn’t need that long. On success, I let all the sirens go, the failsafes, concrete shielding, chemical and physical coolants, evac, killzones. Half-life of 87.7 years. Hold one channel open; as my body shuts down, my upload begins.