収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Last month, I saw a horrific video going around, that one of a cop slamming a butch lesbian into a wall and out of a washroom for not performing femininity to his satisfaction. And, after I was done shaking with rage, I wrote this song.

It’s very angry, very political music, with an eye towards bitter humour. Klopfenpop called it “Pete Seeger meets Pussy Riot,” and I have to say, I’m pretty happy with that reaction.

That video I mentioned above was the first of a flood of similar incidents being reported after North Carolina rushed through the anti-TLGB (and safety and child labour law repealing – didn’t know that part, did you?) HB2 in a several-hour-long special session.

Sure, these abuses happened before it became this year’s fundamentalist-button-pushing issue. But the people who get off on this have certainly felt emboldened ever since, to the point of this North Carolina school system voting to let people pepper-spray transgendered students. It’s that fucking bad.

There are several such bills going around, in various permutations, all sourced from the same choose-your-own-oppression master bill by a fundamentalist/rightist organisation. The one offered here puts a $2500 bounty on the heads of transgendered children, targeting the most vulnerable in this particularly vicious hate campaign. The legislative version did not make it out of committee, so they are now gathering signatures to put it onto the ballot. They can’t win, but they can wage hate for months and crank up fundamentalist turnout – and, of course, hurt lots and lots of children.

Hurting people – particularly very vulnerable people, like kids – is the point, of course. That’s how they get off, and just putting all that out there is the whole point of this new song. Well, okay, they also have the goal of boosting fundamentalist voter turnout. It’s always about that, and if people get hurt along the way – well, so much the better. As long as it’s the right people, like women who don’t know their place.

Din of Thieves will be a lot harder-edged than Bone Walker, and this is part of that aesthetic. I’m not making any guesses about the far end of its range – it won’t be a whole album of this kind of four-chord metal-influenced punk, but I feel like I have some things to prove, and that’ll show. How much, I don’t entirely know. It’s all written, and some of it is the most hopeful stuff I’ve ever written – ask anyone who has heard “Supervillain For I Love You” or – most of all – “We’re Not Friends.”

I guess what I’m saying is: this is a pretty emotional song – one I hope is cathartic – and Din of Thieves will be a pretty emotional album. Because it’s… it’s a pretty damn emotional time.

Share it around. Particularly where you think it might do some good.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Art for the new single coming out on Monday. It’s kind of driving me crazy holding onto this one because there’s so much insanity over this right now, and when I saw that video of that cop slamming that butch lesbian against a wall and then out of a washroom for not performing femininity correctly – so angry – the song that popped into my head virtually wrote itself.

This is still “test” art – I’m not sure it’s there yet. It’s in the neighbourhood tho’. It just seems too… I dunno, bright? But I like it. So I’m torn.

Ah well, I’ll figure it out before Monday.

eta: New version:

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Recording today, no time to type much. I don’t write particularly topical music, because I guess I hate success? But I have a highly topical song and I want to get it out there.

Those who know what I mean when I say “this is another Mary Kaye and the Cosmetics song” will, um, know what I mean by that? Sure. That works. The rest of you will have to wait.

And honestly, I can write some difficult changes even into four chords, I’m just saying, and I don’t even know why. This is why it’s not out already. I’ve been practicing it for days.

Oh, separately, yesterday, I fixed the leaky valves in that barely-post-war not-yet-East-Germany-made Cajun accordian that I’ve had hanging around for a couple of years. Tim Walker – one of the GoHs at this past Rainbowcon, and who actually plays various kind of squeezeboxes for real – looked it over and gave me some tips. One disassembly and set of adjustments later, no more extraneous tones. Thanks, Tim!

The inside of this thing is amazingly clean, by the by, it’s like it got shipped off from the factory last week. DID I TAKE PHOTOS NO I DID NOT TAKE PHOTOS BECAUSE I DON’T EVEN KNOW. It’s approximately 70 years old, but you sure as hell wouldn’t know it from looking at it, not even on the inside.

Anyway, enough accordion, time for a more electric kind of loud. Let’s see if I can get some good takes today. Rrrarrrr.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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So here’s video of a cop throwing a lesbian against a wall and out of a washroom for dressing too butch, as the Gender Police start stepping up their game. This has been happening for a while, but the new fundamentalist right Queer Panic is really ramping it back up again. It’s like Saudi Arabia and the goddamn religious police in action, only, you know, it’s not a death penalty situation – yet.

That video pretty much instantly triggered a new Mary Kaye and the Cosmetics song. They’re my all-dyke hardcore punk alt-band who play only Hello Kitty-branded instruments, and they write shit like this and My Boyfriend and Sad Muppet. I’ve worked out the lyrics and most of the chords, of which there are four.

It’s short and very screamy. I’m not sure I have the vocal chops for it but I’m going to try. The lyrics are not worksafe.

Also, this same pack of assholes are going to be ramping up their local to me initiative campaign next week.

See, they may have local activists, but all these trace back to one specific large group of fundamentalist/reconstructionist lawyers who advocate making queer people illegal across the world. This time, it results in putting a $2500 bounty on trans kids in schools. I am not even making that shit up, it’s $2500 per kid per washroom break, because as I’ve said before: these SOBs aren’t happy unless they can make queer kids as miserable and broken as possible. It’s what they live for.

And yet, somehow, we’re the supervillains. jfc.

I think I’m gonna go work more on that song now.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I may have written a theme for the Blue Morpho unsold pilot episode that would’ve been made circa 1964/1967 in the Venture Brothers world. That may be a thing that has definitely happened.

I wonder if I have enough decent MIDI instruments to record it. I wonder if there’s such a thing as actually good MIDI horns. That has to be a thing, right? Surely. I’d pay for that. How much would I pay for that and where would I get it? Because this is not the first time I’ve wanted this so now it’s like OKAY MAKE ROOM FOR BUDGET!

Linux (soundfont) preferred, but I have room in my life for Apple Audio Units.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Today and tomorrow are the last days that the “cyber2015” code will work at checkout. It’s for 20% off everything on our Bandcamp site – not just Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album, but everything, including the Free Court of Seattle books, Faerie Blood and Bone Walker. Plus everything else on the merch page.

plus other stuff too

Also, I’ve just handed off the single to Conflikt. I wish I could just throw this out at you now, but I can’t, it’s a 2016 release and I did it for them, so I have to be good and have to wait. Which is really hard, because I’m not good at that. I MADE SHINY, LOOK AT IT!!!1! is just too much of my nature, I admit it.

ngngngngngngngh oh well. I guess I’ll just go bury myself in some other project. (but shiny!)

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Two more show announcements already! W00! In addition to January 27th with Kräken-Röhl and Leannan Sidhe at B-Side Music, we add:

• February 26, 2012: House Concert, Portland, Oregon. Details TBA, but 4-6pm. This may end up being a private show, I don’t know yet.
• July 14, 2012: Live at Comic Sands/Clallam Bay Comiket, Outdoor show, multiple sets through the day. Details TBA, but this will NOT be a private show! C’mon out, everybody!

ALSO, I posted this a couple of nights ago but everybody missed it because lol, drunk. The final Cracksman Betty track was released on the 31st! Read about all that here, and come back with me, to days of old, when computers weren’t bought – they were built! By hand! Come back with me – to the days of The S-100 Bus!

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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So, wow. The first two stops in my first House Concert Tour are over – the guest appearance with Leannan Sidhe on Friday, and the Spooky Action at a Distance party and show on Saturday. Thank you so much, Fern and Corvi and Juli, for throwing these events and letting me be involved! I had a great time, and I hope everybody else did too!

The new Transformation Sequence edition of “My Boyfriend” worked about as well as I’d hoped. I came up with one more component literally on the way to the show, and added it without rehearsal, and it worked great. I do need to fix the headdress, tho’ – adhesive-attachment worked fine in rehearsal, but not on stage, so I’ll have to do that the right way for next time.

And! I got called up for an unplanned! encore! at someone! else’s! show! I still can’t believe that happened! The audience was all “YEAH!” and I was all “lol sure!” and then was like, “wait, seriously?” And I ended up going back up and doing two more of my own songs. Thanks so much to Leannan Sidhe for putting up with that 😀 because that’s not an experience you get to have very often!

I’m still all O.O over that one.

I am also told that I need to come up with a way to do Dalek Boy – “Danny Boy,” as sung by a Dalek, a Cyberman, and a Mechanoid, a.k.a. the Bacon for Birds people and myself – live, and also, I am told I need to write a song about Munchkin.

Then Saturday! and SPOOKY ACTION! The party got going a little late, which was actually kind of good since it let me get in a little nap after the drive down, and a little warmup before people arrived. Incidentally? Corvi and Juli put on quite the spread of hospitality out on their little farm, I gotta tell you. I think my favourite were the chocolate covered pomegranate seed clusters, because they weren’t dehydrated in any way, so it was chocolate and pom and juicy. So simple yet so good.

But then people started arriving, and everybody played with flash paper and sparkle chemicals around the bonfire, and after a few visits from the Bad Idea Bears I realised I had to do an impromptu rendition of Paul and Storm’s Ten Finger Johnny. I think we managed all the really bad ideas except for flash paper hats, but somehow, everybody still had all their fingers at showtime! And only a couple of blisters.

Bad Idea Bears

Then, showtime! Around 12:30am. Hey, only four and a half hours later than planned, and we get one of those back thanks to the return of Normal Time! I had lots of fun doing the spooooky creeeepy set, complete with candlelight and growls in the dark. That’s fun. <3 But I wasn’t going to send them off into the night that way, so closed on “Stars,” which is an even lighter song performed without all the bass solos and drums and such – the mandolin alone can carry that song, because when I’m doing it solo, I really just tear loose with the mandolin work and am basically playing chords and simultaneously soloing the whole damn time, only ducking the complexity down for lyrics.

And I really enjoy that. YES I AM SHOWING OFF HERE GODDAMMIT PAY ATTENTION. XD

Were you at either show and made your way here? Tell me what you thought! This tour is my first set of house concerts, so it’s all new and exciting! And I’m making it up as I go along and having one hell of a good time so far. Best of all, I get another go on Friday! Yay! o/

So I’m really looking forward to this Friday at Sidhehaven. Please come out for it! And if you can’t, there’s the Bainbridge Island show on the 18th.

And while we’re at it – how was your weekend?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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It’s Friday! Friday very early in the morning, Cascadia time – really still Thursday night, socially, you know how that goes.

I have something I can’t talk about yet! But I can talk about November 5th. Doesn’t November 5th sound nice? I think it sounds nice. Maybe nice for a trip down to the south sound. Just, you know, for fun. That evening.

This should not be confused with the House Concert at Sidhehaven, which is on November 11th, and further south! Please RSVP there or here, and come and stuff – it’s my very first house concert! And I’ll have a new song.

I also have something else I can’t talk about too specifically, but I’m hoping to release as a new free/pay-what-you-like Cracksman Betty track! It’s a cover song. Of sorts.

See, I’d heard this song, and liked it, and when I was prepping for the Talk Like a Pirate Day show at Juanita Bay, I realised with a little tweaking it could be a really good modern pirate song! So I was trying to remember how the music went from memory and reconstruct it, and, um, I kind of… missed. By a LOT.

By which I mean I wrote new music, like y’do. Oops. XD

But I really like my version. o/ So I’ve got permissions request in to the original artist, and we’ll see! He’s not opposed in principle, but wanted to hear it, and he has an mp3 waiting for him. It’s still mostly his lyrics, so I really hope he signs on. The original music was traditional, so we’re good there.

Oh, mustn’t forget this:

What else? I found out that some people missed a bunch of the horror film polls entirely – like, didn’t see notice of them or anything! That kind of explains the low turnout. Are people seeing the final championship poll?

Or are people just not as into horror film as I thought, even this time of year? That’s kind of a shame, since all of these are really good in different ways, from Quatermass and the Pit‘s postwar British SF to what is for my money absolutely Carpenter’s best film Prince of Darkness, which has…

A lot of films use the warning/message-from-beyond shtick. Lots of them. That part of This Island Earth is the part that’s actually really effective, creepy, and weird. I love that first reel to death. (In the MST3K treatment, it’s almost entirely cut out – it’s too unironically good. You could mock it, but why? Best to cut it out.)

But in horror – for my money, no film plays that game better than Prince of Darkness. None. So much ambiguity, so much uncertainty, but at the same time, so much existential need to act. Fantastic.

And! Bride of Frankenstein. For my money, the best of the classic era. So luscious, so lovingly filmed, so weird. It’s like an art film, in the best senses – experimental, daring, a story of defiance with a cold heart of hardest stoic inevitability, wrapped in a tight little horror plot, bundled in some of the most beautiful visuals of the classic Universal horror set. What’s not to love?

I’ll leave you with this bit of WTFery, IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS from a box of labels I bought three days ago:

I had an HP IIIp – in 1994. And guys, even grandma’s not using that printer anymore. It’s not even like that’s generic print art; these are instructions specific to those printers. And to no other printers. Just those. Print cartridges for them haven’t even been available since 2007. Guys – let it go. Okay? XD

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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