SELECTIONS FROM THE KING'S NOTEBOOKS: PART ONE

Self-Savagery no. 444: Never fail as you are expected to fail. Always find new and exciting carriages of underachivement; new methods of being wrong. Never be buried in the coffin that fits.

With this in mind, a little exclusive:

SELECTIONS FROM THE KING'S NOTEBOOKS; AUGUST 1977

'The King speaks in plurals,' they're saying, 'and it ain't no Royal We.' The implications being that yours truly is losin' some of the glass coloured balls that are gathered precariously in his lap, when in all truth, folks, Ah'm only just beginning to see the light of day.
For truly, mah twin has arisen and mah future is cojoined to his. Ah is we, mah hell is his.
But how many coaches long is our train of misery? When will the whistle sound? And when, all in all, will that engine disappear into that tunnel? Ah'm feelin' right now that conspiracies abound, and that those around me have answers to these questions. Indeed, ah've been offered suggestions by various less-than-trustworhy sources. You got trust, but if you take tea like the British, an' one of mah boys talks up his Scottish parentage on one side an' his Devonish ancestry on the other, well, if you take that T from trust y'all be hearing right when y'all find that what is left is rust. And rust expands like cavities, sweetheart, it does for sure.
Ah see how the brain can terrorise itself if it is occupied with only this kind of nonsensical deliberation. Ah'm gonna ride it out on mah horse, sweat it out in racquetball, carve it out in chords on the piano... but it doesn't work. That contraption within mah skull whirrs and buzzes and ah'm tick-tick-ticking mah way to blessed confusions.
Ah have ascertained, from various nocturnal computations, that we are players in a game; Ah have forseen this in mah dreams. Of a night, Ah will sit in the chair ah have placed in Cilla's room, at least on the nights that she is not staying there, and ah will dream. Ah dream not of the wondrous and sinewy future; but of the dull tomorrow, the real-life, very next day tomorrow ; And so every word that anyone says arrives at my eardrums as old news. These hobo minds around me are speaking from a script. Their actions are directed from a supernatural page.
Mah deliberations began with the example ah will give you first; with Annie's song. Annie, mah beautiful coloured nurse, with her rainbow smile; her simple holy outook and her gorgeous bulk; ah love her like a nanny. It was her, without any realisation on her part, that aroused me to the curious happenings in mah dreams. And forthat ah will salute her eternally.
When Annie prepares me breakfast, she'll say, every time, 'batton down the hatches, a sharp wind is a'comin'', and then she'll barrel in through mah bedroom door. Every morning, the same.
But this mornin' the other day, she was muttering away to herself, instead. Indeed, she rolled into mah room quite without announcin' her dubious entry, and did not pause to check her incroachin' trajectory over mah private airspace. She just carried on a-mutterin' and a-whisperin' to hesself as she walked, smilin away but somewhere else altogether. She put the tray down on mah side table.
'What's that you sayin' there now Annie?'' Ah asked, not a little cantankerously, having had mah slumber interrupted in such an unusual fashion. Now happens ah do not like to raise mah voice to mah staff; not like mah daughter, who' d threaten to have them fired for the wrong type of pancakes of a morning. No sir, it's wrong. This was as angry as ah ever got. And Annie, such a subtle mind usually, with an eye for every nook of every personage in that there house, well, she didn't pick up on mah irate lines and carried on with herself.
She was animating, with that sing-song voice of hers, some lyrics that ah remembered immediately:

'Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.'

Now the reason ah remembered so easily is that these words had been in mah very dream, the one she had awoken me from. It was a dream in which ah, along with mah mentor, spiritual advisor and karate teacher, Kang Rhee, were taking on some unblessed dark spirits in some unholy part of the United States of America; using breathing exercises, we were putting these blackened spirits up to the most irregular of examinations. And all throughout, as we set our feet and elbows into their evil personages, a-kickin' and a-punching with righteour vigour, mah master was a talkin' to me, most calmly. A lesson, it seemed, so I listened, ah committed to memory, ah examined the contents. Ah believed, at the time, to be hearing some proverb of Eastern philosophy; but upon waking, and hearing Annie sing-alinging the very same words out over mah room, ah knew that her limited education did not extend to covering any scriptures from Asian lands, God bless her heart and lungs, except those of the disciples themselves, bound up by King James.
Annie denied any knowledge of what she was saying; said she must have picked it up from one of the boys. Now ah may be in a period of suspectin' these boys around me, and so mah judgments may be bruised; and ah may reckon on the fact that ah do not know their tastes and motives as well as ah may or might; but ah am sure that they do not qoute such poetics around the other hired help. Or at any time, indeed.
Presently, mah cousin called from back home, telling me about little Johnny and his efforts at his schoolin; Ah'm interested in the little fella, he's a good kid, and ah believe we must take an interest in the educations and ruminations of our brethren and their flocks. So ah probe mah cousin further, askin' for details of said little Johnny's efforts; and upon probin' her further, she regales me with the tale of his reading to a packed school hall, a verse by an English poet by the name of Rudyard Kipling.
'You might know it, Elvis,' she said to me, 'It's all about the law of the jungle, and how the strength of a wolf is in it's pack. Ah don't recall it word for word…'
… don't worry, now, cousin, ah said, through mah shiver of horrible coincidence; don't worry yourself, for ah know the exact same poem you are referrin' to.
The whole business got me to thinkin' that ah should take a notebook with me to mah dreams, so as to heed the happenings therein. What it all meant was anyone's guess, blessed with education or otherwise. But ah knew that conventional schoolin' was not up to the task; ah knew somethin' more sinister and enraged was afoot.

HUMAN ANIMAL by WOLF EYES

The following review was disallowed from an esteemed online music magazine because when asked for my favourite bands of each decade since the sixties, I included Abba in the 'seventies' list. It seems that as a system of weeding out rogue elements, such a quiz is second to none. I of course knew this would be the case. I of course knew that the mention of Abba would cause furrowings of their brown brows. But I listed them anyway. Self-Savagery in practice. Which reminds me:

Self Savagery no 465: A common myth is that successful people just 'act as themselves.' The truth of course, is that successful people just act at acting as themselves. Self-Savagery suggests that merely being yourself is a sure-fire way to find the land of beautiful rejection and gorgeous poverty, and so is encouraged at all times.

HUMAN ANIMAL-WOLF EYES

Or: How I learned to Stop Burrowing and Love the Womb; for within the filthy sanctuary
of their own fried brains, Wolf Eyes are settling ever more snugly into a nauseous template of churning death rattle ambience. They’ve patrolled these weirder shores for a while, volunteering for the shifts few ever seem up to and carrying out their chores with verve.
Some are out there with them, of course. Whereas a band like liars deal in a kind of spooked awe at the unknown, hoping to call up and describe spirits with their drums, Wolf Eyes are themselves concerned with producing the sound of horror; Whereas liars evoked a childlike supplication to mystical promise on their last two records, Wolf Eyes reach for the source, and conjure up the beast itself.
Why create something so horrible? A grand defence might evoke such taboo-challengers as Pasolini and the Marquis de Sade, and suggest that Wolf Eyes are providing us with a continuation of a canon that confronts and stares down our fears. As horror writer Clive Barker put it- ‘At best you can hold death at bay; you can pretend it isn’t there; but to deny it totally is a sickness.’
But stop. Wolf Eyes just a bunch of nerds amusing themselves with toys aren’t they? The musical equivalent of adolescents painting portraits in intestinal red and brown tones to scare their sisters. But what, pray tell, could be more noble and heroic than that?
Whereas liars (a band, I have to say, who sound nothing like Wolf Eyes, but who aesthetically overlap enough to offer as a counterweight) pitched their shrines with a certain naive hope to underpin the rumble of voodoo, Wolf Eyes bury theirs in spiteful dirty protests. Texture, texture, texture, dense as one thousand mantras, rendered A Burned Mind a wonderfully horrid and confused listen, the crusting fuzz borne from a genesis of, one imagines, hybrid technologies and interbred machineries.
A Million Years, the opener on Human Animal, however dispenses with the ectoplasmal fuzz from the previous record, leaving a sparse torture chamber of cranking, fidgeting metal. Thence forth emerges the sound of Satan’s coffee percolator, bringing with it a lusty brew to the boil. It seems there’s been a wiping down of the decks, a burning off of the hot stubble. But then the title track has that explosive yet buried horror of yore, drums limping like Long John Silver with the roars of the undead ringing in his head, the sounds of King Tut's curse. Not a quick predator, but a stuttering, disorientated one, like a Mummy freed after 10,000 years, but with time to kill. Gloopy production lends it the film of something more biodegradable than other processed electronica. There is jellied flesh on these bones. It’s the simultaneous directness and vagueness that captivates when Wolf Eyes are at their best; the ability to produce stompalong fratboy fuckfests and smear them with gore, rendering them appealing to both (and probably neither) fans of hardcore noise and detached ambience; two opposing schools are forced to wrestle together.
If A Million Years is Bundy in a wind-tunnel after the fact, then Lake of Roaches, charged with staticky screams, is a communiqué from a disinterested alien race. The quite deliciously titled Rusted Mange carries Wolf Eyes’ full visceral assault, with kicking kickdrums like popping eardrums, before squeals of alien birds overawe the set. Leper War evokes the cold woods, with it’s rustling noises in the distance. The Driller starts like a flatulent John Carpenter, with echoing percussion evoking a misfiring hell cart and gleaming feedback synth sounds only a dog could hear, before a stomping demon puts his size tens all over it. Bonus track and live favourite Noise Not Music, a cover of a No Fucker tune, serves simultaneously as a simple title with which to hang the whole thing on, and (to these bruised ears at least) the most direct and straight piece of work here.
‘Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends... with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!’ So the Marquis de Sade announced proudly; and in his great claims for abusive, horrible selfish behaviour, de Sade captures what those who enjoy Wolf Eyes know; there is greatness in such putrid pathetic horror. Get stupid, children.