Howdy Haunts,
I apologize for not posting more these past few days. I tend to only post when I have a lull or some gumption to come correct within the digital detritus and the past few days were an analog holiday. I hope to do a stream tonight – but I know better than to make any plans during this trip as things have been hectic and active! So much has happened – and with that – so much to write about. I figure I’ll take you through the Eclipse & The Mercury House first… honestly, there’s so much to write about that I’ll have to keep catching up!
Tomorrow we play our final gig in Long Beach. So expect some more footage and writing about the San Diego and Long Beach shows soon, plus an overall draft / write up for Haunt Manual VOL. 1’s closing pieces concerning the tour and other revelations!
*What I’m sharing now is a folder of Moon Division and Revel Rosz’s full sets at the Mercury House shot by Logan Ford:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pp7zicyCY_dLimPOB9i1IRu-D4DIEko8?usp=share_link
THE ECLIPSE:
We got to Logan’s late on the Friday the 13th. He got himself a precious adobe-bungalow on the outskirts of Taos in Arroyo Seco. It’s a one bedroom ramshackle dish of everything southwestern and manly, replete with furs and guns, and it’s quite a brilliant little monster shack. Among obtuse lumbered walls, stucco moldings and woodworking marvels from the ancient age, it has become quite a favorite little haunted abode of mine.
We slept in the living room underneath Art Bell’s Ghost to Ghost because with New Mexico comes an unwavering itch of childhood, and I’m a glutton for memory punishment.
Mary and I had to switch from floor to couch quite a number of times because my bones decided to tense up after the long driving bouts. That, coupled with the god-shaming altitude change, decided to do it’s dirty work on the holiest of days this trip, the damn eclipse day.
I was feeling a whole sweat of nasty business in the morning; not being able to think straight nor garner the gumption to correct any confidence, I just drudged around with Logan and Mary to Logan’s land to watch the early eclipse. My mind already dogged from altitude, travel, and an unwavering sense of importance I put on this damn moon shadow.
We got out to Logan’s land about an hour’s drive by the Carson National Forest with 40 minutes to spare. We took that time to hear and waltz around Logan’s brilliant future nest – and his come-to from a long hard road to here. This perked me up, not because we might have some acres on the property, or any potential on the same land, but because I genuinely feel great for my dear friend and understand how much he deserves the peace that is only provided to those with purpose. And I got to thinking, I’d like that peace too.
On the hood of Logan’s truck I took out one of my magickal sketch books, bound with blood and ink, and got my Marsielle tarot deck ready for a mid-eclipse reading in front of my little bone idol of Santisima Muerte. The reading, the deck, the idol, are major components of my last eclipse ritual in August 2017, and it felt a perfect metaphor for the Prospectre ritual to utilize some aspects of that working, with brand new takes, to will something new.
As the world went gray-scale in a preternatural silence under the eclipse, I thought about that peace, that peace of making decisions of things to work towards, and not just being adaptable with reactions as I had been. I had thought about Mary and my deep conversation on the road from Utah to New Mexico where we came clean about our wants, desires, missives, etc. And how we need to make us a priority, and to truly define a futurecast with us moving forward. I didn’t will anything but the road to figuring all the above out. I willed the ability to find. I willed the ability to begin.
I utilized my DISOLVER, ECO, RESONAR reading with a REVELATOR charge card and an overall ritual card. There are as follows:
DISOLVER: Temperance
ECO: The Hanged Man
RESONAR: Death
REVELATOR: 4 of Pentacles
RITUAL CARD: The Emperor
I’m logging these for further inspection upon our return. I can say that it is singing well for change and the cosmic shed that an eclipse brings. Albeit, unlike August 2017’s totality in ruination for building anew, this one is only needed for a slight decimation as I’d much like to keep alot of things I built this time around…
I got rather ill post eclipse in a sort of psychical resonance not unlike boat motion sickness. I was still vibrating with the grayscale hum of the eclipse and had to cut plans short to shut my eyes in a dark room. Luckily, it could have been mostly due to the altitude. Living sea-level for so long really loses your aptitude for altitude. For this, Logan was equipped with ginko extract, and after a heavy dose of that oily goop I began to feel normal again.
TERRIBLE TRUSTFUNDERS AND BEAUTIFUL MESABLUNDERS
The night of the eclipse we fashioned ourselves in old behaviors, namely that of a drinks-on-the-town sort of aimless tourism that Americans are wont to do. We met some of Logan’s new friends, from Mesa strife-lifers to the sort of yuppie Americana trustfunders that forever lay locked in a dark part of my heart. Of course, I was more akin to the Mesa kids, largely natives and artists that could live with little (i.e. shitting in buckets, and tire fires) than I was for these Trustafarian scummers. Boy-howdy, do they irk me so!
One trustfunder sticks in my mind in particular, an overconfident aryan woman adorned in gringo-overpriced posh “native” fabrics that took every opportunity to proclaim she was hard at work on her “conservation” thesis – a hilariously ironic concept considering she was the living avatar of gentrification after Logan gave me some backstory about how she lives in a damn mansion in Santa Fe and films herself killing chickens on instagram for cloutfarming green-peacers. She took any available moment to admonish Logan and I about our scruffy and impovershed upbringing, whether it was tales of hunting or wilderness survival, and proved fast she didn’t know dick about struggle. She was hanging on the arm of some Dylan wannabe and when it came up that we were playing a show the next day I was so damn relieved to know that the Dylan wannabe was too, albiet in a posh part of town at some wedding destination venue, and when we said we were playing for the Mesa artists at the Mercury Lounge, it gave me such pleasure watching their stuffy noses recoil in judgement. I was over-the-moon that our paths wouldn’t cross again.
We ended the night at what my Louisiana native buddy, Logan, called a “cowboy” bar. Mary and I have long learned that Logan’s labels and associations are skewed, and hell, any desert dweller could be considered a cowboy to him. Really, the bar was a small neighborhood drink-hole that serviced more of the cap wearin’ and leather-skinned types than say shit-kickers or ten-gallon types. Mary and I laughed recalling how Logan termed it a Cowboy bar, and it literally just being a small desert town’s local dive that was hosting a high-school reunion where half of the guest list’s names ended with Rael, and they were jammin’ Journey and .38 Special – far from the gun totin’ horsey-ridin’ folk that I grew up with and considered “cowboys”.
I quit drinking liquor alltogether over a year ago, but something about the arrid desert and it’s swarm of childhood nostalgia spelunking got me moving on to gin. Gin helped quell my social awkwardness enough to pass judgement and/or get gabby with Logan’s new crew – and we ended the night not unlike Logan and I used to in Portland so many years ago – half-drunk, blaring Mark Lanegan’s “Bubblegum” and causing a sort of ruckous that would be illegal in most states, but in the desert, it was par for the course.
MERCURY HOUSE
Mary and I decided we would keep to ourselves most of the day to try to get into the rhythm of our first main show on this small tour. We learned quite fast that too many days of aimless footin’ inbetween shows was bad for muscle memory, and after spending the morning at the Taos City Hall flea market, we rehearsed in Logan’s backyard.
The flea market was a standard affair of southwestern ephemera and tourist-shlock-opium rife with sort of trinkets my grandparents littered around their desert abode. We did, however, find an epiphone acoustic electric guitar – one I quickly named “Cinnamon Girl” after the Niel Young number due to its red wood – for a fraction of its worth. It was in the Caballero collection from Nashville, and gave us another tool in our adaptable arsenal to busk free from electricity if need be as we had only brought one acoustic on tour. We also found a little casiotone rip-off, an italian noisemaker (now a new nickname for Mary Joon) and decided to incorporate it into our set later that night as Mary has piano parts on a song of hers and rendition of my tune “Weightless”.
We got to the Mercury Lounge in time for a steady and non-hurried load-in. There is something ecstatically poisonous about feeling “rushed” and I surefire aim to always avoid the feeling whenever possible. This can be contentious between Mary and I because she is often late or running behind so I’ve learned to prep long before the need to get goin’ – something of a microcosmic metaphor to a revelation about adulthood and energy in general: prep long before and tend to rather than race I suppose. In a perfect world this would be true for everything, alas, I am far from perfect, hell, I may as well be considered defunct. A boy can dream.
MK, the Mercury House proprietor, I would later learn was a Laguna Beach product – a punk amongst the wealthy – and a crew and place I knew well due to my short years in highschool living south of there. We got along famously discussing Underdog Records, a rare punkrock vinyl store that serviced all the beach goth outcasts, and Tippy Canoe’s, a dark & dour vintage store that serviced all the weirdos and witches of the south county kind. It made sense she would be in Taos and starting an art gallery/performance space that celebrated the disillusioned and dejected in a town with a foreboding sense of white-wealth and turquoise studded bubble wives’ galleries full of Georgia O’Keefe knock-offs. It made perfect sense that an outcast from a famously oppulent and vapid culture seen on early 2000’s shows like The Hills or The OC would take that same crustified megaphone for the wrong-side-of-the-tracks-types to another place with those irritations. I applaud her, and she is doing one hellova job giving the shadowed some light. I was even more excited she offered us the invite to play a gallery closing of incredible arts by Mesa dwellers – the very ghostkin of artists and punks that do the desert justice and treat it as a refuge of freedoms rather than a timeshare for snow sports.
The turn out was as madcap and as jovial than anything I could have expected. During Mary’s set we saw folks in tattered dust riddled yarns, madmax jackets and angular haircuts swaying and dancing with elder Taos folk – folk permanently in that crust-punky cavalcade of travel worn but wide-grinned acid eaters and freakfolkers – a true be-in of outcasts of all desert sorts. I felt belonged amidst a sea of different.
During my set one of the Oogles rolled madly on the floor while a gang of Mesa artists chugged and cheered – further proving my musick is an LSD accentuator. I yelled on the microphone how “rolling on the floor to this music is the best compliment I have ever got!” They laughed and at one point and overzealous patron yelled “do you even surf?!”, after I spent a song punching my whammy bar on my Mosrite-like baritone, to which I replied “I used to, but not in Seattle!” Which is true, I did used to surf, and as a matter-of-fact, I used to surf near MK’s hometown of Laguna Beach back in my lonely high-school years after my dad’s family high-tailed it to Colorado and I finished high-school alone. I like to think MK and I crossed paths, and by some weird synchronous outcast karma, our marches matched rhythms once again and led us to that very moment of my musick in her space with floor-rollers rug-dancing.
Our sets were hurried, as is natural for show-nerves’ uptempo BPM-ing – we also were weary to keep the show longer than a noise ordinance would allow. We would come to find that these shows inevitably go late, and as touring acts we are the first to sacrifice tunes in the service of later sets having ample time. I scrambled through different drum instrumentation via Mary’s set as the spirit of the DIY space overtook and through setlists to the wind – I always think the worst after playing, completely unable to view or hear anything objectively when it comes to my performance, and often ready and all too willing to take the blame for fuck ups and shonders. But to my amazement, Logan’s complete documentation of the set proved my inklings wrong, and Mary’s set went more than okay even with my flubs and odd instrumentation. It proved that playing her “Tango” tune without the maraca and for some odd reason choosing a brush for the high-hat was a cool rendition and not a complete trainwreck.
After her set ended I ran outside to piss in the desert twilight, take huge puffs of my e-cigarette, and grab another beer before returning on the drum throne with my baritone and mic ready to engage. It had been so long since I felt the fervor of live performance, as a matter of fact, it had been exactly a year since I performed. Last October I played at Blue Moon in Seattle as Dakota Slim, just me, my baritone and a drum machine, performing proto-versions of a handful of the current setlist – and it was with Rachel of Bird of Paradise who we’d be playing with again in San Diego in a few days time.
Odd to think of the time inbetween as smushed artifacts within the genealogy of the music itself – from lowley drum machine sparse arrangements with a burrow-browed wide-brim alone to a ramshackle duo with foot drums, Mary’s percussion, harmonica, and guitar, and whole lot more conviction as Revel Rosz. My nom-de-guerre that I retired for a few years time, now resurrected in the wake of Dakota Slim’s disappearance, resurrected and barking made with kinetic proselytization after another eclipse that gave the name life and purpose. A poetic rhyme-scheme dressed in song-garb and magickal jigging; time no more a flat circle but grooves on a vinyl forever moving to the center on a rocky, rollicking mesa – some skips, scratches of course – but moving towards instead of away.
I had that sickness again, like a humdrum withdraw shaken into a fever, I yelped, I banged and clamored, it felt like a newborn shrieking at the atmosphere for the first time. I had missed it. I had missed the uniquely individual atmosphere that comes with performance, that comes with the afforded ability to tune absolutely everything around out, and the affordability to be the loudest and the most wild in a room. There is a release in it, good or bad, it’s a privilege that I had always shook down because of a crooked perfectionism – not anymore, I am truly performing for the sole purpose of performance – like an ordained exorcism every night to shake out the tired and gray shit of the day. I finally understand it.
I decided to cut out my weirdo version of Tom Waits’ “Clap Hands” for the sake of time, and that was a very touched decision as the closer was a local dreaded, oogle-type who declared himself a one-man-band as written on his suitcase he footdrumed with and banjo’d many Tom Waits and Devil Makes Three covers – somewhat of an obvious collection of songs of folks I’ve known over the years that are his type of model and make. That crust-punk string-band desert type that gets 18 sheets to the wind and sings about the devil and drinking – that make and model is an entire subculture and he was their perfect avatar that night.
I felt a little funny having one-man-band’d my instrumentation before him but didn’t promote it as much as he did, and was very happy I didn’t rip into the Tom Waits sing-alongs he was banking on performing. That is to say he was a fun crowd servicer after Mary and my sets of wholly strange sounds to holy strangers abound. I would find out later that during the Moon Division set, it was him that drunkenly turned the lights off twice, and we have it documented. A proud moment of mine since Mary and I played in complete darkness to a crowd of desertkin for seconds on in, and I just remember the glowing jewlery illuminated by a faint bathroom light as I drummed on.
Jitter, as he was called, seemed to be the elected official of the Mesa kids and anti-trustfunders, and I was happy to pray at his altar for 20 minutes until I needed to sneak outside and take in the desert stars in silence. A meditative and peaceful moment after such a heavy performance, and I’ll never forget the milky stars and billowing lung-smoke as I sat in static vibrations in a post-show Taos hum alone with the world.
The Mercury House will always be a part of my altar-of-musick, replete with its too kind and devilishly funny Mesa patrons and artists, long talks about the dissolution of society and the apex of artistic freedom, and a crew of new ghosts I’ll make sure to keep in contact with. It was if this was the art gallery at the end of the world, where the desert drops into space, the end-of-the-road in a limbo between civilization and the afterlife – and it was everything I had wanted to celebrate the birth of the first moon post-eclipse.
Again, so much more to cover, until then, stay tuned for a probable Long Beach stream!
HAUNT ON,
RKR
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