show

Saw Concrete Blonde at the Disneyland HOB with redmaenad. Many thanks to her and her sister for making it happen.

Wow, Johnette is amazing. I hadn’t seen her play live since 1987 or so, I think. If anything she’s better. She has the pipes and the songs and a total abandonment to her art that is unique. The vocal pyrotechnics don’t sound forced or showy, just genuine. Fine, fine version of “As Tears Go By” among others.

There aren’t too many singers who can give me goosebumps, and she’s one of them.

I sort of knew her in the 80s, friends of friends thing, and I remember seeing her in my neighborhood in Hollywood a lot. She wasn’t a kid even then, and she had a presence that was notable even hung over on a Sunday afternoon at the local restaurant where we’d see each other across the room over eggs and tabasco. I was the kid writing for a paper and she was the older, mysterious rock star lady. She was nice to me.

She’s 46 now and roaring through her prime. Can I be her when I grow up? Not a note out of place, but every emotion is real.

The opening band raised a question to me: why would 25-year-olds who can play instruments want to make supermarket rock? They sounded like every cookie-cutter guitar power pop band on the Star 98 (Vertical Horizon/Matchbox 20/whatever), but they’re a bit too late for the big money train. My suggestion is that they switch to the God Team and go for Bad Christian Rock, where it’s okay to be a few years out of date if you’re cute and can hold a tune. Good money and lots of blowjobs from cornfed Kansas girls, guys. Their name was “Studio Trash”. Uh-huh. Did Daddy buy that amp for ya?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

Our local transgendered oddball magick enthusiast, "Bree" ROBBED A BANK WITH A GUN.

Bree.

As I posted earlier, a local character I know robbed a bank and is in jail.

Bree (formerly Brian) is an odd duck who frequents my local hangout coffeehouse, and until recently was also a bagger at the local supermarket. She’s transgendered and wants the operation, and is chronically broke and works various bad jobs, or none at all.

Her obsession is Magick, of the Crowleyian variety. Any conversation with Bree will eventually arrive at a lecture on the failure of Judaeo-Christian morality and theology, the unity of Good and Evil, the power and beauty of the Occult, and some Crowleyan wisdom. She’s intelligent in some ways and can carry on a good conversation, but is narrowly obsessed on magickal transformations of various kinds. She’d spend ours at an inside table reading books with titles like “Modern Magick” (modern?) or “Practical Sex Magick”, etc.

Despite the fact that her philosophical and theological ideas gave me a sharp pain in the neck, I always got along okay with her. She was very pleasant and polite, always a big smile, and went out of her way to greet me and be pleasant all the time. As long as she wasn’t lighting incense all over the patio or talking my ear off about the Way of the Inner Something, she was okay.

I wonder what motivated this? I know she really, really wanted money for the operation, and there’s no way she was going to get it. Also, being unemployed for so long during and after the grocery strike couldn’t be fun. I just don’t get it though. She robbed a bank in her neighborhood, where everyone knows her, and then went home and waited, without leaving town or even throwing away the gun or hiding the money. She never seemed that dumb to me. Maybe she just snapped, or maybe she wants to go to jail?

The gun, too. You can rob a bank without a gun. And she never struck me as violent in any way.

Maybe the union of good and evil wasn’t such a smart idea after all. Or maybe she really, really lost it. Sad.