In the past week:

A prostitute solicited me downtown on 3rd and Bell. I was parking my car on a Thursday afternoon, in the act of slipping my credit card into the meter, when I heard a brash voice call out ... worrying that it was meant for me, I ignored it, when suddenly the source sidled up to my side and croaked, "Hey, you wanna go kick it?" I declined and then apologized, for some reason. She actually was relatively attractive, or might have been under different circumstances, a white lady with long dark hair in a vaguely hippie/homeless outfit. She was probably about my age but looked far older ... underneath the years was something once fetching. Anyhow, there's any number of reasons not to have sex with a prostitute in a downtown Seattle alleyway in broad daylight, but the one I'm using this time is that I was late for a doctor's appointment.

I learned that The End Times' first demo has been catalogued in the University of Washington library system. This means that 100 years from now, when graduate students are writing theses on Tyson (Rev. Dr. Tyson Lynn: Peacemaker or Tyrant?) they'll be able to access the brief, amusing period of his life before he entered world politics and changed everything.

I added a few more shows to The End Times' roster, viewable here. Three cities over the next six weeks, including a Valentine's Day performance in Tacoma with our sisters in Pillow Army.

I mourned the passing of Ron Asheton and noted the death of another very psychotronic personality, Z-movie creator Ray Dennis Steckler. I've been fascinated by Steckler for years, well before I ever saw his films, simply for titles like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies and The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary (which is actually the same film with a different ad campaign). Steckler was an independent man in every sense of the word, doggedly refusing to play ball with the studios or his audiences ... sometimes his films were wildly unpredictable oddities that one couldn't look away from, others were little more than slightly-padded home movies that turned boredom into a weapon. Aside from his own films, Steckler had a hand in other unique features like The World's Greatest Sinner and The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio, plus he even dipped his toe into the porno cesspool of the late 70s (Teenage Dessert, Sexorcist Devil) using the pseudonym "Cindy Lou Sutters." Steckler was 70 years old. Here's links to reviews of a few titles:

Rat Pfink A Boo Boo

The Thrill Killers (aka The Maniacs Are Loose!)

The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll


It just struck me that the last three posts here commemorated the deaths of men who inspired particularly good pieces by Lester Bangs ... the aforementioned "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" about the Count Five, "Of Pop and Pies and Fun," which lays down the case for Funhouse better than I'd be able, and "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, or The Day The Airwaves Erupted," in which a late-night TV viewing of the Steckler classic leads Bangs to dream of an airwave takeover by an army of cultural terrorists who decide to play every film ever made by anyone, starting with The Great Train Robbery and moving forward into infinity.

So to Byrne, Asheton, Steckler, even Bangs (and let's throw Stooges bassist Dave Alexander in there too, since he died in the 70s and I wasn't able to toast him then), I salute all of you fine dead men. Rest on.