failure, horror

It's March already? What!

Last month, I had the opportunity to play Tom Johnson's piece "Failing: a Very Difficult piece for Solo Bass" at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. It was for the MMoCA Nights event, and the program was put together by New Muse. The rest of the program was pretty fantastic, as you can see here. The event was very well attended and was a lot of fun. Performers were stationed around the gallery like works on display, and we played in succession, so the attendees could roam from performance to performance. Pretty cool! I even had a fancy placard on my stand.

Photo: Donald Bartkowiak

This week, I'm playing in the University Theater's production of Rocky Horror--a revival of the stage production. This is so much fun. It's every musician's dream to be a rockstar, and it's hard not to feel like one playing this music. We have four performances this weekend at the Wisconsin Union Theater, including two midnight shows Friday and Saturday. Trusting that everyone lasts through this week's cold and flu pandemics, this will be a pretty awesome show.

Speaking of failure and horror, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker continues his attack on the working class of Wisconsin by trying to push through his "budget repair" bill that strips union workers of collective bargaining rights, guts Badger Care (Wisconsin's state Medicaid program) and includes many other reprehensible and asinine provisions. 

Protestors continue to rally in solidarity against this bill, in a period of debate that is allowed by the action of 14 Wisconsin state senators who left the state in order to deprive the Republicans of the quorum required to vote on the bill.

Walker delivered from the state capitol this afternoon, where protestors were not allowed in through unconstitutional restrictions enforced by state police. He spoke to an audience of fawning approval, which apparently he smuggled in for his benefit--indeed, I waited in line to get inside the capitol building for 2 hours, and no one was let in.

This ordeal is disgusting.

I just watched a movie called From Beyond, a Stuart Gordon film from 1986. It's based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, and follows the plight of a physicist and psychiatrist who try to control a machine that unleashes unspeakable horrors by triggering the pineal gland, which is the gateway to a sixth sense--apparently the sense of detecting slimy, mutating creatures that turn you into writhing, toothy monstrosities. The film includes a crazy scientist who takes kinky S&M videos of himself, a man being eaten to the bone by a swarm of pineal creatures, heads being devoured, vindictive doctors, faces bursting out of creatures' mouths, and x-ray vision that allows people to eat the brains out of other peoples' heads. 

Scott Walker is more disgusting than that.