Halloween

I don't like the holidays these days
no reason to, really.
nothing to celebrate.
So Oct-Nov-Dec is a tough stretch
but I'm a trooper.
So how 'bout a trip down Memory Lane?

I got jumped Halloween night when I was in 5th grade,
it was to be my last Halloween anyway.
11-12 years old? I was kind of milking it...
the kiddee candy & parties belong to the single digit youngsters.
Not someone veering on Junior High.

But when I was little,
Halloween was pretty wonderful.
We'd host Halloween parties every other year,
my mom goading my brother & I to clean the cellar
starting as early as September...
All that sweeping & re-arranging until one 1/2 of the cellar
was immaculate
and the other was well-stacked bric-a-brac.
A blanket would cordon off the descending steps
& lead the guests into a well-lit, festooned place.
Iced oatmeal cookies hung from strings
apples bobbed in a frigid metal drum...
chairs arranged & pin-the-tail-on-the-something-or-other.
Parents escorting cousins & family friends.
When the party did spill over to the culmative Spook Walk
(oh so non-PC, mind you)
it was via an old Winnie-the-Pooh fold-out tunnel,
sort of a vinyl catepillar
that slid under the curtain divider
& led through the shadowy, witch lair
to the cellar door...now ajar.
Outside was cold & dark.
And the walk ensued w/ my mom leading, narrating...
pointing this & that out w/ the flashlight.
Oh look, there's the Scarecrow Man on the front lawn,
you know the one...
the man-sized, newspaper-stuffed mannequin w/ his plastic pumpkin head
(got us in the local paper one year,
my toddler brother & I posing in B&W delight)
A calming, inanimate reference point
until he jumped up & down,
shouting jibberish & frightening the children,
all clasping on their rope life-line,
a kindergarten class on a field trip to Bradbury's October Country.
Scarecrow Man was my dad then,
strange to think he'd agree to something like that,
but I guess my mom loosened him up somewhat.
Boy, that's changed.

So those early memories are good.
Although I suffered my 1st panic attack on the verge of Party #1,
all the build-up & expectation
only to be smashed by poor costuming.
I wanted to be Spider-Man that inaugaral year
but what did my mom get.
Quasi-Spider-Man...
some green-faced mask w/ webbing
& a yellow! 1-piece tie-up cheapie costume.
Green & yellow?
Spider-Man's red & blue, for Pete's sake!
Oh I was an angry, ungrateful brat,
& I suddenly couldn't go on w/ the party.
Taking a 4PM nap,
& staring at the wall's late afternoon shadow descending,
submerging the room into slow tranquility.
I think it was more nerves than production design,
the thought of all those guests coming to MY house.
But I got through it somehow.
I'm in the old Super 8 movies, after all.
Running from one game to the next,
an impatient, bossy do-it-all.
Boy, that's changed?

Anyway, flash-forward to the spiraling tail-end of childhood,
that last Halloween.
I was a tall, lanky kid w/ fine hair
& rather remote.
I was only comfortable putting together plays
and STARRING
as King Midas or Daniel Boone or Doctor Doolittle...
I also was in full arts-and-crafts mode.
My costume that year was fairly simple,
I was a magician.
But not just any moustached, Lincoln-hatted magician...
No way, Jose!
I made a tubular mask from thick construction paper,
that not only constituted said stovepipe hat,
but the magician's face itself.
Cut a few slits out for the eyes,
nostrils & some sort of breathing access...
I broke out the magic markers for facial detail &
viola!
Magician-face!
And I had a cape & I borrowed my mom's white gloves
& I dressed in a Sunday school suit
& I went on my merry way to meet up w/ my buddy,
PJ Connors.

Only at the end of PJ's street a.k.a. Junior Terrace,
although it was barely dusk...
there were a horde of these older kids spraying shaving cream
obscenities on the street itself.
I thought it was the Christmas's at 1st
(that's not holiday confusion, there was actually a family
in the neighborhood whose last name was Christmas).
I was already experiencing technical difficulty w/ my mask,
I could barely see & had to tilt my head this way & that...
yes, I may have misaligned where to cut the eyeslits :>

ANYWAY--

These kids stand up the moment I round the corner of Junior Terrace,
there was like 5 or 6 of 'em.
& I knew right then & there,
this wasn't no Christmas Party (sorry).
"Who are you?" they asked...
Man, I was so dopey dumb...what a set-up & I...
fell right into it.
Cue me--
"Why, it's me, Ted Cormey," I say... & I lift my mask to reveal my
dumb dumb dumb face
& they get me right in the freakin' eyes & mouth
& all I can feel is a horrible, rash stinging
& all I can taste is shaving cream & air-pumped mint.

I was blinded,
my mask plunked off somewhere.
I thrashed & threw my fists out & connected...
But they all got their shots in.
Well, ha ha Mooney's & Lombardi's
(for that's who it was indeed...the most fearsome, thuggery
bullies in all of Martin E. Young Elementary School,
although light years from their home terf)
I didn't have any candy to pillage.
I was brought down & bashed down
before I got the sweet sugary goods.
& maybe that only incensed them all that more,
but I was a fury,
& I do remember, no exaggeration,
actually taking 2 or 3 of 'em out, knocking them flat on their
asses
until the littlest Moody
and therefore the most dangerous
came up behind me & slammed what felt like a sledghammer
into the back of my leg.
Turned out it was just some well-endowed tree branch,
as thick as a thermos & packed hard wood...
Well, I went down then swearing & they all scrambled off
laughing.
I remember that...
because it was funny to them.
What good fun.
And I remembered losing it them,
swearing after them that I'd kill them.
Yes...I used the k-word.
I wanted them dead.

And the crying because I was hurt & the shaving cream stung
& my good suit was ruined
& my mask forgotten...
& I walked all of the 1 minute back to my house
& startled my grandmother in the doorway...
who had come down off the hill to distribute candy at our house...
& I screamed at her.
& I screamed at my parents.

I stayed in that Halloween.
Lying in my parents bed as my leg swelled up.
My older cousins came by to visit,
& they knew the older Bombardi's
& they promised to make things tough for them in Junior High...
but it was all moot.
Even finding out later that PJ Connor's mother had seen the whole
thing out her window,
saw my beat-down from her porch,
yet didn't lift a finger.

So there it is-- Memory Lane. Some good, some sucky.
And things these days...well, they're neither.
OK they're sucky.
But no joy is fine now,
I'll get beyond this time.
Until maybe Oct-Nov-Dec in some foreign land
is __________________.

Musical Interlude 2: A Less Than Short, Melancholic History of the Band LESSER ANGLOS & Its Many Haunted Successors

You know of Lesser Anglos II
more for their infamy than musical diatribes.
Oh sure, there was that Noise cover article circa 1989
(or was it 1990?)
telling how the 2nd bass player got "inspired"...
"A dream", he says
(or was it a fortune cookie?).
"To keep it going", he says,
"To keep T. Constantine's memory alive for the next generation
of disaffected, dissatisfied, disenchanted"
(although that might be authorial flourish).
You know how these things go...
one well-placed cassette copy of "National Anathema"
in the Harvard Square Newbury Comics
and suddenly the kids can't get enough!
Or Stonehill College plays "Mastiff..." one Saturday at 11:12PM
and everyone in the radio station's 2 mile transmission radius
takes notice.
It's usually that simple, right?
All that success after you're dead.

So there was this sequel band,
and as sequel bands go they weren't bad...
a bunch of Berklee kids this time out,
the 2nd bass player casting his net well.
And they got to play this houseparty & that gig in the BC cafeteria
& dang it all...if they didn't get better...
and garner actual returning fans.
This was all before the internet, right?
So word-of-mouth leading to butts-in-seat
was all that more powerful.
It meant something had to inspire beyond a mere E-M reminder,
or hodge-podge band website.
And they covered the basics well,
at T. Constantine's "passing" there were all of 14 songs in the Lesser Anglos canon
some little more than sketches
or extended drum rolls
("Bun in the Oven" was merely 3 mins of cymbals ticking off an impending
afterbirth of feedback squeals).

So they wrote new songs--
faster songs
gloomier songs
crooning songs
garbled songs
bloody songs
spectral songs
And were ready to record a proper album's worth--

Only what happened?
Well, you read the headlines...
those awful awful tragedies...

The entire band went mad apparently.

The rapes at the nursing home,
the ham-fisted lobotimies at the day care,
the racial disfigurations.
The 2nd bassist was the worse.
His name was Chad Henry Rosenberg, by the way
(although everyone called him MARQUIS, oooh).
Well Chad...I mean MARQUIS
took it upon himself to kill his baby sister
feeding her bottle after bottle of sour milk,
drowning her really.
And then after that, he went to the Goth club...
and set it on fire with all the patrons inside.
And then after that...
he scooped out his own eyes
and jumped in front of a train at South Station.
No rhyme or reason it seems,
altough he was thoughtful enough to write it all down
and explain...

Ahem. This is very confidential stuff. Not a lot of
people have seen this. So if you traipsed upon this
blog by chance, lucky you.
I give you, in MARQUIS' own writing, found stuffed
in an envelope with the band's practice space rent check...

THE RULES TO BEING IN A LESSER ANGLOS
SEQUEL BAND!

1) You cannot be in Lesser Anglos longer than a year-
and-a-half OR
2) You cannot be in Lesser Anglos in a shorter span of
time if your success increases incremently beyond
your musical predecessor
3) You can never record new material or re-record older
material
4) You can never be happy once you are in the band

Well, that seems simple enough, huh?
But what does it all mean?
What's with all these stipulations
which unfortunately
Lesser Anglos III thru IX paid no attention to...
(although their ruin was petty & perfunctory...
no grand Lesser Anglos II mayhem & murder,
just your usual arrests & home invasion misunderstandings)

Can a band really be haunted,
their members on steady rotation
like some gothic Menudo?
Hit a certain longevity or level of success
and your credibility and lifeline literally dies?
Yet your body of work goes on and on?

Planet Records, right before the fire in Fenway,
had a live bootleg of Lesser Anglos VII playing Middle East upstairs
in the mid 90's
and although the vocals are submerged in distortion as thick as seafog,
there are moments of brilliant mimicry--
one can almost envision T. Constantine himself on-stage at that moment,
hardly coddling the masses
yet desperately connecting.
A ghost hand reaching into the front row.
A boom mic in the grave.
Brrr. Gives me the willies just thinking about it,
especially as that was the show the poor girl in the wheelchair
got trampled.
But you know how it goes...
one man's tragedy is another's inspiration.

So I hope this was all informative. Maybe I'll have an update
from SXSW next year.
I hear Lesser Anglos XX may be on the bill.
That should be good timing,
they just re-formed earlier this month.
They might just make it.

If they're not that good-- yet.

A COLLABORATION: T. Constantine's Basement in Acton, MA/ICP Studios Brussels January 1987

In that final instant...

The usual clutter
The lack of anything inside
Paintman smears his oil palms against the concrete
smudges & colored flesh.

A rap on the casement
a dead moth
the frozen lawn...
I can see now, through even blood-eyes...

You can take me away
Scoop out my insides
And leave this leopard's skin.
Two days of fasting & dry...

17 seconds
A 100 days
The future of 4:13 dreams.
A perfect day for bananafishbones &
poison sequels.

The Old Man cracks the newspapers
yellow thick pages
bound.
And I will leave on furious headlines,
inkpots & stabbing dyes.

A song for posterity
An elegy that goes on and on...
You will listen.

And PaintMan whispers in my ears,
clutches my buckling neck & waist.
A puppet on a pumpkin-stained string.

The procession outside
parked in the drive.
Umbrellas & gooseneck for me...
Rusted tin
and coffeepots, cobblepots, wet laiden pies.
In the kitchen upstairs they can't hear

This Scream--

Musical Interlude: A Less Than Short, Melancholic History of the Band LESSER ANGLOS & Its Many Haunted Successors

This was during late 80's Boston,
I'm sure you saw them during their all too brief 17 month "career"...
Probably at The Ratt or Ground Zero,
maybe some loft party or open studios?
Wherever doesn't matter. It's the whatever--
The gossamer keyboard arrangements,
as cold & useless as a nylon bedsheet in winter.
The twin bass,
plucking sounds like drunk bees coated in molasses.
The only band this side of the 16th century featuring lead gittern.
And the vocals were always lost
amid the percussion & theatrical tomfoolery.
You'd remember them more for the dry ice spectacle,
blasting the stage & front row w/ smoke smoke smoke!
There were figures pirouetting in there,
an occasional spot penetrated the gelid mass
only to reveal skinny teens in Germanic gear,
their pants tucked into knee-high boots
their hairs parted neatly & oily to the right.

No one paid them much attention.
They released all of one EP--"National Anathema"
(on cassette, no less!).
Four songs like lost bastards to each of their more obvious influences:
Pale Saints!
The Swans!
Simple Minds circa "Empires & Dance"!
Sleep Chamber!
Nothing stood out, mind you.
The music just as lost in the studio as it was on-stage,
a swirling threatening gail off-shore
which never reached dry land...which never connected.
If there was a single in that 22 mins. of aural fog
it was the opening 12 minute epic
that inaugerated all their sets-- "Mastiff (At Its Master's Heels)".
The lyrics are written down somewhere for posterity...
something about oligarchies & father figures
with the tell-tale refrain of awkward, post-adolescent grist:
"And it nips at the heels,
the heels it serves! It serves to pleeeeeeeze!"

Then the lead singer killed himself.
He was from Acton & lived with his seventy-two year old father.
He even had a stage name which he pinched from a comicbook character--
He was T. Constantine,
a blond bleached thing that looked like left-over summer sand
who dressed in tight black slacks
& wore cheap rings on every finger & thumb
& a medallion he found at the Brimsfield Fair.
He hanged himself in the same basement his grandmother had her accident
(she fell down the stairs, shattering her pelvis...
& despite his father's protests, she had corrective surgery...
which at 90 years of age...took the last of life & cognition out of her)
They found him by the clothes dryer,
in the corner beneath his 1st floor high school bed.
He must've even played the band's tape,
but the boombox had gnarled the magnetic strips
& all the musical elegy left was whirr fuzz static...
& a crunchy sound like fried chicked skin.

Oh this is too pathetic.
Must I go on how T. Constantine dropped acid
& did the beanies & reds & popped his pills...
trying to get into Robert Smith's head by telekenetic transmutation?
Or that he believed the medallion round his neck,
ultimately overlapped by a taunt red-orange extension cord,
gave him magical properties?
Toward the end, even when all the bandbates knew they were going nowhere...
T. Constantine BELIEVED!
He believed in the perfect long-distance song
& finally connecting w/ an audience...
There would be the appreciative Goth girl in there too
& eventual parental approval
& his own van w/ velvet curtains
which he & the Goth girl (might her name not be Clarisse?)
would drive to Montreal.

But this is all supposition...
culled from "he said this" & "one day I heard him say that".
Who knows what T.Constantine, lead singer for Lesser Anglos was truly thinking
that last day?
As his single artistic expression played beside him all of one minute
before tearing itself to greasy shreds?
& T. Constantine's 4th & 5th vertebrea separated in a clean wrench?

Most suicides glamorize a band,
but Lesser Anglos went their indifferent, separate ways...
most back to Roger Williams College or neighboring RISD
where art school & educational canopies insulated them from their dead.
And a summer passed.
And another...
and more Boston bands you have heard of,
played the same venues that Lesser Anglos once did...
only they did it much better & with a lot less pretense.
And went to better parties in Allston
& maybe even got to see breasts & drink really good wine.

But one day...
at an exclusive Castle vonBuhler shindig
a new band made its surprising debut
amid the dyed red walls & Renaissance artwork...
perhaps you've heard of them?
Lesser Anglos II?

CONTINUED...

Storyboard Life

Got in so very late yesterday morning.
Energies depleted.
Managed to post but then the tailspin sputter began,
Reading this & that.
A shower.
A breakfast.
An on-line search.
Outside & nowhere (although the purchase of Robyn Hitchcock's
"Element of Light" & Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love" helped subdue
the residual disquiet).

It's always like this...
After every shoot or film-related event
The return to Monday's duldrums,
That "everyday life" I referenced yesterday.

Couldn't get wifi @ the Braintree coffeeshop,
it's anything linksys it seems...
hence no go @ the house & other once reliable ports...
So I'm dallying about seeking cyber,
needing photo reference for the upcoming music video
my artwork only as good as a pre-established pose.
I'm a Pearl art store packrat,
carrying my papers & pens & mini-backboard.
Finally returning to the house mid-afternoon,
working off dad's computer.
Then my brother calls & it's another procrastination...
we're off car shopping for him & the kidees.

5PM then & most of the Rte 44 auto moguls are closed,
one secures its doors immediately after we leave...
managing only to hand little Emma a glossy Pilot pamphlet.
At another dealership,
my brother wheels even littler Christine around (all of 19 days, wow!)
while Emma & I run & run about the lot.
It's fun for all of one minute,
but I remember what my brother always says about the running...
The running is good
The running means an early night for he & the wife
So let Emma run. Run Emma run!

I finally get home early eve & pencil the last of the new page...
I have the house to myself so it helps.
I'm in the drawing groove but sloppy...
Artistic A.D.D.
The depression, no doubt. Hard to focus on any one thing too long.
I grow disinterested quickly.
Boo hoo. Poor me.

Now it's just after 6AM Monday morning &
I'm in the office.
Front door was locked I'm so early,
so I had to come in through the bay.
But here I am,
honoring my literary commitment,
documenting this period of my filmic life
(because let's face it, there's little else to relate)
& then going on to the inking.
Of course that will have to be in the other room,
my co-worker made it very clear on Friday her disdain for
the ink. Although I find it odorless,
& although I think she's just trying to pick a fight only she can win...
I'm in that other room soon.

In Everyday Life...

Today's title from a clipped author bio...
delineating the man's many authorial accomplishments
& publications...
then ending w/ that great BUT!
BUT the dayjob teaching at some rinky-dink college!
BUT the wife & 2 kids!

Well, today is the coattail BUT of my weekend,
driving back through the windswept squall of rain & brakelights
from NoHo to NoWhere, MA.
Back to the old high school bedframe & Simple Minds wall poster.
Slinking in not to wake the parent.
And here I am Sunday AM...
no romantic entanglements, no awed college-somethings,
no drunken sordid stories...
Just me driving along MA Pike alone in the rain,
leaving voicemail to the -ex.
Watching chubby lovers neck & feed each other McDs
under the awning of a highway stop-off.
Is that what I'm envying?
Hardly. That's settling much like the fat fat fat bodyparts...
those two damned before they even know it.
Only who am I to judge?
I'm jaded & old (walk around a collegetown on Homecoming Weekend
& you too will feel ancient compared to the Hot Top tweens &
well-thighed Smith trackstars).
I simply want to eliminate the BUT
when all my life is this dry-humping BUT.
Yes, I live Mode A to accomplish Means B...
and yesterday's screening @ NIFF was great vindication.
BUT who cared?
BUT what did it accomplish?
BUT did I get the girl?
BUT did I get the love of my vast unsuspecting public?
BUT...

Eating gluey ketchup french fries at midnight,
while the rain splashed the windshield & the flubby lovebirds
licked their fingers a few feet away.
I'm blasting the Skinny Puppy & thinking of upstate NY again,
all these old memories of should've would've could've
colliding this weekend.

NIFF was good. Liked the Johnny Cash movie.
Liked the record shop doc.
But little else clicked. Did chat it up w/ a few other filmmakers
even though my hair was destroyed by the rain
(again w/ the McDs reference...but looking in the overhead
concave reflection above the register & the security cam monitor,
I looked monstrous w/ the plastered back hairline...
& this extra 10 pounds of gutcheese).
My confidence so tied into my looks.

Wowsers, this is all over the place today. But pops has returned
from his bikeride & I'm alternating recollection w/ "uh-huh's" &
"oh's" to his topics.
So will end this now.
Because I'm back in the rote,
the treadmill tracks & bachelor solititude.

Northampton Independent Film Festival 2008

So I'm back.
Back on-line, tapping away exploits & phobias
& back in Western MA for the weekend.

Good ole NoHo...
remember the early 90's & the Angela Scalisi weekends?
I'd work @ the convenient store/deli in upstate NY,
saving up my moolah
sloshing through junior year @ IC.
And then when the requisite monies were accumulated,
I'd take the 8 hr + busride down to the valleys & pinecones
of Holyoke, Northampton, Amherst...
my weekend hopes building like well-laid tindersticks
w/ each rehearsed mile.
Practicing the perfect words & moves in my head,
crammed at an odd angle in a compact seat
(a lucky trip if no one beside me);
the smells of amonia & recycled air & Pepsi,
glass bottles rolling across the aisle.

I had such a thing for Angela Scalisi...
and even though it was never consumated
(because I was an idiot)
(because I was a coward)
(because I was young & naive)
(because I didn't man up)
(because because because)
I consider her my first great love.
Looking back now,
it was a puppy crush
but man!
The hours & angst I invested!
And to travel all that way down here...
only to be repeatedly stifled...

"She only hooks up w/ someone when you're here, Ted"
someone once told me.
And she would.
Older, loser ex-punkers or
brash, bronzed bucks.
I can analyze it now & see it for what it was...
after summer & months of courtship,
of hanging out every day...
sharing so much...
except that one thing (even embarassed by the one stray kiss)
She was prompting me to step up to the plate,
but me?
I was the good guy.
I was the milksop.
Sitting in the kitchen while she got felt up on the parlor couch.
What kind of man allows that?
I was lax.
I should have thrown punches!

Yet we'd always end up in her bed,
so close...
and I couldn't do it.
I couldn't make that pass,
brushed that hair, or cheek.
That overwhelming fear of rejection.
How ugly I always felt.

Oh yes. Such swell memories here. A batch of poorly executed
Saturday nights & early Sunday departures.

And walking around this early, overcast AM in downtown NoHo,
where nothing's changed...
the same CD shops, the same sidestreet bookstores &
homeless under the bridge...w/ their backpacks the size of well-fed infants...
The band fliers on every free newspaper bin,
like Allston in the hills.
I have come so far yet done nothing w/ this life of mine.
I am more alone than ever.
And that is my penance, my decision...
allowing the baldness & belly & burns
to place me in this plenum of my own insecurities.

There is nothing here but nostalgia...
yet this time, I have accomplishment!
The "SACRILEGE" music video is playing across the street @ 3:45PM
in the same Academy of Music that I sat many years ago.
Listening to Andrew Mudge & The 5? 6? Burn Sisters...
talk about their movies--their careers.

I don't delude myself in thinking that they'll be any intensive Q&A
after the Shorts Package (of which the Walter Sickert video is included)...
no one will be envying me.
But I really wanted this one.
"AERO" may come later...& I can prolong that adulation...
but this weekend I have returned older, never wiser...
but intact & productive.

This isn't for Angela. This isn't for my so-called life.
This is for progress.

OK, finish the peppermint tea.
Put more money in the meter.
And get your VIP tix, you!