We Can Now Move On To Other Subjects.

Whew.  What a season!  I think I did some of my best work on both The Blog and on The Podcast this year, and the Spooktacular was the tacular-est of them all, thanks to everyone who has been following along.  Please, check out All Our October Podcasts and All Our October Blog Posts if you’d like to catch up.  But don’t worry too much about the past.  There’s lots of cool stuff on the horizon, too, so whatever your relative “now” is, it is always a good time to jump on board with our stuff.  To close I will ask, one last time, that you take a look and a listen at The Ways Of Ghosts one more time, and if you’re feeling generous, please pick up a copy.  It’s a good way to support what we do, and a great piece of Halloween listening if I do say so myself.  (End of plugs section.)

As much as I’ve enjoyed Halloween and the music associated with it for a long time, I have never obsessed too much over what I dress up as, or how I should decorate for the holiday.  Sure, I would participate if I was going to a party, or had a pumpkin lying around, but it is only recently that I have gotten into collecting cool decorations for the holiday, and if I were to get very specific, it is only since I met my wife, who is also a big fan of vintage holiday ephemera.  We have an aesthetic we’re trying to cultivate, and obviously we fudge things here and there for the sake of nostalgia, but try to keep it within reason.  We don’t go all-out with crazy decorations, and “tasteful” is something we are constantly weighing when we put things up.  But we do like to have fun, an we’re always looking out for something to add to our collection.  To close out the season here on the blog, here’s a photo shoot of our decorations, and some highlights discussed below.

First, here’s a video of walking up to our house in the dark.  I think it is rather charming.

Lights.

We try to keep our lights simple, and limited to path lighting with a few accent strings here and there.  Among them are a few strings of these flickering lights, that are supposed to replicate the look of candles.  I’m quite fond of them, and the best part is that they are appropraite for both Halloween & Christmas.  The path lights are only problematic because we have shitty people in the neighborhood who will stomp on them.  Otherwise, they are so easy to install and store if you keep the original packaging, and replacement bulbs are easy to find.

I would also mention that many of the “electronic” candles that you can get in most stores have “timer” settings, where the light is on for five hours, and off for 19.  (Some have even further settings to fine tune these times.)  These can work really well to accent parts of the room, or light the inside of other decorations (like our stack of pumpkins).  Lastly, I have all of my lights on one switch in the living room, so I don’t even have to go outside to turn everything off.  I recommend this for anyone who wants to set up decorations.  I used to just plug things in where ever I could, and really thought I wouldn’t mind going out to unplug things.  Being able to shut it down with one switch is quite a luxury.

Our Wreath.

When we moved into our house last year, it was Spring, and throughout the summer we got to know our neighbors.  But we were still very surprised when they offered this wreath to us last October, just before we were about to put our our decorations, as a gift.  It was so incredibly thoughtful, and is such a great addition to the porch.  I have since made a special box just for the wreath to store it during the off season, we are very proud of it.  While we mostly keep to ourselves, that wreath really bonded us as neighbors.

Blowmolds.

My wife and I are fond of vintage blowmolds, and every time we’ve found one it’s been worth buying, no matter where you find them.  Patience has paid off, and we have found four incredible pumpkins at various thrift stores.  Each of these are designed to insert a light that plugs in, creating the effect that the entire plastic item is lighting up (you can see them in action in the video).  These things are really awesome, and we get excited when we can put them out.  As you can see, the biggest one is clearly sun-damaged with age, but the others are pretty fantastic.  We’re hoping that we can find more to flesh out our entire porch as the years go on.

Bag of Leaves

Among the other weird thrift scores that my wife has found was this plastic bag that you can fill with leaves.  It is much grosser and harder to fill than you would think, and it is easy to damage or ruin the plastic, too.  However, it has a bit of charm to it, and we have enjoyed putting it on the porch this year.  There are four other versions of this same kind of thing, made by the same company (Kenley Corporation in Mason, Ohio), so it would be cool to complete the set.

Sound.

Last year I made this mix of “scary” sounds from a variety of sources, and edited it to fit the length of an audio CD.  I made a CD, and play it on my porch from a small, portable CD player that I purchased several years ago (you can see it in the video above).  I put the CD on infinite repeat, and it works very well as an atmospheric sound for people who walk up to the porch.

Paper Crafts.

While we have picked up a few things in stores (like these pumpkins that fold out), my wife has scored a variety of vintage cardboard and paper wall hangings, and you can tell by the designs that they are most likely the from the early ’80s or late ’70s.  However, we have also acquired a folding witch lantern, a Halloween banner, and a stand up cat.  While most of our paper crafts – like the Mummy – are fairly newish, this Pumpkin / Owl Fold-Out item is not only one of the oldest items we have, but by far the coolest.  I added a spider to it this year for effect, but it does not need one.  It is pretty great.

Tissue Ghosts.

My mom used to make these tissue paper ghosts when I was a kid, and they are very much something I remember fondly.  They’re incredibly easy to make, too.  After you wad up a bit of paper or newspaper to create the “head,” wrap a piece of generic tissue paper around it.  Tie a piece of thread around the tissue paper to keep the head in place, and cut off the thread at a reasonable length so you can hang it from somewhere (like, you’re ceiling).  I call this part of our living room “Ghost Corner,” and I already have plans for creating little floating styrofoam headstones in the future.  But for now these twenty are a good start to my collection.  These are an easy craft project for kids, too, and is much less messy than carving a pumpkin.

Blythe Halloween Doll Party.

My wife used to have a number of Blythe Dolls, and to this day is connected to a group that still interacts regularly.  (She has two that she still keeps).  This year she was invited to a Halloween Doll party, where other collectors brought their dolls dressed up in all sorts of costumes.  To that end, she made the helmet using a styrofoam pumpkin she bought at a craft store.  She cut the bottom out, and covered the surface of the pumpkin with glue, then glitter.  Lastly, she added a coat of hairspray to help “set” the glitter.  The overall effect was pretty great, as you can see.

* * * * * *

So, while we don’t cover every inch of our house with decorations, we like to have fun, and we like the stuff we have.  We’ve only been together for a short time, and just got married, so our collection is pretty young.  But given a few more years, we could amass some awesome stuff if we keep looking.

Ghost Stories Are The Evidence That The Oral Tradition Is Alive & Well.

If you really want to get at the heart of what makes Halloween great, telling Ghost Stories is pretty much the reason this holiday persists.  We might tell our stories a little more abstractly – through blog posts, cosplay, or in rambling podcasts – but the basic idea is that you want to convey a story that has a “spooky” dimension to it, be it of the goriest horror, or the merest suggestion that it wasn’t wind they heard in the first place.  Much has been written about Oral Tradition and the way that pre-literate culture has persisted into “today” through stories that are passed down.  Ghost Stories historically persisted in the world of sitting around a fire, leaning in to get warm, and having someone in the group start with, “Did I ever tell you of the time I encountered the spook that haunted my Uncle’s barn?”  (Or some other personal variant of a few different ghost notions.)

While the telling of any story is fairly compelling while in the right hands, Ghost Stories carry a particular weight because they refer (directly in some cases) to the kinds of pre-literate religions that featured ancestor worship.  While many faiths include some form of the dead living on outside of their earthly vessel, the notion of a Ghost – the “spirit” of a person who has passed and is haunting a location / object / person – opens a world of the supernatural that is somewhat outside of the stories we hear as part of experiential reality or modern religion.  So much of our lives can be explained through rational thought, or through supplication to God.  But when we hear about a ghostly encounter, we are immediately outside of the acceptable discourse of every day life, and into something truly harrowing and unique.

In discussing the world of the supernatural as if it were something that actually happened – even as a lark or a fictive campfire pursuit – the speaker is asking the audience to put themselves into a different relationship with what we’re about to hear, one that is almost “forbidden” in many contexts.  That experience alone makes a Ghost Story a rare and fascinating piece of narrative discourse, not to mention, chilling if taken at face value.

The Golden Age of Ghost Stories

Ghosts certainly show up in The Odyssey when Odysseus travels to the Underworld, they have made regular appearances in Shakespeare, had a hand in Gothic Literature, and have so many other antecedents that is would be impossible to claim that any one period had more or less Ghost Stories than any other.  But Jack Sullivan makes a very strong case for the period between 1830 and 1914 being the unmistakable “Golden Age of Ghost Stories.”  Not only are Edgar Allen Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu publishing during this period, but it is essentially sandwiched between two huge world-wide events that changed the world is massive ways: the end of the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of WWI.

Life in the late 19th Century wasn’t exactly “easy,” and yet humanity lived in a post-Industrialized world that longed to ease the problems of the past.  Newspapers were ubiquitous, but most people still read at home by creepy candle-light.  Homes were not electrified, outhouses were still the most common solution to waste-management, people largely still traveled by foot or by horse, and the world still felt unexplored, boundless, and full or events and experiences that could not be explained.  And yet, travel was becoming easier, roads were going to more and more places, clothes and food was more accessible for poor people and helped insulate you against the cold better, and families could now afford a few “luxuries,” but did not yet live in a “modernized world.”  Most importantly, a central fire was still present in nearly all American homes, giving the family a place to gather and talk about the day when the Sun went down.

This period is also significant because many American traditions were becoming solidified in the cultural consciousness, all because of these new communication technologies that were sweeping the nation.  New Holidays were being developed, new traditions were being celebrated and regionalized, and people began to share their stories with friends and neighbors that were living on in more than just a story told late at night.  The precursors to Devil’s Night caught on quite a bit almost everywhere, and as costumes and trick-or-treating became huge parts of Halloween, the telling of Ghosts Stories – something that would happen at night throughout the Fall and Winter – became something that happened around the hearth.

Into The Modern Age

Ghost Stories still exist, and will most likely never disappear, but the emphasis on the Oral Tradition has dropped off quite a bit as the years have wore on.  With the development of recording technology and radio broadcasting, horror anthology shows intermixed with annual “Halloween” episodes moved the yearly Ghost Story from the hearth to the radio.  Once film – and later television – replaced the radio, horror movies and TV programs became all the rage, and when Shock Theater! hit America in 1957, it was the glow of the screen late at night that signaled where you could hear a good scary story.

Record companies certainly tried to capitalize on this old-fashioned scary story in the ’60’s with the advent of Halloween LPs, containing “scary sounds” and Ghost Stories, and this trend seemed to last well into into the early ’80’s.  But spoken Ghost Stories – in a ’round the campfire’ spirit – is not nearly as popular as it once was almost 200 years ago.  This has not quieted those who are listening to Ghost Stories, but technological developments has transformed the nature of these stories tremendously.  Ghost Hunting is still alive and well nearly everywhere in the country, and with franchises like Paranormal Activity and a slew of “haunted” house films raking in big bucks ever year, the desire to interact with Ghosts has not dropped off in the slightest.  We still love being scared, and we look for more and more sophisticated ways to go about it with each generation.

However, for my money, I am captivated once the sun goes down and a fire gets started.  Once someone starts in on a good Ghost Story – even a funny one – I lean in.  As the flames dance on their face, and as the unbelievable tale unfolds, the cloak of night is enough to lend a crumb of credibility to what I’m hearing.  For a moment, as a convinced atheist who has found no basis for supernatural reality, I get chills, and I like it.  Perhaps it is the power of a good Ghost Story to convince us of something – in spite of our earnest beliefs – that is at the heart of their charm.

To quote Fox Mulder, “I Want To Believe.”

Halloween History Lesson:
Let’s Get This Party Started Right*

* (This story was published when I was on the staff of The Rearguard Newspaper, from 2005 – 2006. The editor at the time had a very specific vision for the paper, and had given us different “titles” & “sections” of the paper to manage and fill.  I was the Arts & Culture Editor / KPSU Guru, and my section was “The Cultureostomy Bag.”  The photo included next to my stories was this one from around The Rearguard office, sporting my very favorite Last of The Juanitas shirt, which I still have.

The “Halloween History Lesson” story appeared in the October 2005 issue of The Rearguard. Vol. 9, Issue 1.  The version here is a longer draft than the one that was in the paper.  I was told to turn in an almost 2500 word story, that was – for some reason – cut down to almost 1000 in the paper.  Again, I’m not sure why, but the editor – Jesse Harrington – did a really good job on both the long and short version, and was really the heart and soul of the paper during that year I was there.  To my knowledge, he and Josh Gross – The Editor – manually edited every word of every story in every issue, no small feat.  The illustrations were done by a staff member, who I have since forgotten.  Many apologies.

Anyway, here’s the story – with a few small edits for this presentation – regarding an overview of this holiday’s history.  Enjoy.)

With October comes one of my favorite holidays, Halloween.  I have fond memories of this time of year, littered with the Costumes, Parties, and “trick-or-treating” of years past.  It seems that I am not alone in wanting to celebrate this wanton extravaganza of tooth rot, parties, and pretending to be someone you’re not. In the US alone, Halloween is the second largest commercial holiday, bringing in for retailers roughly $7 Billion annually. Yes, with a B.  Every year, Americans sink the equivalent cost of 213,000 Hummers into costumes, candy, pumpkins & horror films.  Not bad for a holiday with curious and fear-based origins.

Most historians agree that the earliest versions of the holiday stem from the Celts, near or around fifth century BC.  Then, it was called Samhain (pronounced sow-in, though try telling Danzig that).  Samhain was the celebration of the New Year, marking the end of the summer and the harvest (falling on October 31^st, more or less). Since winter was around the corner, the time of year was always a bit scary for most folk, as people invariably died during those dark and cold months where there was little food and insulated shelter.

As if that weren’t enough to bring you down, the Celts also believed that the dead could walk amongst the living on the New Year and would then cause mischief and mayhem in the village (often resulting in the damaging of crops, back then the only kind of mischief anyone got upset about).  To help sate the spirits of the dead, villagers would leave food and wine out for the dead to consume, which never seemed to work; while the food and wine always wound up consumed, it did not seem to affect any noticeable change in the world around them. The only upshot to the dead walking among us seemed to be that the Druids (Celtic priests) were better at making inaccurate predictions about the coming future, instilling some amount of hope more fear to a culture that was only going to be able to survive the winter on a steady diet of worry and misery.

To get people’s spirits up, the Druids would have huge bonfires in the woods. The villagers would then put out all other fires in town, and come to dressed in animal skins and masks (so the ghosts that were wandering around would think the villagers were ghosts too). In the fire they burned crops (assumedly to beat the dead-walking-amongst-the-living to the punch of ruining them). Animal sacrifices & attempted fortune telling rounded out this fun-filled evening, and at the end of the night everyone would return to their homes, relight their fires using a piece of the sacred Druidic fire they attended, and spend the rest of the winter cowering in fear and hunger until the Sun mysteriously came back many months later. (This would be emulated years later by every teenager suffering from a medium-to-large breakup in the years to follow.)

While the Celts were happy with being frightened and miserable every year, the Romans (being Romans) were not. They decided to conquer the Celts around 43 AD so they could combine two of their own holidays with Samhain, encouraging the Celts to see their way of thinking.  (Apparently the Romans felt guilty about having too many holidays, and wanted to combine them with someone else’s.)  Feralia was one of those, a holiday dedicated to the dead (a common theme for holidays in those days). The other, known as Pomona, was a celebration for the Roman goddess of fruit and trees, which apparently introduced apples (for future “bobbing”) into the Samhain mythology.  This new Roman “combined” holiday kept the name, but was moved to November 1^st (shattering the traditions and culture of the Celts and making this much more fun and light-hearted for the Romans).  This supposedly encouraged the Celts to follow Roman beliefs, creating the illusion that everyone was now content to maintain the status quo for another few hundred years after the bloodbath of being conquered (or, at least, to not talk about any discontentment that may have theoretically existed in public).

As is often the case with many things, Christianity was the catalyst for the next big deconstruction of a perfectly strange a creepy Pagan holiday. Since Christianity had spread like a virus to The Land Formerly Controlled By Celts (no relation to TAFKAP), most Former Celts were now considered Roman Catholics, in spite of their resistance against this.  Around 800 AD, the king of the Catholics, Pope Boniface IV (named after the Patron Saint of Brewers and Germany) declared that Samhain was now called All Saints’ Day to further distance it from the Pagan rites, and it was now intended for honoring (wait for it) saints & martyrs (read = more dead people). Depending on where you lived, you might also call it All-hallows, or All-hallowmas (for you linguistic types out there, that comes from the Middle English word, alholowmesse, meaning, you guessed it, All Saints’ Day).

A few hundred years later the church also decided that there were too many saints and martyrs to celebrate, and added November 2^nd to the list of days to honor the dead (this time called All Souls’ Day to differentiate it from the day before). All Souls’ day involved the usual celebratory kinds of things: bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes (this time in the guise of saints, angels or devils). And, since three is better than two, threw in October 31^st as a pre-holiday holiday. To keep things straight, people began to refer to October 31^st as All-hallows Eve, which was eventually shorted into the trademarked name companies now use to sell us plastic pumpkins and candy that tastes like wax.

During the All Soul’s Day parades, many poor people would beg for food from those who were better off.  Traditionally, “soul cakes” were given to these poor people, in exchange for their prayers for the well off family members’ dead relatives. (“Soul cakes” are, sadly, just a simple piece of pastry, and has nothing to do with eating spiritual souls.)  Eventually the transaction of “soul cakes” for prayer began to be called “going a-souling,” which should have been way more evil than it actually was.  Soon enough other food, money, and even alcohol was given out when people went “a-souling,” and neighborhood kids began to join in on the act (beginning the time-honored tradition of underage drinking on Halloween).  Of course, the Catholic Church dug these traditions much more than the ancient “lets leave food and wine out for the evil spirits” Celtic version, and endorsed “going a-souling” whole heartedly despite it’s emphasis on being considerate to kids and poor folk, and sort of resembling this Pagan practice anyway.

This version of the holiday was unchanged (for the most part) until America opened for business, and people started to rape and pillage a new land in an attempt to start new holidays.  As Protestants controlled New England, so the primary foothold for Halloween began in the southern colonies.  Not content to keep using an established tradition in a new world, the new Catholic version of this holiday meshed with all the various ethnic groups that made up the new American people, thus perverting the celebration further.

The primary American treatment of the holiday fell on All-Hallows Eve, and involved “play parties,” huge public events that celebrated town harvests and whatnot.  Neighbors would drink (big surprise), tell Ghost Stories (that were much more effective when the story had been told the year before), dance (despite not having the benefit of things like Soul Train or MTV to teach them), and have fortunes read by strange wizened hags that cackled manically (using yarn, apple parings, and mirrors to divine things like “who you were going to marry” or, if you were a woman, “who was going to drunkenly decide you were their wife when they got horny”).  People capped the night off by singing out-of-key, public-domain folk songs until everyone was tired.  While the holiday took some time to get going full steam, when Irish immigrants began to flee the famine of 1846, the party really began to take off (probably because there was drinking involved).  It was their idea to re-incorporate the Catholic focus on costumes and “going a-souling,” which was now called “trick-or-treating” in it’s American incarnation, supposedly to avoid copyright infringement.

We also have the Irish to thank for the introduction of the Jack-o-Lantern into the Halloween accouterments.  The origin of the practice comes from the folk tale about “Stingy Jack,” a trickster who managed to best the devil at his own game of lies and deception in order to get things like free drinks at bars and apples to eat (making this the second “apple” reference in the historic account).  When Jack finally died (according to the folk tale), he was not allowed into either Heaven or Hell, but instead was forced to roam the earth with a burning piece of coal to light his way. Jack, being the clever jack that he was, carved out a turnip and kept the piece of coal in it, so he could carry his source of light like a lantern. Jack, in his ghostly form, was thereafter known as “Jack of the Lantern.”

It became tradition to carve turnips or potatoes with scary faces and light them up in the hopes of scaring away Jack himself, or other ghosts that might wander by your house (and for anyone who’s tried to eat burned turnips, you know why he would be scared).  These vegetables that were left on your porch became known as Jack-o-Lanterns, mostly because people weren’t that creative at the time. The English, who were good at stealing things from the Irish anyway, did pretty much the same thing, but used beets instead (assumedly just to be different).  In the US, since no other holiday had claimed the fruit as it’s own, pumpkins made a prime target for this aspect of Irish culture.

“Mischief-making” was pretty common on Halloween too, something completely absent from modern culture thanks to worried parental groups and Mothers Against Anything Fun.  Vandalism was extremely common at the time. Many hooligans would roam the streets at night, carousing, breaking everything in sight, and creating a truly frightening experience for anyone else trying to get a good night’s sleep. By the late 1800’s, a movement attempted to suck the remaining fun out of Halloween.  Many people wanted to focus on the community-oriented aspects of the “play parties” instead of the ghosts and “scary” aspects of the holiday that seemed to appeal to hooligans so much.

By the 1930’s, the holiday began to take the secular shape it has now as a community-centered holiday.  Parades were still a part of the celebration, but the “play parties” expanded to encompass civic centers rather than just neighborhoods.  With most religious and scary aspects of the holiday censored and or eliminated by uncaring activist groups, the holiday was now much “safer” for kids.  By the 1950’s, the holiday became focused entirely on them (thanks in part to the Post-WWII Baby Boom). With the focus on children, the “play parties” most often associated with Halloween moved back to neighborhood homes (so they could drink in peace). “Trick-or-treating,” which still consisted of asking complete strangers to give you something just because you asked for it, seemed to be the only unaffected aspect of the holiday.  However, the violence and vandalism persisted on October 30th – “Devil’s Night” – well into the ’70’s, creating a combative environment in cities like Detroit.  However, the ’80’s did a good job of stymying that sort of terror in our country.

These days, there are various permutations of Halloween all over the world, all more or less having their origins in the same creepy Celtic past, and all of them more complicated than an essay like this can quickly embrace. The American version has remained pretty much unchanged since the 50’s, with the exception of local variants and personal changes. Just to be different, the English now celebrate Guy Fawkes Day on November 5^th, which consists of bonfires and the usual paraphernalia, but with a twist: the fires are used to burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, a man who tried to blow up the parliament building in England in 1606.  Not content to keep this kind of murderous tradition just for the adults, children walk around with miniature effigies on sticks, and go door to door asking for “a penny for the guy,” though they ironically keep the money for themselves when they get it. While this sounds remarkably like “trick-or-treating,” the English are too stubborn to claim this has any connection to Halloween, given that the country supposedly stopped celebrating the holiday around the time of the Protestant Reformation, and Halloween was Pope-o-centric.

The Irish incorporate “treasure hunts” and odd card games to the usual party games kids play, but more or less do things the same as their US counterparts.  By far, the coolest adaptation is Dia De Los Muertos, the Latin American version of All Souls’ Day with origins that date back even further in South America, but are now heavily Catholoicised.  This holiday lasts the historic three days, and more or less contains much of the same Catholic Functions that were creepy and fun. The biggest difference, however, is that families construct cool alters to honor their dead relatives, and use incense, candles, candy, flowers, food, booze, and photographs to decorate them.  Next they have “grave picnics” on the final resting places of their family members. These picnics include food, tequila, and a mariachi band if you can afford it.  Afterward they tidy up the site before they leave (which is very considerate).  All of that, combined with the Day of The Dead skeletons that are a mainstay of all wonderful ’80’s animated rock videos and Tim Burton movies, make this holiday the single coolest version of Halloween around the world.

These days, with the heavily commercialized version reigning supreme, it’s hard to keep a positive attitude toward it when deciding what to celebrate, and how. The ghosts of consumerism, dental hygiene warnings, and frightened parents from the ’80’s warning you about razor blades and poisoned candy seem to haunt this time of year worse than the original Celtic spirits ever could.  Fortunately for us, the holiday has evolved again in several cool ways.

Most modern adults have a nostalgic attachment to the time of year, who then throw parties that are just as wild at the early American ones before “vandals” supposedly ruined everything.  Modern horror rock bands (The Murder Dolls, Misfits, Rob Zombie, etc.), coupled with the prevalence of the cheaply made horror movies that tattooed kids seems to love have helped return the themes of the holiday to the everyday person, rather than the entities that control the production of masks and individually wrapped pieces of sugar.  And lets face it: people are just weirder these days.  Now, a time of year that was dominated by choosing between being a ghost, skeleton, vampire or devil is now overtaken by hordes of adults dressing up in post-modern deconstructions of costumes, who then stay in character for days before (and after) the holiday, if not longer. (read = Goth people)  While the holiday is still second only to Christmas in retail sales, the fans of this ghost and demon-centric celebration are doing all they can to wrest control away from the modern day Druids that want to tell you how to celebrate.

I Am Artist, Here Me Roar.
(An Earnest Plea For Support.)

In 1993 I made my first ‘zine, which was distributed for free in my High School.  In the years since then, I have taken on a number of hobbies that match the fun and excitement I felt when I sat down to layout that publication.  My joy when it came to radio was almost matched by doing interviews, writing for the paper, video editing, playing in bands, and, most importantly, meeting other people with similar interests.  I’ve really enjoyed all the work I’ve done in the last 20+ years, as it has not only been preparatory, it has been the most fun I’ve had in that time.

Strangely, I never considered myself an artist.  Or even close to the world of Art.  At best I called myself a DJ, and at worst, a writer.  But I never made a profit, never found myself in a position to get work with what I was doing, and more importantly, never put myself in that mindset.  I made ‘zines.  I made radio.  I made albums.  But I saw it more as a hobby than anything else.  In reality, I would have another job, and that would be my vocation.  This is why I rarely collected money – if anything, a single dollar – for the stuff I created.  The joy was in the making, and that was good for me then.

However, as I have honed and cultivated a set of skills since the early ’90’s, it occurred to me that the amount of hours I had put in were vastly surpassing anything else I’d done in my life.  I couldn’t really call myself a retail clerk, and an office specialist seemed far from the truth.  Dishwasher never set well, and farm hand was very short lived.  If there was anything I could apply a title to, it was, in fact, artist.  I’ve been making things for a long time now.  It is the thing I have done the most, for the longest time, and with the biggest passion.  Certainly more that IT Support.

Now I Have To Do The Hard Thing

Most of the things I make usually fall into the “free” category.  Radio and podcasts are still things that are part of the media landscape around us, and blogging is usually not considered a “paid” position.  And I’m not really interested in changing that dynamic.  But as our world becomes more digitized, and traditional jobs are not longer a way of life, those of us that make things find ourselves in a position of asking – politely – for money.  I’m not comfortable with it, and I’m sure you aren’t, either.  I find most things involving money to be frustrating and difficult, and I would rather not have to go down that road.  However, it also seems strange to put so much time and energy into making things, without at least breaking even so I can keep doing it.  I’ve gone without earning much for so long, it seems awkward to change that now.

Still, this is my job.  I am, for better or worse, an artist, with everything that comes with that understanding.  And if I’m going to this much time into something, it should be worth my time to ask you to help support it.  My promise is that I will keep making things that I like, and offer much of it for free.  What I’m asking is that, when I make something new that does require a few dollars to enjoy, that you send a little support my way.

I promise to make it worth your while.  I will put care and attention into all the things I offer for sale, and when you buy, I will make the thing something that feels like it is worth owning.  As much as I am an artist, I am also a fan.  I know what it is like to buy something, take it home, and appreciate it.  I download music and podcasts like everyone else.  For me, I want to make sure I’m not ripping you off, either.

So, What Have You Got, So Far?

I’m glad you asked.  Right now, we have two albums that are available for you to purchase, in a digital format, for $5.00 each:

The Ways of Ghosts
This is a spoken word album of Halloween Ghost Stories, written by Ambrose Bierce, and read by Austin Rich, with music and sound effects by Austin Rich, too.

Lost In The Supermarket

This compilation of music by 20 artists was a party favor at the 15th Anniversary Blas-travaganza that went down in 2013.  Now you can pick this up and enjoy the best in punk, experimental, rock, electronic, and everything in-between.

We also have a two-disc set that you can pick up in either a digital or physical form for $10.00:

The Shindig Shakedown (Disc 1) (Disc 2)
With music, zines, photography & art by over 80 artists, this massive collection (affectionately referred to at the office as a “digital seven inch”) was a party favor for those who attended my 40th Birthday party in April.  Now, you can pick up the collection and rock out to a vast array of friends & well-wishers of our work over the last 20 years.  This is the cumulative work of the end of 2014 / beginning of 2015, and is a real compilation, in every sense of the word.

And, if you’re feeling very supportive, we have three albums available that are entirely free, and yet, as with all of these albums, you can pay what you’d like, and help keep up going:

Cathead – In Loving Memory Of Harold (Expanded Edition)
This avant-punk group – largely from the ’90’s – recorded varying qualities of songs and live gigs over their short existence, and with the magic of the digital age, more people can experience these recordings than every saw us live in the day.  This is where “pay what you will” really comes in handy.

Moth Hunter – No Contact (Live)
Moth Hunter has been a friend for some time now, and performed live on our radio program to supply the backing music for our program “No Contact.”  The music is available here without the mixing and editing of the other samples that were used in that program as a four piece suite of songs for you to enjoy.

Live At Habesha Lounge 13 April 2013
This contains all the music performed live at this amazing Ethiopian restaurant in 2013, where I first joined The Dead Air Fresheners on stage for a spoken word performance.  This was an incredible show, of which there is video, too, and you can enjoy it all.

Thank You.

Really.  Thanks.  I would most likely continue to do this without you, but knowing that you are out there – and that you are willing to lend a hand – only adds to the joy of making music.

Keep up the support, and you’ll get to enjoy cool stuff like this more often.

Hell yeah.