Coven is one of the more obscure bands of the 1960s; a Chicago based outfit of quasi-Satanic occultists best known for a stage show incorporating wild antics, crucifixion, Black Masses and, one supposes, music. Their debut album, Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls, is the most regarded, but I prefer the subsequent releases that move away from the vague Satanic proto-metal into an early ’70s dark schmaltz. This puts me in a minority. I recommend Blood on the Snow.

Though I’ve loved Coven for years, I am nothing compared against my aspiring hetero life partner, Andrew god-damn-the-man Harrison. In his monomaniacal quest for Knowledge, he hosts about 13,000 prog rock/psych radio shows and recently scored an interview with Coven’s vocalist, the self-proclaimed Queen of Goth, Jinx Dawson. You can listen here– the interview is at the 1/3rd mark, give or take. Take or give. Your choice.

Jinx reveals many shocking things and Andrew vaguely scandalizes her, but the high point comes towards the end when she shouts me out by name. I am one of her Magick Friends. Obviously a favor pulled by Harrison. I’ve got the best god damned friends in the world.

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Update: Harrison has his own blog dedicated to whatever obscure music is taking his whimsical fancy, both as a man and as a DJ. Douse yourself in his perfumed fineries at arcanaobscura.blogspot.com.

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Update #2:  The lovely Jinx Dawson kindly commented on this post & pointed out my error. Hi, Jinx!

For reasons beyond cheapness, I prefer my books used. The transfer of knowledge and experience from owner to owner is a thing unique to the grey market, and makes one believe in an Iain Sinclair/Grant Morrisony idea that books, in their layered pages of information and content, are mystical objects radiating power outwards. (The one downside that I’ve encountered was olfactory. My first edition of Alfred Watkin’s The Old Straight Track reeked like an unembalmed corpse. I kept it outdoors and most of the odor dissipated– it remains a noxious volume, but only when opened.)

I bought Blake Nelson’s Exile in 2004– I had either read, or was about to read, his first novel Girl, which turned out amazing despite the atrocious film adaptation, and I was in the Connecticut Book Barn when I saw Exile’s partially lime green cover. It bore hideous ad copy: A DOWNTOWN BAUDELAIRE FOR THE ’90s.

“Well, self,” sez I, “This surely must be awful. You must give yourself over.”

And so I did. I paid $3.

Exile sat for some time. I read it months later, almost 3 years ago, in March of 2005. This was during the first or second week of a ridiculously painful break-up. It’s a far stronger book than Girl, an unsung masterpiece– a third person, year-long and present tense account of a writer’s life. 85% of it felt like reading my biography through vaseline. Like Girl, it’s a true book. Rare enough to write one, let alone two.

It was heavy enough reading Exile, but as I moved through its pages, I was confronted by the marginalia of its previous owner. Poetry and nonsense at first, but then notes directed at the person to whom she had given the book. It was like a second narrative layered on top of the first, what Arafat Kazi, scourge of the Dhaka Theatre community, would have Knowingly called a palimpsest. The second story took shape as one high school girl’s scribblings and lovenotes to her girlfriend, oozing the innocence of being 16 years old and thinking that her Love would last forever. It was almost too much.

The notes have a terrible fatalism. Someone had sold the book. Either the girl who’d written or the girl to whom she’d been writing. It isn’t hard to imagine their relationship crashing and burning, and the ruination and heartbreak that had followed. The book itself remained, a relic and a time capsule that was cast out into the wider world. It waited to consume an unsuspecting sucker with its implicit drama.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet and Myspace, I located a person that I believed was one of the girls. I thought about writing to her, to ask what had happened, to discover why this thing had been inflicted on me, but even in the low ways of 2005, I had a sense that this idea was awful. So I didn’t. But I’ve thought about those notes almost every day.

All I wanted was a crap book about a downtown Baudelaire for the ’90s.

When I was on the Winter Tour, I re-read my copy of Exile (and Girl too), and I decided that I’d scan the pages with marginalia. I’ve only omitted two: one was redundant, and the other was minor, but allowed a person to identify, in total, one of the girls.

And I ain’t that bad. Not yet.

Page 25, First Strike: “one day I was a princess / wearing a golden dress / (14 carat jewel gown) / don’t worry about me / I’m still a princess / I’m just a little tarnished / just a little rusted”

Page 43, Falling: “falling / i’m not sure / where i’m supposed / to be / except maybe / here? / i think so / i think so / i think so”

Page 61, First Note: “Hi / Katy / you / are / reading /my / book / (+my / writing / in the / margin / s”

Page 127, The Heartbreaker: “Katy… i’m writing you a note so that when you get to page 127, you can read a note from me beautiful me. I’m a rose, I’m a thorn growing off of myself. And everyone is talking about the burning sun. Birds fly south in Summer and my star is shining for you, always. 6/10/98 Gina”

Page 156, The Ephemera: “la di la di la”

Page 203, The Absolute Best: “I wanna sink to the / bottom with you”

Page 243, Stupidity: “VANDALISM OH DEAR”

Pages 273 & 274, We’re Definitely in High School: “FOR CHRISSAKE –> YOUR A POTATO”

Page 288, Last Page, The End: “lets drive forever / lets never forget / one day I will know everything”

Bad times in Los Angeles town. My bootleg wireless bit the dust, sending me into the Mercury Retrograde hell of Internet Access Disaster. A story too boring to summarize with sarcasm. Like an old friend of the blog once sang, “I wanna make a movie, so let’s star in it together. Don’t make a move til I say action. Here comes the hardcore life.”

So? What’s been the haps, paps?

The usual: writing, reading Wuthering Heights for the third time, talking boy poets down from ledges. The Freak Kingdom, its discontents and la casa de Kobek. What we do and how we do it.

I had a birthday. I’m thirty! My old pal and romantic interest, elly jonez, Escaped the Mission– which I believe was the title of a film starring Kurt Russell’s hipster second cousin– and visited the Freak Kingdom. Between anxiety attacks brought on by ferocious Concerns and Worries, she managed this photograph of my head exploding in a burst of incandescent radiance:

The Author at Thirty. Griffith Observatory. Surveying the Kingdom from on High.