I'm Richard Rory, your host for Psychedelic Supper on Citrusville's one and only Rock FM! Quicksilver Messenger Service, from San Fransisco...that one goes out for Jammin' Jamison on the opening course for Psychedelic Supper. Here's one from Theivery Incorporated. Shout out to Dr. Laurie, with her Saturday morning positive thinking chats on our sister station in Rome, GA! Shouts due our sponsor, Dave and Amy down at Omegaville Hardware & Supply! Seed and feed needs? Indeed! Coming up on the show: Blue Oyster Cult spotlight, part two, next! Here's part two of our Psyche Supper Spotlight on Blue Oyster Cult. So, what was biker boogie? It's the speed-fueled darkened twin of the psychedelic music movement. Steppenwolf embodied it perhaps better than any other band that comes to mind. Here is Blue Oyster Cult, from their eponymous first album, debuted in 1972. BOC, as they are known often by their fans, were created as an answer to Britain's Black Sa...

And now, what has been by far my most hit post: Myebook - D'n'A Comics #1 As promised: the online version of DNA #1!!! The Southern Gothic mini-series unlike anything else in comics. This is Richard Rory,on Citrusville's Rock FM WNRV, spotlighting the Blue Oyster Cult for this Psychedelic Psupper. The Long Island, NY band, after five years of name and line-up changes, became Blue Oyster Cult in 1972, roaring onto the scene as the prototypical heavy metal group. In fact, the symbol that adorns each of their album covers is an ancient symbol for that classic heavy metal known as lead. Critic Richard Meltzer, manager Sandy Pearlman (who named the band), and future punk poetess Patti Smith all contributed lyrics. According to Wiki: The name "Blue Öyster Cult" came from a 1960s poem written by manager Sandy Pearlman. It was part of his "Imaginos" poetry, later used more extensively in their 1988 album Imaginos. Pearlman had also com...

Listen, I'm about to have an exciting announcement on integr8dsoul.com, which is going to be a really deluxe space for you to groove before we're through. Meanwhile, as we get it all together behind the scenes, let's do some jams this Monday! Pick your style, try something new, but don't let Monday get you down, it's just the start of better things, believe it. This is Richard Rory, rolling into the week with you on Citrusville's Rock FM!!! with that said, here's a request from our early morning listener Vita, some new rock to start off your week, from the Brian Jonestown Massacre: Nice textures in those guitars, freaky vocal...all right! So how about we continue our role with some Grohl? Acoustic Foo Fighters, going out to Hugh, our energy's with ya, buddy...Citrusville Rock FM... That's the Lovebugs, with the Key...gotta get up, y'all! Rise and shine, as we watch the sun come up on a Florida morning that looks to be cloudy, with clearing ...

I enjoyed a discussion, following along afterwards, about the legacy of darker visions of heroes, often spun out of inspiration for Alan Moore's Watchmen. Watchmen is indeed written with the quality of a serious book, but its treatment of heroes takes them further away from certainities of even the squabbling, emotional Lee/Kirby/Ditko superheroes popularized by Marvel in the mid 1960s. Super-Dickery examples abound, but DC comics heroes, which outsold everything but Archie in the same time period, were written specifically to save the day. To this day, the older generation remembers comics as they were frozen in this time. It's the rare superhero book, like FX, listed in this month's blogs on the side bar, that dares to evoke the fresh faces of those by-gone adventures. http://ceaseill.blogspot.com/2011/03/much-more-than-bird-or-plane-fx-by.html Has Moore, then, developed a sad legacy? Is it indeed fair to say, as my friends concur, that Moore just didn't understa...

Listen, I may well find myself sneaking in more enthusiastic blogs about Steve Gerber's work. here, however, I believe my sheer zeal for writing has encountered a saturation point, leading me to create a beautiful new artifice that I sincerely hope will bring peace and light and fun into the lives of people still many generations to come. here's where we turn from the Gerber discussion in the past to the writing discussion that's been here all along. There's no better place to change direction than with the very best similarity. I will describe for you the Red Guardian and her introduction in Defenders #35. Then, I will begin talking to you about this idea, Sheer-Zan. ( This turns out to be one of seven pieces found in posts ahead .) To compare Sheer-Zan: One, written over the rest of this month, with Batman: Year One is to strike a very true chord. The years since I last read that story reverberated with me on the days I watched students risking their lives in T...

The last column tells you all about Roshomonics, the song cycle, which includes this. “Guardian of the Nexus” “Guardian of the Nexus” 1. She drew a pentagram in the mud of the swamp A world nearby could not delay Some pages she recited, elegance and pomp Za-rehd-Na, from ten thousand years away Told of world shaking doom in another dawn Told of power of Thog the Nether Spawn But the savior arising was itself made of fear The evil stained-world, brought its burning hands near A man destroyed by his pride his own hand Became of the vines and quicksand Though there’s little more to make him man Thing that he is, never had he planned Guardian of the Nexus Guardian of the Nexus Chorus: Though there’s fear in everyone And everyone’s a setting sun Other worlds to eat our pain And one is left with not a thing to gain. I was there to say aloud/ the last ones even left around To crush the pyramid so proud Guardian of the Nexus. 2. Haunted loser’s luck became The way I came to know your name Y...

After soaking my brain in Gerber of late, there's a very short tale of how a couple of responses to writing led to a chain of subconscious that followed me out on my walk to Subway at 2:30 am. The colorful Headmen characters were the first to call forth a rocker: I had the feel for something punk rock that suits the freaky visual aspect of these unique comic book schemers. As I pondered the "Talking Headsmen" soon after I realized my favorite piece of dialog with them, the multi-level ruse of the impostor Jack Norriss seems a promising scene to offer lyrics. In between crossing streets, a Berlin-era Bowie/ Eno flavored tribute to Celestial Mind Control emerges as a second song, after only a block spent with creativity broken loose for "Headmen" by a quick listen to Black Flag before I'd left. After I arrived home, I tried listening for other themes. A couple of tunes started to come along as lyrics, and then, I wrote this one in one sitting. Ladies and ge...

I originally thought I'd have a few hundred words about the passing of the Soviet Union, how its former political existence still effects the world, and what a fine exemplar of humanity Gerber fashioned in the new Red Guardian. Her civilian guise, Tania Belinsky, is called upon by Dr. Stephen Strange to perform a one-of-a-kind surgery: replace the brain of Kyle Richmond within his own body! Meanwhile, a plan of sudden inspiration appears...as Chondu's body is changed in horrible, childish ways by the time his mind is transplanted within one of Ruby's artificial brains. Immortality, however, assures this need not be the end of Chondu's horrible, super-human experience. Instead of discussing the Soviet Union, or the plot, I spent the evening playing a golf video game with my best friend. When do I ever take real time off to enjoy her?

“That’s right,” says the nebbish man, fist clenched, other hand outstretched; despite his sawed-off frame, he is every inch the villain. Some self-help seminar! He’s just tactlessly suggested his audience cover their desire to improve with self-loathing. Oh sure, you might think you can debase yourself and who you have been up till now, as part of the road to change---but however much you might need to clean the slate, so to speak, are you willing to embrace that you are completely ridiculous? In this case, the villain’s real thoughts about humanity show through, dictating his self-righteous approach to helping humanity “save” itself. So, is he doing it for money? Oh, no---he’s actually just doing this because, after his last defeat (despite superhuman “dimension spanning” powers), he was discovered by, and indoctrinated partially by, the Lubderdite race. Upon telling about him, Marc remarked: “he sounds like one of those missionaries that would come to tribal people, kill their ...

Celestial Mind Control! What better way for a super alien to show he believes he is above us, than by terrorizing New York arriving in a completely gratuitous meteor strike? Still, it IS the right way to draw attention, at least. A natural shape shifter, Nebulon becomes a nebbish, slant-shouldered, uneviable bald little man with glasses, soon as he steps from the flames, surrounded by police. He explains, he’s just coming to work...he can travel to work this way, any time he wants. And so can they. “Want to learn about it?” Celestial Mind Control! From above, scanning the streets for his lost Bambi friend, the incredible Hulk bounds to the Earth, accusing “Four Eyes” of taking “Hulk’s friend Bambi!” Why does he do this? Well, Steve clearly wants us to think about that...but because the Hulk’s so, oh, prone to irrationality, his impulse is easy to dismiss, much as Hulk himself dismisses it. But he’s right! Nebulon DID take “Bambi,” or that is, the Lubderites did, for the sake of...

I was wrapping around my head around nuggets such as this, from objective reductionist theory (OR). For some reason, reading this caused a second train of thought in my mind to record an interesting insight, though I can't reasonably explain how, just some similar terminology. Quoth Stuart Hameroff: Every superposition is considered a separation in the underlying structure of spacetime, or fabric of the universe, with each branch of the separation evolving separately—resulting in two different universes. The universe divides like a living cell into two nearly identical copies. Roger (Penrose) agreed that superpositions are indeed separations in the underlying spacetime fabric, or geometry of the universe. He pointed out that Einstein’s general relativity meant that matter was equivalent to curvature in spacetime, so that a particle in two places is the same as simultaneous spacetime curvatures in opposite directions—a bubble in the underlying fabric of reality. But in Roger’s view...

This is what mowing the lawn sounds like.

Having fun? We’re over a year into Steve Gerber’s Defenders run, from the days when I still ate my share of Gerber, no doubt. It may be one of your favorites, it may be you just discovered them. If I’ve done my job, you don’t even have to like comic books to appreciate what an unusual entity Steve’s slant on superhero comics truly was; there’s no doubt his approach inspired many of the field’s most lauded talents, and, I suspect , many creative people who went into other directions. I hope a lot of kids grew up, if never again to read comics, to fondly half-remember these strangest and most fun comic books of days gone by. Come to it like a little child and you’ll find imagination heaven inside! “I think we’re all Bozos in this Book!” we've got: Nebulon, the Celestial Man...the most glam rock of super villain designs. School of scaly Lubberdites... and Jack Norriss, as....le Beaver. Naw! Something WAY more outlandish than that. Say it with me: His consciousness resides in...

Remember: as Steve Gerber was wont to say, "the joke is, there IS no joke." All Howard's done since Le Beaver tumbled from his tightrope above Niagara Falls is hallucinate, with stream of consciousness free word association and restless sleep. Beverly Switzler stands over the exhausted duck; she worries that the doctor's declared a nervous breakdown. She agrees to go for coffee with him. That's when Howard finally awakens, still dealing with some dementia. (Remember, he's not a cartoon, he's a flesh and blood being with limits to how much disruption and absurdity he can handle, because while he'd be content to walk away from what will needlessly complicate his life, it's followed him everywhere since arriving on Earth.) In this state he finds Bev at the coffee shop, but rather than go in, he storms off in self-pity and spends the last of his "campaign money" on the next bus out of town. Great gesture. The vendor tried to warn him. T...

I love Ruth Hart's run in the early stories of the Man-Thing comic book series, precisely because she opts on her own to participate, and decides on her own to move on. She is the protagonistic opposite number to the Man-Thing, who relies utterly upon the emotions of others for his motivation. Ruth's source is herself. That is how she walks away from both the man she rode into town with (who set her up as double-crosser of the whole cycle gang he's double crossing) and even the cooler, trustworthy misfit guy Richard Rory, who helps her break free, on account of the bizarre weirdness that is relentlessly Rich's Citrusville companion. They'd both just stumbled into this life where he's taken residence, if not shelter; but much as she likes him, she decides maybe she's never done anything real after all. Her plans for leaving town would not involve stopping to load a muck monster into a van to visit Atlanta. But that's Rich for you. Why not throw in ...

Beverly Switzler is as much a part of the Howard the Duck stories as Steve Gerber himself. Beverly, like Amber and Ruth Hart from Omega the Unknown, make these two wonderful titles Gerber wrote in the latter part of the 1970's while working freelance for Marvel Comics, as he'd moved to New York City to do in 1972, I believe. All three were created by his collaborator, writer Mary Skrenes. why not imagine jet setting the globe in Epicurian splendor? When I was searching the apartment for change, I started telling Angela about Bev, scrounging those two quarters so she and her weird new best friend could have a candy bar. In direct contrast to Howard, she is never upset about the things that bother him. While she has fears only when they seem relatively sensible, it's those times Howard seems unafraid, and just enough unworried, even. His worrying is absurd to her, but she's not really hung up about his trip. Howard is a fantastic creature in our world,...