The psychobilly band Nekromantix has become pretty big on the US west coast. Fun for me, for I know the founder and cornerstone, Kim, from back in Denmark in the early nineties. Him and his then-girlfriend, super cute Pernille, published a magazine for which I was writing articles.
"We park by the cemetery thats our 'lovers lane'
That might be bizarre to some but not this here Dane"
Their music is quite narrow in style, but of course why mess with a working thing, and I did enjoy their first two albums back then, Hellbound and Curse of the Coffin.
I was visiting Kim and Pernille one day, and one of the early members of the band had just left in a huff, and taken his artwork (a big skull) for their tee-shirt with him, damned if they would be allowed to use this now. And Kim was drawing pupils in the eyes of the skull, figuring this would make it a different drawing so he could continue to use it.
We were discussing how art fares in the smaller size of the CD as opposed to vinyl covers, and to my embarrassment I kept humming Howling At The Moon, I did not want to seem like fanboy.
This was a couple of years before I got my first computer, and Pernille showed me their new Macintosh and how they could make drawings on it. Later she accidentally walked into a classical greek sculpture which was standing on her floor, hurting her shin. I helped her do a "contact assist", and she told me next day that she was surprised that she did not have a huge bruise like she normally would have. I said we needed to protect our beautiful assets.
Man, this "contact assist" is some weird stuff.
ReplyDeleteThen again, so is the song! ;-)
I have my disagreements with Scientology, but the contact assist is good. It works from the simple and universal healing principle that pain (mental and physical) persists where you refuse to face it, and dissolves when you stop resisting it.
ReplyDeleteI must say, I'd love to dismiss this unnerving method as pure bull, I really would. But it's not at all this simple.
ReplyDeleteWillpower and/or mental attitude can greatly tone down pain and even bleeding, it's scientifically proven. Football players with a sprained ankle frequently only feel it when the focus and excitement of the game are over.
Similarly, some imbalanced mental states (not necessarily psychoses/madness at all) can see pain and even wounds appear sometimes. I don't think all cases of christic stigmata are just self-inflicted, consciously or unconsciously.
And I'm not even going to expand on how mere belief in some batty old hag's curse can give a credulous man permanent impotence.
Shucks, even sterility, sometimes. Typically, you see some couples who have been trying to conceive for years in vain. Finally they decide to adopt, obtain a child, and all of a sudden the woman gets pregnant! Not always, but it's been known to happen.
The mind is part of the body (or vice-versa, according to some). This means that the mysteries of the body will never be fully solved until all the enigmas of the human mind are penetrated as well.
Which might well be never. We only have the mind as a tool to study the mind, in the end. And its potential complexity is mathematically infinite.
I'll also remind of that true story I mentioned years ago, of a sailor (or docker?) who accidentally got locked in the cold chamber of a cargo ship for the whole trip. The empty chamber wasn't turned on, but the man died of cold, writing the testimony of his long agony on the walls, simply because he was certain he WOULD be dying of cold.
I'm not going to claim the opposite would allow you to survive comfortably in the Antarctic winter if stranded, but it might help. And buy you time enough for rescue teams to find you...
Same in the Sahara, I reckon, if you're not too dried up.