Today, Satan! EP Music Videos

The Today, Satan! EP may not be available until October 31, 2019, but until then, you can get your Shiny Red Nothing fix with these wicked cool music videos of new songs from the EP!

Enjoy, friends!

A Ghost At The Door

Recently, we discovered a church that we enjoy in great part due to its inclusiveness. Whoever you are, whatever you believe, the doors are open to you. We learned of the church from an atheist family that we know. A transexual rode the elevator with us. There’s a statue of Buddha in one hall and an Islamic mosaic in another. Today’s program featured a child’s painting of the solar system. It simply said, “Hope” on the front.

The sermon included biblical quotes juxtaposed against quotes from Twain and Einstein, two outspoken opponents to the idea of a personal god. It felt more like a relaxed lecture than a sermon. Despite flagrant liberalism, there was an even handed diplomacy to what was being said. The preacher acknowledged that on the many limbed creature of democratic politics, the liberals may be on the left, and the conservatives may be on the right, but both are equally necessary to the life of the beast.

Anyways, this morning’s talk was about hope versus desire and the spiritual quest to know the difference inside of oneself. For me, “desire” is sensual whereas “hope” is sublime. As a devout atheist, I think I can safely say I hope for wisdom, but I desire truth. Truth can be subjective, but if I’m wise enough, perhaps I can be objective in my search for it. Wisdom is a cool breeze through your window on a sunny day. Truth is a ghost at the door.

The truth is, the piece of art that inspired this post is not pornography, though there has been an argument made that it is. Facebook removed it from my personal Facebook page once, issuing me a warning about violating their fuzzy and non debatable obscenity rules. Zazzle, a website which allows its users to create their own personalized merchandise, also removed “A Ghost at the Door” and all of the merchandise I created with it from their website, also claiming that I violated their obscenity policy.

Lucky for me, Zazzle allowed a rebuttal. I wrote to them post haste:

“To whom it may concern,

I was recently notified that my piece, “A Ghost At The Door,” was being removed from Zazzle because the “Design contains text or image that is obscene, pornographic, or nudity that is not artistic in nature.” I believe this to be an unfit and unfair description of my work. I do not see this image as being pornographic. It is provocative, yes, and it has something to say about sexuality, but in my opinion, it is done tastefully. Is a vagina pornographic? We were all born from one, so I would prefer to imagine that we could acknowledge the existence of vaginas without becoming offended because we’ve seen one.

This piece is about the mysteries of God, new life, and consciousness. It was not designed to arouse physically; it was designed to arouse intellectually and spiritually. I am offended that Zazzle has claimed the piece to contain “nudity that is not artistic in nature,” and I respectfully request your reconsideration.

Thank you for your time, and thank you for your wonderful platform for artists; besides the case in point, I have been very pleased with what Zazzle offers the likes of me.

Cheers,
Jeremiah Strickland”

As I hoped they would, The Zazzle Team, in their infinite wisdom, restored my artwork to the website. I’d like to think that they recognized the piece as both sensual and sublime, but regardless of their reasoning, it’s always nice to feel a sense of inclusion.

TOTB 2: The Birdman vs Loretta Lynn and the Apocalyptic Zombies

Listen, before you go any further, you should know that Tales of the Birdman is intended for mature audiences only. The views expressed within do not reflect the views of WordPress, Shiny Red Nothing, or myself. Read at your own risk and enjoy. Life’s too short to be offended.

Tales Of The Birdman by Wayne Bird

I: Keeping Our Vices Warm

2: The Birdman vs Loretta Lynn and the Apocalyptic Zombies

If you are reading this and you are the one who fucked my girlfriend, Sally, then I am going to kick your ass. We have decided that we will stay together despite her transgression, as this is a young relationship and it was childish revenge for a childish fight. She was mad at me for tricking her into eating pot brownies, a harmless prank by my estimation, but she found it to be evil and without thought or regard to her negative history with potheads like her parents and an ex-boyfriend. She totally flipped out. It was kind of awesome in a sick kind of way.

I should tell you that we had just made up after fighting about my previous experimentations with the drug. I promised I wouldn’t do it anymore, and, like a complete idiot, I listened to her stories of drug abuse and neglect and still thought it would be a funny prank. I figured that once she experienced getting high, it would be all rainbows and Jimi Hendrix guitar solos. No. It was more like Gone With The Wind. High drama. And we were burned like Atlanta, her crying and barely coping with paranoia. The possibility of her brain chemistry being forever altered and random piss tests at work, which had never happened before, kept her up for hours. I should tell you that I bought the pot from Bruce, who supposedly got it off a guy who smuggled it over from Hawaii and referred to it as “Hawaiian Thai-Stick.” I will neither confirm nor deny this claim, but I will say that Bruce believes that he is visited by a succubus whenever he is horny, and one time this succubus tied his hands to his wheelchair with the red shoestrings of her Doc Martins.

So, like I said, Sally was out of her mind for hours. Having only tried it five times, I am not much of authority, but I thought it was pretty killer stuff. Whatever that is worth to you. I finally managed to placate her by giving her my Moldy Peaches CD (she had already stolen it anyway) and by going out and buying her three cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. She broke up with me the next day. I found this shocking because I had not broken up with her for punching me in the face and giving me a black eye last week. Also, she cited my writing about our personal relationship in this column, and said she hated me for calling her “VD” instead of Sally in it.

Bruce threatened to introduce me to country music upon hearing my story. I was not elated by this prospect: why would I want to listen to stupid country music while trying to come down from what was possibly one of the worst days of my life? It was only a month, but I really liked Sally. I have always hated country music. My mother listened to commercial country radio constantly while I was growing up, and it made me suicidal. How can anyone with enough intelligence to brush their teeth listen to Garth Brooks or Randy Travis? I won’t even get into Toby Keith or Grethen Wilson here. It’s such drivel. Easy sentiment. Heart wrenching stories. Angels living among us.

The Christmas after my grandfather died, my mom acquired the single for Alabama’s “Angels Among Us.” The song tells a few tales of angels intervening in human matters during the verses, which I can’t remember, but the chorus is riveted to my memory. The chorus goes: “I believe there are angels among us / sent down to us from somewhere up above / they come to you and me in our darkest hour / teach us how live / show us how to give / lead us with a light of love.” These are hard points to argue with my mother when she tells me that the song reminds her of her recently deceased father.

But Bruce insists that country music is the only way to deal with a broken heart. He suggests, in between sips of his rum and Coke, that I should connect with my roots in an effort to fully appreciate the album. Not my negative experiences with my mother, but through my family tree, which, just a couple of generations ago, was growing like an old oak in the mountains of Kentucky. This is why he gives me (not lends, but gives) “Van Lear Rose” by Loretta Lynn.

I listen to it one day at work, think: “Corny,” and turn it off. I work part time on campus in a computer lab, basically just answering phones (eliminating headphones), watching over things, and answering the questions of the lab patrons. They complain about the music sometimes, but I don’t care. I don’t play the music very loud, and it’s only vaguely audible over the hum of computers and printing printers.

I was intrigued because “Van Lear Rose” was produced by Jack White, and gave it another chance on the strength of it’s song, “Portland, Oregon.” It wasn’t long before it was in heavy rotation at work, one of the ten CD’s found in my CD booklet I keep there to annoy the “lab rats,” what I call the annoying regulars who show up every day to play an online role playing game about vampires. The next song to hit me was “God Makes No Mistakes” and it’s partner, “Women’s Prison.” Here is the crazy thing: I couldn’t get over how corny it was, but I was drawn to it. First of all, the arrangement is spectacular. Besides blending a powerful southern gospel song into a country- rocker about a woman on death row, the end of “Women’s Prison” has this moment when the music dies into the ghosts or pedal steel and organ. It’s a beautiful noise and somewhere underneath Mrs. Lynn mumbles inaudibly. Then it explodes, the musical equivalent of an orgasm.

A ritual developed from it. I had to turn it off anytime I was drawn away from my desk. Interuption during either of my favorite songs disturbed me- became hard to deal with over the course of the next couple of days. I started to listen to it over and over again. The songs had begun to affect me on another level. It was Sunday Mornings at church with my grandmother back home in Indiana. It was being little and visiting my cousins in the county. It was being embarassed by my cousin Angie. It was her uncle, crying in his beer every night, listening to country music on the radio, whiskey bottle and telephone close at hand.

When I was a kid, I refused to accept that I was a hillbilly. My dad was always quick to tell me that I was, and it infuriated me every time. I wanted nothing to do with that. I was modern. I was urban. In retrospect, I realize I had loved growing up in a small town, but like any other kid in any other town, I would always claim to hate it. The people were kind and generous. They were genuine. The fact that it bore more than a passing resemblance to Mayberry, North Carolina also added charm. The mayor was my barber. I attended the grand opening of a Wal-Mart.

The album sank it’s hooks deep into the recesses of my hillbilly brain. I brought it home a few days ago to listen to it in headphones, something to help pass the recently lonely nights. I stopped off at Bruce’s to get drunk first, and he spent my entire visit talking about zombies, his obsession. He claims to think about them for at least, but not limited to, six hours a day. He dreams about them most nights. He considers scenarios in which he may have to face Mostly, he considers the weapons he will use to destroy them. I should tell you that I think he really believes in the possibility of a zombie attack at end times. So, I walked home in the middle of the night, drunk and paranoid of a zombie attack because: what if all of this war and disaster means the end times are upon us? Bruce’s words, Hawaiin Thai-Stick, and years of macaabre conditioning were freaking me out.

When I was fifteen, the conditioning was working so well that I became a Sunday School teacher. Our old one left for Florida and the only other volunteer was a sweet but illiterate lady. I was to be the man for the job until she learned to read enough to take over. This was no problem for me, as I have six younger siblings and have always known how to work with children. I was an instant hit, my group made up mostly of junior-high school aged kids.

In my last column, I told you I would tell you this story. I was doing the Sunday School thing every week for about five weeks when my cousin, Darlene, another member of the flock, accused her stepfather of molesting her. I was so disturbed by this event that I decided to take it upon myself to teach my students how to avoid sexual predators, which was not a bad idea. The bad idea was teaching them the facts of life first. The way I saw it: How can you understand one if you can’t fathom the other?

None of this is important now because Darlene made that shit up, and I’m an athiest now- at least, that’s what I was thinking while walking home from Bruce’s on that bitterly cold night, despising every cloud of breath that I exhaled. At home, I put the headphones on and pulled the covers up over my head. I listened to “Van Lear Rose” at full volume for the first, complete, uninterupted time.

I laughed at the corniness of the title track. I gave a “fuck yeah” (the official I See Sound comment of musical approval) to my favorite blue blanket as Jack and Loretta have a drunken but unregretted one night stand in “Portland, Oregon.” I come to realize that “High On A Mountaintop” could have been a hit song on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. I take in each and every word on the brilliantly delivered spoken word piece “Little Red Shoes.”

I had an epiphany near the end of “Women’s Prison.” At the end, when the ghosts of pedal steel and organ are lingering about and Lynn is mumbling underneath- well, she’s not mumbling. She’s quietly singing “Amazing Grace.” This realization made me cry, conjouring the image of my cousin Angie’s drunken uncle, crying in his beer to country music on the radio, waiting on his phone call. I cried myself to sleep and dreamed that I was teaching the story of Abraham and Isaac to my Sunday School class when the zombies began their attack.

Sally called me the next morning in tears. She had also went out to get drunk the night before, at a club with some friends, and had gone home with some frat boy. She awoke in the morning to find that he had already left, the mystery man passed out on the floor not willing to wake up and remind her of her lover’s name.

I forgive her, and I will honestly tell you that I have no hard feelings. At least, not any I can’t deal with rationally (except, maybe, my overwhelming hatred for that frat boy, whom I conveniently lay the blame for everything upon). I can’t tell you exactly how I can feel so serene toward’s VD after all of this, but I can, in all sincerity, tell you it was not the fear of losing her to an apocolyptic zombie attack. But that’s part of it.