Mansonites Converge at El Coyote

http://www.laweekly.com/2009-08-13/columns/the-last-supper/

The Last Supper: Mansonites Converge at El Coyote
By Skylaire Alfvegren
August 12, 2009

El Coyote is Movieland’s idea of a Mexican restaurant: The lighting is garish, the margaritas stiff. Waitresses clad in petticoated, off-the-shoulder cotton fiestas have been serving, as they call it, “authentic California-style Mexican food” to actors and others since 1931, but the blood-red leather booth in the back played host to its most infamous party on the night of August 8, 1969, when actress Sharon Tate dined there with Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger. Later that night, the group would be slain by followers of Charles Manson in Tate’s home at 10050 Cielo Drive. Tall, blond, and forever gripping a camcorder, odd-teur Jon Aes-Nihil (director of the gory cult classic Manson Family Movies) gathered his unusual band of miscreants for “the Last Supper” this past Saturday night, as he has done every August 8 since 1979. Manson’s long-standing appeal? “It was the first time the hippies struck back,” one diner commented. Or was it?

Never a true crime buff nor serial-killer dilettante, I had long viewed Manson symbolically — a guitar-strumming ecoterrorist with a Messiah complex, who effectively extinguished the Age of Aquarius, but on this, the 40th anniversary of the Tate/LaBianca slayings, a different picture emerged.

Manson, suspected of being both an FBI informant and agent provocateur, may well have been a patsy. “The FBI took out the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the Weather Underground, and it’s a contention that the murders were orchestrated,” author Adam Gorightly pointed out between sips from a margarita. Manson’s connections to military intelligence, the Church of Scientology, government-sponsored mind-control experiments and the ’60s occult underground ripple through The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Gorightly’s definitive Manson tome, recently rereleased by Creation Books.

Manson referred to his family as “slippies,” and only grew his hair long in the months preceding the murders; but because of Manson, “it was a long time before you saw longhairs portrayed in a positive light.”

Aes-Nihil’s group of historians, writers, musicians and filmmakers traded stories of the weird, twisted Hollywood of old, attracting the attention of a pudgy industry type who, with no prompting, described the “peaceful vibe” surrounding Tate’s house when Trent Reznor recorded “Helter Skelter” there with a not-yet-famous Marilyn Manson. Archivist Aes-Nihil (short for “aesthetic nihilism”) poked his ever-present camera in the man’s face, adding to the hundreds of hours of Manson-related footage he’s acquired over the decades, smirking all the while.

In all the years I’d known Aes-Nihil, I’d always thought it was the Family’s creep factor that had attracted him. But “there’s infinitely more to the Manson thing than Tex Watson killing people,” he explained. “I’m obsessed with the effect the murders had on the ’60s, since I was there, part of a group somewhat like the Family. When the story came out, we didn’t believe it for a second.”

A man of few words, he resumed shooting the party’s chatter: Church of Satan founder Anton La Vey had cursed Tate’s husband, director Roman Polanski, after they’d had a falling-out on the set of Rosemary’s Baby. Drug-addled orgies at the house on Cielo Drive were filmed and later sold on the black market by crooked LAPD cops, who’d stolen them from the crime scene. Family member Patricia Krenwinkel, in correspondence with researcher John Judge, swore she had been a victim of mind control. The acid Manson gave his followers was allegedly of the same, government-issued variety “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz had been dosed with while in the military. Standard dinner-party conversation.

Gathering the assembled for a postdinner portrait, Aes-Nihil continued: “Charlie and Sharon [Tate] have been baptized in the well of eternity via mass culture and universal myth. As for Charlie, he’s a modern-day Nietzsche.” This is apparent, he says, in Manson’s unedited interviews. “If a lot of what Charlie has said had been attributed to someone who is politically correct, it would be hailed as genius.”

I heard him out, knowing that many people don’t, and smiled for his camera.

A most bizarre encounter with Marilyn Manson

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6432653.ece

From The Times
June 5, 2009
A most bizarre encounter with Marilyn Manson
A friendly, forthcoming Marilyn Manson, conspicuous by his absinthe, talks about loose women, drugs and role models
Hugo Rifkind

Hopeless naif that I am, I don’t immediately realise that Marilyn Manson is totally wasted on absinthe. I can see he’s drinking the stuff, but I assume it’s just for show. By the end, though, when he’s showing me the picture on his iPhone of the swastika freshly shaved into his new girlfriend’s pubic hair, I know differently.

“I drew it on,” he’s saying as his publicist ushers him from the room, “with blue eyeliner. I had to call the hotel: ‘Can I have a protractor, please?’ It was 6am. But you gotta, uh, line it up properly. You know?”

Sort of. But that was later. For now, we’re just getting started in a room at the London Metropolitan Hotel. Manson, the self-proclaimed Antichrist Superstar and God of F*** and the major reason why Americans tend to be scared of their goths and not just snigger at them as we do, has an album to promote.

He didn’t want to come in here with me. He wanted to stay next door with that statuesque blonde, the one with the enormous heels and tiny Lycra dress. I don’t know who she is. I do know that she’s not the new girlfriend, the one with the unusual pelvic topiary. I checked. Different face.

Manson was out last night, downstairs in the Met Bar. I have a hunch that last night might not have ended yet. Today he is wearing huge sunglasses, streaky make-up, black lipgloss and a black hooded top with the hood up at which he keeps pushing, as though it were hair. He has leather trousers on and black platform boots. The window behind us keeps rattling, and he keeps thinking it is gunfire. Little details of his evening filter out.

“Somebody left a knife in my room,” he growls, in that crackly, gravelly voice. “Like, a proper small knife? I almost used it. On a woman. But then I thought . . . no. I didn’t have a shovel or anything. And the airport, immigration, can’t bury her in the shower curtain . . .” Like all the horrible things that Manson says, this is said with a disarmingly sweet smile. You laugh. There’s wit here, peeking out through the aniseed haze. Later he’ll feel his side, and frown. “I caused . . . I have a bruise. It goes from here to here. I don’t know where it came from. That means I had a good night. Loose women. Intoxicated on loose women.”

Manson has his own brand of absinthe, dubbed Mansinthe. That’s not what he’s drinking at the moment. “I don’t drink my own absinthe,” he says. “I drink this. It’s Serpis. I based the taste of mine on it. It’s like black liquorice, which I f***in’ hate. Try it,” he adds, passing me the glass. “Mmmm,” I say, sniffing deeply. I pass it back.

The High End of Low is Manson’s seventh album. It’s funny, you’ll almost certainly have heard of him, but could you could name any of his songs? It’s 15 years since he burst on to the public consciousness on MTV, with the video of his death metal cover of Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams. Remember that? Him painted black, riding a pig? “That pig,” he says, “did not want to be ridden. And I did not want to ride it. I have ridden no other pigs. That sounds like such a misogynist statement.”

Manson was born plain Brian Warner in Ohio in 1969, and was actually not, contrary to the best showbiz hoax ever, the geeky one out of The Wonder Years. What he was, briefly, was a rock journalist, before starting his first band, Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. He finally emerged, all those years ago, from under the wing of the producer Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails. The debut album, Portrait of an American Family (1994), sold two and a half million copies.

The next, Smells Like Children (1995), sold four million. The third, Antichrist Superstar (1996), has sold nearly eight million. Musically speaking, none were exactly ground-breaking, but look behind the bondage, Nazis, Satanism, death fetishism and long black fingernails and you’ll find a perfectly respectable sort of industrial metal, maybe halfway between Reznor himself and Guns N’ Roses. Manson, though, was always about the whole package.

“I’m not trying to be something that is simply a clown,” he rasps. “I’m a role villain. Role models are mannequins. I want to be the person who f***s shit up.” Then he flinches. “Is that guns?” he says. It’s the window, I tell him again.

Britain, I think, struggles a bit with Marilyn Manson. He’s all-American in his own way, and we don’t really get the references. Most crucially, we just don’t think he really means it. We just see a sort of zombie Boy George, pretending. He knows this, and minds it. “This has always been the most cynical and calculating country,” he says, “and the country I most want to impress. All my heroes are British, whether it’s Aleister Crowley or Bowie. All the best art has come from your godforsaken island. And it makes me mad.”

Just because we don’t get it, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to get. In America Manson remains a poster boy for the disaffected. A fortnight ago Justin Doucet, a schoolboy in Louisiana, forced a teacher to say “Hail Marilyn Manson” before shooting at him and then shooting himself. Manson brings this up himself. “What do I say?” he says. “Thanks for hiring that kid to promote the record? No! It’s f***ed up. I didn’t say do it. But I get blamed for it.”

Ten years ago, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher in the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, it was swiftly reported that both were Manson fans. Two years later, when he next played in the state capital, Denver, he was still receiving death threats. “I had, like, 30 undercover cops escorting me to the stage,” he says. “Everyone was telling me not to do it. My girlfriend, my friends. I had my mother on the phone, Hunter S. Thompson going ‘F*** ’em! Come to my house! I got a tank!’ And onstage, at every moment, I thought it was the last thing I’d do.”

Fifteen minutes before going on he was being interviewed by the film-maker Michael Moore. “Boning for Concubines,” says Manson now, meaning Bowling for Columbine, Moore’s documentary about gun control. To almost everybody’s surprise, Manson came across as a calm, lucid voice, discussing the problems of a society that celebrated war and consumption. When Moore asked him what he would have said to the killers, Manson replied that he wouldn’t say anything. “I’d listen to what they had to say,” he said. “And that’s what nobody did.”

“I don’t like that movie,” he says now. “But I like the fact that it opened a window for me, to have people go, ‘Oh wow, you’re smart.’ Because they saw me in that movie and I could form two sentences. And last week . . . you hear that? Is it firecrackers?”

Window, I tell him. “Oh yeah,” he says, and carries on. Doucet, the schoolboy, is in a coma now. “And of course,” Manson says, “he was 15. Because that’s my number. Marilyn Manson, 15. Brian Hugh Warner, 15. Look.” He pulls down his T-shirt and there, below his neck, is tattooed the number 15. Why? God knows. I ask. He just says “15” again, and I count the letters in “Marilyn Manson”. That’s when I ask him how much absinthe he’s had today. He replies with a diagram, drawn on my notebook. It’s a rectangle, coloured in. “Is that glass,” I ask, “or a bottle?” “It’s life,” he says.

Marilyn Manson isn’t 15. He turned 40 in January. It looks a bit different, all this dark lord of gothic angst business, when you’re 40, doesn’t it? “The 40 part doesn’t matter,” he says, although he sounds a bit annoyed. “God decided to forsake me so I became a vampire, sold my soul to the Devil and f*** off, good luck to the rest of you.”

He says he’s not slowing down as he gets older, not at all, and still takes drugs whenever he can. “I learnt a new lesson,” he says. “Do drugs and drink when you are in a good mood, not in a bad mood. And you’ll be happier.” This failure to calm down reportedly had a lot to do with the breakup of his marriage in 2007 to Dita Von Teese, the burlesque artist.

They went to court, famously, over who was to get custody of their three cats. “I saw her two days ago,” he says. “At a bar. And I was like, ‘Hey, you’re my ex-wife!’ And we got along well. So that was nice.” And who got the cats in the end? “She got the boy cats. I got the virgin girl cat.” He pauses. “Did you know that if you say ‘in the end’ it infers anal sex?”

No, I say, and I ask him if he has a girlfriend at the moment. “No,” he says, and thinks. “Yes,” he says, “but I’m single.” After Von Teese he was involved with the actress Evan Rachel Wood, but that’s not who he is talking about. That’s when he starts hunting for the swastika picture. He won’t tell me her name out loud, but he writes it down on my notebook. Stoya. Later I Google her. She’s a Serbo-Scottish porn star, aged 22.

He’s fun to chat to, Marilyn Manson, absinthe or not. But I just don’t think the Antichrist Superstar and God of F** is in a particularly good place right now. Maybe it’s an existential panic. The corpse-in-black-lipstick look, it’s getting old. He must know that. Who wears black platforms in 2009? And also, I just keep thinking about that swastika. At a push, I can see how a certain kind of guy might find it exciting. But at 40? Still? I suppose he does really mean it, and always has. Poor guy.

The High End of Low is released by Polydor. Manson plays the Download Festival, Donington Park, Derby, on June 13

Manson Accused Of Buying Skeleton

Things you didn't know you could find in the Sharper Image catalogue...

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1294097,00.html

Manson Accused Of Buying Skeleton
Friday November 23, 2007

Shock rock singer Marilyn Manson has been accused of squandering his band's profit on a child's skeleton and masks made of human skin.

Keyboardist Stephen "Pogo" Bier filed a breach of contract lawsuit in August in which he accused Manson of taking cash belonging to the rest of the band to pay for the "sick and disturbing" purchases.

His lawyer Keith Fink has now filed additional papers adding to a list of artefacts bought by the goth singer- many of which are illegal in the US.

As well as the skeleton and masks, Manson is said to have bought a range of stuffed animals, including a grizzly bear and two baboons.

He is also accused of using band funds to pay for a collection of Nazi memorabilia.

Swastika wall tiles with matching custom rugs and Nazi government coat hangers owned by Adolf Hitler are allegedly on display in Manson's Californian mansion, according to legal papers.

When interviewed on MTV after Bier filed the original lawsuit, Manson said: "The fact that he's claiming that I've treated him unfairly, financially, is really ridiculous."

"And I would never spend my money on a Chinese girl skeleton. That would be crossing the line. It's a Chinese boy, for the record."

Bier is seeking damages and lawyers fees from millionaire Manson as well as his slice of the successful band's profit.