"Ogre" is splicing. Gary is suggesting. Cyan is smoking. And I'm watching - - for the umpteenth time - - a Indy Car pit crew member get completely flattened, whipped to the pavment, DEAD. "Make The Image Move Slower," Gary says. "Ogre" rewinds the film with the instrument that Resembles a joystick, punches a few keys on the computer, and we watch it again, slower. The joystick can track the film Fast-Forward or Frame-by-Frame. "Tweaking" they call it. They have been working 14 to 15 hours a night tweaking away, creating specific films for each song. If Dwayne were here, I'm sure he could create a quick-edged "THWAMP-ing" noise for the guy who becomes one with the pavment, The action is so out of the ordinary it looks unreal. But It's Real. Each time we watch the guy get flattened, our reactions are heightened, much like a crowd response to instant replays of near-amazing feats in sports. Ogre tweaks it back and splices it in twice. Twin Tweaks: 20 minutes of work for 10 seconds of film. "THWAMP!" "THWAMP!" Gary is moving back and forth in his swival chair like he's about to wet his pants. "Oh Yes! Yes! Look at that! It's classic Ogre." "Gary...." Cyan says. "This is almost sexual for you." Gary mimes jacking-off, grabbing what would be a monstrosity of an appendage. Bill ( the editing godsend ) comes in from an adjacent side studio, where he and Cyan had been "fine-tuning" Ogre's films. It's break time. Bill sneaks up behind Ogre and jabs him right below his ribs ( a tweaking of sorts ), hard enough to create a short spasm of startle. Ogre Yells ("WHOA!"), squirms and laughs. This is one of those tiresome rituals that continues only because of the victim's reactions ( this time it was Ogre ), which gave everyone in the room a good laugh. The element of surprise is the key. Gary get ups, hands me this flimsy blue book that he and Ogre continuously swap while working. "Ahhhh, The Blue Book". I'm curious. I open it. It's their personal Beta catalogue of grisly images, meticulously organized: categorized by movie title, image, how long the image runs, and where the image exisists on the tape. There are four medium-sized shelves filled with these Beta cassettes. Bill sits down to view the latest segment of splicing. Gary is holding a lighter beneath Bill's ass. We're up to the human pancake scene. "THWAMP!" "THWAMP!" Ogre: "I've taken some falls in my life, but this is ridiculous." Bill twitches forward, "Damn that's hot!" Ogre laughs. Bill quickly jabs him. "Whao!" Ogre tweaks the film back. We watch it three more times. "Thwamp!" "Thwamp!" "Thwamp!"...

Out of the volkswagon and into a small cafe. Coffee. Chocolate pastries. Having slept for an hour, I'm in dire need of sugar. We sit against the wall. Cevin faces the congested street. I face the noisy kitchen. I ask him if h'es seen any of the films Ogre is making. "Bits and pieces," he says. "I'd rather see the finished product." Whereas Ogre creates the backing visuals for the tour, Cevin and Dwayne create "the reason for us to even be up onstage," Cevin says. "We could very well have a backing tape and stand behind synths playing two notes on the keyboard, but we've decided to physicallly strain ourselves and learn additional parts along with what we've allready written. We know were gonna play these songs, and they're gonna be songs we can preform differently every night." Cevin on drums. Dwayne on keys. Two turtlenecked yuppies sit down besides us - - they're named Thurston and Phoebe, I'm sure. They're discussing the sub-textual meaning of oat bran in television (or something), with the affected tone of pseudo coffee house intellectuals. I note this because it's a white bread pageant of self-absorbed futuristic Hell. As for Cevin, I don't think he notices. He appears more attuned to utilizing the combined noises of the cafe to create a soundtrack for the action he watches outside. "Usually I start off with a sound that exisists in the world allready," he says, exploring his modus operandi of writing music, "Like a sound from the radio. I'll flip through the dial, hit the sample button on the keyboard, and I'll get this sound - - which may or may not inspire me. If it does, I'll build the rhythm into [it] and then work a song into that weird rhythm. This isn't how I do every song, but its a typical example of how I like to work. It's totally at the will of the waves. So its not so mush [that] I'm creating the songs as I'm helping them come to life. It exisists allready in some form; right now there's a song out there waiting.... It must sound crazy." I dont think so, but Thurston and Phoebe have subsided their oat-bran blatherings and are painfully obvious in their eavesdropping when Cevin begins to talk of Skinny Puppy's birth. "One day we were hanging out at this place, we had gotten high or something like that. Ogre was just a friend who was allways good at.... the song would be playing and he'd just sit there and go {makes garbling sound}. I said 'fuck, that sounds pretty good, why dont we put that down.' So we did. Ogre laid the vocals down and we had our first song ("Canine"). It was some loopy concept of ours: Life Seen Through A Dog's Eyes." Cevin rhythmically rubs his stubble with his knuckles, pauses, and laughs. "Actually I don't even remember naming the band. I dont even remember saying, 'This band is called Skinny Puppy.' One day I woke up and it was on the tape." As Cevin and I continue to talk, Thurston and Phoebe exit quietly - - exactly opposite from the way they entered.

Artificially created, monosyllabic tech-noise from the mouth music of Dwayne: "piszzzzshew"....... He's re-creating the sounds his mother heard from the first keyboard he ever bought. "I saved up $800.00 dollars, started hanging around music shops, and bought a little MS20 Korg, I didn't even tell my parents. I'm up in my room, my mom walks in and she's like ( Dwayne hits an "it-it-live-or-Memorex" falsetto ), 'What's that!' And Im sitting there with all these little keys and buttons going "Piszzzzzshew...." Cannily, hoping he'll make the noise again, I ask, "What was that?" I realize I probably jus sounded like his mother. Dwayne continues on about growing up in Edmonton. "I hated high-school," he says with a repellent laugh. "I went into the system one way and came out of grade 12 exactly the opposite. But I didn't even know I was rebelling that's teen-agers and rock culture have been doing all along. I grew up hating AC/DC, the status quo and all that. It wasn't until afterwards that I realized I was saying 'Fuck you' to this shit." Dwayne mentions his "trumpeting days" twice, both times creating a brassy sounding riff - - "Dadada - DA - da - DAH." I feel like yelling "Charge!" I was learning notes, and chords and all the theory. All it did was set me in boundaries that I didn't think I could go outside of. Cevin, on the other hand, learned everything by instinct. He doesn't know a C major from an F minor and yet he can play really complex things, things that go inside and outside the rules. "He showed me that when you start on a C you can play more than just these certain notes, that you can do what the moment demands of you, instead of looking blindly backwards."

Ask Dwayne, ask Cevin, ask Ogre: "Did you think Skinny Puppy was going to get together after "RABIES?" They'll pause..... "No." They're definitely in cahoots on this. Then, what was the matter? Seemingly, during the creation of "RABIES", Skinny Puppy needed than just a vaccination to keep the group together. Things started to fall apart and no one wanted to take the time to sift through all the rabid babble. Now, as things have been mended, they speak very logically and calmly about the period that created a glacial coldness between the three. While talking with them, I get the feeling that there was never a Skinny Puppy Summit or a Group Hug which ultimately settled "1989's" differences. Rather a natural, individual coming-to-grips with the situation melted the ice, for they each seem to have their own therapeutic reasons and answers. This is one deep pool, Take a deep breath.

-{ DWAYNE }-

Out of the three, Dwayne seems to be the only one to have handled the situation with a Zen-like attitude. In fact, when we begin to talk about "RABIES", the first thing he brings up is the fact that "the album cover didn't turn out all to well." That's just for starters. "There are some great things on "RABIES" for all of us, but on a whole, how it came off was less within the Skinny Puppy vision. And things were up in the air: we weren't doing the tour, we weren't supporting the album, Ogre was in Chicago satisfying a lot of things that weren't being satisfied in Vancouver or in Puppy, and obviously Cevin and myself were satisfying alot of things we wanted to do. Just the fact that there was so much satisfaction coming from outside Skinny Puppy led to that feeling of, 'The End."

-{ CEVIN }-

Cevin, on the other hand, was more bitter about the ordeal. From the very beginning, when Ogre was on tour with Ministry, Cevin was pointedly skeptical. "RABIES" came out with "Al Jourgensen's" name lopped onto it. The influence was heard, hands down. "We wrote "RABIES" before "Al" was ever involved," Cevin says . "But when we did write it. we were thinking about the fact that "Al" might come in the studio and jam." "So we're thinking," Dwayne says. "What would "Jourgensen" like? Well, he would like this." "So we came up with songs like 'Tin Omen' and 'Fascist Jock Itch'," Cevin says. Dwayne: "We were allready guitaring out before he got there. But "Al" could play it and he had more power and control over those sounds. None of us can plug a guitar into a Marshal amp and go "Arn, arn, arn" like he can." Pure Puppy does exist on the album with songs like "Warlock," "River," and "Choralone," but to many critics and fans, "RABIES" sounded like a hybrid os Skinny Puppy and Ministry. This is when Ogre seemingly traded allegiances to join Ministry. "Yeah, I was pissed off." Cevin says, "But I understood why Ogre was doing it. We had been doing Skinny Puppy for eight years and we needed a break. What I got really pissed off about was "Al" - - although I don't have anything against him personally. His motive for the whole thing was to break this band up... At least that's what I feel."

-{ OGRE }-

Ogre was the hub of everyone's concern. Leave? Stay? What was he thinking? What was he gonna do? In his soft monotone: "It's that old saying of divide and conquer. If someone can cut divisions between people, you'll eventually conquer that group of people. Wheras if those people stay together, concentrate, and make decisions for themselves, there is no way a record label, or whoever, can fuck with you. "When we first started Skinny Puppy we never wanted to get anywhere close to being a conventional rock band. We just wanted to create a mood and sustain that mood by using lots of visuals, imagery and theatre. "I'm not too sure about Cevin and Dwayne, but I personally felt that I flopped on "RABIES". When I look back on it, I think I was near a nervous breakdown in a way - - not the classic nervous breakdown where I'm in a straight jacket and frothing at the mouth. [ short laugh.] But I was really unsure of myself and unsure of what I wanted to say and do. The work and artistic environment really weren't there at all either. It was completely negative. With mud being thrown back and forth, there was no trust between the members. There were possibilities of me joining Ministry, but I didn't have a very good time on that tour." "Reasons?" - - "Lots of reasons," Ogre comes up for air. "Al" is a fucking great guy, a real cool person. There are things that I admire about him.... a lot. But there were a few things that happened between me and him that really made me question our whole friendship and his reason for having me down there. So I decided to bow out of the Revolting Cocks tour. If I hadn't, I would have come back totally addicted to heroin. There was rumors that I was fired, that I was a junkie - - I wasn't quite at that point yet, but I was on that sort of final destination. I was plummeting into this pit and had to get out of it."

It is a fact that if you take a frog and place him in a pot of boiling water, he'll immediately jump out. Sounds obvious enough. But, if you take the same frog, place him in water, and gradually bring the water to a boil, the frog will sit in that environment until it ultimately kills him. The frog, quite simply, won't realize the severity of the situation. So happens a slow death. Cooked Kermit. Ogre and I are sitting, talking. The film studio turns off the heat - - completely - - at night. Though Ogre has a stuffed-up nose, he seems accustomed to seeing his breath while indoors. The cigarette he smokes looks as if it keeps him warm. I contemplate taking up smoking. I've allready taken up shivering. The jeans he wears look like they've been run over by a lawn mower - - on purpose, twice - - but where the material gaps, black long underwear fills the void. I asked about the concept behind the album and tour of "TOO DARK PARK" - - The gradual decay of the planet, of humankind consuming itself, "man" actually eating himself away. "It's a very dark dark show, an interpretive descent down a path ranging from a 'personal' to a 'world' perspective." At first, the fact that Ogre couldn't conceptualize a positive ending had him frantic. That is, until he realized that the "message" was not supposed to create the -feel-good-concert-of-the-year-. Man's acceptance of decay isn't natural. It's idiotic. "It's that feeling of going down a road with the knowledge that your breaking down. Yet you continue to travel down that road. Is there, In the end, some kind of final solution? That's yet to be seen.' Except at the Skinny Puppy concert, where the conclusion is an effective warning of finality - - globally and personally. "Our oceans are spitting up what we have flushed into them, and our water's become so polluted that Eskimos are dying of cancer from PCB's that are showing up in the tidal streams. So on stage I'm still very much a character, grossly exaggerating things, images. [Grand Pause.] Than again you can talk to Cyan and she'll say that alot of the qualities on stage are very much apart of me, just amplified. There's probably a Too Dark Park in every city in the world. But there are actual places where I can reference it within myself." Listening to Ogre speak on his personal Park that turned Too Dark is like looking at someone with a toup'ee - - you know it's there, it just doesn't seem real. "I was in Chicago and was going to buy some drugs. I went to a place called Wicker Park where I gave this dealer $109. We walked down to Walcott Street, which is in the really dark suburb of Chicago. There was this apartment building that had no front door. We went in. I waited in this empty sorta hallway while the dealer went upstairs. And I'm standing there waiting and waiting and all of a sudden a cop pulls right in front of the doorway and flashes his light on me. I'm like, 'Uh-oh.' So I turn around and I'm thinking, 'Hell, I'll just walk away.' [Ogre goes into his law enforcement voice] 'Sorry white boy, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time!' So they drag me out, frisked me, pulled up my sleeves, saw that I had track marks and said, 'Oh..... you're new at doing this aren't you. Gonna go make you arm warm?'" Ogre sits up on the couch, stands his cigarette filter on the table. "I realized that within minutes I was that far away from blowing my career. If I had been caught with heroin I wouldn't be able to come across into America ever again. I realized then that I was completely out of control - - totally out of control."

Cevin and I have picked up Al Nelson, lead singer of Hilt, and are driving through Stanley Park again. They point put a section of Vancouver - - a suburb - - that is built into the side of a mountain. Nelson says, "The group loverboy lives somewhere over there. You know they're coming out with a new album?" -We Snicker- "You wanna go bowling?" Cevin says looking into the rear view mirror at Al who sits amidst a pile of unfolded laundry - - all black - - and a bunch of "TOO DARK PARK CD's". "Yeah, sure," Nelson says. "Yeah, right,' I think.

Weirded Out - - the Skinny Puppy catch phrase to describe, accentuate, or amplify. Weirded out this, Weirded out that. Everyone was saying it.

-{ OGRE }-

Ogre and I go into the side studio where Gary, Cyan, and Bill are watching a "Snuff Film" - - a film of someone's murder: first the bondage, then the drugging of the victim, and finally the systematic delimbing of the victim. Gary, again is holding a lighter underneath Bill's ass. Cyan is watching the victims hand being torn off. Blood spatters everywhere. "This is totally weirding me out," she says. All of us are scrutinizing the film, trying to decide if it's authentic. Bill twitches forward. "Goddamit, that's hot." We laugh. A black carbon residue has left its mark on Bill's jeans. We watch the film for the complete, well.... snuffing.

-{ CEVIN }-

Cevin, Al Nelson, and I pull into a parking lot and get out. Walking through these doors, I hear the faint sound of a ball rolling: fading, fading, fade - - strike! Cevin was serious? We're gonna go bowling? We go to the counter and it's obvious that Cevin and Al are regulars here. They say hello to people, wave to others. "Yeah, we're all into bowling," Cevin says. "Ogre, me, Dwayne." Im bowling with Skinny Puppy? I stand confused; I stand stultified; I stand in bowling shoes holding this fluorescent orange bowling ball which will soon be rolling down the gutter lane, again. "Fuck!" I scream. An elderly couple the next lane over stare at me in disgust. I conclude that the look is a result of one of two things: One, they're weirding out, or two, they're both relieving thenselves in their depends undergarmets. I dont care to ponder the thought; I have another gutter ball to roll. Cevin and Al bowl near 200 each game. Not to mention that it's one hell of a sight to see Cevin, all six feet whatever of him, winging the ball down the alley and releasing it about knee high.

Metal prosthetic attachments are now strapped to his arms. "OGRE" has four new, though useless, limbs. The snuff film victim, you now notice, has no limbs whatsoever. . . . . . "OGRE" tries to walk on all fours, but with every step the arms collapse in a pathetic "Spasmolytic" torture. . . . . .

"De-Limbed", . . . . . "Disemboweled", . . . . . "Detoxed", . . . . . "Distrught", . . . . "Demise"!~! ! He's lost control, He's wearing this mask of decay, - - - "With that crunched up piece of paper texture". . . . . "His eyes never glance down at the audience". . . . . A person holding a hefty piece of grayish still leaps onto the stage and fires four shots at "OGRE". . . . . "Dead". . . . .
"The Song Ends". . . . . . . . . . . .

"There's an uncomfortable pause". . . . . . . . "People stand confused, not knowing if they should clap, stultified whether or not to cheer". . . . . . .( Thurston and Phoebe would definitely leave exactly opposite from the way they entered. )

"OGRE" rises, . . . . . . . . Suspended on a cable, - - - - - "An ascension into hell". . . . . . . . . "He hangs pendulous", . . . . . . . . "Swinging in front of his own horrific images from the pages of his Blue Book". . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . "The show ends and all the monitors fuzz out". . . . . . .

. . . . . . . "Nothing more can be offered except TV snow". . . . . . . .

"Back To Fracture Main"

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..{ Transcribed By: "Harsh Stone White": -Erik- }..
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