Use just once and destroy
Invasion of our piracy
Afterbirth of a nation
Starve without your skeleton key
I love you for what I am not
I do not want what I have got
A blanket acne’ed with cigarette burns
Speak at once while taking turns
– Kurt Cobain “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” (In Utero 1993)
I have made the claim that archivists, scenesters, and writers writing about the music of the pacific northwest – in particular those writing about the times when Chris was actively playing and recording – recite from a script. And they don’t just recite from a script about Chris, but about all notable artists within his orbit, or shall we say sphere of influence.
In addition to there being a script, there are established gatekeepers of history, especially when it comes to artists around whom there is a lot to hide – and there are a few of those. Chris’ history is hidden mostly by simply being omitted, though it seems that the more is written about him, the more there is to disentangle, because falsehoods are being published, and once they are published, if they aren’t immediately corrected, they’re apt to be republished again and again. The more that is written about Chris, the more likely it is that gatekeepers will appear, and one person who may be positioning herself in that regard is his first wife Valarie. Valarie – another honey trap – has published out and out libelous statements about me – by which I mean demonstrably factually false as well as harmful – and refused to remove the defamatory content when asked, so she may deserve additional attention.
Gatekeeping is particularly systematic when it comes to more well-known artists. The who come most immediately to mind are Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith, both of whom I believe – or better put – I believe beyond reasonable doubt – were forced to suicide. In other words, like Chris and many others, they were murdered. And not only that, it was widely known that Cobain and Smith were murdered, and that it was widely known ahead of time that they would be murdered. In other words, these are cover-ups that begin while a murder is being planned (and the victim could still potentially be saved) – and they are cover ups involving not just a small group, but large communities, and supported or instigated and covered up, once again, by the FBI/CIA. Under such circumstances, you can understand why there would be gatekeepers, and why any writer who cared about his or her own life and/or the lives of their family members, would not venture beyond the official gatekeepers and the official script.
I mean, I hesitate to support this fear such a system engenders by painting it out to be exactly as corrupt and terrifying as it is, but history teaches us that acquiescing to violent authoritarianism only leads to more violence, and more authoritarianism. So my point of view is that someone has to break the cycle, and that starts with speaking truth.
The gatekeeping is about more than covering up murders. A lot of it is about money, and the murders themselves seem to be linked to financial and material gain (homes, cars, opportunities) by people in the community. Gatekeeping can be as simple as directing attention. “Mark Lanegan is the best singer” is one example of the script. You’ll hear some version of that from lots of different sources. I’m not alleging this part of the script comes from Lanegan – I think it is linked to someone else – but that everyone within a certain community was obligated to go along with it, and certainly not to counter it publicly. This background made it even weirder when Lanegan would say to Chris – more than once, but only in private – “Chris, you are my favorite singer.”
Cobain sort of takes the piss out of the whole thing here, as he introduces “the last song of the night” on MTV Unplugged, which is a Leadbelly* song he recorded as a duet with Lanegan, Leadbelly’s “In The Pines”. The introduction (first minute of the video) is the main part I’m taking about – “this was written by my favorite performer – our favorite performer – all our favorite performer, isn’t it? We like him the best. Oh, and there’s a donation basket…”
Within the full performance are other hints about what’s been going on in the background – like when he says “K” at the end of his intro and at the end when he says “WHOLE (HOLE) night” and instead of saying “cold wind” he pronounces it “CONE wind” – recalling some imagery of a cone-shaped hat blowing off along with some blue butterflies, and switching from white to black in the Heart Shaped Box video.
* It is my contention that Chris Newman was murdered by aiming a frequency weapon – possibly a carrier wave with radioactivity – at his internal organs via one or more implants in his gut – aka a link to both the moniker “Leadbelly” and the word “gutter.”
Gutter Twins – Dulli and Lanegan
Cobain, from my perspective, was uniquely talented at creating art which could potentially catch the attention of either Chris or me. I was listening to and reading about a lot of old folk and blues artists in the 1980s and early 1990s, including Leadbelly. In addition, Leadbelly was known for the song “Goodnight Irene,” which links him to Ken Kesey (via the lyric taken for the book title Sometimes A Great Notion), and to the Oregon Country fair which is where Bret was headed on June 27, 1988 when he was hit by a car. I suspect that the Kesey family is linked to Courtney Love’s family (something to do with dairies and/or Grateful Dead and/or LSD/CIA).
In 1981, with income of about $800 a month from a trust fund set up by her maternal grandfather, Courtney moved into the first of many co-ed houses with struggling artists and rock performers. She promptly developed a crush on the lead singer of a group called Napalm Beach. From her earliest days, the objects of her affection have almost always been the breed that sings.
Hank Harrison, who had essentially been awakened from the dead, made up for the years he and Courtney had lost. He made good on his offer to put her up in Ireland, and several people who knew Courtney at the time say that she showed up with a thousand hits of very strong L.S.D.
– Melissa Rossi, Courtney Love: Queen of Noise p 33-34
Why was I not good enough to save you from destruction?
Your end and my beginning – Oh, they need no introduction
– Courtney Love, “Honey”
I’m not sure when it first occurred to me that Courtney Love was a honey trap. I think it was sometime in 2019 and I’ll get to why. It is interesting though, that the first time I recognized that Courtney may have been trying to communicate to Chris via song was in her song “Honey.” And I strongly suspect now that the word “honey” – including the way it is used in A.A. Milne’s Winnie The Pooh books, and likely also in the band name Mudhoney. Mudhoney took their name from a 1965 Russ Meyer film I don’t recall seeing but also may be linked to the idea of a honey trap. I suspect that in the song “Honey” Courtney is admitting that she was used – by the FBI/CIA – as a honeytrap both for Chris Newman and for Kurt Cobain.
In 2013 I showed our music attorney a recording of “Honey” and I said I thought it contained a message to Chris. The attorney blew me off. He had massive conflicts of interest, and for this reason, in his dealings with Chris and me, was committing malpractice.
This is the recording I showed him:
The word “gutter” by the way appears to also have an underlying meaning, which is linked to “pins” and “spikes” – it references a radio frequency implant that is covertly placed into a person’s food which allows the gut and internal organs to be targeted with ultrasonic and other frequency-based weapons. In Chris’ case, his gut and gall bladder were among the organs which were attacked with cancer-causing frequencies. Similarly, my maternal grandfather was killed with stomach cancer in 1980. Everyone around me seems to have at least one implant in their gut. The CIA, FBI, and associated gangsters are behind this.
The reason why I am tending to fold the FBI and CIA into a single entity is because the CIA is, by law, not permitted to conduct operations – certainly not this type of operation – in the United States, against US citizens. So they are doing so under protection of the FBI, which is the one US agency that I know of which is linked both to intelligence activities and to the Justice Department (policing). The crimes I’ve experienced and witnessed are so heinous – and OBVIOUS – that I’ve tried to report them numerous times to police and FBI and so by now it’s beyond clear that the FBI is involved in, and covering up these crimes, and it is increasingly clear that they are doing this on behalf of the CIA as well as corporate entities.
One of the things the CIA/FBI has been doing is engaging in, and shepherding an older occult practice of child enslavement and covert trafficking sometimes called trauma-based mind control. My own family – both my mother’s side and my father’s side – have also been involved in this, both as victims and as handlers. This practice appears to run in families, and it seems to also have been part of Courtney’s family, on both her mother and father’s side. Without getting into detail right now, there are things that tell me this is the case. Furthermore, Kurt Cobain was in the same situation, at least on his mother’s side of the family. And Chris Newman as well, at least on his father’s side. The CIA/FBI seems to have been actively involved in cementing this system through systematic psychological warfare and use of these frequency based weapons which operate through the use of ground-based antennas, hand held weapons, and networks of drones which are difficult, but definitely not impossible, to see and photograph. I’ve got tons of photos of these aircraft, but the FAA is also participating in this cover up, as is the FCC so as long as the cover ups and omerta is intact, what can be done about it?
If you look up the definition of “honey trap” online, you learn that, at least in theory, a honey trap is supposed to collect intelligence information from their target – evidence and secret plans and so forth. This is not really how honey traps have been used with Chris and I – never mind that Chris and I were both artists, not foreign diplomats, military officers, or spies. With us, honeytraps have been used mostly for misdirection, subversion, and trafficking. Sure, the honey traps might report on us, but there’s no reason to suspect they were reporting accurate information. Likely they were paid to waste our time and sabotage us in different ways. In the case of Courtney, she was for Chris, for lack of a better word, jailbait. And this is why I first realized that she was a honey trap. Because I too, was sent jailbait. Not only that, but both Courtney and the young man who was sent after me were, in the late 1980s, connected to the same woman – Erika Schlaeger Dos Santos of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I am not suggesting that Erika Schlaeger (I’ll use her maiden name from here) was behind the honeytrapping – just that she herself was part of the same child trafficking network.
I met Erika Schlaeger in northern Minnesota in the fall of 1985. Without getting into details, I am certain that I met her because I was meant to meet her. We quickly became friends, both having the same first name and feeling like outsiders. I left Minnesota the following spring, but ended up being funneled back to Minnesota in August 1987, where I quickly hooked up again with Erika Schlaeger who was then living in an artist warehouse space in downtown Minneapolis, the Berman Buckskin Warehouse. I went to school in Minneapolis for a while, then left in October 1989.
Erika Schlaeger hung out with artists, poets, and people in bands. I knew she was friends with girls in a band called Babes In Toyland that she thought was cool, but I didn’t know much more than that. She may have played me a tape, and I probably thought it was sludge and didn’t give it much thought. The so-called kinderwhore look was a thing back then – a lot of punk girls had that look – babygirl barrettes and girly dresses. It wasn’t really my thing.
I later learned from Erika Schlaeger that she also knew Courtney Love. She said that Courtney had almost moved into her warehouse space, but then decided to stay with Kat Bjelland instead. Trying to piece together exactly when this was, I concluded based on recent interviews, it was 1988. In other words, when I was living in Minneapolis and in regular contact with Erika Schlaeger.
A Minneapolis Star Tribune blog from 2010 quotes Courtney as saying she lived in Minneapolis three years “(’87-’89)” – but I seriously doubt that. I’m the one that lived in Minneapolis (and St Paul) – for two years – August 87-October 89. I suspect that Courtney was in Minneapolis for less than a year, in 1988. But I don’t know, because she moved around a lot and stories conflict.
I felt, even before meeting Chris, that Courtney was some kind of shadow person in my life, living in the SF Bay Area when my parents lived there, then in rural Oregon when I lived in rural Humboldt County, then in Portland and Minneapolis and Seattle – all places linked to me, some before she was there, some after. I even started having dreams about her, beginning in 2002. When Chris mentioned his connection to her to me in 2009, it was like it was just more of the same thing.
From June 1988 to October 1989 I lived in an apartment on University Ave in Dinkeytown, near the University of Minnesota. We used to hang out at a neighborhood coffeeshop called Giocco’s.
Sometime in late 1988 or early 1989, at Giocco’s, Erika Schlager introduced me to a young black boy – supposedly only 15 years old – who apparently was on his own, homeless. In my journals I call him “George.” I can’t remember if that was his real name or a name I made up. I wrote in an entry dated May 30, 1989 about my last meeting with George, where we walked down to the old Pillsbury Mill on the Mississippi river and he showed me the scar on his abdomen he said was from a bullet where his father shot him. “He was trying to shoot my mother but I got in the way of the bullet,” he told me.
For various reasons, I suspect the little boy in the 2018 film called Proud Mary was based on “George” and that the female assassin character who cares for him is a combination of Erika Schlaeger and my Dinkytown roommate at the time. And I suspect the older song called Proud Mary was based on the name of one of Chris’ ancestors, Mary Proude, wife of Isaac Pennington and mother-in-law to William Penn.
Anyway, when I first met George, I was 20 years old and he said he was 15 – the same age difference, incidentally, as between Mike Payne (also a honey trap) and me, when we met (I was 16 and he was 21). And 15 year old George was always putting the moves on me. He wanted me to be his girlfriend. It was probably after I’d seen the movie Proud Mary, and I started remembering George, and seeing the parallels between him offering himself to me, and Courtney offering herself to Chris, that I realized that this wasn’t likely just something that happened – it was a situation that was manufactured by someone in the background. And it was no doubt manufactured in the hopes of trapping us in order to smear us. I am certain that there were hidden cameras ready and eager to capture – and traffic – any misstep that might happen.
Erika Schlaeger is the one who introduced me to George, and was closer to him than me – seemed to take on a maternal role with him. He may have even stayed at her warehouse space. I don’t know where she met him, or whether they continued to stay in touch. On our last meeting, this was the conversation we had, which I put into my journal:
George: I won’t be seeing you no more… cause I’m going on a car trip across the United States.
In his 2021 book, The Rocky Road To Recovery: The Life of Chris Newman of Napalm Beach Eric Danielson claimed that Chris Newman “attended and participated in the infamous Satyricon Riot” (p 77, 171). This claim is uncited, unsupported, and false. I am not claiming that Danielson has deliberately falsified information. It’s possible this was a rumor that everyone had simply accepted as self-evident.
The Satyricon Riot of April 28-29 1990 is an event that has come up in conversation and in the press from time to time, ever since I moved to Portland in the summer of 2000. At some point in the early 2000s I conducted an interview with Satyricon owner George Touhouliotis who cited that event as being a turning point in his enthusiasm for running the club. What I didn’t understand, until researching the event in The Oregonian archives a few days ago, is that it really was not a one-night affair – but that it seems to have inspired a long running conflict involving not just a few criminal cases, but civil lawsuits stretching into the mid 1990s.
So what actually happened on this night? The core of the incidence seems to be this – that Touhouliotis had stepped outside and decided to take a leak in a neighboring vacant lot. Portland Police Officer Rocky Balada spied and then confronted him. George tried to give him the brush off and walk back into the club, and that’s when Balada began to beat George. What George told me when I interviewed him, and what seems to have come out a grand jury trial later that year, is that at first, no one understood that Rocky Balada was a police officer. He was described as a “guy in a windbreaker” with an earring beating up on George, the club owner. At that point two club employees, Bruno Berger, the bouncer, and Taki Kapellakis, the cook, rushed to George’s aid. After that, more police showed up. Berger and Kapellakis were charged with “among other things, rioting and Escape I” – felony charges. These cases were thrown out by the grand jury the following June (Stanford, “Whose Riot Was That Anyway?” Oregonian, June 20, 1990)
Charges of assault against Steven A. Birch, and John J. Noyola were dropped in July 1991. Both were convicted of harassment, put on probation, and ordered to pay fines. George Touhouliotis and Gilly Ann Hanner “entered pleas of guilty and no contest to misdemeanor charges.” (Leeson, “2 Patrons Convicted In Satyricon Disturbance” Oregonian, July 4, 1991)
By this point, four police officers had filed a civil suit against Touhouliotis and five other individuals, and Touhouliotis had filed a counter suit. These civil suits dragged on for years. One of the suits was by Officer Balada, against the the club, for mental distress resulting from the display of a painting – “the painting of a policeman choking a bleeding black man included the name ‘Rocky.'”
1st Amendment Benefit Show – July 10, 1991
On July 10, 1991 a benefit concert was held at the Melody Ballroom to help Touhouliotis defray legal expenses. It was called The Benefit To Support The First Amendment. Text on the poster read “Help keep Satyricon open. Under attack for a painting displayed after a police raid last year, owner George Touhouliotis needs help with the fight. Stand up for all our rights.” The poster went on to advertise “One night only – 2 Big Stages – ALL AGES.” It appears that Napalm Beach and Sweaty Nipples were co-headliners. This doesn’t make Chris a participant in the riots – it simply means someone asked him to play a benefit to help the beloved club owner, George Touhouliotis, and he accepted. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s Chris’ bands seem to have been playing Satyricon an average of twice a month (alternating between Napalm Beach and Snow Bud). So it was only natural that Chris would want to support the club and George, and as a songwriter and artist, it was only natural that he would support our constitutional right to free speech. From my perspective, all good US citizens should want to support and defend the first amendment – though that, and what that does and does not entail exactly – is, I understand, often a matter of controversy.
Looking through Oregonian archives, appears that most or all of the legal wrangling over the May 29 1990 conflict and the “Rocky” painting was completed by 1995. And that’s when, from my perspective, the story gets even weirder.
Musician Jeffrey Lee Pierce died of a brain aneurism on March 31, 1996, exactly one year, as it happens, after the gun murder of Tejano artist Selena Quintanilla-Pérez (and exactly 23 years before the gun murder of rapper Nipsey Hussle). Another musician named Pierce – Paula Pierce of the Pandoras – died of an aneurism in 1991 at age 31 – just one of many weird spiderweb links around these events. Chris was a big fan of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, but he didn’t find out about his death until the following November. Once he found out, Chris put together a memorial tribute concert for Jeffrey Lee, which was held on December 11, 1996 (also my daughter’s first birthday). Two days later, on December 13, 1996, Chris was arrested for heroin possession, an event which would eventually lead to him and his wife Valarie losing all their possessions and becoming homeless for the better part of a decade.
The catalytic event that led to Chris’ fateful arrest had to do with Valarie creating a ruckus at a 7-11 after spilling a tray of nachos. The clerk at the 7-11 called the police, and Chris allowed them to frisk him. They found evidence of heroin, then searched the car and found more.
Could this little nacho fracas and the resulting drug bust have been seen as a parallel to the Satyricon Riot? Something that is interesting – especially in light of the July 1991 Satyricon benefit show advertising “Two Big Stages” – is there were actually two different incidents in downtown Portland on the night of April 28-29, 1991 involving arrests of bar patrons. The other incident was at a bar called Goldie’s and resulted in the arrest of Portland Trailblazer Cliff Robinson. (After retiring from basketball Robinson suffered a stroke in 2017 and died in of lymphoma in 2020 at the age of 53. Robinson was born in Buffalo, New York, and died in Portland, Oregon.)
So by the end of 1996, Chris was dealing with arrest warrants, legal problems, treatment programs, and all kinds of loss, including financial ruin. This is also when Valarie openly began working as a prostitute.
Meanwhile, back in April 1996, the Satyricon which had previously been a beer and wine only venue, acquired a liquor license. The change was announced in an April 12, 1996 Oregonian article entitled “Spiking the punks at boozy Satyricon: Booze at Satyricon.” Twelve days later, the Oregonian published another article by the same writer, with the headline “Satyricon’s Dirty Dozen” and opening with a quote from 19th century clergyman John Henry Newman. This “dirty dozen” reference had to do, at least on the surface, with Satyricon celebrating its 12th anniversary. But what else does it mean? It was the title of a 1967 film about “a top-secret mission to train some of the Army’s worst prisoners and turn them into commandos to be sent on a virtual suicide mission just before D-Day.” But before it was a film, “dirty dozens” were spoken word insult games (later showing up in blues lyrics) where (according to Wikipedia) “participants insult each other until one gives up.” (Wikipedia, dozens (game))
Another interesting construction in this article is the one that was pulled for the headline of the April 12 article “Spiking the punks.” Spiked belts were a 1980s staple of punk rock gear, but what is the meaning of all of that? I now have come to believe that “spike” is slang for the covert insertion of radio frequency activated devices which are used by intelligence agencies (and doctors and police linked to them) to manipulate behavior, create disease, and to murder. This conclusion is based on direct forensic evidence which I have found and documented, as well as on pattern-based evidence. I have discerned that there is actually a lot of slang linked to this technology – wires/wired, or chicken wire, and pins are also slang for the same thing. Chain link fences are used in photos and video to symbolize someone being wired up in this way. Such references come up with regularity in different media, including song lyrics, and this goes back at least to the 1970s (though the technology itself is older). The idea of “spiking” being something more sinister than a simple liquor license is further supported by the doubling in the headling – the word “booze” is doubled and the name “Satyricon” is doubled. This is a reference to matched, or “twin” attacks and murders – covert assassinations that are linked to each other, symbolically or otherwise (often by dates, names, circumstances).
As far as the content of the articles, what I find myself asking is how did George Touhouliotis suddenly have the money to do a $200,000 renovation of Satyricon? This was a man who five years earlier was in dire financial straights, scraping together money from benefit shows, to pay a few thousand dollars in legal fees. $15,000 from the Portland Development Commission still leaves $185,000 the Satyricon allegedly paid out of its own pocket.
From my perspective, it seems to be indicative of a pattern around Chris and me in which things begin to simultaneously go really bad for us, and really good for everyone else. But I’m beginning to see it’s not just Chris and me who have been suffering. The concept of “spiking the punks” – and the fate of many of those in the community – by which I mean many premature deaths which I maintain have been falsely attributed to bad luck, drugs, and/or a “rock n’ roll lifestyle”- are starting to tell a bigger story.
And what about Officer Balada? In June 1999 Balada was caught up in another scandal. He was accused of allowing officers working federally-funded drug missions to leave hours early yet still receive pay for the full shift. The federal program was called “Operation North Star.” According to Balada and others, the practice of paying officers federal funds for time they didn’t actually work was known as “cuff time” or “short nights” and was common throughout the Portland Police Department. Balada was transferred, then relieved of his duties in July 1999, and promptly filed a stress disability claim against the city. It’s difficult to sort out how many lawsuits Balada filed in the 1990s, but there were several, and he seems to have frequently won money in settlements from these suits. George Touhouliotis paid him a settlement of $7,000 (Police officer near settling lawsuit – Oregonian – April 13, 1994 – page B02). In 1993 Balada sued then-Mayor Bud Clark and various city officials “accusing them of engaging in racism and a plot to oust him from the bureau” and won a settlement of $34,000. In 2000, Balada, who was receiving disability pay, sued the City of Portland for $22 million, claiming civil rights violations and defamation (Policeman Sues City, Superiors – Oregonian – July 1, 2000 – page D01). Balada seems to have been staying home and receiving disability pay from July 1999 to September 2006, when he retired and received his pension as well as $92,300 from the city in addition to the disability pay he had already been receiving since 1999 (December 4, 2008, Oregonian, Bernstein – page B02).
SNELL – of the Oregonian Staff; DWIGHT JAYNES of The Oregonian also contributed to this report from Dallas. ‘TRAIL BLAZER ROOKIE CITED AFTER BRAWL‘, Oregonian, 30 Apr 1990 A01
Danielson, Eric N. The Rocky Road To Recovery: The Life of Chris Newman of Napalm Beach. Pagoda Press/self-published (September 12, 2021). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09F3GSNDL/
