South Afreaky

Recently this group Die Antwoord (in Afrikaans, 'the answer') has been blowing up all over the place. I first witnessed the weirdness at Sticky Rice when John started playing this video after dinner:

As I previously expected, based on hints of tongue-in-cheekness in there, these folks are spoofin'. Much in the vein of that guy with the big nose and curly hair from SNL who did the video with T. Pain, it's all apparently a satire of the young white Afrikaaners, those sons-of-apartheid-turned-poseur in the realm of South Africa's Zef style street hip hop style.

And yes, that video plays at Sticky every single night as well.

Okay, I'll admit that for a while they had me going too. I mean, I thought it was entirely possible that they were for real, and for real really weird, with a healthy sense of humor in their videos. It brings warm Xmas cheer to my heart to watch the expressions on the faces of diners and bar rats when they see Yolandi Va$$er, the toe-headed mouse-wonder with her dead white rat coat and long nails carving a pentagram on Diplo's chest. And I'm just tickled with tender amusement of articles like This One from "Music Industry Online," that calls them "courageous" for using such controversial language and subject themes. It would be like if a Japanese music blog hailed this video for being "courageous," in the important sense:

SNL Uncensored: Dick In A Box

Come to think of it, this might actually be the beacon of anti-censorship we've needed on major cable television network conglomerate shareholder-owned blah blah blah!

Indeed, the American public needs its fair share of blah blah blah, otherwise what the fuck are we doing here anyway? I've got a headache, don't bother me. Ahhh.

Spotlit on: The Twentieth Century

It's an obvious pick, and soon we'll all get tired of rehashing the "significance" of the last millennium, specifically the last century. But somehow it never gets tiresome to keep learning from our modern patterns, the reactions to life that cause inventions, and the reactions in life to those inventions including that of the God-corpse (with apologies to Donald Barthelme)

In the last week or two I've been stumbling across gems from the past, including this book my new boss lent me in hopes that I would "dig it" as much as he. It's called Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, and check it under the Spotlit navbar thingy---> Czech writer Patrik Ourednik is no Howard Zinn--this is not your average prep school required reading. Neither is it Cat's Cradle. If anything it falls somewhere in between, a gray area of lyrical prose on par with Burroughs and David Foster Wallace. Clearly it is an absurdist take on the wars that made us confront other cultures and the revolutions that reformed the future. The tone is without whimsy or condescension (or condensation), and we're often forced to reread the same phrases on several pages, sometimes in making a discordant parallel to something very different.

Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare

Where we almost, yea more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is.

-John Donne, "The Flea"

I'm not fifty pages into it, but one of these passages struck me:

"Trees were important in cities as they ensured regeneration of oxygen and the ash from the corpses could be used as fertilizer in fruit orchards and vegetable gardens, because organic fertilizer was starting to be in short supply in Germany. The corpses in the ruins of buildings were huddled up together and sometimes two or three corpses were holding hands or hugging each other and had to be sawn apart to free them. And one woman did not want to cut apart corpses and the commander of the squad in charge of the operation wanted to have her shot for sabotage but in the meantime the soldiers who were supposed to shoot her had deserted." (20)

It's going to be a fast ride through this landscape, and I have a feeling it won't be all too comfortable.

While Mr. Zinn may have the socio-political field covered in terms of exhaustive historical archiving, we have two others that have arguably had equal impact on the arguably most impacting social/artistic phenomena, Rock'n'Roll: Joan Didion and Lester Bangs. Didion served a very important role as the pinprick to the giant pink balloon that was the capitalized Sixties. Her essay,Slouching Towards Bethlemmaintains a venerable position in the cannon of compassionate journalism, and I'll always look to her example of grace and integrity in her writing. It should be pretty obvious my affinity for Lester Bangs given my choice in quotes for the disclaimer of my blog. I became increasingly interested in rock journalism when I read--and subsequently forgot to return to my high school library--Rolling Stone'sIllustrated guide to Rock and Roll in which were included articles by Lester Bangs.

Then he appeared, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the 2000 movieAlmost Famous as the lovably brash mentor to William Miller. Anyway, somehow or another I caught onto his book on Blondie which I just bought, and which will hopefully be arriving on my doorstep, gently loved and awaiting me on top of the reading list.

Birthday Tunes

I've been working on a "Flora" playlist, which means those songs that make the little girl named Flora in my soulest of souls dance around the kitchen in front of a mirror with cookie dough all over her fingers. I'm still experimenting with Opendrive, so apologies if these links don't quite work at first. There's a Floyd track there that no one's probably listened to for a long time, but it's one of those little gems in the mid sixties that got lost in the weight of later epic concept albums. But the most significant of this playlist are definitely the spritely tracks from Sweden's de Montevert.

High On You.mp3


de-Montevert-Skyll-på-mig-www.esau_.se_.mp3

de-Montevert-The-Ghost-www.esau_.se_.mp3

Crumbling Land.mp3

04 I Want The World To Stop.mp3

And then, because I'm in a particularly wistful mood, a Best Coast song.

When I'm With You.mp3

Halloween Playlist

It is that happy time of year again when everything dies and all the spirits come out to lurk. I too have been lurking, and I've come up with a few gems. The following are tracks that I'll be using as the soundtrack for this, the season of death and renewal, and are the result of Googling "Halloween." Play close attention especially to my new Audiogasm track, which would be from the LA trio Halloween Swim Team. Also, note the prevalence of Danny E:lfman tracks, because after all he is IS the mayor of Halloweentown!

02 Pitch Black.mp3


01 Grey Matter.m4a

A little Kills:

03 Pull A U.mp3

More Danny Elfman:
Beetlejuice Theme (Kamei Halloween Edit).mp3

Punks do Halloween best (Misfits and Dead Kennedys)

Halloween.mp3

07 Halloween.mp3

Bmore Hearts Sticky!

Although this IS NOT A FOODIE BLOG by any means, I feel cheerfully obligated to announce that Sticky B'more is off the proverbial chain. By which I mean that the Baltimorian newcomers are coming to understand what it is to be truly Sticky in the sense that you know how to work hard/play hard and keep it classy. The Examiner concurs.

The new opening marks the third in a Northerly-encroaching creep up the East Coast, from RVA to DC to Bmore...will we one day add NYC to these charming abbreves? One can only hope...

We've been graced with the presence of DJs the likes of Dave Nada and Kom-Toki every weekend, and we've enjoyed cutting rugs with the back of house. The space is significant for many Baltimore natives who recall when it was a bar called Friends. A spacious room with booth/tables and the original grand ol' divey bar lead back to a little offshoot enclosed room with three small tables and stained glass reminiscent of cathedral decor is called the Church, and the Boom-Boom room has its own backroom-near-kitchen charm. Rickety warped stairs lead up past the beautiful stickycoyfish mural by House Party Dave to our office floor with dry storage, etc. The upper levels are currently being occupied by a few of the owners during extended workweeks, in addition to some surly brothel/addict hauntings, no doubt. This was the enduring charm of the bar Friends, which apparently everyone was sad to see go out, though not surprised (I've heard they gave away the bar). During the first few weeks we were open, our sandwich board read "Sticky Rice...We Can Be Your 'Friends' Too!"

So far we've enjoyed GREAT reviews on Yelp, and the LivingSocial promotion has brought out a lot of sushi lovers and curious casual diners. Dinner is delicious, but you really want to stay late and drink with us. I hear the staff gets kind of nuts. You might even get to bang on a gong.

Art in Death's Capital

Sometimes I get that weird little feeling as if the universe is conspiring in my favor...and today's events have definitely left me buzzing with pronoia...

I was eating a delicious portabella sandwich today at Liquid Earth on Aliceanna (basically next door to Sticky Rice), and picked up a copy of the Urbanite , my new favorite Baltimore rag to read a couple articles on local graf art. Naturally that put me in a sweat, but I was a total mess by the end of the second article where it so casually referenced an XTC song from the early eighties that has been adopted by local great Cuba. (Song would be "Living Through Another Cuba," and yes you would be correct in the assumption that it's brilliant)

But let me back up. Looks like there's a dude calls himself Gaia who has been throwing up beautiful drawings matted onto sagging overhangs and derelict building fronts. He's twenty-two and goes to MICA, where I just interviewed for a position at the Writing Studio. There's one of his grandfather on Park and Franklin, but other than that the are mostly figures with animal heads and human bodies and hands, usually wrenched in some sort of anguish, presumably because what was once a human head has gone animal. My plan is to become infatuated with spotting these around town now. My next stop is at W. North Ave. and Pennsylvania, but I'll have to take some breed of large male with me. The images, according to the article, are affixed with wheat paste and glue, and go up in a matter of seconds, (obviously he couldn't do the drawing on the buildings themselves for reasons of bad medium and the small legal issue), the way graffiti artists choose names that are short and sweet and go up fast under the cover of night before anyone can hear the tell-tale rattlerattlerattle, ch-shhhhhhhhh.

The next article was about this guy Cuba, an older head who also went to MICA, and was a good friend of the author's until he faded into legendary obscurity. The author, Charles Cohen, said last he'd heard of his boy, he'd O-Ded on heroin in like '82. Not only false, but a direct quote I'll take the liberty of snagging from the article went like this:

"Doing drugs was a way to do myself in and still enjoy it until I got close [to death]. Then I realize I ain't going out like that. I'll take a bullet in the head. No I won't. Fuck it, I'm never going to die."

...which I think really eloquently sums up the impetus these artists have for doing what they're doing. While the one motto goes, "nothing is sacred," in that most people who actually notice street art are liable to erase it, the other one is about marking out your space, the art making you immortal. In an environment particularly like Baltimore's where death marks just about everything (see R.I.P art), there are those who know their days are numbered. So what do you do? Write up your will, spit in the ocean, become a makeout bandit, make a baby, make a song, or imprint your soul on a slab of concrete that couldn't care less how you make it?

Even if you're not involved in a gang war, this is probably the most relatable existential fear, of the Nothing eating you alive, wiping you out forever with nothing to show for it. A professor from Pratt and a kind of friend of mine told me he started smoking cigarettes as a way to kill himself as slowly as possible, all the while

dutifully scribbling, etching the mirror of beauty he encounters for whomever will care about it later. When I think about the kind of writer I'll be known as, I know I won't be a Stephen King, who will survive the eons perhaps as a cultural icon, a genre writer who gave words to some of our darkest nightmares which necessarily illuminate our assumptions and attachments to the things we care about most. He's experimented with writing under a pseudonym to test out whether his success has been valid or just a clever marketing scheme. The essays still sold really well. So, props to him. He's no literary giant, just a guy with a great thing going. I've toyed with the idea of writing some great erotic trash to make my millions before The Cicada Killers breathes life of publication, but I can't see myself doing it. Nope, I'm going to fiddle and fuck around and produce some terrible trash until finally, on my deathbed, I produce my life-affirming work, only to be appreciated by a handful of maladjusted teenage art students decades after I die. And what's really sick about it all is that I've resigned myself only in hopes of the opposite actually happening.

These articles found me just a week after I bought Style Wars about the early hip hop/graf art scene in NYC, and two days after British street artist Banksy was commissioned to draft a new couch gag for this Sunday's episodes of The Simpsons.

I for one am impressed that no heads have rolled over this. Impressed and hopeful. We are fortunate to be so immersed in The Great Recession that (IMHO) the highest art forms like satire and street art have room and audience to thrive. I'm becoming very excited about living in Baltimore, where there are more gravestones than citizens, and there is an urgency to the art being produced. Live live urbania!

Spotlit on Tim Winton

I realize the lit portion of my blog has been somewhat lacking due to the influx of better and better jams, and the relative absence of good fiction out there. When I was down under, my sister turned me onto an Aussie writer Tim Winton, and his novels Breath (Penguin, 2008) and Cloudstreet (Penguin 1991). Two very different novels in almost every angle, but somewhat familiar in their apparent disconnect.

The character in Breath is a middle-aged paramedic who encounters a ghost from his adolescence in the form of a teen thrill gone wrong. Readers are transported back to the beginning of Bruce's friendship with insatiable risk-taking Loonie and the old surfer hero Sando who takes both young surfers under his wing. The language is brief, tragically clear. It's a quick read, and offers a lot of those "surprises" for which space and expectation is made early on. Specifically the story spoke to me on the levels of youth and the addiction to risk, the fear of mediocrity and the threat of being lost to the eons of ordinary. And to these extents it's very sexually driven, the danger, the bliss, the life pulsing through a skull and crossbones.

(excerpt)

Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I'd already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I'll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn't know it yet, but we'd already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we'd left the ordinary in our wake.

(p. 94)

I'm only about halfway through Cloudstreet, but already it's as if it were written by an entirely different writer.

The cheeky Aussie humor is abounding, but for starters, it's concerned with about ten major characters, all

of whom get POV in the third...except one, the boy named Fish whose heart stopped when he fell overboard

the fishing boat and got caught in the net. He survives, albeit with scrambled eggs for brains. His sections (the novel

is divided amongst the characters and the two families living together by small headed vignettes) are by far the most

beautiful and the most wrenching. They are written in second person, as a conversation across some great divide and always

addressed to Fish. Is "I" the author? I tend to doubt, as it would be tremendously risky with all the other characters

involved, to suddenly spring some sort of authorial involvement and crowd the novel.

At the risk of total literary blasphemy (and giddy is the thought!), I say these two juxtaposed works remind me

of none other than Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses. Think about it. If I were to introduce Winton to a classroom, I would

most likely give them Breath to cut their teeth before they jump into a dual-family historical epic like Cloudstreet.

The stories in Dubliners mirror the close scope and developed private interiors of the Bruce character. (I think

Bruce and the boy from Arabia would have a fine time bitching about girls and sexual competence.) The

sheer breadth, volume, involvement and elevated-low-brow wash of language in Cloudstreet is an instant

likeness to the one-day spectacle that is Ulysses, the novel which Joyce claimed contained not a single extraneous

word. Deliberate is the word we're looking for, and we're sticking to the one, thanks J.J. I've stumbled

across some effortless beauty on page 164:

(excerpt)

Across the planes all things still play themselves out, all fun and fear, all the silliness and quaking effort,

all the bickering and twitching, all the people going about the relentless limited endeavour of human

business, and the sight of your body rolling like that, bursting with voice and doubleness, reminds you that the

worlds are still connected, the lives are still related and the Here still feels the pangs of history.

Obsessed as I am with "relentless limited endeavours" and of course the "pangs of history,"

this passage was meant just for me...and Fish, apparently. It's worthy of note that in spite of the grand

scope and the way the family names (Pickles and Lamb) are difficult at first to assign to the characters'

first names, one becomes very quickly entangled in the matters of the two trying to live under the same

roof during a time of great economic depression in Australia.

Oh, and flipping over my copy here, I notice Elizabeth Ward of the Washington Post, no less, has

already paid tribute to my undergraduate mentor: "Cloudstreet gets you inside the very skin of post-war working-class Australians the way Joyce makes you feel

like a turn-of-the-century Dubliner..."

She's right, but not as right as I am, of course, about the two novels back-to-back. And then there's

the wordplay...

I'll decide when I get to the end of this one if anyone else should bother reading it. I highly recommend

the first half, however, and it is up to you whether you'd like to continue on, asphyxiate your breath with the

witching rhythm of Winton's phrasing and the quivering potential for tragedy.

DJ's and Crust Punks

It was a very sweaty and dusty day at Merriweather Post last weekend for the Free Fest. We started off the day sipping lime flavored vodka and sprite under a tarp we strung between two cars. Everyone was wearing green bandanas around their nose and mouths because of the dust and smoke rising from the Dance Forest. People were sniffing the air and exchanging glances with their friends and then looking around suspiciously to see who the pot culprit was. Wow, we really are at a rock and roll festival, do ya smell that??
Joan Jett looks fantastic and sounds even better. It was bizarre to watch a rock concert so traditional when everything else we heard that day was inspired by ironic looks back at her genre. She played "Cherry Bomb" and "Crimson and Clover," and ripped up a guitar solo. I wonder what it must be like to be a grungy-ass crust punk one day and the next Hollywood is sucking at your fame teat, and casting teenage heartthrobs to play you in a movie about yourself, and how hot it is that you were a raging young lesbian rocker back in the day. It's gotta be weird. I'd hate to see that mainstream depiction of my private life while I'm still living. Must be creepy to see how Hollywood interprets your motivations in life and shit. I haven't yet seen Runaways, so I may be revising this assessment accordingly.

I think it's safe to say women really dominated this show. From Kim of Matt and Kim, who is irritatingly adorable standing on her drum stool, to Alexis Krauss of Sleigh Bells teaching the crowd how to scream, to the absolutely gorgeous albeit bitchy and demanding MIA, in my mind these were the best performances. Seeing Pavement back together was great, but after the mosh pit and crowd-surfing at Sleigh Bells, it was a sit-down show. LCD was fun but my friend couldn't stop punching at the "From this position..." song, so pretty soon it was more funny than badass. Neon Indian, as I previously predicted was my favorite in the electronic music. But Chromeo killed it, and seeing Dave 1 in person, it's clear now what look my friend John Q is going for, and apologies for the oversized photos.

Maryland brought out a funny crowd, mostly because it's a funny place. In the one section, you have hyper-functional teens growing up in Montgomery and Howard counties, being groomed for government and finance, journalism and medicine. Then you have the rest of Maryland, all hopped up on Starbucks and trash T.V. They've carved out existences in corn fields and cubicles, then show up to these shows after hitting the neighborhood tattoo parlor, and look like it's maybe the first time they've bothered to shower or leave their pet-infested apartments they share with their grab bag, significant-enough other. They show up way too early to each show to set up camp with the girl in the front and the dude with arms around from behind. The goal of this game is to try to stand perfectly still, no matter how awesome the music is or how everyone else is dancing.

I have a hard time understanding why these people bother to show up to anything. Stay at home with the comforting scents of cat piss and cock breath on your unwashed sheets.

I love going to shows, obviously. And a good festival where you're torn between great acts can be life-affirming. To be sure, the whole thing was the highlight of my month. Getting to dance hard in the middle of a bunch of other sweaty hard dancers is the stuff of ecstasy. I don't let the lame-asses giving me dirty looks for stepping on the blanket they plopped down in the middle of a standing crowd ruin my fun. But I will say that it's exhausting to have to look around at all the douchebags who you apparently have something in common with. I'm egalitarian as hell, but I like to think of myself as part of a group of genuine music appreciators, so it bums me out to be breathing the same air as some people I see at concerts. Sometimes I much prefer to blast out my apartment windows, get all dressed up and do my own music video in front of the mirror. The music fantasy transcends all the realities of band drama, egos and the sheep mentality of the bandwaggoners, and on some days I think this is how I prefer to keep it.

Speaking of crustiness, the last show I caught was Laughing Man opening for Wavves at the Rock and Roll Hotel, D.C.. LM is a trio, and I know of them through the drummer who is a server at Sticky Rice down there. Their sound is slightly psychedelic yet early funk-age, they've all got great chops and really tight style. And everyone should know by now how much I sweat Wavves, even though they put on a weird show. I ran into an old coworker who was wasted and trashing Nathan Williams regarding his stage water. Then they got onstage and I saw what he was talking about. He's the asshole you love to hate. He makes himself accessible that way, an easy target because he's goating you on and taking hits at everyone, everything, the venue, the crowd, themselves. So in between songs when the stage banter gets passed amongst him and his ex-Reatard rhythm section, and people are started to walk out, and others up front are yelling at them to play a fucking song already, some people are laughing including me and I'm kind of enjoying all the flack they're getting for not playing the show.

Fuck man, if you want to hear the songs, go the fuck home and listen to the album. You're here to see US, don't forget. This is who we are, and we are wasted, and the band leader is famously stoned and the drummer is on acid, and this is what you came for. This is the image you get off to, so deal with it.

I, for one, moshed the shit out of that show which I was not prepared for in boots and a threadbare see-thru T-shirt. All the dickbags ogling me in the five minutes I was at the bar I got to shove back into the shit and have them turn around and look completely baffled. The spooning couples got pushed out and shoved to the back or the sidelines. (Have I mentioned I hate concert couples??) The band members are complete and utter assholes, and pissed off nearly all my friends that night who either worked at the Hotel or were playing with them. The nice musicians in Laughing Man were taken aback, and the rock band Christmas Island from sunny Sandy Eggo were politely baffled at the rudeness of these Adolescents-wannabes who look like they haven't showered in weeks. And I'm loving all of it. Long live obnoxious punk rockers, but maybe should stick to the studio if a tour is just a good excuse to weed out the weak in your fanbase.

The Visual Component

Baltimore has its head screwed on right. There is no better evidence of this than the naming of their home team and many roads after native son E.A. Poe's "The Raven," and most recently the pride in acknowledging its own Frank Zappa as deserving of his bronzed head on a column outside a library in east Bmore.

From the LA Times:

“The spirit of Frank Zappa is alive and well in Baltimore,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

“He’d be wildly amused by this, because of the absurdity of these guys in Lithuania coming up with this phenomenal sculptor who normally does busts of Stalin,” Gail Zappa said.

"Baltimore is the kind of the city that resonates with Zappa's work," he added, citing another iconoclastic Baltimorean, journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken. The ceremony came 25 years after Zappa appeared at a Senate hearing to rail against censorship of rock lyrics and calls for an album rating system.

Then today at the Baltimore Book Festival, I happened to root through the precise bin containing a book called Viva! Zappa by Dominique Chevalier, a collection of photos and details of his work. Maybe I have an even better idea for a Halloween costume...

And speaking of genius rock stars, David Byrne did something a few years after I was born that I wish had been a part of my life forever. Take a look at this clip from his musical featuring John Goodman, True Stories:

On the whole, I found it visually stunning and sensibly baffling. Which is to say it finds a good home in this little heart, being of the Sundae variety. The songs are kind of hit-or-miss, for instance when the witch doctor is performing the ritual to make John Goodman not humiliate himself onstage. But watching Byrne deliver his lines deadpan and detached is a treat not to be missed. You'll like the fashion show too, when the little girls are dressed like inanimate objects and there are whole families decked out in clothes made of fresh-cut lawn. A few spoonfuls of the absurd never hurt anyone, after all.

Optimal Awesomeness and the Ubermensch

It's been said that writers are inherently sadistic in the way they create their work, putting perfectly innocent fictional characters through conflict and trial just for fun. And it follows that the creation affects and then consumes the creator, thereby making her masochistic. I've always blamed this for--among other vices--continuing to watch and read things that constantly give me anguish at all the catching up I have to do, in my search for Optimal Awesomeness.

Some call it nirvana,

others salvation. My fierce northern ancestors called it Valhalla. And as long as I am not at the great feasting table, I am tortured. It's a method called the double-bind, which if youse a English majer you'll find when rooting around some Beckett one dusky autumnal twilight, trapped and paralysed eternally. This is the effect of the double-bind: paralysis. And when applied to writing is that little devil known as Writers Block.

So that being said, I have come to terms with my masochistic nature because although I habitually--compusively--seek out music and books and film that make me ache for admiration, the opportunity to wax rhapsodical as prelude to their Optimal Awesomeness is cathartic.

If I wrote screenplays and the OA was strong with me I would have written Arrested Development, Weeds, and...yeah:

But just the screenplay, because I thought I was too good for a vampire book. And because of the casting.

I have a mean case of the gots-ta-have-its with Brad Neely. He's been around for a while--an artist friend turned me onto his cartoons "Baby Cakes" and "The Professor Brothers." It's comically genius, you'll see.

But now I've found his essays, and I'm having fun. Here's one that's more joyful than achey, mostly because it makes me think about Brad Pitt. It's about Brad being a sort of unfair but necessary illusion in our sad, vapid little lives. It's called "Brad Pitt: God Substitute.

(excerpt)

“Brad Pitt is the perfect man.”
The promotional period for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was on, and I was hearing it again.
The radio, the smiling entertainment shows, my friends; everyone needed to say it.
“He’s better than us.”
“Just look at him.”

Brad Pitt is the biggest movie star on the planet. But, while waiting for the movie’s release, I began to ask myself, “What is a Brad Pitt movie?”
I knew to expect the usual guilt brought on by jealousy, admiration, and basic inadequacy.
But after light investigation I came to a very flimsy conclusion: A Brad Pitt movie is never about his character, but rather about other characters reacting to his stasis, his perfection and his flat out otherworldliness.

(See: Hopkins in Meet Joe Black, the elder brother in A River Runs Through It, the entire family in Legends Of The Fall, Statham in Snatch, the team in Oceans, the entire sane world in Twelve Monkeys, Norton in Fight Club, Redford in Spy Game, Ford in Devil’s Own, his friends and the court in Sleepers, Robert Ford and crew in The Assassination of Jesse James By That Coward Robert Ford, and most definitely in the case of Cate Blanchett’s character withering in his glow throughout Benjamin Button.)
Often, the stories in his films are even told in the first person perspectives of those dealing with him. We watch as they evolve, adapt, and grow in order to comprehend him, to abide in his shadow. They tell us about him.

He has come among us. He is the new version, the knower, the seer. He need not develop for he has long sense arrived at stillness, at godhood.

>>end transmission

All hail the Ubermensch!!

I love how he just crumbles at the end. Don't you just love that? He's right, you know. And I haven't even seen all those movies. But now I will, because now I know it'll be like stepping into a Starbucks after traveling so far out of the country my gravity feels off but then ahhhh thank you Father Capitalism for driving out foreign markets to make way for your big, strong, market-competitive gimmicks to cradle me in your familiar, methodical bosom. No disappointments, just treats.

Never On My Own

The line at the side door of Ottobar last night was wrapped around the alley. A far cry from the Down To Nothing show in Richmond half a year ago, which boasted a crowd of bandana-ankled homegrown scuzziness, I was amused at all the D-rings attached to ball-buster jeans. (Is it possible Baltimore is more hipster than Richmond?) But more amusement seemed directed towards me, as I elected to show up in a Banana Republic cream collared blouse tuckedinto a high-waist denim mini skirt, my little vintage cherry flats and a light blue Alice inWonderland bow in my hair. I knew better than toWear the Shirt to the Show, so even though I don't yet have shirts of the bands playing last night, I left my Strike Anywhere, Bracewar and Hatebreed shirts at home and decided I wouldn't be the chick who is trying too hard to look like a boy in order to like the music she likes. So I ran the opposite direction, and we will analyze the consequences later.

I got inside too late to catch Alpha and Omega from LA, but they'll be on the tour with Bane and TUI when they go to Europe next month. Cruel Hand struck me as pretty

traditional, call-and-response, heavy distortion and aggressively uplifting lyrics. Tight, charismatic, balls-to-the-wall. Some punches were thrown down in the pit, and before too long there was mild crowd control--two songs into the set. Reptilian, yes. Juvenile, certainly. But impressive nonetheless.

For sake of the Bmore experience, and to break the ice with myself being at a show unaccompanied, I grabbed a PBR at the bar and tiptoed carefully up the stairs to the loft where I could observe without getting beer all over once the windup really started. Here's where the majority of the ladies sat together or with their strong silent men. Some of them were clearly making a statement (yes, you, bleached mohawk girl with the bull ring), others were making neutra-statements in flannel and jeans. I got some good pictures from up there (to follow), but I had to scamper back down to the floor once TUI took the stage, because you get good photos but bad experience up there. There's not nearly enough sweat, and it was cold as hell.

My solo status afforded me much more opportunity for eavesdropping, and something I've learned is that if people think you're listening even casually, they put on a freaking show for

you. It makes for good notes. Some of the snippets from up there in the loft:

-Who

said hardcore died in '83?

-I think it was Reagan.

-You see that fat dude? He kicked me in the fucking dick. The dick, dude. Not cool.

-Maybe he thought he knew you.

-Would YOU kick your friend in the dick??

-Maybe.

-Not cool.

My beer drained and my senses really kicked up a notch, I descended from the lofty lair and joined the sweaty peons below. Their first two songs, including "Believe" from their new album, sent everyone into a whirling, kicking, pushing frenzy. Unfortunately their momentum was disrupted by a problem with the kick drum, and they had to carry it off on a stretcher.

Question: why is Trapped Under Ice possibly the most badass hc band I've ever seen (other than maybe DTN or Cro-Mags?) Their breaks are well timed, the anthems are the most triumphant, and even a whammy bar and the occasional guitar solo makes it better. When a band is uniformly throwing down as hard as its fans...you get it: totally, fucking, badass. Punches thrown pamby-pamby and hugs in between. Just one big dude (was his name really Frodo?) on the floor, going totally batshit insane on absolutely everyone, and someone tries to stage dive but misses and gets to eat some concrete floor. He's okay. But he gets kicked out anyway.

I've never seen Bane, but I've been exposed to the name and a few tracks off their myspace, and a fellow music-stalker and scribbler on the West Coast agreed that it was going to be an epic show. I'm curious about the direction some hardcore bands take in adding more melodic elements to the sound, turning down the distortion a little and giving notes to the lyrics. These are the guys who pull it off, although the risks there are great and border on that pop-punk bullshit I really can't handle. I hate to be a hater, but there it is. I need music that could punch ME in the face, not the other way around. And yes I love folk and indie jams and of course I'm a huge Dead head, so that's not what I'm talking about. I want to see a hardcore band kick the ass of all those fucking beefcake pop-punk lead singers who bench press in their videos, probably wear too much cologne and whine loudly if the hotel has no hair dryer. Just sayin'.

The aggression you feel in the room at a hardcore show is the most positive form of male friendship I've noted in our increasingly man-child addled society. And don't think it doesn't make me a little jealous that girls think they can't have the same thing without going lesbocurious. Aaron Bedard broke it all down a couple times, giving shout-outs to his old show-going Bmore crew (he's in ol' beantown now), and especially to a dude who was standing along the sidelines for the entire show, who apparently is from Texas but since missed all of Bane's shows out there, he looked up cheap tickets and flew out to the East to catch them.

It's not a Scene, although there are those who have created some around the bands. It's most definitely a brotherhood, and the loyalty there is fierce and bolstering. It's what gets you high, and a lot of them are still straight edge. I can't imagine trying to be knackered and playing those riffs and breaks at the drop of a hat, break-neck speed and ear-pummeling volume. It's been done, and when it's right it's a beautiful thing. But I daresay a skiezed-out drummer would collapse after one or two songs. That's four minutes. Think about it. There's something pure about it, and I like that just as well as my beloved junky jams.

Then all too quickly, the show is over and everyone begins filing out. I am apart but not alone! It's after midnight, and the several block walk home does not seem like a good idea. All instincts point to wait--and listen. But I'm totally conspicuous standing outside with a notebook and a cell phone, trying to wake up a girlfriend to pick me up. I'm going to have to bum a ride, and it's gonna be a while because the bands are packing up and everyone else is packed into their sedans and headed in opposite directions. I'm like four blocks away, I say. Or...more like six to eight. Someone calls me out on it, and there ensues a total bum rush of boys directing point-blank questions at my wardrobe, my bag, my notebook, hands start pawing through my purse which I obligingly hold open, feeling a bit like a tourist in the monkey house as they remove the fliers, atomizer, pens, camera, lipstick...thank God I didn't bring all those things I thought to remove! I answer their questions the best I can, amused that I thought I would be on the other side of this conversation.

-If we give you a ride, can we crash at your place?

-Do you have room?

-Do you live in a crack house?

-Or a trailer? (There's a story to that one.)

-Why doesn't your boyfriend come pick you up? (Ah, the real question implied.)

-On a scale of one to ten, how good of a kisser are you? (Jesus, look at those expressions. They're serious.)

I tell them: yes, I'd love to have all of them stay, but I'm afraid I just moved in and I only have one small couch but lots of floor space.

-I don't do couches. Or floors.

-Yeah, beds only.

It's funny that despite all this banter, not one of them has officially decided to walk me back or drive me back. The one van has a dead battery and they're jumping it with another. A few beers appear from inside the van, and they're all in dojo form and yelling and laughing at fart jokes and ignoring the Ottobar staff whistling at them to mind the neighbors. I'm fine to hang around, but I stick out like a sore thumb more and more, and I'm sort of anxious to end my public appearance and disappear into my apartment and digest all this. I consider walking myself home, just so as not to be a bother. But my instincts tell me to stick it out, and I thank them now.

I got to chat for a bit individually with some members of all bands, and I get a chance to tell Aaron Bedard how much I loved the whole thing. It is he who mans up and agrees that I cannot walk home alone. "Jump in the van, sit there and look pretty. We'll get you home." They are on their way to Long Island, and ask where I live. I tell them it's actually pretty convenient, it's between here and Long Island. I'm giving play-by-play directions while fielding more middle school questions and absolutely loving every minute but wishing I weren't so swept away by the attention that I'd maintain presence of mind to ask all MY questions, maybe get a picture of me with all of them in their van, anything to have some physical proof of my brief taste of that fantastic van full of two awesome hc bands. I'm afraid I'll have to settle for my scribblings and the hope that I can hook up with them when they're back in town so I can pretend to be a real journalist. (What am I saying??)

Many many thanks to the bands for reminding me of the virtuous life of heavy music, clear minds, and loyal friends, but mostly to my instincts for telling me that it was better that I showed up alone, and for making me stick it out for two hours after the show.

It is crazy when they tell me that this is just screams to a beat
when i know its what shot you into my veins
glue that binds, a weapon that defines us
and I would be so lost without you
though I walk alone I am never on my own
cuz the places we've been become the times we have shared
and they crash like waves and mark these days
and I don't go anywhere without them

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When Bands Stop Taking Drugs

Anyone who is familiar with Insane Clown Posse's early days of glory would be looking forward to their new album blowing a hole through their soft, malleable skulls a la The Tower:

However, I'm afraid you will have to settle for their recent genius which has produced some of the best art I think we can expect from two wiggers in facepaint and a way inflated video budget. There are no words, and laughter doesn't do quite do it justice. Just watch. And be soothed at all the "miracles up in this bitch."

Hungry for more? Maybe you're ready for Spring Break, ICP style on their own Juggalo Island.

Ottobar Blowing Up

The month of September will be a great one at the Ottobar on Howard St. in Bmore. Check it: next Friday, none other but the venerable BANE with worthy companions Trapped Under Ice will be slamming around, and yes yes yes I already have my ticket. TUI has a new album out, Secrets of the World, on sale and for download on iTunes. Check out their official video for "Believe," shot in Bmore:

The next day is Tobacco, formerly Black Moth Super Rainbow, spacey electro-something that will probably invite tons of SpecialK-heads and acid freaks. Thereby, the Ottobar will be totally cracked out and we like that.

And THEN, just in case you haven't properly been ear-stroked by that point, Wavves will be gracing us with their presence as well. Their new album King of the Beach is also on iTunes and has a similar effect of hearing an album by Of Montreal or something equally overwhelming to your dopamine receptors. Brian Wilson, eat your heart out.

Your Dreams Don't Look This Good

Before all thoughts of Australia are dashed to the polluted winds of East Coast port cities, I feel this must be properly documented. First, I have to ask: do you believe in portal discovery? Astral projection? Parallel universes? It is, I'm afraid, the only way to encapsulate what you find in a little place called Yorkeys Knob, up in the town of Cairns, North Queensland. Now don't go there or anything, otherwise I will have spoiled the delicious secret. You should probably just stick to the backpacker-friendly city of Cairns, spending your days in the beergarten of Shenanigan's and picking up twenty-something American college students who are throwing caution to the wind while on parents' travel money, unless...

You know the answers to the following:

1) Cairns was discovered and settled by the English explorer named blank.

2) The main cash crop in Cairns is blank.

3) The surrounding area is most like America's blank in terms of education and opportunity.

4) You can throw your used syringes blank.

One of the first sights when you arrive in Cairns is the giant cartoonish monument to Cap'n James Cook's legacy. There he stands, proud in breeches, sharing this momentous discovery with you, but you're too busy consulting the map in your ridiculously painted mystery machine that some idiot either thought would be TOO cute to decorate the six-pack-toting backpackers passing through town, or a cruel joke to alert locals to the trust fund babies on board.

Driving down the single access road to Yorkeys at dawn is one of those smells you can't forget. They're cutting the stalks of sugar cane to add to all those products that in the US are injected with enough high fructose corn syrup to make your grandkids diabetic, and the salty sea spray air spreads it around the valley.

As with many little preserved secret paradises, the area is home to skilled tradespeople and rednecks who have a great connection to the land they tried (and succeeded) not to share with the natives.

Although I can't imagine it has very much more heroin being pumped through its wayward youth than, say, Eugene, OR, Australia definitely takes a more responsive approach to the problem by providing public bathrooms with easy syringe disposal here, there, around the corner, pick up new ones at the free clinic. Enlightened! Proactive! And yet exactly the kind of thing would send up a million furious mothers at preemptively introducing their impressionable youngsters to the evil facts of the world. Sex can wait--masturbate.

I could give a flying yorkeys knob who settled the place, but I'm most intrigued by this last bit comparison between Uzzie and Auzzie. Maybe because of pressure we feel to attract tourists and locals alike, lure them into a false sense of security by pretending that the drug problems of some of its citizens need not interfere with anyone else's daily life. A sign placed on the inside of a bathroom stall door could, hypothetically, interfere with someone's God-given right to drop the kids off at the pool without having to think about larger community issues. Can we at least get those sacrosanct five minutes, please? In our hustle and bustle of fulfilling ambition (a term not nearly as household in OZ), we need to consider the children. (Won't someone pleeeease?!) Where else will they get the brilliant idea to give themselves a booster shot of pure

sweetsugarheavenJesusridingamechanicalbullTijuananineteenseventyfourwasahelluvayear than these, quote, proactive signs? We might as well be handing out fliers at all the bus stops, for His sake! (Statistics of applicable ratios, prevalence of signs to later junky-hood still in progress).

But we mustn't fool ourselves that our empire expatriate cousins down under are more enlightened in all respects than us poor fallen Puritans. After all, we got like fifty years on them in terms of integration, and I'm sure there's been a lot of back-patting for this one at least. 2008 was the first formal governmental apology to the aboriginal and islander peoples of Australia, but the resentment still sticks like peanut butter in the mouths of many bushies who,

not unlike the natural-born workers of Arizona are having a tough time getting on with the new kids from the other side of the fence.

In my month stay, I didn't hear of a single violent crime not linked to an aboriginal or islander man, and the paper proclaimed growing support for anti-petrol-sniffing efforts in a town north of Alice Springs. On Thursday Island where I stayed for four days, in amidst the continental crumbs from some prehistoric Pangea in between Australia and Papua-New Guinea, memories of the Lost Generation, the children who were yoinked from their families by the missionaries to learn proper cosmic philosophy still smart. Families who raised chickens to support their families were stripped of both chickens and children, then told to buy the one back at a government-installed grocer, and leave the other in the hands of Christians. (Ooh, but we love their artwork!) With a past like this, maybe inhaling petrol would feel better.

But I wasn't there for political reasons, or I really can't claim to have left D.C. at all. I went for the rainbows, the geckos, the salty sea air that poodled my hair, and the sun that turned it golden-white and my skin brown. And in this regard there were no disappointments. It's a forty-five degree slope up to where my sister lives on a cliff overlooking the dry tropics, beach and tablelands. The building is circular, and her balcony overlooks this grotesquely gorgeous scene. The windows and doors stay open even though it's wintertime because it's the dry season, and besides it's only about seventy-five degrees Farenheit. And should anyone get a little chilly out there, you can just climb on in and make for one very strange bedfellow:

And yet Octavio wasn't so dangerous as some of the other friends I made at the zoo where my sister works.

Even though he could rip me apart faster than any full-grown adult male, I am ultimately more likely to trust a fellow like this one: