Mayyyyhem!

Who knows when you'll stumble across the greatest Norweigan black metal band the world has ever seen? Have your mace out when you do. Although they'd probably like that, sick fucks. I guess somehow I was bragging to someone about how I'd just watched the adultswim phenomenon "Metalocalypse" on a giant, 3D TV. One of the sushi rollers at Sticky Rice then informed me it was all an elaborate satire of this great black metal band from the nineties called Mayhem, and there was controversy because of how the one guy killed himself and his bandmate kind of enjoyed the remains. So naturally I had to do some research. I found the picture of the rearranged corpse that Euronymous took and made into partial brain stew (rumored). It then became an album cover for a bootleg album called Dawn of the Black Hearts. Yes, that is his brain. And yes, it is pretty brutal.

Of course, right before I posted this, VICE just had to beat me to the punch: http://www.viceland.com/int/v8n1/htdocs/blackmetal.php

F-ing awesome.

While we're in the great Nordic regions, we shift our attentions to a little blonde dance pop chick from the nineties making a great splash. Robyn (best known for "Show Me Love", a favorite of 6th grade Julie) just came out with a new album, Body Talk Part 1. High-profile collaborators include Royksopp:

and Diplo, on the track "Dance Hall Queen." Themes include boredom, self-destruction, and feminine fierceness. What's not to like?

Awesome Blog, Great Job!

In between fluffernutters tonight, I had time to create the literary/literal blog addendum to this here Sundae, Jukebox Dive. There you will find, to your bemusement and delight, a collection of some of my best collegiate efforts, and even some excerpts that will be in my first novel. Enjoy, critique, ponder.

The Drug War

Pictures of the Brian Jonestown Massacre will be forthcoming, pending the discovery of my camera-to-computer cord, but don't get too wet in the pants because as I recall, I had shitty angles and bad aperture settings. Arghf. In any case, perhaps the description shows a thousand pictures. I rolled up hazily to the 9:30 Club to get the tickets at Will Call, and had to practically step over the prostrated bodies of two youths gunned in the face over a bad drug deal. (Oh, U St. Corridor. When will you be perfectly gentrified?) My madman friend Neil joined me, but his so looked forward to concert experience was marred when he was excused from the premises for blowing one lone toke over the crowd during an ebullient rise in the music. Meanwhile, an old friend of mine was intent on introducing me to Joel Gion and Newcomb's lovely Welsh wife, Kate. He texted me, "Enjoy the show, do your thing. Over some weed--jesus." Indeed. I'm sure it's laughable to anyone in NYC or SFC that in D.C. you can still get busted for tokin' a smoke at a perfectly psychedelic concert. But the crowd was older--the I-Graduated-From-High-School-In-'89 crowd still haunting the Velvet Lounge and Asylums of Northwest. It was a great vibe. Everyone was totally chilled out, the bar was empty and entirely approachable. (You win this time, AA.) On the way in, the chick asked to look in my bag. My paraphernalia was well-hidden, but she asked about my small black Sephora drawstring bag which contained my bottle of legit antidepressants label intact, and unfortunately still an unlabeled bottle of Blue Dragon, stripped of its label since I lost a similarly precious prescription bottle on the ground outside a 711, and so some lucky fuck knows my name, address and phone number. But when she asked to verify the name on the bottle with the name on my ID I freaked temporarily, preparing to part with the magical purple bud. Whew, I just squeaked through.

I thought about what Newcomb would have said about the fact that two poor assholes get their faces blown off for crack or yeyo and all the cops have to do is crouch down and clean it up, while I provide government record of the various coping methods I've found to ease the anxiety of walking down a street covered in rats and crackheads. And actually, it's not even so much the crackheads and dog-sized rodents that really makes the hair stand on end, but the people who walk by and pretend to help you when you fall and break your leg, only to steal your last bottle of Vicodin to get ripped with some Grey Goose later. Or the dude who buddies up to your boyfriend to try to lock you in a bathroom. But then I remember Newcomb's miles away from all this bullshit. He's had his time, but he's sober now and crystal-clear according to a January interview for London-based webzine SUPERSWEET, in which he concludes:

A lot of clever people are completely overwhelmed. This stuff keeps happening, such as the Pakistani earthquakes. I was thinking that you could have really light, bomb shaped objects, breakable plastic, load that up and fly low and drop it, you can mobilise an insane amount to them. But I don’t like getting into the politics, because it’s bad form while I’m here, sitting in a hotel living room. My concern is that, when the fatigue sets in, when we stop worrying about it.

As Nietzsche said, politics is the prostitution of the intellect. And that's why I'm getting out of D.C. Soon. Soon.

Take me, Vice Records, my palms are moist for you.

Summer Madness

June first, D.C. hits a Code Orange index for air quality. This means you're showering three times a day, and all attempts at elegance are thwarted by sweat drenchings. Yucko. But as the crazies hit Capitol City, it seems appropriate to focus on the nature of madness. In preparation for the concert at the 9:30 Club tomorrow night, I did a bit of research on the influences of the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

BJM took me by surprise one afternoon riding shotgun with my friend and fellow writer Neil Defalco, and I immediately demanded to know who it was. It's a familiar, San Francisco sound, circular in sensibility, tortured voice and enigmatic lyrics overtop. The psychedelic sound amongst eight musicians, one of whom, the founder Anton Newcomb, seems taken with something behind the personage of one Charles Manson. But he's definitely not the first rock star to be fascinated with mass manipulators. If we recall Pink Floyd, we remember the allusions to Hitler, and Churchill, and the general distrust of those who seem to influence the air we breathe. Manson is probably part Lenin part Woody Guthrie, for his nature of common man, travelin' minstrel slash pimp slash hereditary criminal. The combination sounds crazy, and maybe that's why he's crazy. But at the same time is pretty bullshit-free.

BJM did a reworking of Manson's song "Arkansas," called "Arkansas Revisited." Maintains much of that train-hopping feel I compared to Woody Guthrie.

He was at worst a monster and at best an opportunist, but wherever his morality lies, for certain Manson is of vital importance to the twentieth century, perhaps only for the way he harnessed the dark side of the Movement, drawing in absolutely everyone including Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. He had to have been a pretty likeable or interesting character for charming so many into his cause. And yet he had no illusions about whether or not he was a "smart man." He claims he isn't in the interview, and it's true he has no education, and he grew up and kept low-brow company his whole life. (Pimping in your early twenties=low-brow). There are those (perhaps Newcomb included) who still like to argue that no one that dumb could have been that manipulative. Isn't it funny how we have a weird sense of respect or admiration for those who so deftly enrope others into one single, often selfish or destructive cause? It's learned behavior, not skilled and fulfilling the basest of instincts, often a result of severe self-doubt in the endless quest for approval. Not a skill, not a talent, just a personality flaw.

But damn, some of the nastiest people have made the coolest music.

Thank you God for auto-tune.