MDB

Forgot how crushing and unique this album is. Good memories

Tell em, cowboy

The world is full of trifflin bamas. But it's not like you didn't already know this.

- Facebook rando

Now(ish) and Then

Things change and stay the same. Kim-Thurston-Lee 4 EVER

Maniacal Metal

Beyond siked to revisit this heavy metal hideout next month deep in the suburban wasteland of Vienna, Virginia. Turns out this is the guy who released the ACID and TANK live LPs a few years back; an ancient bard who's seen more than most can imagine and is still around to tell the tales. For Christ's sake, the man saw PENTAGRAM at CB's with the CRO MAGS and GOVERNMENT ISSUE!!!

Until then, some treasures from the vaults:

Somethings I Learned Today

1) I should give up on arguing because I stink at it (and most of the time it's just my ego playing defense).

2) You can be the friendliest person in the world, but it's all hollow until unless you get your shit done.

Ghaleon

The last few weeks have been grim here at NA. So in an effort to lighten the mood, I present... Ghaleon!

I met this dude last year at Folsom Fair, where he asked to take my photo shirtless. I took him up on the offer, he gave me his card, and then I lost it in the depths of my room until the big purge this weekend. A sampling from his vast media empire:

Old video game reviews on Althena's Temple:


Shirtless randos on modelmayhem (that coulda been me):


"Hot men showing off their armpits" at Pitstalker:


Aaaand Movies with Male Bondage!

Witch House

Blurry photo (of a photo) of a SF Episcopal church from around the turn of the century, though I prefer to think of it as a witches coven. Or a gnome fortress.

!HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

For her pleasure

Turns out there's a lot of sexy stuff on the internet related to the execution biz. Take your pick of hunky mystery man:


Or basement gimp:

Black Ice/Rabies

Take-home lesson: they will both kill you.

Dad's gettin the band back together

Amazing Rant Overheard

From SF Weekly:

Ranter: Leather-jacketed man in his forties sporting a mustache like a fat strip of Velcro

Location: BART, Pittsburgh/Bay Point train headed out of Powell Station

The Rant:

[Commuters pour into the train. Like several others, Mustache Man approaches what at first seems to be an empty seat. Unlike those others, upon seeing that the seat is occupied with a large rolling suitcase Mustache Man shares his frustrations. As the train surges toward Montgomery, Mustache Man addresses the case’s owner.]

Mustache Man: That there’s some pretty luggage, boss.

[Owner stares straight ahead.]

Mustache Man: But it better be, if you going to treat it like a princess. That’s what you think it is, right? You think your bag’s a princess?

[Owner stares straight ahead.]

Mustache Man: It best be some kind of princess if you think that it ought to have a seat, and all of these hardworking people all up in here don’t. You think that you’re the only motherfucker here who deserves two seats. You think that you got some precious royalty here, You think —

Owner: The floor is dirty.

Mustache Man: You think your princess bag is more important than all these tired, tired people? You want to stand up and tell ’em your princess bag is more important than they is?

Owner: I don’t want my shit on that dirty floor.

Mustache Man: Your shit wouldn’t be on the floor! It’s packed in the bag, boss! That’s the reason they make bags!

[People laugh. Mustache Man feels encouraged.]

Mustache Man: You going to take it home and eat off it? Jesus Christ. You’re taking your princess bag out on a date or some shit?

[Owner stares straight ahead.]

Mustache Man: And who the fuck ever said those seats was clean?

On versatility

Directly from the mouth of my hairdresser, shortly after I finished reading a copy of Fantastic Man magazine (with Bryan Ferry on the cover [of course]):

Blessed be the flexible, for they will bend and not break.

Die Right/Right to Die

Good lord the Guttural Breath LP is a bummer. These blokes coulda really benefited from a lesson on packing it in when the going's good

PJ O'Rourke is a buffoon

But at least this guy has got it right

Bedtime for Bonzo

As I head out on another tour of bodily punishment, a part of me is dreaming of an Ian MacKaye life of gardening, drinking tea, and going to bed early.

Parents Playlist

Tunes from a weekend in the company of parental units and other assorted Halals.

Retro is Poison

Good critique of the surge of TV shows reinforcing and banking on outdated gender roles; widen the lense a bit for a jab in the face of an obsession that's rapidly choking itself into meaninglessness.

Retro is an addiction that rages out of control in a recession; the more we drink it in — the more times we remake “Charlie’s Angels” or wish for a return of stewardesses and other clear-cut visual cues of gender rigidity — the less able we are to move forward and come up with our own ideas.

Anal Probing Aliens

Just returned from an epic evening of the strangest proportions. A night that began attached to a million wires in a foreign bed on Nob Hill, and ended in a diner eating pancakes at 6 am with Creedence playing overhead. And I still got the goo in my hair to prove it.

Great Goats

Old

Slowly making my way to the rest home for aging punks. Excited to use this line from George Carlin (I've actually been doin it for years):

One great thing about getting old is that you can get out of all sorts of social obligations just by saying you're too tired.

Double Vision

Incarnation one, followed by two. Hard to believe it's the same band. Need this!

The Countdown Begins

Final week as a 20 year old, err... whatever, you know what I mean.

On Being "Against Nature"

From an awesome book I picked up yesterday on homosexuality throughout history:

This kind of argument is ridiculuous because men forget that they are part of nature themselves; if some aberration develops within them it is caused by nature acting within them. I have never been able to understand why intelligent men fail to see how absurd and pretentious it is to mention something which could exist outside nature or in opposition to it, because we can have no knowledge of anything which is not within nature; we are phenomena of nature and an integral part of it... If homosexuality is perverse, then we are forced to find nature itself perverse.

Seems to me that anyone who makes the "against nature" argument doesn't really want to grapple with the dizzying complexity of the world we live in; a pompous explanation for a place that is so much bigger than us. Get over yourself!

Back from the East

With a head full of memories, a twinkle in my eye, and a grip of new brain toys. Top 5, in no particular order (or ARE they???)

Lovers in the House of Halal:

Boston minimal wavers on a comeback with the help of my sis:

25 year old bearded George Castanza party boy:

Deutschland's forgotten space rockers:


And finally, why is this dude running through a snowstorm holding an ice cream cone?

Jason Halal

A people person with a low tolerance for people.

Relinquish Thy Sinful Ways

Not real, but still kinda real:



Totally real and totally hilarious:

Kaleidoscope World

Paisley-clad hobbits and billygoats galore:

Fish Patrol

Sitting here wondering what to put on my lonely blog, and--lo and behold--the internet poops out this little gem.

Hardcore confusion

Just rediscovered this mind numbing map detailing the twists and turns of the preeminent Tokyo hardcore tribes (pretty sure I scored a Systematic Death family tree at their east coast shows a few years back but alas, it has been lots to the mists of poor memory). Respect/pity for the poor fool who put this together.

The World According to Cicero

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Friends

Live Free and Burn

Fiendishly anticipating the reunion of Victor and Bob the Nob tomorrow night. Some things that are getting my diabolic dick hard:

No babies no babies no babies

Lost in Hell

Punk Under Glass

Read all about their wacky hi-jinx right here.

I Dig Pain

The lone perk in navigating a sea of dental insurance bureaucracy:

Baby brother

Welcome to the family, lil guy

No Information

Sincerely wish I had some shred of knowledge about this, but alas, I am not an art history major. And besides, it's 2011; that would be missing the point.

They defined their collectomania as art. The art of what? They seemed to think that their art, in posting a barrage of truly luscious images on the Internet, involved "explain[ing] in a new way the world unknown to you." The problem was that those luscious images were just that, and nothing else. Just pretty pixels. No content, contextual indicators, knowledge, or anything of real intelligible value could be gleaned from [their] contributions to the World Wide Web -- and that's the way they intended it!

Come to the Sabbat

Yes, this is Peanuts

But it captures the spirit of things. And you know what? Rob Gordon would most certainly agree:

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

Eagle Babe

Been reading up on eagle hunting lately, an Asian sport that uses trained eagles to catch small mammals. Kinda like pigeon racing but with bloodthirsty Mongolians. From a Kazakh blog I stumbled upon:

Makpal’s father Murat brought us photo albums upon photo albums. They were like your average family photos, but half of them had eagles in them, like family members... Kazakh society was conservative and segregated, yet Makpal’s passion for this tradition defied all boundaries. Here was a woman in the manliest of sports, all blood and beasts and horseback hunts. She was a symbol of a new Kazakh woman, I thought, one who could do anything... Makpal came out in her finest falconry-ware, a traditional Kazakh robe and a fur hat. She looked stunning.... With an eagle on her arm, I just about fainted. The beautiful girl and the beautiful bird had been partners for ten years... I had seen her picture in a Kyrgyz class magazine clipping, and now I had found her in the middle of nowhere. The strangeness of it all jumbled my common sense, and I thought of staying here forever, learning Kazakh, and giving my heart to a hunter in the heart of Eurasia.

Killing Technology

Sickened by the banality of modern life

Keep it clean

Hardcore Rules!

I don't know Aesop, but I do know that: 1) he does one of the coolest music blogs out there, the ever impressive Cosmic Hearse, 2) he made this with his 10 year old son, Ezra, and 3) I'm excited to trowl through the rest of his videos, particularly "Generic Black Metal" and Cap'n NAMBLA."

Hardcore Rules!!! from Aesop Dekker on Vimeo.

Unconditional Love

That's what this is. I love him, as is, fully. I've had to stop arm wrestling with the facts. Why me? Didn't I already have a big love once? And lost it? So why should I get it again? I've had to stop trying to look for cracks and flaws to prove that it's not as good as it seems. Because it's as good as it seems. Even when we fight, we fight inside the container of good.

Somehow, through a flip of the coin, I ended up here. Feeling like somebody at the top of the heart-lung transplant list. Damaged but invigorated and fucking lucky.

TransCosmic Geometry

Caught this a few months ago as part of a film series loosely based on "static, feedback, interference and reception," plus live film deconstruction with tin foil and bug zappers.

More from Edwin Rostron here.

Can't remember what was shown by this guy, Yoshi Sodeoka, but there's a killer collection of videos, stills, and prints here.

Hair Care

What a Guy

Volumes upon volumes have been written about the waste laid upon hotels by The Who, a band known for its ability to trash rooms as much as for its exuberant music. The group exploded rhythmic energy and its most reckless member was Keith Moon. Moon’s boyish violence of hitting and destroying things was exhibited not only in rock, but in his propensity for using cherry bombs and dynamite to blow up toilets… lots of them. “We got thrown out of every hotel we ever stayed in,” The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend once said. One time, Moon said he forgot something on the way to the airport, insisted on returning to the hotel, ran to his room, threw the television set out into the pool, and legendarily sighed, “I nearly forgot.” On August 23, 1967, his 21st birthday, he set in motion a now-mythical spree at the Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan. Though we can’t ascertain fact from legend, Moon claimed to have driven a Lincoln Continental into the hotel pool.

Fucking Robots

Meaning of Robots from Matt Lenski on Vimeo.

What a Steal

$1,045 on eBay gets you



Or you could just stick with the halter top for a cool $40

Big Joe's Bogus Journey

Down let the man get you down... WATCH THIS AND BE EXCELLENT! Free Denunzio!

Music Proletariats Unite!

Picked up these lil treats during a thunderstorm yesterday along with the first Witchcraft LP (finally) and some early Mercury Rev and Seefeel. A million more things I desperately want (looks like the entire Razor and Sacrifice discographies have been rereleased on vinyl--what???), but I don't plan on getting rich or winning the lottery anytime soon, so until then you will find me picking up the scraps at Reckless -- a true friend of the low income audiophile.

Narcissism in the Modern Age

Writing in the late ’70s, Lasch distinguished modern narcissism from old-fashioned egotism. The contemporary narcissist, he wrote, differs “from an earlier type of American individualist” in “the tenuous quality of his selfhood.” Despite “his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem.” His innate insecurity can only be overcome “by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power and charisma.”

This is a depressingly accurate anticipation of both the relationship between Weiner and his female “followers,” and the broader “look at me! look at meeeee!” culture of online social media, in which nearly all of us participate to some degree or another.

Facebook and Twitter did not forge the culture of narcissism. But they serve as a hall of mirrors in which it flourishes as never before — a “vast virtual gallery,” as Rosen has written, whose self-portraits mainly testify to “the timeless human desire for attention.”

CPAs

An elite class of superfreaks of which my bud Rob is a member.

Perfection

This is what it looks like

Remember those stickers that said "skateboarding is not a crime"?