LITURGY

I've got a longish feature on the Brooklyn-based black metal-ish band Liturgy in the Summer 2011 issue of Signal to Noise. I'm not gonna put the whole thing here; you should buy the magazine. But here are a few paragraphs, to give you some idea of its tone:

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's core idea, that black metal is fundamentally European in outlook and thus requires philosophical reshuffling in order to be relevant to American life and culture, is certainly defensible. This has been true of other musical movements in the past; contrast, say, the Sex Pistols' declaration of "No Future" with Black Flag's determination to "Rise Above." Compare the fatalistic doom of Black Sabbath when they were 100% English to the heroic mythmaking of their second lineup, with Italian-Americans Ronnie James Dio and Vinny Appice on vocals and drums, respectively. The wintry nihilism of black metal as performed by its Scandinavian creators—Mayhem, Enslaved et al.—is only minimally applicable to American sensibilities. Consequently, US black metal acts like Nachtmystium and Black Anvil add elements of punk, industrial and Goth in order to give the music a rock-star edge it would otherwise lack.

Hunt-Hendrix's use of the word "transcendental" is misleading, though. He seems to be primarily talking about transcending the limitations of black metal as a musical genre and set of philosophical concepts—actual links to Transcendentalism are minimal. The closest thing modern America has to the 19th Century Transcendentalists are the Amish, or maybe some super-committed hippies, militant environmentalists, et cetera. There are black metal musicians who have taken the genre's embrace of paganism and primeval nature in that direction, most notably the Pacific Northwest-based group Wolves in the Throne Room, whose members live on a collective farm in the woods. But Hunt-Hendrix is a city kid, and he wants no part of this kind of rejectionism. "I'm not interested in pre-industrial ideals," he says. "The more technology and science the better."

...

Of course, it's possible to argue that black metal itself is essentially anti-metal, that the qualities it emphasizes—obscurantism, lack of catharsis (blast beats aside, the guitar riffs seem to hover in place rather than galloping forward), crude sound quality—are precisely the opposite of metal as it's been known since the late 1970s, when bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were first forging a unique sound out of the ashes of the heavy blues-rock scene. Black metal rejects the strutting godhood of arena-sized metal, and the use of makeup puts them into a weirdly androgynous performative space occupied mostly by, yes, Kiss and the other glam-rockers of the 1970s (from stars like David Bowie and Alice Cooper to also-rans like T.Rex and Jobriath). Is black metal itself androgynous, and is Hunt-Hendrix, with his shrieks that are sometimes more like the yelps of a startled Girl Scout, playing into that?

CHOOSING IGNORANCE

Why not have dignity today, for ourselves? We don’t need to wait for a Gandhi or Bobby Seale for this. You wake up, regardless of your circumstances, and you have a pretty open book. You can turn on the teevee and have some people yell at you, and then get in the car and have people yell at you, and then feel bad all the time, and then come home and flop on the couch or in front of the computer, and eat fast food that you know is rotting you away, and then go to bed exhausted and depressed and repeat until death...or you could not do any of those things, because you’re going to choose personal dignity instead.

...

We have a remarkable ability to know exactly what things we’re doing are harmful to us...and then we keep doing those things, until we decide to stop.

For anyone who feels this Internet emptiness chewing at them, I would say, do a little test. Go outside and take a 15-minute walk — around the block, through the park, just a short walk. While you’re doing this, clear your mind of work and of home. Just look at things, birds and cars and trees and the clouds and buildings and dumpsters, and when you think of something internal just say “thinking” to yourself and go back to walking and breathing. Then return to your computer. Do the usual things you do on your computer, like check the news and your email and the blogs you read and whatever people post on Facebook and Twitter.

Do this second part, the computer-looking-at, for just 15 minutes. You can set one of those web timers...hang on, I have one in my bookmarks.

When this stopwatch beeps, honestly ask yourself how you feel. Compare this to how you felt at the end of your 15-minute walk. Ask yourself what, if anything, you learned during those 15 minutes of wasting time on the Internet. Did it help you in some way? Are you better off? This is a question often asked by political challengers: Are you better off than __ years ago? Well, are you better off than fifteen minutes ago? If not, don’t re-elect the Internet.

...

[T]he answer is almost certainly going to be No, you’re not better off. But you’re going to be agitated now, both restless and slothful, and you’re either going to feel something negative about somebody you don’t even know or you’re going to want something you don’t need, because you’ve been bombarded with advertising the whole time, even in the corner of your vision while reading your gmail.

The above comes from an interview with now-former Wonkette editor Ken Layne, who has a book out (Kindle-only, apparently) that sounds sort of interesting. But who said it, and in what context, is sort of beside the point.

Recently I wrote about giving up cable, and how it's helped me out mentally - I'm reading a lot more, and writing a lot more (which means I'm making more money, so while cable was an expense, the absence of cable has turned out to be an economic engine). Now I'm thinking about erasing all my bookmarked political sites, too.

I've lately come to the realization that a lot of things are out of ordinary people's control. You can apply for a thousand jobs and never get one, because in 2011 America, jobs are like meteorites - one either falls out of the sky and hits you, or it doesn't. You have no control over it - who you know doesn't help, volume of applications doesn't help, skill levels don't help. You're just out there making your way in the world, and maybe someone steps over and taps you on the shoulder and says, "Hey, I'll pay you to do [x thing]," but more likely than not, no one ever comes.

Politics is similar. We, the governed, have no control over what our leaders do. None. We can vote for them based on what they say when they want us to vote for them, but they're almost certain to be lying. This has been proven time and time again. So what recourse do we have left to us? Why, we have the Internet! We can tell each other how angry we are that our leaders keep lying, and we can even address our angry thoughts directly to the leaders in question, as though Barack Obama or Sarah Palin or Anthony Weiner or whoever is reading the comments on joeispissedaboutpolitics.blogspot.com. We can call each other names and explain in agonizingly minute detail how wrong everybody but us is, or we can clap each other on the back and talk about how smart we are and how dumb and wrong and destructive-to-America everyone else is. And none of it matters.

I used to read some right-wing sites (National Review Online most prominent among them) along with a bunch of putatively left-wing sites and blogs. I felt it was "important" to know what people who disagreed with me thought. Now I don't even care what people who agree with me think. Most of American politics, and all of American political commentary with one or two exceptions whose names I will not cite, is composed of people I don't want on my side of any issue. They're ugly (I mean this in the spiritual/philosophical sense, though Washington, DC is not exactly a hotbed of modeling-agency recruitment), narcissistic people who don't seem to have even fleetingly thought "But what if I'm wrong?" in decades. And that includes the ones in their twenties.

I just don't have time for it. Reading about politics is like studying meteorology. You can know all you want about weather patterns, but it's not going to help you stop it from raining on a day you'd rather it not rain. You can figure out what causes tornadoes, and maybe learn to predict them, but they're coming whether you know about it in advance or not.

I choose to be ignorant. I wish I didn't know who was President, and couldn't name any members of Congress just like I can't name a single baseball, basketball or football player. I for damn sure wish I didn't know the names and faces of political writers and TV talking heads, because they are to a man (and woman) a worthless, debased group of people who should be rounded up and shoved into the Fukushima reactor to prevent further leakage.

The more time I spend thinking about politics, the less time I can spend doing things that make me happy. Like reading stories, and writing them. Listening to music, and thinking about it and writing about it. (Buy Burning Ambulance - issue four just came out this week.) Watching movies (not documentaries, movies - preferably ones where things blow up and people get kicked in the face). Like just hanging out with my wife.

I don't need this shit anymore. I'm done.

NEW STUFF WHAT I HAVE WROTE

I interviewed Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure (son of the late Ali Farka Toure, and godson of Toumani Diabaté; if you know your Malian music, you know this basically makes him the Chosen One) about his new album The Secret. Be warned: the album features guest appearances by John Scofield, Derek Trucks, and (ugh) Dave Matthews. But for the rest of its running time, it's a pretty hard-grooving, and occasionally quite scorching, slab of Afro-rock. VFT is not one of those lilting African guitarists. He likes to step on the pedal and kick some ass. Here's the link.

And here are links to 10 more All Music Guide reviews:

Arch Enemy, Khaos Legions
Autopsy, Macabre Eternal (Amazon MP3 link)
Krallice, Diotima (Amazon MP3 link)
Portrait, Crimen Laesae Majestatis Divinae (Amazon MP3 link)
Qluster, Fragen (Amazon MP3 link)
Wadada Leo Smith, Heart's Reflections (Amazon link)
A Storm of Light, As the Valley of Death Becomes Us, Our Silver Memories Fade (Amazon MP3 link)
Jeremy Udden, If the Past Seems So Bright (Amazon MP3 link)
Anthony Wilson, Campo Belo (Amazon MP3 link)

I also wrote a review of Hate Eternal's Phoenix Amongst the Ashes that AMG decided not to use, so here's that:

Hate Eternal
Phoenix Amongst the Ashes
Metal Blade
Hate Eternal’s music is death metal, sharpened to a razor’s edge and polished to a blinding gleam. There is almost no subtlety to it—the riffs saw at the listener’s ears, the drums are a relentless double bass machine-gun barrage, the vocals are a harsh, guttural roar. Still, both through his long tenure leading the group and his production work for a variety of other extreme metal outfits, Hate Eternal leader Erik Rutan continues to refine his group’s core sound from album to album. Phoenix Amongst the Ashes doesn’t inject even slight doses of melody, but these songs do somehow seem to function as songs, not mere collections of riffs. The band is very much influenced by Morbid Angel, for whom Rutan played in the ’90s; their songs have the same feeling of huge slabs of concrete being pushed back and forth. There are unexpected sounds here, though, like when a guitar that sounds almost like a horn section comes in at 2:30 into “Haunting Abound,” or the ultra-clean guitar riff that follows it, in the same song. “The Art of Redemption” opens with extremely high-pitched, insanely fast picking by Rutan that sounds like the work of Krallice/Orthrelm guitarist Mick Barr, as drummer Jade Simonetto hammers his kit into submission. So while in some ways this is “just another Hate Eternal album,” the band continues to find new facets of a style that might be easily classifiable—and ignorable—in the hands of lesser players.

Oh, and I reviewed three albums for emusic.com:

Altar of Plagues, Mammal
Jesu, Ascension
Krallice, Diotima

THE MAYANS INVENTED TELEVISION

Could this be an alternate theory of the Rapture?

CUT LOOSE

It's been two weeks since I gave up television. I still own a television, but I cancelled my cable; now it's just a monitor for watching DVDs.

I didn't have a TV for much of my childhood. My mom wanted to encourage my brother and me to read more, and to go outside and play more, so there was no television set in our house between my preschool days and my early teen years. And indeed, I spent a lot of time outside riding my bike or climbing trees or playing football on a local patch of grass (far too small to be called a park) with other kids, or sitting in my room alone reading library books.

As a side note, I didn't hear the word "playdate" until I was in my late 20s or early 30s. My mom used to push my brother and me out the door with the words "Dinner's at six. Be home on time." End of story. There are lots of things not to miss about the '70s and '80s, but the freedom children enjoyed in those years is definitely a major loss.

Anyway, I don't miss TV. I used to watch Morning Joe while eating breakfast, and it made me angry. I used to watch Hardball in the evenings, and it made me angry. Not angry because "dammit, Obama's takin' all our money and givin' it to [insert group I don't belong to]." Angry because journalists are so fucking stupid, myopic and above all narcissistic, because they talk only to each other or to people richer than themselves and then go on television and talk about what "the American people" want, or about how a given policy decision is going to poll, whether or not it's the right thing to do. I don't need to hear that bullshit anymore. I'm out.

And political jabber aside, there aren't any sitcoms or dramas I'm particularly interested in seeing that I can't catch up with a day later on Hulu. And I'm already reading a lot more, and writing a lot more. So this is pretty much a win from every angle. I should have done it years ago.