Celtic Frost and other musical business

I have a new band. We’re called Missionaries of the Air. One night Jacob and I were at the bar and we’re out in the back with the smokers when Jacob starts belting out a Soundgarden song that impresses pretty much everyone. Including the guy who’s now our bassist, Jared. This is what we sound like when covering Celtic Frost.

Metal review: Entropia-Electric Chaos

On their sophomore outing, Vancouver’s Entropia have crafted a well thought out sound that is just as much an homage to their bloodline and that of the thrash metal genre as it is original and in a few instances, profoundly so. Consider two album highlights: the retro-thrash anthem “Disciples of Aggression,” the best old Metallica sound-alike I’ve heard in ages and the gorgeous closer “Tears of Blood,” which is both their “Beyond the Realms of Death” as it is a fresh approach to the ubiquitous metal ballad. Marrying these disparate poles of being is what Entropia do best on this album.

Ebola

And now, a story. Three sections of one anyway, adapted to be sort of coherent. One of my favorite things I’ve done. You can read this without knowing or caring about the other sections.

Ebola.

2.

In the four hundredth year of my million year summer, I fell in love with a woman that used to be a woman. I was sitting in a car that was stalled at a traffic light in a nothing town. I was supposed to meet for dinner a friend I had worked with many years ago so I was driving out West to where she lived. The radio was tuned to a heavy metal station from Des Moines that had played nothing but old Mayhem and Ozzy Osbourne records all night. At various points, I’d been singing along even though I had forgotten most of the words, and in so doing, I’d made myself smile. As I said, a nothing town. I didn’t care so much about the dinner I was driving out for, in all honesty. Perhaps it would be couscous with a side of grilled mergueza, followed by some perfectly honeyed besbousa. My ideal last meal if I were ever on death row—everyone who knows me knows this about me, my morbid decadences— and who better to prepare it than my friend? My old friend had been a sous chef in the time I knew her. She could only have gotten better in the time we’d been apart, grown even more sophisticated. In our phone conversation, she spoke about a restaurant in the Yukon to which you trekked ten miles on foot or with a pack of dogs, tired and hungry until the owner satisfied your weariness. I did not tell her I had been to that restaurant, that the man who designed it had been a client of mine many years previous. In the moment before I fell in love with the woman that used to be a woman, I remember wanting a burger, fries and a diet coke with a straw, but I didn’t desire it, the burger, fries and diet coke with a straw. I hadn’t desired anything in a long time. In fact, I felt nothing about the burger, fries and the diet coke with a straw. I recognized the words. I could chew the concept if I chose but more than that, who knows? Perhaps, I reasoned, as I had not eaten all day in anticipation of the conversation during the lovely dinner my friend would undoubtedly prepare for me, I could draw the delicate juices from the very center of the word “fries.” Frites, as the French and Belgians say. Pommes de terre frites. Fried apples of the earth. The woman who used to be a woman stuck her head into my window. I had not noticed her approach. Are you going somewhere? No, I said, I can’t give you a ride even if you ask. I’m not asking, don’t get me wrong, but I’m curious: why can’t you give me a ride? You’re a woman that used to be a woman, I said. Your mind started out as that of a woman but your life forced you to live as a man but now you are returned to your natural state. She smiled. Ahh, you noticed and we’ve just barely met. In that case, pardon my rudeness. My name is Ebola. Pleasure to meet you. She held out her hand. It was small and well-formed, with hollow bones like a bird. Ebola. Yes, Ebola. I said: It is my turn to be curious. Why Ebola? Isn’t that, well, Ebola? Translated into German, Ebola is Verboten. Because all drag queens are named after diseases, she said. My best friend was named Arterosclerosis, Artie for short. Where is she now? I asked. In California. Maybe Florida. Somewhere that’s hanging off of America’s body. I see, I responded. Is America a drag queen too? She laughed. I can see you’re taking me very seriously. You shouldn’t. America’s only the country we live in. Is that so? Yes, she said very properly. This town is in America. This road runs through this town, which is in America, and therefore this road is America as well. It possesses everything that passes through it. May I come in?

Hey ma, look what I can do with the internet

Tell you what they ate in restaurants in 1941 apparently. There is a collection of menus in the Rare Book Room at the LA Public Library that’s been digitized that I’m digging today. You can search for more than that of course but I’m going to spend tomorrow cooking a meal out of what I would have ordered in 1955 or another such arbitrary old-timey year.

Link

I’ll cook a meal to order if you tell me a year and menu and items within.

Random notes from a book I discovered in an old suitcase

This is what Jewish housekeepers knew in Philadelphia, 1871. Well, Mrs. Esther Levy anyway. Picked at random for epicness. Italics mine.

How to fatten poultry in four or five days

Boil some rice with skimmed milk, only as much as will serve one day; let it boil, with a teaspoonful of sugar, until the rice is swelled out. Feed them three times a day, in common pans, giving them as much as will quite fill them at one time. Before putting fresh food into the pans wash them clean, so that no sour food may be given to the poultry, as it will prevent them getting fat. Give them clean water, or the milk off the rice to drink, but the less water the better; by this method the flesh will have a clear whiteness, which no other food gives it. The pen should always be kept clean and no food given them for sixteen hours before killing.

To boil calf’s head

Clean it very nicely and soak it in water, that it may look very white. Boil the head extremely tender then strew it over with some bread crumbs and chopped parsley, and brown them or if preferred, leave one side plain. Serve with smoked meat. The brains must be boiled, and then mixed with some chopped fat, marjoram, parsley, salt, pepper, bread crumbs and eggs.

i r return

and this time, i hate air quotes. this is the only difference, illiterate fucking cum-sodden dickrag <3

this is the only acceptable use of air-quotes. ever.

Klingon

I’m not ashamed to say it. I love Star Trek. I was raised on it. Growing up, I thought the only literature that existed was Star Trek novelizations. And Hardy Boys, the occasional comic book. Everything else was schoolwork.

What I liked best about Star Trek was how fundamentally optimistic it was. Some part of this had to do with the fact that the creators allowed entire races their history and culture, for culture’s sake. I mean, sure, Kirk would still probably bang anything that moved and the history didn’t usually amount to a whole lot but someone made the effort to put that all in there regardless of how easily cliche it all was.

Arika Okrent has a post up on Slate detailing the history of the Klingon language and its linguistics. Here’s something I didn’t know which delighted me. I can’t speak or understand a word of Klingon btw. Yet this is testament to its universality and awesomeness.

“Klingon is….an ungodly combination of Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, and Yiddish and works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk. The linguistic features of Klingon are not especially unusual (at least to a linguist) when considered independently, but put together, they make for one hell of an alien language.”

Stephen Fry’s letter to his younger self

This makes me glad to be alive. I have a certain picture I address when I read this out loud. Sappiness++

Of course, I’m quoting out of context. This letter’s true purpose is to confront Stephen Fry’s (from Fry and Laurie, Blackadder and QI) younger self’s struggles with his homosexuality but it’s more than that. Fry says as much, which makes me feel okay about co-opting his wonderful words. It’s a universal adolescent struggle, I think, that mad combination of despair and yearning. It made my heart soar a little bit reading. I wonder what my younger self would think of me now.

Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.

God is not in the earthquake but in the still, small voice

That’s a John Ruskin quote.

I was reading this article in a poetry journal and then it occurred to me that many of my favorite paintings are from a school of 19th century American art called Luminism whose primary concern is with the depiction of light within a landscape. I’m always engaged by works that rely on light for texture, whether it’s in art, literature or even life.

Libraries

One of the panels this year at AWP was apparently literature about libraries. I love libraries. Ever since I was informed of this panel, I’ve been curious about what they might have spoken about. More people should write about being in them.

In the Library
-Charles Simic

There’s a book called
“A Dictionary of Angels.”
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.