Fifteen Percent Less Evil

Yes, you heard it. Fifteen percent less evil today, and thinking about the big picture. Metaphysics, existence and the lack of it. Made a metaphysical glyph. Something dreamed into existence.

Sixteen-Year-Old Demos

I just recorded two songs, bass tracks and vocals, on Garage Band, and I am wonderfully surprised. They sound like the demos sixteen-year-olds make in their basements. The vocals are certainly weaker than the bass tracks, which are far from perfect. Still, they exist. I can show them to the other band members. It does not matter that they suck. They exist and I made them. The metal brother was right, it is important to save beginnings because a person can learn from them later.

An Ill-Begotten Beginning

The Honkey Tonk Barbacque, in Pilsen, Opened Too Early and has MAde some Insulting Decisions Regarding Service And To Dine There is To Become Furious at the Inadequacies of Others, Especially Considering the Wasted Potential of the Affair Because it is Charming and Good that the Propriotors of A Food Truck Expand into Permanent Quarters

A Culinary Review by Psycho Butcher

The particular operation, on Eighteenth street in the lovely Pilsen neighborhood, was suggested by a friend on the basis of its inherent promise. I say lovely, because it is ruled by picturesque criminal gangs and has buildings whose exteriors contain elements of the quaint and unexpected. Within its confines is a place that offers live country music on Friday and Saturday nights, and is in the process of opening its doors to guests. The food, though not terrible, is not great. The cornbread was too dry. I make better cornbread and my oven must double as a kiln for crafting swords. The idea of roasting meat over a flame appeals to me for reasons which should be obvious to my regular readers. The meat was adequate. The chicken fatty and cheap. The ribs equally so. The mac and cheese tolerable. The bread worthless. Ironically, the only truly exceptional meal was their vegetarian option.
This was all very disappointing because the room is truly charming. It has a high ceiling and is replete with rustic nicknacks. So unfortunate that they did not expend so much energy on plates an silverware. There were none of either. Dine-in guests are quite literally forced to eat their meals, carry-out style, on to-go paper and with to-go forks. This infuriated me so much I nearly stabbed the waitress, friendly and charming though she was. Even the pathetic to-go boats dispensed to us were inadequately small.
The place serves no coffee. My charming server looked at me as if it were normal that a place that serves dessert lack coffee, trying to sell me sweet potato pie at the same time she denied me the essential accompaniement. She is lucky to have left the table with her life.

Unless you are a buffoon and like country music, do not go here.

Metal Lyrics

It is a widespread axiom among neurobiologists that "talent" as we know it, is built mostly from experience-10,000 hours of experience makes a virtuoso. There are, of course, intrinsic factors that make one person benefit more than another from two hours of mathematical instruction, or piano, or throwing a knife. To date, I have logged in about 500 hours with bass guitar-the playing and the musical composition that goes with it. My mind takes to the composition, and much less so to the process of making my fingers do what they should. The one part of creating metal that comes naturally to me is the process of writing lyrics. I wasted much of my youth writing poetry, much of it for open mic shows.
Now, I have discovered a wonderful new use for this ability. I have put in my ten thousand hours as a writer, and writing lyrics comes as naturally to me as singing and abusing drugs and sex partners comes to somebody like Rob Halford or Lemmy, or taking a dump in the shoes of unsuspecting fellow-hotel guests comes to Ozzy Ozbourne. Better still, a totally new parameter space to explore. All art, especially the art that pretends to challenge all boundaries, occupies a parameter space. There are things that can and cannot be done within the context of the art form. Violating the parameter space occasionally creates a new art form, but usually creates bad art. For song lyrics, especially metal lyrics, the parameter space is wonderfully delineated. I love parameters. I love one-sentence novels, for instance.

I wrote three sets of lyrics yesterday. This first one refers to the work of Chicago outsider-artist Henry Darger (who created a new art form by violating the parameter-space of the novel, writing a 10,000+ page, multivolume work describing a war between sexulalized child slaves and their dragon allies, and the Glandolinian overlords who worked their petite little nude bodies till they dropped to exhaustion. General Blood was one of many Glandolinain enemies. Their emblem, by the way, was the Confederate uniform.)

General Blood

Ready for battle. The legions await. Envenom their steel and reflect on their fate.

At dawn we confront them. Their beasts and their gore. With arrows of fire. Ballista and sword.

Thirst.

For their blood.

Fight.

Sword and Steel.

Triumph.

Lead them Home in Chains.

The flash of steel sabre. An ocean of gore. Ten thousand blue children impaled on their swords. Across the green landscape cacophonous cries. The angels are dying. Their empire’s demise.

Kill.

Make them pay.

Fight.

Win the Day.

Triumph.

Lead them Home in Chains

A gargantuan beast-its spine is exposed. Its minions and leaders are fleeing in droves. The children of Darger they meet their demise. The heel of a jack boot-a six year old dies.

Thirst.

For their blood.

Fight.

Sword and steel.

Triumph.

Lead them home in chains.

These angels have poisoned the minds of our slaves. At bayonet’s point interred in their graves. Dishonor their bodies their heads in a bag. At the crest of the hill a confederate flag.

Kill

Make them pay

Fight.

Win the Day.

Triumph.

Lead them home in chains.

This second one is about Meth. My clone and I came up with this notion of an entire playlist of songs with titles corresponding to procedures for loading and firing medieval siege engines. Overcranking is something, unwise, you can do to improve the range of a ballista.

Overcrank

Midnight spirits fade at dawn.

Pygmy shadows linger on.

Trapped inside a world of thought.

This hellish snare that mind begot.

Meth.

Crank.

Overcrank.

The glassy rock has done its deed.

And in its wake an oafish greed.

You took apart the TV set.

At noon you stare with dull regret.

Meth.

Crank.

Overcrank.

Your money vanished in a fog.

Your woman left and took the dog.

And on your skin you feel the bugs.

They aren’t real its just the drugs.

Meth.

Crank.

Overcrank.

The above two have a very strict meter, corresponding to the only simple rhythms I can play on bass and sing at the same time. This last one has no conspicuous meter because it was intended to be screamed over the top of a melodic piece. The Skeleton Coast is a real place, in Namibia. The above two were inspired by Venom and Motorhead...intentionally stupid and funny, the one below was inspired more by Bathory..ponderous and heavy.

Skeleton Coast

Bleached bones

A black sky

A scorpion’s fight

A skeleton’s fate

Diamond dry

A criminal fog

A serpent’s back

A killing sun

The desert is ancient its memory deep

Your fate, to perish with riches at hand

The lion is desperate come here to die

A fortune in diamonds adrift on the dunes

You’ll die here

The skeleton coast

Death’s grip

A black spear

A thatch hut

A dry wind

War paint

A savage night

A skin drum

A cannibal rite

The desert is ancient its memory deep

Your fate, to perish with riches at hand

The lion is desperate come here to die

A fortune in diamonds adrift on the dunes

You’ll die here

The skeleton coast

Seasonality in Chicago

I have lived in Chicago for 17 years, and I have become accustomed to the seasons here. It is no longer window-plastic season, and I am overjoyed. I just played bass on the porch, and I might do it again in a few minutes. My turtle suns himself in the light streaming through a north-facing window, as do our cats. Houseplants have been redeployed. Most importantly, window plastic is being taken down from the windows, and several of them are already cracked.

Right now, we are in a very short season. Some people might call it "spring", but Chicago experiences nothing of the sort. We are too near the continental interior for this "spring" that Shakespeare experienced. Summer comes in fits and starts-episodes of summerlike weather of increasing duration, punctuated by cold, until summer becomes normative and cold becomes unusual. Right on this cusp between the two, we experience "window-cracked" season. The windows are cracked a bit, ready to be shut at any moment, but the need for extreme measures against high gas bills is over-the damage is done, I will be paying the gas bill down till the process starts again next year.

Soon, it will be "window open all the time" season, roughly what Europeans consider to be summer. We also have a "windows shut-air conditioner on" season, at the height of summer, which does not correspond to the classical definition of summer, but which residents of Phoenix recognize, I am sure. For them, the strange seasons of the desert rule, the two Sonoran rainy seasons, one in summer and one hinted at in winter, and other such strangeness.

This is all important to me because, as a kid growing up in California, I was taught the wrong seasons. I was taught the four seasons; spring, summer, fall, and winter, which bear no relation whatsoever to the actual seasonality of the Chapparal biome that predominates there. I remember cutting out orange and yellow leaves, in maple and oak shapes, to celebrate the coming of "Fall", when leaves fall from the trees. Of course, in most of CA, this is the opposite of the truth. In September, the cypresses and cedars are particularly green, the live oaks are leafing out some new growth, and the brown grass has turned emerald.