recent metalshows capsulereview

Lone Wolf and Cub: ......acceptable but fairly standard the wrong man was standing in the front at Reggie's it was a June Saturday and they sounded better from the outside-it is true that I am biased against them because of their name I never liked the comic and the films are something a friend keeps insisting i enjoy but i detest...they will evolve I am certain because the act was technically proficient yes. two screams and a skull.
Yakuza: was a total full on skullfuck of the first order, forcing bloodcurdling images of nuns impaled on pikes, strange frost-covered wastelands, the astral plane writhing with ghoulish faces and fire. The saxaphone fit nicely, despite my misgivings, the vocals were incredible, and the bassist should not leave the band, but he will. Same warm evening as above, more high, and wanting beer. Sixteen impaled nuns and a landscape strewn with bones, visionary.
Minsk: Synthesizers should front metal bands only if the person behind it is a hot chick or is in the process of taking a human life and neitherappliedhere....though the music is an incredible soundscape, strange visions and wastelands, eyes closed this was an incredible show, which is fortunate because eyes open some dork is playing a keyboard and does not look sufficiently metal to keep me excited. The drummer has facial tattoos and obviously wants to front the band, so he should, what is he waiting for. Tongues of endless fire and a box of spent ammunition.
Nachtmystium.: compainions and I were joking that these people were rockandroll trash of the first order, roadhardened, having swagger, very promising after a night of nerds making metal, and our expectations were exceeded. This is black metal regressing into Motorheadesque roots full of power and energy and drugs and sex and speed and the flavor of an enemy's blood in the mouth. A hundred dead enemies, drums, black banners, triumph.
Inocula.: First at the Pearl Room, opening for Gwar, then at the Double Door, this band is Nu Metal with all that comes to it the vocalist has feelings and the band dresses down to an irrational extreme going onstage they look like the suburbanites from Crystal Lake that they are. The stripper, and the skinny girl forced into the role, at the Double Door were a good idea, small crowd, no Gwar that time, but NOT deathmetal and not even metal, just aspiring rockstardom. About sixteen feet of beer strewn with empties, an empty bikkini top lying there amid them, but it turns out the owner dropped it changing into her shirt get evil or get out.
Mensria: Both before Gwar and at the Double Door, an act of incredible rage and power. It takes savage professionalism to play an incredible show to both crowds, the first triumph, the second equally brutal, despite opening for a lead act with no draw whatsoever. This band is the resurrection of DeathMetal at is finest, an reincarnation of what it must have been like to see Possessed before Beccera got shot by junkies, savage, energetic, violent, violent, violent. Two crates of unregistered handguns and ammunition, a pound of weed, two naked chicks, sirens in the distance, incredible.
GWAR: Was Gwar. Fans soaked in fake blood. Incredible sets. Pissed off the fans by scheduling a stupid band just before themselves. Over a hundred thousand years in the business, I hear, and they deliver. One dead fat kid, slumped over a table at McDonalds, other patrons laughing. Yes.

Odious Yellow

Exterior Shot. A shadowy world full of creeping vines, sagging and ancient trees, everything in shades of grey, even the sky, checkerboarded with bilous grey cumulus. Black spitlizards sun themselves on the ancient trunks, the white sun poking between stratocumulus for a moment before ducking into the shade. Giant earwigs everywhere. Spiders the size of basketballs, sitting motionless in the absence of a breeze. The calls of a dozen different species of cicadas, neuroptera, tree frog, and katydid, mixed with the onerous bellowings of the hairy-faced humanmonkey. Two moons, in orbit about each other, high in the sky, hidden by tree trunk and cloud.

Parathaxes and Jubilinda slither to the surface, emerging from an underground nest meters deep. Both of them sniff the sky, lazily and with delight, tasting the scents of the grey jungle after a rainstor. Jublinda raises her dorsal crest and wraps her tail about a tree trunk, pushing her pearly moist skin into the polka-dot pattern of postcourtship. Parathaxes slithers under her and vibrates softly.

Parathaxes. Croaking in gutteral Lymbonese, a dialect shared between them but rarely pronounced so far north of the equator.

Odious yellow sausage engine engaged deeply mimicking muttering feldspar magnetism boom boom dust to dirt dirt to entropy sky to star star to cinder cinder to ash to earth to germ to brain to mind to here and now croak croak croak......

Jubilinda. Croaking a deeper version of the same dialect, her croaks drawn out and pulsing through the darkening jungle.

Deeply Circumspect.

The two watch the sunset together, both sure the universe will produce a certain amount of radio waves, and no more, for the greater good.

the turtle stalks the smoking lounge

a pleasant morning, and the weather here, in Chicago, feels like the weather then, in Costa Rica. Almost the same quantity of rain, though the wildlife is somewhat sparser...sunflowers bloom, already, and one is a mutant. a sport, the nurserymen call them, a carpel systematically replaced with a petal, in every flower, it looks like a sunflower carnation....such a simple trick of nature, it is what produced the ornamental rose. an air conditioner runs, uselessly, creating a tiny pocket of cool air that was somehow significant the night before. in space, a green lantern has lost his life to the caprice of an ancient demon, his ship crashing into a radiation belt. in wisconsin, osmia albiventris and andrena carlinii flourish, apparently, in the sandy wastelands between Madison and timber. the future swims full of malignant cells, and countermeasures, and measures to counter the countermeasures. as a hunter gatherer, i would be dead right now, my head crushed with a rock by some well-meaning member of the tribe, though it is not clear i would harbor the arthritis that would necessitate such a fate, it too, like the viruses that spring from our genomes like mice leaving a plague temple, is a product of the density of potential hosts, and immune system countermeasures, and overdone countermeasures that continue to last a lifetime. everyone seems to be coming down with one, an autoimmune disorder. as a priest, in ancient Sumeria, i would be completely at home. my kind are like that, content to preach. the turtle stalks the smoking lounge now. it is time to rise and remember things.

Drywall

they make it out of gypsum now but back in the earlier part of the twentieth century at least two companies made the stuff out of paper pulp, anticipating Ikea.......it was the great depression at the time but a good idea because in upstate New York they had just cut down all the useful trees and had given up, resorting to making wall board out of compressed paper......people were drunk a great deal back then, like all the good characters in Nelson Algren's novels, such as Somebody in Boots, drunk, all the time.....only a small amount of the stuff, the most expensive, was "enhanced" with asbestos fibers, and I am hoping not do die of mesothelioma as a result of my house...but we all die of something and i have my suspicions that asbestos is not the killer we have made it out to be......not like mister cancer, he kills, in cigarette form........i could use a cigarette right now, though i do not smoke, i know if i were smoking i would feel calm and lucid and clear, not scattered in the wake of a weekend spent eating cannibinoid brownies and seeing concerts...... i do not get the impression that the Olsons used the most expensive fake wallboard, however, so i think i am save, and the stuff must have been pleasantly light....it is worth mentioning that the Olsons were Nordic heroes who occupied my house from its construction till 1979 when i was in grade school and bad things were happening everywhere, i remember seeing a Newsweek article on how our cities were dying and it seemed crazy, how could the cities be dying when it was well known that people were moving away from the country into urban areas...i knew that back then......now it is easy to see what the suburbs did to downtown, and all the junkies and boarded over shop windows that spread from the nuclei that had always lived in the centers of the metropolis....Chicago once had an impressive red light district spanning block after block....did i mention that there is something called a "queer ladder of social mobility?" and that the Irish were working their way out of criminality in my great grandfather's time, in St. Paul Minnesota, a city of rolling hills and narrow streets...... eight decades and a leaky roof, and the Beaverboard is eroded but I refuse to replace it in all but the most problem areas...drywall, the gypsum stuff, is heavy......hanging drywall is masculine....men are supposed to hand drywall, drink Coors, and fart......i cannot do it right unless metal is playing....I drank a Coors at a metal show on Sat........i do not know where they get the gypsum they mine for drywall, but it does indeed come out of the ground from somewhere.....like plastic...which comes out of the ground as petroleum......

The Cosmic All

by stages, it has been happening, usually after i have had about six cups of coffee and then kept drinking it. the cosmic "all". it crashes in from all sides. i cannot stop extrapolating till my mind bumps against the corners of what is known and what is unknown or what cannot be known by definition because it is not there to know. too much of a big picture thinker, yes, this usually happens when i am letting the microdetails of my life go to hell. certainly, it takes more and more caffeine to get me out of bed every morning. i hear there is a lethal dose. still. still, i see my cat vainly staring at the new insulation we have stapled to the wall, a change from the last time, the neurons in his feline mind unable to connect in such a way as to indicate why this change has occurred, but the feline is unable to let it go. i am like that, but with a bigger brain. so many five dimensional strands weaving themselves in and out of time. so many microscopic plastic spherules in the ocean. so many extinct paleozoic neuropterans. at some point it all connects....the cat, the spherules, the fifth dimension, the neuroptera, the cytochrome oxidase, the death metal. all this has something to do with the fact that, since we have moved to a room with a plain, almost zen, lavender ceiling, i have slept terribly, unable to amaze myself with the details of a decaying drop ceiling suspended beneath shredded vintage beaverboard. i dream awake now and make sensible decisions while i sleep.

The Room That Should Not Be

It has tiny fibers under my skin now, and my respiratory passages will never be the same. I fear mesothelioma and yet I do not. Generations of men and women before me have lived with Beaver Plank, many in upstate NY, many of the same drank heavily and played cards. Brother, my real one, sees so much with his minds eye that I get an occasional phone call from his workplace, requesting directions back. Genevieve, mother of many, gives me a baby quilt in beige, perplexed that she cannot assign a gender to the embryo. They are huge, the two magnificent formations that are the source of all my joy and happiness. Damn anyone or anything that tries to make me wait in line for them. Yes, I am thinking about the class Mammalia. Our strange clade, more beastly than birds, giants of the animal kingdom. It is summer and everything blooms outside. Pentstemon. Hollyhock. Carrots. Ants forage. I have not found the time to dig a burrow under my garage. Instead, I craft the Room that Should Not Be. The cat fears a passage to another dimension. A hole to hell. Sheol.

Planktonic Larvae

By this I write of freedom, of the gyre in the South Atlantic where all our noncollectibles are accumulating, in vast bulk, to the detriment of albatross and to the amusement of planktonic organisms now hidden among the considerable shelter of a false Sargasso. We do not float our leftover submersibles here, pity, nor is there an active volcano inland of California within which to tunnel, endlessly, through the very hard igneous rock, building gallery after gallery in the darkened vault of the earth, in short, chaeotgnaths but no dragons, arrow worms but precious few arrows. What I am getting at is absolutely nothing. My purpose is to illustrate a sort of confusion, a hunger for that feeling I had when I was merely twenty one years old and finally able to justify buying beer of my own, growing on the windowsill of my own apartment, this same city years younger in my mind, and I had the energy to confront it all, but none of the resources. I want drugs, I want them badly. I want the drug that makes my mind swell like a kitchen sponge left in a pool of gasoline, so that I can see even more of the cosmic all, from my back porch, and measure every trivial moment of time in terms of its true, unique importance. Another summer drifts by, Sargasso-like in its moment by moment sloshing, in its quiet chorus of birds and its often neglected arrangement of smells. Sex. I want sex and I want it badly. If I were a Viking, I would desire to kill things as well.