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.

In the West, Cuisine ist Krieg

Cuisine ist Krieg in Portland

Portland.

In terms of its climate and overall disposition, the Pacific Northwest is as close as our miserable little country gets to the greatness of Scandinavia. The climate plays some small part of it, I am sure. Gottenburg and Portland share a similar, gloomy, cloudscape, with a grey ocean thundering just a ram's run away. Just think of it. Giant trees covered in moss, on which to tie captive maidens. It wrenches the heart to know that the churls and cretins that founded this stupid berg thought not to preserve a single oak, fixated as they were on farming every square meter with the humble harvest of corn, corn, and more corn.

Formerly a logging town, haunt of junkies and hippie burnouts, Portland was a place where a wretch with a methamphetamine addiction could while away his or her last days thumb-strumming an acoustic guitar with a loyal dog barking to the broken rhythms. The benevolent, yet not overtly sunny weather and relative lack of ultraconservative mongoloids has been good to the town, of late, and it is now a city enlightened enough to sport a performance venue dedicated to Metal-the Satyricon. Eager to settle a score with our old Black-Metal Enemies, Indian, my bandmates drove our tourbus overnight to reach the place, but I digress.

Portland is possessed of the most incredible cuisine. Among other things, the Starbucks there are empty. Barely a soul in those terrible cafes. And no wonder, the one Starbucks coffee I had there was particularly atrocious-not the standardized, solid, boring but effective flavor of a typical Starbucks house coffee, but a pale, watery, brew tasting of dishsoap. Clearly, they have given up. Vanquished, but a hoard of independent coffeehouses that brew coffee fit for the mighty Thunder God himself, the empty green rooms are a laughing stock there. Stump Town, the mightiest of them all, is a formidable coffeehouse. Stump Town is the equal of our vaunted Intelligentsia, and is is one of many independent coffeehouses there. One by one, Chicago has let its independent operations go, and lameness is triumphing here. Sad fate. Northwest Coffee Roasters, on Burnside, is a pleasant room with admirable lattes. I caffeinated there daily and contemplated the sad fate of Filter-closed, by an idiot who had so little respect for his customer base, and the generosity they had shown him by patronizing his business, that he neglected to renew his lease as a Bank of America usurped his spot. Fool. Ungrateful, short-sighted fool.

It seems that, to triumph over mediocrity, one has to wage constant war. Customers need to be educated at every opportunity, to avoid equating a homegrown Chinese Restaurant with tacky decor and strange fortune cookies, from a Panda Express. Burger Baron is not the same as Mc Donalds, and yet the cretins will have you think otherwise because they fill the airwaves with their shit.

For now, good food, and the nuanced, pleasant lifestyle that goes with it, triumphs in Portland. Among other things, there are more strip clubs there than any other place I can imagine. These are colorful places, not the fleecing operations of Atlanta, or mere JerkOff dens. Each is different. Again, I digress.

Easily, the best Tapas I have had outside Spain, was at El Torro Bravo, on the City's West Side. They serve incredible Paella as well, have an appropriate wine list, and the servers do not flinch at the sight of a seven-piece black metal band, in corpsepaint, sitting down to dine.

I wish I could say I liked Farm, but I did not. The operation was buckling under the strain of its own success, and they made mistakes like undercooked lentils, unattentive service, and a Dungeness crab risotto that tasted like risotto, yes, but not Dungeness crab.

Other culinary highlights include the city's battery of "roach coaches". These hardy operations, based in trailers, delivery vans, and mobile homes, line the inner-city parking lots, serving a dizzying array of foodstuff in a kitchen smaller than a decent amplifier. In Chicago, we persecute gyros vendors for the fun of it, so enthralled are we with regulating away charm and adventurousness, in the name of cleanliness, that we forget that each of these operations is a small microcosm of cuisine-a world of possibilities from which greater things might sprout.

Sadly, the city's churches were mostly stone, and well-guarded, but again, I digress.

Brunch

BLACK METAL BRUNCH
A Culinary Review by the Illustrious and Infernal Psycho Butcher

Since my unfortunate period of incarceration, I have made a point of appreciating the small things in life that a person might otherwise ignore: candlelight, black nail polish, wood smoke. One of the greatest of these small joys is the ritual of brunch. It compares favorably to a Sunday afternoon, spent on the floor of a prison cell, administering a homemade tattoo with an unraveled bass string and the broken contents of a Bic pen, though I must admit, the latter has its charms as well.

Regarding the reasons for my incarceration, my attorney has advised me that, if I am to stay in the country, I should not comment. Suffice it to say that my actions were ethically justified, and aesthetically as well. Ahhh, wood smoke.

Brunch is, in fact, a perfect example of “Nature Red in Tooth and Claw” as the Englishman would have put it. The better the brunch, the more a person is forced to wait, in the cold or the rain, or for enduring hours spent crouching on a charming Wicker-Park sidewalk, reading the vapid nonsense the publishers of Red Eye choose to print rather than real news. In fact, the longer the wait, the better the food, because the gluttonous hoards of humanity do not assort themselves randomly. Those cretinous individuals happy with a Waffle House stack of pancakes, or Moons Over My Hammy sit comfortably, stuffing their obese bellies without so much as a hunt for a space to park their minivans, while the truly astute breakfast enthusiasts all flock to a tiny cluster of establishments. Among the best of these is the Bongo Room. I have not been there since before my incarceration, and in truth, it was at its best before my original incarceration, in the 1990’s. I am told that the lines for brunch have stretched two city blocks, down Milwaukee Avenue and through the parking lot of an adjacent Burger King, (now closed, thank Odin). Many was the Sunday morning when my bandmates and I were forced to wait outside this place, cigarettes in hand, for hours, for a mere taste of the heavenly pleasure of the chocolate chip pancakes there. I am sure they are still divine.

In essence, the weak do not deserve to eat good food. The stupid eat bad food without realizing it.

I write all this because I recently dined at Hot Chocolate, for brunch, and it was worth the hellish wait. In fact, they provide free coffee, and fragments of delicious pastries, while encouraging the would-be patron to sit on comfortable furniture. This was, frankly, amazing to me. When brunch came, I was delighted. Each member of our party had a dish that amounted to a novel interpretation of a classic delight. The grilled cheese sandwich was delightful. The real trick was the analog of the Egg Mc Muffin that my drummer was kind enough to share with me. It was heavenly. The donuts there live up to their reputation- for them it is perhaps worth waiting ten years in a cramped cell.

Very recently, we repeated the brunch ritual at Café Lula. Before my incarceration, this was a small, hipster, diner. It was the sort of place a person would pretend to read the Onion as they waited for an inexpensively-priced and expertly-rendered interpretation of eggs and potatoes, as they nursed a hangover from hours of drunken screaming. It has come up in the world, rising to the top of a culinary food chain that has sent formidable phonies to their dark demise. The brunch there is truly magnificent. The French toast, for instance, was an infernal delight, with layer after layer of mysterious pleasure stacked neatly for annihilation at the business end of a fork. The trout was magnificent. The fish did not die in vain and must have gone to Valhalla for its contribution to the pleasure of a greater being.