A VISION OF PURE METAL

Skulls, black obsidian, carved like Maya temple decorations, arrayed like peaches in some improbable orchard. Each and every one of them has the glowing eyes of DOOM. Oh, great ones, I crawl beneath you, through this hall of diabolical judgement, towards the INFERNUM. Guitars, like pickets, rise imposingly to either side of me. In the distance, where the two walls lead but do not touch, a column of flame rises, and before it, a throne. I have paid homage to you through DEATH METAL, through the most sinister of imaginings, through the loathsome, despicable, and decadent lifestyle I have lived for these many years.

Flames rise from every direction, and in those flames, images of strippers dancing on poles, saber-toothed cats bringing down extinct megafauna, girls in catholic schoolgirl uniforms setting fire to garages. The unholy IT sits beside its master, GREAT BAPHOMET, an a mighty stone made from the bones of extinct reptiles, magma from the formation of ancient supercontinents, and ten million broken guitar strings, all melted into chrome tailpipes, projecting from the thing like antlers.

Baphomet, so beautiful, the body and face of a Las Vegas hooker, eyes of a reptile. Observes.

This is the DEATH METAL level of Hell, deeper yet than the frozen lake, next door to Tartarus, where the imprisoned titans groan and strain against their shackles. Here, the strains of Deicide and Morbid Angel, Possessed and Goatwhore, wail against the disembodied screams of metal's victims. Metalhead, beware. One stray footfall from the path of TRUE METAL, and you could join these eternal outcasts, wailing in the wind for all eternity, rather than sit at the LEFT HAND of BAPHOMET, baptized in the wail of guitar.

Catastrophic break line rupture, tow truck, enforced picnic in the grass, auto repair bills

the lesson for the week is that i am, at best, half smart, and entirely foolish. i keep scanning the horizon, for things to look about, so that that terrible day will never come, but when it creeps around the corner, i practically invite the thing into my kitchen for orange juice and donuts. stopping a car is pretty damned important, something i should have learned from the internet, and i guess things could be a lot worse right now. there is a part of me that wants to be charmed, to have bad things never happen, even when probability dictates that a seventeen year old car is going to break down in spectacular ways. i guess i am a little attached to certain aspects of my life right now, the picnics, the park, but things change and things happen. still, it gnaws at me, a game i am loosing, against the giants i owe money to. last year, i could say that things are tough all over, and we are weathering this storm pretty damned well, but the storm is ending, and the giants who caused it have grown even stronger. when will it be time for MY donuts?

I Could Never Have Made it as a Hunter-Gatherer

How do I arrange to sit my fat ass on a barstool, and do goddamned nothing all day? Because if there is a recipe for this, I think I need to know how I might go about pursuing such an occupation. Perhaps I could become one of those people the call town drunks. Perhaps, instead, I could arrange to be born with a permanent, parasitic twin growing somewhere south of my bellybutton. Perhaps this twin would require a basket. Perhaps the government might be obliged to send me pills in the mail every single month. Perhaps I could live among the storks and ostriches, the only creatures that will accept me. I wonder how long I could live in a lean-to anyway. I wonder about cardboard boxes sometimes, too. If I could somehow claim the real estate under a cardboard refrigerator box, in Manhattan, I could sell the property and arrange to sit on a barstool for the rest of my life. How can there be any poor people in New York City, anyway? How can they call a person "homeless" when he has staked out a good spot under an overpass. Clearly he or she has a home, it is simply a very BAD home. Home is where the heart is. A person can live out of a suitcase, but not actually live in a suitcase. There are suitcases big enough to sleep in, I have seen them. I suppose it depends upon whether a person is short. I slept in a cave, once. The thing about my cave is that it had an oval depression, from where a mountain lion probably slept, on occasion. I slept in a mountain lion's bed once. I was a fool for sleeping in that mountain lion's bed. It had no sheets-it was a rock overhang. I do not know if I could have made it as a hunter-gatherer....probably not.

The Violent Hour

The Violent Hour

A Culinary Review

By PsyCHO Butcher

Chicago suffers from an unfortunate "second city" complex, a mayor who hates nightlife because his father was an abusive drunk, and a certain halfheartedness when it comes to doing anything that might be construed as "uppity". Fortunately, their is a little cloud hovering just south of the el stop at North and Damen avenues, and this strange miasma seems to block the banal rays we emit, by virtue of our own working-class chumpishness. The result is that this address spawns interesting businesses like serpents from a stone. True, the first two failed in short order. Mod was a wonderful place...the first failure-it had a science fiction flair to it, and mac and cheese so good I was tempted to break the window to the place and rob a portion from a customer. I liked the egg-and-spacemodule motif. It made me imagine I was dining on a planet where ninety percent of this dreadful species had already gone extinct, and those few of us that survived had ample deviled eggs to go around.

Del Toro had terrible service, but great furniture. Each chair was like a torture device. Fortunately, you can still see the saddle-barstools, more suited to sadomasochistic pleasure than to lattes, across the street at Cippollina. It was an interesting place, this second failure, with great tile and strange horse stalls for bathrooms.

Hopefully, The Violet Hour will stick around, because the city needs it. We need a drinking space that shrouds itself in veils of image. We need a place to drink expensive cocktails and pretend we are cooler, more literary, more travelled, and genuinely interesting than we are. We need a place that serves absinthe and chicken wings on the same menu. For now, we have it, and I approve quite strongly.

From the outside, the place is a cipher. They keep changing the exterior, from one cryptic ruse to another. Do not look for a sign, you will not find one. Once the valet starts parking cars, this is merely annoying, but just as they open the doors, it imparts a bit of a speakeasy feel to the place. To augment this, the entranceway is dark and heavily curtained, stark, and obviously purposed to give would-be patrons the unmistakable impression that they have walked into the wrong place and should leave. I like this. Darkness, drama, chandeliers, and very tall chairs that resemble thrones. This place is very black metal, and to risk belaboring the point, I approve. The place feels such like a maze-a patron needing to tiptoe and squeeze between chairs in the event that they do not guess the correct path across the room in the darkness, amid a forest of overly tall seats-that is was disappointed not to see a corner devoted solely to death traps for the unwary. Perhaps such a thing is too much to ask in a place that carries a Chicago Liquor license, but their cocktails are deliciously inventive and served with an air of drama.

The place seems purposed to scare away tourists, frat boys, and the lame. To seal the deal, the place has a dress code and requests that patrons do not use cellphones.

Now comes the subject that your churlish and stupid friends will raise, either at the mere mention of the place, or upon discovering that the cocktails there cost something like fourteen dollars each (I frankly do not remember, for reasons I will mention in a moment). They are worth it, each and every one. Of course they are. The bartenders lavish time and care on each drink, and use very fine ingredients. Neither of these objections hold any weight whatsoever if a person visits for the purpose of imbibing one, or perhaps at most, two cocktails. After all, who goes out in the evening expecting to spend less than twenty dollars (a person must factor in the tip)? Such frugal evenings are best spent, enjoyably, on the fire escape, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and trying to eek the last resin out of a cannabis pipe. Places like this are for the theatre and ambiance of the place, and if a good buzz is needed, that must wait for the second, or third drinking establishment of the evening. What would be the purpose of having more, at a place like this? To get drunk? Getting drunk at swanky clubs is for the stupid-for people who order bottles of expensive vodka served to their tables at night clubs and covet the experience of the VIP room. People like that can die, frankly.

I arrived with my usual coterie of exotic dancers and adult film stars, on a weeknight, just after they opened. I suppose I avoided the line by doing this, but the fact of the matter is that my companions had serious work to do later in the evening, bilking needy men out of money they would otherwise spend on their families. My cocktail was something called a Vincent's Downfall, a Van Gough reference, of course, an homage to its liberal use of absinthe. It was delicious. One of my companions, a longtime friend for many years, devoured a whole plate of chicken wings without stopping. If you have never watched a sexy woman, trained in the art of adult entertainment, devour a full plate of chicken wings as if the Earth was about to run out of food, you should. I do not remember much about our conversation, absorbed by lust as I was the whole time, but it was a great experience and a great room to showcase desire and lust of all sort, for chicken wings or otherwise.

Finally, I am glad to meet you, Osiris

i thought it was strange to see it like that-the scarlet hue of the thing. it wasn't. even grey, it would find a way of looking the way it did. seven thousand tomorrows later and i have not lost an hour of sleep over it. still, it helps for a man to look back and appreciate what he had, while he was having it. i admit i am, and have been, a voyeur. i also admit that i have been know to eat a whole box of Chips Ahoy in a sitting. i try never to park illegally not because i am decent but because i am a coward. i also blame other people for stealing my stamps. but still, even back in my youth i tried to stand for something worth standing for. i always liked the taste of green vegetables, and usually i have not driven a car to worry about parking. on that scale, the thing looked just like they do in anatomy textbooks. it was not curiously worn around the edges. it had a black spot or two here and there, but as i mentioned, upon closer examination, most of that black was grey calling itself black so as not to be misrepresenting itself. the thing had a lot of grey, it was mostly grey, i admit it. Osiris, how am i doing here?

Coffee, and More Coffee, a Culinary Review by Psycho Butcher

Dear Readers,

Finally, I can write you from beyond the shackles of my unfortunate incarceration, for crimes which I am entirely innocent. That entire time, behind bars, I craved a decent cup of coffee-one not produced or adultrated by Sysco in any way.

Ahhhh. The independent coffee shop. I used to love the places. Years back, in Los Angeles, Dear Reader, I was deeply engrossed in the so-called "Hair Metal" scene. It took something like two hundred cups of coffee a day to keep me functioning, because I could afford neither the cocaine nor the hairspray to keep up with the lifestyle. Suffice it to say that I spent time at now-legendary coffee shops like Java, and The Living Room. In this latter venue, a young Drew Barrymore sneered and turned her back at me, rather than make me a cappuccino, and I stormed out of the place, threatening to burn it down. True story, but they had great coffee, and comfortable couches. The fact of the matter is that each of these little places, scattered throughout the hipster neighborhoods of the cities, had its own personality. I remember the day I saw the first Starbucks in Los Angeles. I was impressed by the green colors, actually, not aware that one more aspect of culinary culture was about to be absorbed by the dull and lifeless tide of globalization/homogenization/banality. I finally left the scene, and the city, for Scandinavia, seeking revenge for many wrongs done to me, through Black Metal, but that is another story.

In Chicago, at the same time, we boasted something like twenty independent coffee shops of our own. Then, Starbucks came, like Christian Missionaries bearing smallpox infested blankets, and within ten years, we were left with three or four. All the others gave up the ghost, the competition with friendly green yuppie frappuccino being too much for them. One of the notable holdouts was a place called Filter, which is more than legendary, nowadays, as a place where Bohemians in the Wicker Park neighborhood used to hook up, and generally hatch acts of gossip and innuendo. It was a fine place, with an excellent menu of coffee drinks, some with names like "Purple Bhudda", and food that was two or three orders of magnitude brighter than the usual plastic-wrapped questionables available in the cooler of a Starbucks. One or sever of the owners of this place lost his/her (there were three, all crazy) lease, got lazy, or otherwise grew unappreciative of all the money I had invested in his/her motorcycles and cocaine habit, by consuming one overpriced coffee drink after another hatching memos like the one you, Dear Reader, are writing at this exact moment. Anyway, the old Filter is gone, long live the new Filter, resurrected farther south on Milwaukee Avenue, and in many ways superior to the old one. The old space was triangular and commanded an amazing view of "The Action", that being the crazy people and drunk club kids that meandered the intersection of North and Damen on every night worth going out. This new place has no view to speak of save the other patrons-but seeing and being seen was always the real meat of the Filter experience back then and it still is. This place has generously free Wi-Fi, for two hours at least with a purchase, a feature the old one lacked because some dickhead thought he could make money charging the patrons. That dickhead is probably still around, but he bought first rate restaurant equipment, hired people who genuinely know what they are doing (many were plucked from other notable coffee shops, such as the Mercury), spent some serious money crafting a nice space with sufficient electric plugs, and generally created a place worth hanging out, for hours, while finishing the liner notes to an album. In case it is relevant, because this is a culinary review, their coffee is amazing, and their food solidly good. Their chicken Caesar wrap particularly well-conceived and crafted, their turkey burger and Thanksgiving wrap much less so. Their tea selection is great, and their food runners much more effective than in the last place. Filter girls from the last place, if you are reading this, I dream about devouring each and every one of you sexually and cannibalistically. The current ones I am just getting to know, but the new counter is designed to actually serve food rather than to showcase the beauty of hot, sweaty, hipster chicks working behind a busy counter in close proximity. Sigh.

An unexpected and new coffee shop has sprung up just north of the place. The wormhole. It is a nostalgia coffee house, complete with a prop from "Back to the Future", possibly never used, a De Lorean fitted with time travel modifications. Hopefully, the owner will sell this waste of space, pay off his or her investors, and put tables in the window there. There are no window tables, and this is unfortunate. I also want him or her to pay off their investors because the place should stay here. This place needs some wear. It needs some stories. Its coffee is every bit as good as Filter's, and far better than Starbucks, if for no other reason than it is served in reusable cups, by efficient staff, in a timely manner. It includes Intelligentsia alums among its staff, a wise move, because these refugees know how to make coffee and handle volume. Intellgentsia, of course, is some of the best coffee this side of Portland, but the new means of producing drip coffee, one slow funnel at a time, take so long that many people are justifiably put off by the slowness of the process. Yes, I know that in my previous entries I have pointed out that the STRONG wait, the WEAK do not, but my time is damned precious, and I am not sure that the results at Intelligentsia are worth the wait. I digress. The artifacts at the Wormhole are amusing, but not necessary, and I hope the posters for The Goonies are taken down, one after the other, over time, and replaced by graffiti. In the meantime, I will go there often, precisely because they do not serve food to speak of, and because i enjoy the place. Both are welcome, both should be patronized.

Oh Beezelbub

Another EVIL PRAYER, revealed. I cannot say where I get these, though I have come across them at great personal jeopardy. I post this as a WARNING, to those of you who do not think the forces of darkness and devil worship are real. This prayer is every bit as real as the Satanic sex ring at the McMartin preschool, and should be taken seriously. Once again, DO NOT attempt to read this invocation aloud, or it could have serious consequences to your well-being.

Oh, Beezlebub, lord of the Flies.

Once known as Baal, rival Yaweh for celestial power, god of the golden calf and tempter of the Hebrews in their shameful flight from Egypt, patron of the City of Carthage, whose sacrificial urns did run red with the blood of children, an honor to your lordship, and of Ninevah, where men did raise great battle flags in your honor and conquer great kingdoms, destroying the ancient kingdom of Israel in your name. Lord Beezlebub, who sits at the right had of Lucifer himself, brothers in arms against Heaven and Earth, who fought the heavenly hoardes with a flaming sword. Beezlebub, Lord Mighty! ruler of hell and master of infernal dominions, grant me the power to make war, sow destruction, and spread plague.

Accept this, my sacrifice, a bull's head, in a silver bowl, dead and rotting for sixty six days time, under the summer sky day and night the whole time, and festering with flies.

Your Lordship, grant me the power to spread jealousy among the churches and congregations, to instill fears of embezzled twenty dollar bills and cannabis butter at the church bake sail, to provoke bullying and orgies of buggering as the church campout, to lead fine young men astray to worship false gods like Judas Priest, Mercyful Fate, and Iron Maiden. I will continue the war with heaven, my master, by tempting good and faithful priests to bow and touch my ivory backside, to kiss my immoral black lips, by tempting noble and honest ministers with prostitutes and promises of cocaine, by tempting girl scouts with cannabis-laden cookies and the notion of a life without servitude to men. Beezlebub, master, I await your infernal command.