What a crock of flash

Few things are more magical than words.

The trouble with me is that I never realise how deep in the shit I am until I'm choking on the stuff. Praise be to fifteen centuries of kings and queens that the flavour rolling over my tongue wasn't fecal matter, but blood.

My blood.

Not much of an improvement? When you've been struck with a virulent plague of sticky notes and gluey tabs polluting text after returned text, you live with the consequences of invisible, no doubt dangerous retaliation. Oh sure, combing through the musty, cobwebbed crypt of a repository did wonders for my respiratory system, but when the rumours proved their whispered veracity and that infamous, sepia-coloured cover, a disturbingly wan hue of ancient skin, was glaring back, in here of all places, I knew whatever pain befell me would be worth this grim endeavour.

Believe me, even I questioned such a fantastical sentiment after a whirling dervish of tomes, tumbling out of the rank air from nowhere I could discern, nearly buried me alive between the stacks, those grey steel walls lording and laughing over my bruised form prone in the valley below. But after I somehow wormed my way home to patch myself up, I turned on the telly and smiled.

Scotland Yard was baffled.

Death by a thousand cuts was no longer a mere phrase.

Saturday Gigs

There's the ass of the infamous and ridiculous free stamp.


















There's the ass of the NFL.


















Note clever placement of the cannon, able to ward off invasion from the Great White North and bombard the hapless Browns into submission.


















Doing out PR part to save green crap from capitalist pigs.


















Mellow on, nondescript burg, mellow on.

The Ill Beehives

My head pops off & this is where it dawns
to float & collect over nectar floors:
suffocating under self-spun honey
to conclude polluting smoky vertical combs: again:
stinging stinging stung by empty
sheets' regurgitating flare gun.
Please
I tried to send
I'll try again demain
after the glass magnifies the basic truth:

the magic center thrives in burning space.
Abstract accident soarings
wheeled free, now stroll
strangling boulevards of unquiet obliques &
carefully tended poppy beds.
Knocked out: wake:
vomit disease & royal spectacle
gritty here in the throat.
All we are permitted is to choke
on droning misdirections that

build
build up
build a new
wax museum
swarming far & wide
open to the public
dressed so nervously:
gaze on those eyes cloudy
with paint & blackened equilibria
below blue skies on sticky ground.

Police state

Oh, great. There goes my plan to spray paint "RTA go to hell" all over the sidewalks of this fair town. How about "Messi just scored again."

Frescoes of the Skull

Shelves and stacks and shelves of skulls, a Dewey
Decimal number inked on each unfurrowed forehead.
Here's a skull
who, before he lost his fleshy parts
and lower bones, once
walked beside a river (we're in the poetry section
now) his head full of love
and loneliness; and this smaller skull,
in the sociology stacks, smiling (they're all
smiling)—it's been empty
a hundred years. That slot
across the temple? An ax blow
that fractured
her here. Look at this one from the children's shelves,
a baby, his fontanel
a screaming mouth and this time no teeth, no smile.
Here's a few (history)—a murderer,
and this one—see how close their eye sockets!—a thief,
and here's a rack of torturers' skulls
beneath which a longer row of the tortured,
and look: generals' row,
their epaulets
on the shelves to each side of them.
Shelves and shelves, stacks stacked on top of stacks,
floor above floor,
this towering high-rise library
of skulls, not another bone in the place
and just now the squeak of a wheel
on a cart piled high with skulls
on their way back to shelves
while in the next aisle
a cart filling with those about to be loaned
to the tall, broken-hearted man waiting
at the desk, his library card
face down before him.

-- A Library of Skulls, Thomas Lux

C'est-à-dire, pay your fines sans regret.
Books aren't the only thing we collect.
Muahahahahahaha, et
cet-
era of good feelings, I mean, whee.

Flash of oranje

The real reason why totaalvoetbal lost the 1974 World Cup Final?
Start there and end here.

Hearing is sometimes believing.

Whatever the motives that fueled the editors of Bild Zeitung, whether anti-Dutch agitprop or simply pre-TMZ nonsense, and whatever damage control from the lips of Netherlands coach Rinus Michels would have succeeded or failed post-report, to those stakeholders unwilling to truly listen, certain facts remained undercover. Even if certain members of the Netherlands football side and their female German companions did not. Skinny dipping and champagne? Who's to say?

A bowl of cashews?

Someone, that's who.

The telephone was glued to the ear of star forward and pitch magician Johan Cruyff the following night as he pleaded with his wife that this was nothing but a fabrication, that he was as faithful as ever. The contents of the large, porcelain bowl were glued to the fingers of his teammates. The nuts, brought to the previous evening's party by one of the German girls, were ambrosia to the confident Dutch and, as they dwindled in number, began to be fought over, first playfully, then with a slightly ferocious, yet drunkenly askew resolve. A fly on the wall would have seen no alcohol in the room, only the increasingly bizarre behavior of the world's most enthralling outfit.

After a night's rest -- only the players themselves can confirm whether it was good, bad or ugly -- both teams took the pitch only to experience a slight delay as someone had forgotten to place the corner flags in their proper location. For the Dutch, their proper location was in the hearts and minds of football fans young and old. Seventeen passes and a penalty. The Germans hadn't touched the ball a single time before it was 1-0.

German forward Gerd Müller, Der Bomber, flashed a grin seen by no one.

Colors, the colors, something was very wrong with them. The no-longer-green grass heaved and twisted, not as during an earthquake, but as if Euclidean space itself was being permanently altered into something incomprehensible. There wasn't a goal, wasn't a cache of heavenly white mesh, only that No-Longer-Green. What the stadium audience, and the billions watching on television perceived as arrogance as the Dutch flitted and floated and weaved over the carefully graded rectangle and around the Germans was anything but. The man who had scored on the penalty shot, forward Johan Neeskens, coolly remembered a wonderful feeling of elation from the distant past, and he tried to grasp it, his hands moving through the pink and chartreuse kit of the opposition. No, it is gone, he thought to himself. Perhaps asking for help.

Willem van Hanegem took the gift. Then Wim Jansen. Johnny Rep.

An interloper.

Wave after wave of usurpers to the throne with three heads and twenty legs.

Then a diving masterclass by Bernd Hölzenbein, 10.0 from the English judge and Paul Breitner's gold medal shot. 1-1.

Cruyff panicked in that placid way cerebral masters do, sliding back to help on defense as the Germans continued their onslaught, those twenty-legged interlopers brandishing their bloody glaives and forked purple tongues, cutting angular swaths through the swelling earth.

At last, their general appears, the devil. Der Bomber. A relentless push, a crafty tip back, decidedly Euclidean space cleared of Oranje and a crawling centipede through frozen keeper Jan Jongbloed and into the cradling arms of that heavenly white mesh. 1-2.

Half time came and went for the Dutch, and the undulating soil soon regained the elegant proportion so reminiscent of their native Holland. Their reality that would gleefully eschew our inept simulacra, would mock our pretensions to proper space and form, dissipated as quickly as a springtime shower. Beautiful totality vanished along with the symphony of blood and monsters, replaced with a human violence, volley after volley threatening to decapitate Jongbloed's opposite, Sepp Meier. Those who had tuned, turned and dropped were now once again men. Woodwork hits, turfed craters, desperation.

The final whistle.

In the subsequent chaos, a reporter manages to corner the world champion Müller, asking a garbled, ridiculous question on the game-winner, his last international goal. His answer is equally as garbled, ridiculous. "Ich liebe Cashewnüsse!"

Friday, and 'tis a good one

Perhaps I need to rethink this whole "religion is full of kooks" gig. Oh sure, it's still full of them --

example, check this serendipitous whackery out: logging in, I accidentally transposed a couple of letters in this dump's URL, and look where I landed; before you ask, no, that is not my devious doing --

but thanks to one of the three kookiest monoliths, the bus was (mostly) chock empty of fellow public transportationistas, ergo an earlier arrival at work, ergo squared I was permitted to imbibe a not inconsiderable swig or three before I had to send in the clowns.

Ah. Life is mediocre good.

No, it's still mediocre, but I've got brew to compensate.

It's Never Sunny In Cleveland

April Fools!

Riddle me this, Camelot. How the hell did Barcelona, after that crazy ass opening fifteen reminiscent of a Great War fusillade, not win?













"This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sepp's blatter may be employed to prevent goals."

To my left, a record

Disintegration. Of structures, of relationships, of mind, of flesh. Death, taxes, annoying customers and that. Inevitable. Inexorable. Thus when it comes, and you're stricken with a raging fever, a violent fervor, you best channel it, lest it devour you from the inside. Hellhammer relatively smoothly, Celtic Frost with turbulence. Rage, man from Switzerland, rage violently, and give countryman Giger a call on your telephone machine for a suitable reflection. Something nasty. The timeless horror that breeds in the noxious crevasse of the human spirit. Gather a likewise band, bleak pranksters this Triptykon, then hit record. Then we listen. Will we smile?

Two minutes of crawling chaos 'til the midnight cataract murders most foul and with precision. The demonic swarm of Goetia, the final word is theirs alone: drop such domineering, illusory dyads. The rusted troposphere tone of Frost's swansong is now sculpted subcutaneously: the initial strike of Huysmans' bellringer Carhaix au contraire the lumbering reverberations. Swift beginnings, torpid finish. With such augmented efficacy, the finest album opener in many a lunar cycle.

Fischer & Co. vs. the sludge monster. A strangled rasp and insistent drumwork (Norman Lonhard shines on this album) plot the topography of the Abyss Within My Soul, a Lovecraftian blasted heath, slow and ill luminous, so redolent of Cathedral's molasses-in-winter debut LP. Peel the veil, see In Shrouds Decayed, the hypnotic, bastard genetic moisture of Into the Pandemonium, Sisters of Mercy and The Swans. The selectively deployed creaky croon has improved to the point to where I'm convinced therein lies the faintest hint of Peter Murphy.

The Shrine echoes a 103-second gloomy sustain, announcing the hyperthrash/To Mega Therion mashup of A Thousand Lies. Sure, we receive fewer instances of the nigh-incomprehensible, snarling Warriorism of old, and the main riff isn't an immediate soul-destroyer as, say, Dethroned Emperor, but if this was a disgruntled employee, he'd be enrolled in anger management. Of course, he'd hit back with Descendant, a penetrating smear of laborious grime; listen intently to pick out bubbling veins below V. Santura's gurgling feedback, then get sideswiped by the vicious coup de grâce.

Subversion is the law of the Myopic Empire, a march undercut with piano and Vanja Slajh bass grind, a song that might require repetition before a comfortable settlement inside this listener's files. A dozen spins shall confirm or deny. The cradling dirge of My Pain mostly works in no small part to Simone Vollenweider's lullaby anchoring the bittersweet tang of this rotting sanctuary. Now it's time for mass. Ladies and tophats, open your hymnals to, given its near 20-minute length, the aptly-titled The Prolonging, a shifty, metalized neo-prog workout, leaden chunks of barks and chords falling about, stops and starts, boredom is but a fantasy save for you short-attention span wankers, wisps of plucked strings and tom hits spiraling: as you perish/I shall live. Submerge.

Comparing Eparistera Daimones to Apocalyptic Raids or the initial, crucial Frost output is an exercise in futility. Those releases laid the still-eviscerating blueprint that's been xeroxed a billion times by every black, death and extreme metal act worth its salt, a singular atmosphere of time and place and shadow. Perhaps only Slayer can lay claim to such a vital influence from those heady days. Here and now, as is so often not the case, the primary creative force didn't willfully engage in a campaign of misinformation: this is his darkest (read: lugubrious, grim) work yet. His best? Another question entirely. (The correct answer is Morbid Tales, if you were at all curious, and you are.) A logical extrapolation of the themes and sounds of Monotheist? Certainly.

We listened. We smiled, like Vlad before his forest of the impaled. Tell me again anger and hatred and despair aren't useful emotions. They'll come in quite handy this afternoon, when I'm still down here in this dump instead of at home watching Arsenal vs. Barcelona. In sum, despite a few niggling faults, a motherfucker of a record. Serving suggestion: in the witching hour, with headphones.

Flash again

Was sick as a dog-faced boy.
Chewed up this line like a toy.
No fiction for you and you and especially you
so read these bus scribbles and then we're through.

Until next time, 'cause what else am I gonna do?
Oh, there's a story. Disagree? Stick your head in the loo.

What do you see when you close your eyes?
Wax fedoras bleeding from theirs:
fetish dolls without a care & with no one who can.
Below underwater glow, glam octopi tangle
their fingers in ours & those, pull & swim midst steel
sheen, drag mobile cage between hither & yon. Past banquet
glass, menagerie of desperate corpses comes, floats.
Do not wait out this black & white night.

Sift a box of sand or be killed by too strong a word.
Dare: go on and retort with new murder: with the bends
see how far you'll go, an old step at most.
To hear songs to burn in hell to:
keep quiet here. You say you won't
go too far, I know. I said I won't. I
told you I won't. You might
in another life. Would I see what I do when I close your eyes?

You salty dogs

Green.















And Boehner orange.

What color is your rock salt, New York? Boston? Chicago? Oh, that's right, you're still using pasty white cracker banality while we're a non-stop neon Mardi Gras.

America's most miserable city? Chortle.

The last shall be last

Doing my duty as an patriotic American while deviously wearing the guise of creative communist -- take that, arts community! -- I recently helped boost the flagging economy by finally purchasing a digital camera 75 years after their introduction. I can only hope the party will approve of my subsequent work and then perhaps, Lenin willing, I shall be nominated for the Stalin Prize. I promise I won't sell out like that jerk Prokofiev, swear.

Well, off to poorly compose some utterly forgetful imagery. Think I'll see any scantily-clad ladies? It's supposed to hit near 40°. At any rate, purty pictures make blogging even easier for a lazy bum like myself.

Hope it's as fun a toy as that baby-chucking trebuchet.

Whitey!

Kudos, Californistan.

La dernière semaine, I was rightly disappointed in my hometown. Now, I'm rightly *chortle* disappointed in suburban cracker mob protestarianism. All this throwing cash at diseased lawnsitters and faxing nooses to congressfuckers is no doubt a good time, but the cutting of a gas line produced a Darwin Award-worthy end for not even one yokel.



C'mon, something equally rich in schadenfreude or don't be calling yourselves revolutionaries any longer. You all diddle around as much as a Catholic priest. Bloody cowards.

Testing...one...two...zzzzzzz

Hey, what smells like smoke?
Is this thing on?
Do I care?
Not really?
Am I sure?
That's it?







Apparently, the land of tea and crumpets isn't thinking of the children.

A recall? Oh well, time to break out the big boy.














Sometimes quantity really is better than quality.

Flashing king snake

My brain may have slowed to a crawl, but it's mobile enough to flash the goods, though they're not very good goods. But they're free, and that's worth something of value.

He had been told crawling would get him nowhere. Defiant, though not standing, he crawled. Across the Mississippi he crawled, across the Huey P. Long. Into the Great Plains he crawled, and through the dust and devolution of Texas and the New Mexican plateau. The ticket taker at the International UFO Museum and Research Center considered him mad, but he was a paying customer and all paying customers in Roswell were mad and thus he was allowed to crawl inside and out. The gift shop, however, was quite the frustrating experience, though he did manage to score a plush grey for his on-again, off-again girlfriend, so perilously close to off because of his determination to be the next world traveling oddity of Ripley's, believe it or not.

Making his case at the San Francisco branch, he was laughed off the premises and crawled onto a trawler about to head out for sturgeon. Ignoring the surgeon general's warning, he lit a Winston and bought off the skipper with a few packs, even proving his worth as a makeshift counterweight in the fight to lift those feisty fish on board.

With the thanks of captain and crew, and a delicious meal to boot, he crawled on shore, sneaking his way, via Solid Snake-inspired crawling (sadly, without a cardboard box) onto a cargo ship bound for mainland China. The hold held many goods, though he was not able to read Chinese. The vast, floating warehouse could have contained the bodies of Triad victims for all he knew. Since a noxious stench never appeared, he understood that whatever illegal shenanigans were likely going on, at least he wouldn't pass out from the fumes.

The astute reader will no doubt be wondering how he survived such an arduous trek across the unforgiving seas.

Rats are tastier than you think.

Disembarking in Shanghai, there was -- surprise! -- no sight of Madonna as he crawled the famous burg, deftly avoiding rickshaws, gunplay in the muddy streets, roving bands of angry Maoists, patrons stumbling out of opium dens, scattered ronin from across the Nihonkai here for a quick score and other Oriental stereotypes as he steadily made his way into and across the vast, agricultural interior and north to his ultimate destination, leaping (crawling, actually) greatly forward into the realm of the horse lords where he continued to crawl.

And crawl.

And crawl.

And crawl, the thickening callouses upon his hands and those straining his tender knee joints furiously weaving burrow after burrow into the ancient earth, uncovering a long-dried riverbed over which he crawled and crawled and crawled and then crawled one more time, a thin, reddish trail in the sandy silt howling that he had at last found his treasure of iron and bone, the grave of the great Khan himself.

As his ex, and the world soon found out, crawling took him everywhere, including the pages of National Geographic and everyone knows where that inevitably leads: hookers n' blow n' crawling, lots of crawling.