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.

Burnt Offerings, Or, The Customer Is Always An Idiot

I'm not sure whether this corpse is me suffering from bloggy burnout or one of those patrons who, like clockwork, when picking up their book orders feel it very vital and important and necessary to both national security and our symbiotic emotional well-being 'cause we're all in this together person whom I won't see again until you return your books late and then never again because you're off to your cubicle, stuffs the immediate vicinity with a hot, stifling air of why they ordered these particular tomes and what their research entails thus forcing my hand into dousing them with lighter fluid, striking a match and giving them the reverse monk protest because, shockingly, gasp, I don't care.

















That's what you get for not taking your books and going.

I hope someone remembered the hot dogs and marshmallows.

To write among strangers

Funny how five minutes contains years. Time to follow the crown.

Extremely important employment-related paradigm shifting

Magical ball-control ray. Not pictured: Doug Henning.

Doug Henning would be proud of such prestidigitation.

Just get some of that Canucklehead curl, then hat tricks aplenty.

Oh, almost forgot about basketballery:
Kentucky waxes Fucking Duke, Kansas outlasts, oh, why not, Butler (go, midmajors, go), then a collection of talent beats John Wall.

Before I take leave of thee, I'm currently in a library-wide meeting (one must take advantage of a student body-less spring break) but if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of a well-oiled book depository, and I know you are, simply watch the live feed below.

Cleveland, I'm very disappointed in you.

An entire 6:15 am bus ride downtown and not a single inebriated wanker? At least the parade doesn't run down Euclid so I'll be able to have a quiet lunch in vomit-free sneakers. Fuck drunk cracker mobs.

In other predictable news, Justice Department claims "my penis is bigger than your penis." Texas Representative says "no way." Justice Department says "way." Our reporter could neither confirm nor deny whether either party in fact whipped it out.

Editorial: in their defense, it wasn't yet St. Patrick's Day.

The drowning flash

No guns or knives? What kind of story is that!

A kiss as sweet as a blowtorch. A touch as gentle as an acid trip. Burning sensations and hyperbolic hues are lovely, if rare, blooms we deign to pluck out of a wasteland of dull aches and infinite shades of matte grey. Those interior states always remain after such transient perfumes scatter at postmodern speed.

Finding one at all, now there's the rub of steel wool, the same color as the pavement saturated with witching hour rain, perforated by neon shards and blood quickly sheathed by a fresh splash.

Watch your step, you tell yourself, or you'll drown.

Turn your head and imbibe the first act of a thousand simultaneous plays staged in a gilded glass cabinet, another thousand each and every block. These actors and actresses, having rehearsed their lines to the point of nausea, restart their wandering through that greasepainted matte grey, warding off those dull aches with loose cravats and spirited abandon until the inevitable awareness that they failed to garner applause once more and so venture forth into the witching hour rain.

Watch your step, they tell themselves, or you'll drown.

Slipping around a streetlight's oval glow, you stalk past carnival minuets and shadow puppet theatres left in the dark, a solitary blossom caught in a flurry of breakdown. Though how long the former will last, you know all too well. They'll find out in a whirlwind, a rushing, redolent scent soon stale. You laugh, for a moment.

Then, as the others, venture forth nonetheless, infused with unspoken promises borne on that hallucinatory soupçon, the tableaux of her abstract, arcane hydrocarbons demanding that we heed her one and only command, that we search for a touch as gentle, a kiss as sweet.

We didn't watch our step, and we drowned.

Don't fuck with the library

You think I'm joking? Pshaw!

Since I'm not entirely sure today's young people are familiar with dark age weaponry, I could really use one of those Snake Plissken EMP dealies. Try remaining oblivious to your excuses now, muahahahaha, etc.

It's magic!

You have journeyed far to reach this wonderland of tomes and microfiche so lo when you arrive at the grand entrance of automatic doors and it doesn't automatically open after you have stood there motionless for fifteen seconds or more while carefully sculpting your righteous indignation face that would impress Donatello you have obviously failed to give the proper address of 'open sesame' but rest easy for after you do the automatic door will automatically open automatically don't worry about those goofy handles trust me you silly goose.

No time for blog, Dr. Jones!

Short Round lies, I've got plenty of time (I am, after all, at work, assonance, sweet assonance, gas, grass, ass, the last aw yeah) I simply don't feel like it. Which makes me a liar because here I am with a post but know this post knows nothing and contains nothing but arsenic, so after you've read it, you don't have long, which makes you dead, an ontological state worse than lying personified, advantage, me, whee.