The Wake

Yellow shirt + shag hair, detached snare, left arm flies up, stick to ceiling, as right arm darts under to hit hi-hat: not showy, just practiced and graceful.

T-shirt grips torso and upper arms, deals glancing blows to hi-hat like he’s flailing, like he fucked up and his arm flew off to the side. With the same practiced grace and timing he bounces an inch out of his chair on certain tom hits and cymbal crashes.

Once upon a time, I got to lay “semen” in a game of Scrabble.

In my blogger’s capacity as Directory of Online Things, I would like to alert you, the internet, to the fact that I have this song stuck in my head real viciously:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruef7aYCEbc&feature=related

Today I was sitting on the couch reading Beowulf when the left lens popped out of my glasses and fell onto my crotch. I plucked that oval of glass off of myself and tried to shove it back into its frame, but upon examination I found that the frame had snapped a little bit above the nosepiece. I tried to superglue it back together, but the glue wouldn’t hold, so then I tried to tape the lens back in using bright orange tape, but my girlfriend made fun of me and then stole the glasses and hid them so I had to go put my contacts in to finish Beowulf.

The moral of the story:

There was no pressure of any kind being applied to my glasses, so what the fuck?

“…this flesh and bone so many inches high and wide, and the nose sticking out and the . . . the punctures of nostrils, and your lips and I . . . and those two things that are eyes, and I . . . why should that be beautiful, anyhow.”

[this post is part 1 of an ongoing series, "On Badasses"]

This is the first badass I’ll be examining, and I’ve chosen to start with him because if they made a team of badasses, Ricky Ho would be team captain.

Things Ricky Ho can do:

Meditate
Draw strength from deep breathing
Play leaf-flute
Break tombstones on his chest
Believe in justice
Hurt you just by punching in front of your face
Casually trip people so that they fall eye-first on spikes
Point his fists and face at the sky and shout “BASTARDS!”
Commit arson
Flail his fists wildly in rainstorms
Frolic and giggle while flying RC planes
Break out of concrete after it has settled all over his entire body, just by flexing
Break out of torso-thick chains just by flexing
Survive being buried alive for a week
Still be able to play leaf-flute while he’s buried alive
Incite riots
Teach people to …

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There are three girls, and he grabs the first one at the knees, bringing her down under him quickly and harshly. The second girl gets out of the room, but the third is frozen in place, watching. He stands up and his body faces hers. She backs against the wall, face twisted, quivering voice saying, “Please, please. Please… don’t hurt me.” He smiles with his whole face, with his mouth and with his eyes, and he chuckles as though at a television screen, and then pulls words out of the laugh: “C’mere, gimme a hug.”

[this post is part 1 of a 156-part series, "The Twilight Zone"]

This is where it all began.

The place is here. The time is now. The picture is black and white. The footage is grainy.

Overlong synopsis, ripe with spoilers:

A man finds himself walking down a road, just dripping with amnesia, leaving globs of the stuff behind him like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. He comes to a town, and goes into a diner. Everything is left on, but nobody is there. He gets himself a cup of tea and a sausage, and leaves some money on the counter. Investigating the rest of the town, he finds it to be in the same bizarre state of abandonment, as if everybody just disappeared in the middle of doing shit. And then, holy shit, a phone rings. He runs …

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[note: this post has nothing to do with vampire novels for young girls]

Take heed, oh internet: I am as of the time of this posting embarking upon a quest for knowledge, a quest which you will have a window into through this very blog! The sharper among you have probably already guessed at the nature of my undertaking because of the title of this very post, but for those of you who are somewhat slow, let me explain the parameters of the exercise:

I am going to watch and then write about each one of the 156 episodes of the original run of TV’s The Twilight Zone! And if I do my job acceptably (and when have I ever not?) you will feel as though you have watched all of those episodes yourself, my posts inducing …

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William Gaddis, writing about Christmas in The Recognitions:

“Tragedy was foresworn in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of that which the heart dare not surrender.”

David Foster Wallace, writing about a life in “Incarnations of Burned Children”:

“…and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.”

William T. Vollmann, writing about skinheads in …

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[this post is part 1 of a 6-part series called "A Critical Investigation of Cattle Decapitation’s Six Full-Length Albums"]

Label: Three-One-G
Runtime: 12:26
Tracks: 18

The sound:

Shitty, shitty drums, sloppy and awful. General lo-fi atmosphere, but not the worst quality you’ll hear from a grind record. Buzzing guitars are executed proficiently enough. Vocals come in pairs, always one high rasp and one low gurgle, unafraid to condense whole sentences into a two-second incomprehensible guttural sound. And in sections without lyrics, they’ll often just make gross noises to pass the time. With an average song length of about 40 seconds, there’s not much songwriting necessary, and the songs stick for the most part to straightforward grind formulas, though they occasionally incorporate mid-tempo thrash or primitive grooves.

The rhetoric:

Three basic lyrical themes here: getting diseases from eating bad food, cattle being …

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My intent is to create a document of one band’s decade-long (and still going!) crusade to bring militant veganism to death metal. My investigation will center on two large and amorphous aspects of each record: the sound, and the rhetoric. Sound because to be effective in carrying a message, a band must create compelling music. Otherwise nobody will listen to them. Rhetoric because duh. At the end of my investigation I will conclude that Cattle Decapitation are not very effective at campaigning for veganism, but I will also conclude that they probably don’t care because they’re just trying to be gross and have fun and play death metal.

Assuredly, you are interested in a most profound way.

The project so far:

1) Human Jerky (1999)
2) Homovore (2000)

Updates will come approximately whenever I feel like listening to …

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To Peg (verb): An act of heterosexual intercourse in which the female partner penetrates the male partner’s rectum using a strap-on dildo.

Usage Examples:

“Oh, fuck, peg me harder!”
“I love to peg my boyfriend!”
“My boyfriend loves to peg.”
“Pegging is easy and fun!”
“Have you tried pegging to spice up your sex life?”
“We pegged for the first time last week, and we’ve never been happier!”
“I knew that what we have is true love, I’ve known it since the minute she first pegged me.”
“Wait, is pegging gay or isn’t it?”
“We pegged last night, and we had to stay up until four in the morning cleaning our bedsheets afterwards.”

There is a knock on her door. She turns from what she is doing and says, “Come in!” A skinny, pale man in a suit and fedora walks up to her, carrying a man-high papier-mâché penis in front of him. She looks at it and says, “My, that’s way too big! Do you have anything smaller?” He looks at the camera and grins like, “You know what’s coming.” She reaches for his belt buckle.

“Badass” is a word we all have an instinctive understanding of, but it’s tough to define. My computer’s built-in dictionary defines “badass” as “n: a tough, aggressive, or uncooperative person, adj: 1) tough or aggressive 2) particularly bad or severe 3) formidable; excellent.” Wiktionary defines it as “N: 1) a mean or belligerent person 2) a person whose extreme attitudes and behavior are admirable, adj: cool.”

Neither of these definitions can quite capture the grandeur, fury, righteousness and ass-kickery of those who the term is applied to. Instead of attempting to fine-tune a definition of my own, I wish to embark upon a project of public edification by describing some of the world’s foremost badasses and what is badass about them. Hopefully, by following this project, you, the humble, uneducated reader, may come to a fuller …

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