not just a mere occident

"Hvitt Lys Over Skogen."
Obv I don't need to state the (obv) artist. This is the most notorious of "bootleg" Burzum songs - never appearing on an official album, but on the "Draugen: Rarities" and on some other strange bootleg. It's hard to find reliable info on Burzum, and I haven't read anything written by Varg re this song. Production-wise, it sounds like it came from either the "Aske" or "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss" sessions, and, indeed, its opening theme sounds very much like the coda theme of the song "Det som Engang Var". At any rate, I've enjoyed Varg's music best at its most epic-length, and "Hvitt Lys" stands proudly alongside his very best songs.

I can't stop listening to Burzum. I don't want to listen to anything but Burzum.

The good news is I finally got a cd burning program to work: an old, cracked version of Ashampoo, running at 4x speed, with a bunch of precautionary adjustments. It's strange that my Nero 6.0 stopped working so suddenly, as it had consistently worked before, where now it consistently failed. At any rate, now I'll be able to listen to music as I retire to bed with my comics - the best way to listen to music.

Did you ever notice how some people's idea of small talk is actually very prying? Like asking somebody why they haven't been able to find a job, or why they've been drinking so much. It boggles my mind that anyone could ask those questions without establishing loads of intimacy first. These are questions the askee might not be able (or rightfully would not want to) answer honestly due to their extremely personal/private nature.

I've been thinking a lot about Varg Vikernes lately, big surprise. Maybe because I do agree with him on a very deep level, and I feel that he and I are very much alike - so when he says something especially ridiculous, I have to do a double-take...and what I find out is that what he said isn't that ridiculous after all, & that I can at least understand where he's coming from. My biggest problem with him is his seeming racism, as if he finds non-Europeans so clearly inferior, he won't even deign to talk about them. And he's clearly anti-immigration when it comes to non-Europeans moving to Scandinavia, and he openly speaks out against miscegenation of whites and nonwhites, as if this is diluting and cheapening the gene pool and the purity of white races. This is really way too much for me to accept, and smacks of an essentialism where he assumes not only a clear biological difference between "races" of people, but a definite hierarchy of these biologies. His logic also seems to put nature above nurture - that culture and intelligence flow directly - subserviently and consistently - from biology and are thus analogously hierachical. Id est, nature predictably produces nurture. I, however, generally believe in the primacy of nurture above nature. But, as Varg might say, that's just because I went to a bourgeois leftist university where they fed everyone that feminist jewish claptrap.

As usual, I'm probably misinterpreting him as I haven't read all of his stuff, and perhaps I could have written directly to Vikernes for clarification back when he was still accepting correspondence. And I won't lie: I still have this fanboyish fantasy where one day I actually travel to Norway when he is released, and we hang out for a day in the countryside just having good ghey times.

He talks about a herd mentality, where it takes a very special kind to walk off the "tarmac" (i.e., beaten) path and explore the "overgrown" path (i.e. the road much less traveled.) Hardly novel concepts, but it's especially relevant to my life right now, as I'm seeing the herd more and more clearly (boorish vulgarians - all around me!) and I'm dangerously close to being swept up in it.

1. Materialism is growing increasingly "sexy." This seems a construction to me - that is, some marketing wizards dreamed it up, and then it became reality. In my mind it symbolizes - illusory or not - wealth, status, social power. Is this what humans have evolved to prefer? I think they have a susceptibility towards it, but just as important is the framing of this power. (By the Jewish Media, harharhar.) It's no surprise, then, that bums get no love from the ladies - unless they're rich college students dressing like they're poor. If they were actually poor, they wouldn't be getting so much sex. Next time you're in a college town, ask one of the real bums when was the last time they got laid by a cute 19-year-old.

I was watching some stupid travel show talking about the club/nightlife in a city, and it was exactly what you'd expect: young people dressed in expensive yet sexualized clothing, buying expensive drinks, and this has all become a prevalent "courtship" (i.e., presex) ritual for the modern westerner. It disgusts me and I'll have nothing to do with it. (Yet how can you escape it when it engulfs you? When you have to work with preachers of this lifestyle in order to make your own, different lifestyle?)

2. Procreation is increasingly associated with stupidity. I'm not as sure this idea was dreamed up in an ad office or by liberal ideologues with good intentions, but it has somehow become a somewhat-sad status quo - a prophecy successfully self-fulfilled.

What I mean: look around you. who are having all the babies? What are your smart friends doing? Not having babies, I'd guess, but rather doing all they can to improve their wealth and their career. Meanwhile, the not-so-bright seemed to have been dumbed-down to the point where they're too stupid to know - or to even want to know - how to use simple birth/population control. By and large, the people squeezing out the kids are the ones least equipped to support these kids, let alone prepare them for any kind of escalating educational, personal or professional development.

(And it doesn't help that our dominant model of university/ "the academy/clinic" is itself inherently, typically westernized/corporatized, regardless of whatever anticapitalist theoretical invective its employees might make their careers spouting. This is where you go to learn how to be bourge - make money - and what the people are actually saying is less important than the money that allows them to say it.)

So, smart people smartly do what they can to survive in this (post)modern world, which essentially rewards not procreating; procreation is seen as financial suicide at best and as patriarchy at worst. So now, not having children is how you sustain the self in a world where it's increasingly more challenging for the self to subsist - and the weakest, least-reproductively fit are the ones doing all the reproducing - weeding out of the weak through gross overpopulation.

It's a vicious circle, which obviously would not be fixed if stupid people got educated and stopped having children, or if smart people had more children.

I'm not sure what process would even help turn things around, and it certainly couldn't be done in my lifetime. I'm not even sure where to plant the seeds. It's challenging enough to try to live my own life according to my beliefs, as "crazy" as they are.

That's all I got for now. Bleccch.

what's burzum

Heh. Consider this an "addendum" to the previous.



I forgot to mention a book I read a few weeks ago, "Curses" by Kevin Huizenga. This was just straight up good times. The drawing was playful and quite "cartoony" yet it was executed with great finesse and a well-trained eye. Craig Thompson beautifully rendered the rural landscapes of Wisconsin and northern michigan ("Up North", "da U.P", as we might say), while Huizenga does the artistic service on the more banal suburbs of Grand Rapids. Yup, that's right, he went to college in the G.R, lived there for a while, and immortalized the strip malls and subdivisions and traffic-choked avenues and the pervasive vanillality, even using a clear stand-in for every Michigander's "favourite" symbol of megaconsumerism, Meijer.

"Curses" is not so much about doomed love than other books I've seen rather than it is basically an exploration of Huizenga's whimsy. He has a very inquisitive mind and his stories are largely illustrations of his entertaining and quite-information thought processes. "28th Street" is a highly amusing recasting of an obscure old folk-tale; there's also a retelling of an old "gothic" horror-story; and - perhaps my favourite - the story of an academic-theologian struggling between rounds of golf to write a scholarly article about why "eternal conscious torment" is the only acceptable form of afterlife, rather than "annihilation of the wicked." We see the scholar's most colorful thoughts and are inundated with arcane theological arguments that are damn interesting, and, if you're not in some sort of divinity program, you've probably never studied. Huizenga is unique and very skilled in his elegant yet simple portrayal of many interesting phenomena, including the history of the starling. It's worth reading just for the ridiculous things you'll learn. And Huizenga's "stand-in" Glenn Ganges is pretty endearing, too. This kid is yet another one to watch.

Today I read a most fascinating interview with Varg Vikernes. This guy never ceases keep me on my toes. He's a decent writer with some very, very...provocative...ideas and attitudes. I'm in general agreement with his opinions on capitalism and christianity, but he seems to be going off into la-la land with his devotion to the "European gods" and some of the stuff he writes just sounds downright racist: such as about the "Negroid races," etc. Nonetheless, I can't simply write him off as a lunatic. In fact, more of what he says makes more sense to me than it did when I was first getting into Burzum 10 years ago: for all the wrong reasons, of course; I saw him as the "most evil black metal musician" and had a morbid fascination in listening to "the music of a murderer."

Nowadays I'm probably at my peak of Burzum-enjoyment. I am listening to all the albums and just getting deeper and deeper into his entire body of music, and the thought of him being an "evil murderer" never crosses my mind. If anything, there's a pervasive admiration, that someone has made this music that speaks to me so directly. It's absolutely the unspoken feel in the music itself: hypnotic, "atmospheric", contemplative, real, raw.

The lyrics become a bit of a stumbling block, sometimes. As time went on, he became more and more heavily into Norse mythology and Asatru and paganism etc. He's certainly done his homework, and he's even written a couple of books on the topic. Now, I find the Norse myths very interesting and I was into them as a hobbyist for a while, but he's getting REALLY into the arcane details and attempting to extrapolate these into a new worldview which includes suspicious references to "purity" and "European races". Something about resurrecting old pagan rituals (which apparently died out when the christians exterminated/converted the last of the Real Pagans) so that the strongest and wisest of the races could re-establish direct contact with "the gods."

I have a feeling that Vikernes, like Nietszche, is often "misunderstood" so I'm not going to say that I just gave an accurate summary of his beliefs per se. I haven't read his books, indeed, I don't think they have an english translation yet. And I think as he does more research, while being separated from his beloved Nature, that his own attitudes have more than likely evolved or adapted, and I'm very curious to see what he does when he gets out of prison. It's not really an ideal living/working environment for him - but I'm not saying people shouldn't go to prison for murder. I don't know. I've never been so fascinated by (and indeed, in admiration of) a murderer before. This is reductive to label him as "a murderer", though, if only because the murder is probably the least interesting thing about him, esp when you consider his music and his writing.

He pulls out the "N-word" a few times and that even made me cringe. But when I considered that he was probably using the word the same way I use the word - i.e., not as hate speech towards blacks per se, more as a provocative show of contempt for garden-variety idiots/boors - I found myself agreeing with what he was saying. Heavy-metal scenes/culture are absolutely troglodytic, and you'd have to be a total troggy not to see that.

Yup. It looks like I'm going to have to spend some quality time with his writings, then.

A cursory glance at which shows that he is even more controversial and inflammatory than I thought.

I dunno. I just can't get over my deep affinity to his music, and I am kind of optimistic that he's gonna make some more classic records once he is released. That's all I'm saying.

semi-functioning autistic

If you suspected it takes a lot of work and effort and intention to deconstruct oneself into the world's biggest loser, you wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

The alienation and loathing and nausea and terror and feelings of drowning can be at least somewhat mitigated by interesting new hobbies, which I feel compelled to discuss today.



Of course, I've been 110% obsessed with Burzum lately. Here's a nice bedtime tune from "Det som en gang var."

Since I mentioned a growing interest in the medium, I've devoured piles of "graphic novels" from the library and I'd like to talk about at least a couple of them.



"Blankets" by Craig Thompson, it would seem, is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Everybody shits themselves over it. Lamewads get tattoos of art from it. Geeky critics criticise it as "overrated". My two cents: when I started reading it, I was absolutely blown away. I was sucked into the "Blankets" universe. I laid awake thinking about how awesome it was, and how it was probably the most impressed I'd been by a book since Bukowski. Indeed, I can't remember the last time I was so enthusiastic about a book or just simply liked something so much. But... But... Yeah, there's a "but...", 'but' I refuse to downplay the immediate enjoyment factor of "Blankets".

If you hadn't guessed, it's a 'typical' first-love story, with all the emo-hand-wringing you've come to expect (and LOVE!) from this genre. Needless to say, I really identified with Craig, being this "sensitive outsider" who doesn't fit in with all the boorish hicks in his bumpkiny Wisconsin town. I faced very similar issues of faith and doubt as I grew up with the (mis)direction of "organised christianity"; and found that I had created my own nuanced moral universe apart from the one-sided judgementalism of hardcore christians. I greatly enjoy that Thompson made this religious/spiritual aspect a major theme in "Blankets", and I felt that his realizations and his drawing thereof were very mature and respectable. The art in general is breathtaking, I should say. Even if the story/writing itself weren't so engrossing, it would be a complete pleasure just to look at his drawings. (Of course, it shows exactly how far yours truly would have to go to become a "graphic novelist", haha.)

The development of Craig's relationship with Raina is beautifully told, perfectly capturing the innocence, the nostalgia, the dare-I-say-it, true love. Even if it's infatuation, whatever it is, it's true, and it certainly looks and feels like love. As I get older, the more doubts I have that most normal, unalienated boors ever experience anything like this in their lives. I was blown away that Thompson had felt what I had felt, and especially that he could put it down on the page in so intimate, yet so graspable detail. I.e., I felt a deep connection to Craig: yup, he's one of us. One of the good guys. Lovable sissy just trying to get along in a fucked-up stupid world, being too girly to be able to pull any of the troggy trollops in his own backwater town.

Yes, I'm a big baby, and near the middle of the book where the Craig/Raina thing really starts to take off, I was struggling to hold back tears at the honest sentiment that poured from the page. It does take something very special to crack my cynicism and turn me into said big baby, and I applaud "Blankets" for doing this. I feel sorry for anyone who has never picked up what Thompson's putting down. My own experiences of this consisted of two women and a considerable amount of disappointment and lingering anger, and though my story clearly hinted at what Thompson depicts, it was more one-sided, more disastrous, and more short-lived. In some ways I'm still seeking a "real first chance" like Thompson shows, and this desire is being partially channeled by my interest in the graphic novel, which shares my interest to a T. (and is much better than whiny "emo indie" rock created by "cute" mansluts.)

My only caveat on "Blankets" was that I found the end unsatisfying - disappointing, even. I was kind of mad that Thompson started such a beautiful story and finished it in a kind of ... Don't want to spoil... arguably haphazard fashion. In hindsight, though, that's life, isn't it? In fact, my reaction to the ending makes me want to read it again, and interested parties should absolutely not let my opinion keep them from reading and re-reading "Blankets."



It was actually through Adrian Tomine that I first became really aware of the form: I was reading "Best American Short Stories of 2006" or 2007 or something, the one with all the "young" "new" writers and that dingus dave eggers editing and introducing everyone. There was a poignant story from Tomine's "Optic Nerve" in there, and I was immediately impressed at the effectiveness and subject matter of this previously-unknown-to-me form of comic.

So I was pleased to finally see a Tomine book, "Shortcomings", at the local lib, and greedily snatched it up. This was a wholly satisfying read, beginning to end. Not as sprawling or ambitious as "Blankets", but it does benefit greatly from its punchy, cinematic pacing. Tomine's people are more "sterile" and "in-the-lines" than Thompson's, but there is a surprising and pleasing amount of humanity right beneath the surface.

I immediately identified with the main character Ben: thirty years old, pathetic career as a movie theater manager, constantly critical and haranguing and generally a picky little bitch. He projects his anger and dissatisfaction with his own life onto to everyone and everything around him, and in this way even reminded me a bit of "Things I Hate." There's endless passive-aggressiveness with his girlfriend, and he's always accused of having a white-girl fetish - never satisfied with his asian girlfriend. In many ways, this story is hauntingly ripped from the proverbial personal headlines: just substitute ann arbor for berkeley and jewish bourgeois women for asian women and I even was a slacker worker at the local indie movie theater, for god's sakes. It's like Tomine had a direct line into my life.

The fun is just beginning. Ben is a failed graduate student whose only friend is a similarly angry nymphomaniacal lesbian, who is a graduate student at a local girl's college mainly because she, too, is putting her life on hold, and she has insatiable sexual urges for those cute idealistic undergrads that just don't exist in the real workaday world. The graphic novel has seemingly become the perfect medium for depicting the prolonged-adolescence that is becoming more and more obvious as more and more of us in this age group "refuse to grow up." And as someone who questioned his own graduate school plans - ["Get real. You don't have a real interest in research and academia. You're just fetishising the academic environment. You want to 'make up for lost time' and have sex with all the 20-year old jewish girls you didn't have sex with in undergrad."] - these characters made my jaw drop a few times. I couldn't believe what I was reading; that anyone else had ever even had such thoughts.

Shortcomings never slips into maudlin or overly sentimental territory like "Blankets" flirts with, and I would be quick to mention Tomine's quick wit/hilarity. He doesn't take himself too seriously, and genuinely uncomfortable moments (Ben getting ingloriously dumped by the flaky blonde grad student) are leavened by other hilarious moments (talks with his lesbian friend Alice, or when the white asian-fetishizer "Leon Christopher" approaches Ben with a kung-fu pose).

Great characters, great story, perfect for your mopey post-undergrad existentially-adriftness and late-20's crisis of identity. Read it. It'll take half an hour and you're not missing anything great on TV that can't be watched again.


Moar Burzum! I've recently only become enamoured of his "ambient" albums. He tends to "Recycle" themes from throughout his career, and here is a piece from "Hlidskjalf" where he reprises "The Crying Orc" from the very first Burzum album - bringing his entire musical vision around full-circle in a way that could not be more appropriate (and surprisingly tender for a man that had no compunction about stabbing another man 20 times!).



I'd heard about Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" being made the center of a censorship controversy (along with "Blankets") when a missouri library threatened to pull the books from shelves for being "pornographic." Of course, I hate pornography probably much more than these pro-censorship types, and, smrt as I am, it's clear that these books are about as far from pornography as you can get. (Despite the probably-notorious panels of Bechdel getting down and munching some fur-burgers in this one.)

I'm honestly starting to fear the day I've read every good graphic novel in the library. I've been coming across a lot of hits and no misses lately, and "Fun Home" also receives my strongest of recommendations. It's probably the most "literate" of the books here, and gives the slacker-faux-reader interesting discussions of Fitzgerald, Proust, Joyce, Sisyphus and Oedipus myths, etc. We see the very complex interactions between a young girl coming to terms with her lesbianism and intellectual "awakening" in her liberal dykey college, and her own closeted-gay father with his perenial crabbiness, vehement artsy-fartsy-ness, and his secret homosex with strapping young boys. At first I was a slight bit surprised by the "coldness" Bechdel evinces, but this is clearly a product of her emotionally-distant (compulsive, "autistic") upbringing. More importantly, there is a warm heart here which Bechdel reveals ever so gradually. It's not hard to see why everybody shat themselves over this one.



Finally, here's the one I'm in the middle of right now, "Clumsy" by Jeffrey Brown. Likewise, there have been many ejaculatory blurbs about this one. One is obviously most struck by the "clumsy" drawing style, which still manages to capture all the emotion it needs to - in fact, arguably captures it better than a more refined style would. This takes a number of mostly-short vignettes from the relationship of a boy and a girl and shuffles them all up, chronologically speaking. It's basically looking at snapshots of the exact moments Brown remembers most vividly about the relationship, and he conveys this vividness painfully well. I was originally put-off on how much nakedness and sex there was in the book, but I guess I'm glad that Brown doesn't show it as a necessarily pretty or beautiful thing. (I just don't think people should be having so much damn sex, though.) But I gather that if you get two humans together who are actually attracted to / aroused by each other, then, apparently, they seek a kind of consummation though and of the physical. Like Blankets, this one gets across a lot of powerful universal (supposedly) truths about what it's like to be a sensitive faggot pansy boy in love with a girl, but it does so with much greater economy of everything: saying as much as possible with as few words and lines as possible, interspersing the mundane with the profound, and, having lots n lots n lots more sex. This is probably Brown's way of being unflinchingly honest about something that affected him deeply, which is how sensitive emo comix-reading faggots tend to feel about sex, so, kudos for that. Apparently this is part of a "Relationship Trilogy." UH-OH! Also, Brown does a "remix" of "Clumsy" called "Be a Man!" which retells this story, but only with Jeff acting like a typical guy (macho douchebag) rather than the sensitive pussy he really is - a brilliant idea, at least just hearing about it.

People say there's nothing on tv worth watching. Apparently they never heard of a little show called "LAW & ORDER."

I don't know what came over me. I have always avoided these shows like the plague, when, last night, I finally admitted my raging attraction to the white-hot Mariska Hargitay and decided to watch an entire episode, mainly out of my adoration of her perfect feminine physique (and mystique, if you can accept that horrible pun). To my very pleasant surprise, I found the story of the episode to be massively entertaining. I can't believe I'd failed to grasp that there was such strong "HARD BOILED DETECTIVE" material right beneath my proverbial nose and its name is "Law And Order." I suppose I was turned off by it being "THE most popular show ever," such that I didn't think it could actually be any good. Yes, it's formulaic; yes, it's cheesy often to the point of complete absurdity (which I think a majority of its idiotic viewers don't grasp); but for me, this ridiculousness only enhances that "Hard-Boiled" factor which I love so sincerely. I actually sat there in my room and watched 4 fucking hours of Law and Order and felt more satisfied with myself than I have in a while. I also got sucked in to "Criminal Intent" starring, alternately, Chris Noth and Vincent D'Onofrio - which I'd previously refused to watch for some fundamentalist reason that Vincent D was throwing himself, as pearls before swine, to an audience who had never even heard of "Full Metal Jacket" or "Stuart Saves His Family" (haha.) But I'm finding that it's just so much easier- and enjoyable - to submit to this craze and just love it. Of course, I have mainly the absolutely stunning, lovely Ms. Hargitay to credit for that. My God. SMOKING HOT. Plus I have to admit I was genuinely impressed with some of the storylines: just last night, there was a great SVU about the promiscuous hook-up culture in high schools and the mental health stigma and corporate-promoted-overmedication issues (in which the guy from the laughably low-brow "Boondock saints" [it sickens me how many people sincerely love that movie!] plays a staunchly anti-psychiatry "Rock star"); and a great CI wherein Vincent D tries to crack a case in which the chair of an "American Studies" department is murdered, with suspects being an inflammatory Black celebrity-professor (almost a mashup of cornel west and zizek perhaps?), a horribly anxious dilettantish grad student who's been aimlessly going through his dissertation for 10 years, and a professor visiting from oxford who is not really a professor at all but a psychopathic/sociopathic madwoman who spent 10 years in Thai Prison learning how to successfully steal people's identities and personalities. HOW CAN YOU EVEN GET AWAY WITH A STORY LIKE THAT???? I LOVE IT!!!

So yeah. It's been fun just immersing myself in all this interesting new stuff that I actually like. A mvvvch more positive alternative to driving around wasted on Peter Vella and making terribly embarassing after-midnight phonecalls, for example. (I apologize to all the nice young ladies.)

As for the k.c. Solo Project, I will just say for now that trying to do home software-based recording is a fucking pain in the balls. But this black metal will find a way.

t.k.c.b.m.s.p.:h.s.'08.f.t.w.

Burzum: "Key to the Gate", from "Det Som En Gang Var", 1993


Oy vey. I have some very big news that I am chomping at the bit to share. Don't worry: I didn't get a job or meet a nice girl or move out or get into grad school or anything. Let's just say it concerns the endeavours of a Trve Artist and is not something of the literary or even visual persuasion. Ha Ha Ha. Let's just say I'm making a huuuge comeback, baby, one that's been whispered about for many, many, many years. Most people (if any) reading this have not even known me for long enough to be really aware that this even is an "artistic" side that I'm indeed returning to. Things are rough, they are raw, but god damn, are they finally real. I'd share what I have now, if I wasn't pretty sure I will produce a more compelling version in the quite-near future. The suspense is killing me, though!

But speaking of jobs and careers: Today I was contacted by a University of Chicago person. When the woman first asked for me on the phone, my first thought was "oh great, a telemarketer" or "oh great, maybe now I can bomb an interview for an hourly job at Home Depot," but when she announced she was from the UofC Vista program I got understandably excited. I figured they were none too impressed by my nervous presentation a few weeks ago and that I was disqualified from all consideration. But if I do well on this talk we scheduled for Friday, then Yaboy might be helping the needy and building a rock-solid resume in Chicago when August arrives. Damn. Don't want to jinx myself. Let's just say these two aforementioned events have been two of the most ridiculously positive developments to occur since...I really couldn't say: Since I recently got the great ideas for "Things I Hate" and for the visual versions of "Confessions of a Hack"? Since I scored that "nonprofit job" in Sept '06? Since I graduated Univ in Apr 2005? Since I got some sweet, sweet make-out action in March 200x? I'm knockin' on wood to stay lucky, but these new things have the potential to eclipse all of those.Wawa-weewa.

Drinking, of course, is idiotic and never, ever recommended, but I have a scholarly interest in prices of alcohol-by-volume ("mL-alcohol/dollar" don' lie). Today I discovered that a handle (1.75 L) of "Northern Lights" Canadian Whisky is 13.98, while a handle of "Canada House" is 14.98. Rich and Rare, you'll recall, goes for a whopping 17.50 a handle.

Rich and Rare: 40 mL-alc per dollar (handle), 37.64 mL-alc / dollar (fifth)
Canada House: 46.73 m.a./d (handle), 46.15 ma/d (fifth, $6.50)
Northern Lights: 50.1 ma/d, 46.15 ma/d
Steel Reserve: 39.89 ma/d (40oz)
Peter Vella: 55 ma/d (5L box)

compared to something good:
Jameson's Irish Whiskey (750 mL fifth at estimated $21.00): 14.29 ma/d. yes, that's correct.

So, Peter Vella still holds a commanding lead, but both NL and CH are fine choices if it be a fifth ye want. What we learn, though, is that buying a handle of CH isn't saving you a world of money compared to the fifth, while the "deal" you get comparing the two sizes of NL is obviously much greater. It's still interesting to see how Peter Vella continues to reign supreme in the "biggest booze-bang for your buck", though. You'd have to get a $12 handle of Arrow or Kamchatka Vodka to really compare, and, as you well know, cheap vodka is never to be considered by anyone.

Yeah, as it turns out, there are more important things in this world than booze. Until such things can be firmed-up, though, whet your thirst on the Burzum - now really relevant even more than ever before.

"Dunkelheit/Burzum": from "Filosofem", 1993.


(ps: It turns out if you search "peter vella" on Googe Image Search, The Sinister Icy Black Hand of Death appears twice in the first two pages of results. Not bad, eh?)

facefarting action

We all knew the NYT's Modern Love "College Essay Contest" was going to be interesting, but even I was unprepared for the heft of this recent article, discussing the "controversial" (to me, at least) "hook-up culture" so familiar to scads of people.

The kid is a pretty good writer; though he might present a one-sided view, his writing was strong enough to make me angry, and then make me bitter and discouraged. Maybe it's just his choice of topic, though, which rarely fails to hit me on a primordial level. I'm not entirely sure why.

Either way I'm not currently in the mood to really write an honest post right now, and I just want to be alone and watch some Sunday night Fox-Tv action and read some Craig Thompson "Blankets" action and listen to some Krohm action. I'll certainly comment on "Blankets" later, as it is blowing my mind and heart into little pieces and just may be some of the most "speaks-to-me-personally" material I've ever read since I discovered Bukowski years ago. Krohm is ridiculously melancholic US black metal (solo project) which I have been down with from the very early days (as far back as 2001 or 2002 I corresponded with the guy and got an early demo from him), and his music just keeps getting better. So Good! Funny that such dreary music can produce such a feeling of hope: that there is somebody out there making this kind and this high-quality of black metal.

I'm Audi 5000. Read the goldam Modern Love article, you sleaze.

you have 20 seconds to comply

Things have been generally more ridiculous than not lately, exacerbated by a nonstop weekend Bender which saw Yaboy getting frighteningly reckless, shockingly irresponsible, and troublingly self-destructive, pushing him to the brink of pure Hunter S. Thompson-level khaos. There have been moments of sheer terror and nausea, but, praise the lord, there have also been moments of unencumbered hilarity. What you see above is the most cogent example.

A couple times a year, at most, you will see a movie scene that is immediately seared upon your memory and you have to watch it again. And again. And again. David Lynch had this effect on me with "The Man Behind Winkie's" in Mulholland Dr. Or, certainly, "The Nurse Scene" from The Exorcist III.

Well, no use in not making the most of everybody's favourite intranets video clip source:


(4:10)




As you can see, I've customarily been a big fan of "JUMP SHOCKS." Now, however, the winds of change are blowing through, and I am shifting my focus decidedly more towards cumbersome stop-motion police robots with ridiculous voices.

It's not even just the ED-209 itself as much as it is absolutely every detail of this scene: the smugness of Dick Jones, the endlessly-grinning black man, the way Kinney says "Yes sir", "Use the gun in a threatening manner", the completely absurd and gratuitous jaguar-sound the ED-209 makes, The Old Man hanging his head, and once those guns start blazing I just can not contain myself. I've been a little bit crabby/antsy/worried today and this clip has been my elixir, my manna from heaven: a perfect angel, even.

I've always been a perfectionist and a gripey one at that, but this is one of those rarest of scenes where I cannot find a single flaw. I stand up and cheer. I die with laughter each and every time.

The overarching theme, as you already know, is that "Robocop" is an undeniable classic that all of humanity should be required to watch on a very frequent basis. I'm pretty disappointed that I have not seen it in many years until I happened across it on cable the other day.

My god. I think what happened was, I was too underwhelmed and/or disgusted by the tedium of the sequels that I completely forgot about the unswerving quality of the original. This one belongs on short lists, baby. Wow.

RUN DON'T WALK.

What I mean is, in part, I'm a little regretful we didn't watch this at least once a week when I was a promising young student and we used to watch 6,000,000 movies a week. I barely watch any movies these days compared to the 2-movies-a-day diet I was on then.

I can't imagine a better party movie, either. Just get your friends together and you're going to be entertained. You won't be lulled to sleep. There has got to be a drinking game for this movie.

Another plus is that the Youtube clips are full of comments by extremely dorky guys who love to see Ed "PWNING" people even more than I do, such that they will make their own "re-edits" of the scene to prolong the "pwnage." FTW!

My brain hurts from the aforementioned recklessness. Really got to start taking better care of the old temple.

It's official. "Coming of age" "(semi-)autobiographical" "graphic novels / art comics" are here to stay. The best part is, there's a whole section in the library for me to explore. I'm in the middle of one right now: "Night Fisher" by R. Kikuo Johnson. This got a lot of hype and I'm digging it. Prep-school overachievers in Hawaii who protest the emptiness of their existence by "tweaking" on crystal meth, or, as they call it, "batu." Some pretty good classwar sentiments in there, as well as some tender unrequited love. If I hadn't been irresponsible and left it over a friend's house, I would be enjoying it right now.

I also read "Escape from Special" by Miss Lasko-Gross, a rebellious loner angry Jewish girl who never fit in with anybody. The marketing blurbs for that book were obnoxious but the book itself was very good and I enjoyed the childlike look of it. Definitely a few good laughs and some timeless truths as well; I eagerly await the second installment, which promises to put me in the shoes of a person you'd assume I'd hate - although I appreciate the honesty and self-awareness of a Womyn courageous enough to show herself at her most confused and uncourageous:



All these "artists" live in Brooklyn and they're all under 30 and I suspect they might be more than a little "cliquish" now that they've "grown up" and finally found the acceptance and approval and validation and happiness and dirty sex they had so bitterly yearned for as pimply virgin teenagers. Now they're all friends with each other and they're plugging all their friends' comics. I wonder what it is I'm walking into here.

I'm going to do it too. I swear. One day I'm just going to pick up a pencil and paper and draw. I don't care if I've only been doing it since the age of 25. Grown-ass men need hobbies too, and, as far as hobbies go, this one's pretty safe, I'd say.


This is what happens when you don't get make-out action and you don't have an acceptable outlet for all your raging ang(st/er), like your own graphic novel. Or a 150-page (and growing) list of things you hate, filled with racist, misogynistic, homophobic, violent language. Or full-blown alcoholism.

what a hateful, angry trip it's been

So I've been so "hard at work" on "Things I Hate" that I haven't (obviously) done anything with The Sinister Hand since I launched "Things I Hate." Today is the auspicious eve of the day that I somewhat-arbitrarily decided I'd update "Things I Hate" with its second massive post, and, I suppose, would be as good of a time to wonder aloud on what "Things I Hate" means to me (at the moment).

TIH started as a Facebook profile joke sometime in late April. Since I was coming to grips with the reality that I was always so hateful and I hated so much of damn near everything that it was almost humorous, I decided to make my "About Me" simply a list of things I hated. This also played off of my annoyance at looong lists that people use on sites like this: like listing 6,000,000 shitty books, bands, and movies is going to impress me any more than listing only 2 or 3. Soon, naturally, I decided to take it as far as it could go. And it hasn't stopped going yet, a month and a half later.

I began by filling up every facebook category with a maximum-length list, essentially filling the page with the upper-limit of information it could hold, all of it things I "hated". Some of which, of course, were meant to be obvious jokes: Humour/comedy is the perfect way for dealing with uncomfortably excessive hate/anger. Hyperbole. Exaggeration. You get the picture. I then expanded the list into my very first facebook Note, which I made sure was at least as long as the list on the mainpage before I posted it.

Some people expressed praise and I myself was pretty happy with it. It was one of the more ridiculous and hilarious things I'd done recently. Not bad for a guy who prides himself on his ridiculous hilarity.

However, naturally, some of it was embarrassing and excessive, so I didn't leave it up forever. I knew the project was a great idea and could be developed into something earthshattering, however, so I saved it for "later." "Later" turned out to be immediately, as I figured, "Why not take this to its natural end, and make THE LONGEST LIST IMAGINABLE?"

And that's exactly what it is. I created a brand-spanking new blogspot site and continued the list there, posting it only when I had tripled or quadrupled the length of the list from the facebook page. Essentially what this boiled down to was a ~75 page list (1 inch margins, double-spaced, which I rationalized was a decent length for an honours thesis or a master's thesis.). The design for the blog was going to be as streamlined as possible: no spaces, just a list of items, commas, black text on a white page. I increased the font for readability.

I knew I wasn't ready to end the project, however I didn't want to update again until I had another post that could rival this 75 pages. I figured this was better than say, posting smaller posts more regularly. The absurd LENGTH of the posts was very relevant and important. I was shooting for a 50 page post to be done by June 6, which of course is a significant date for worshippers of The Dark Lord.

When I reached the 50 page mark a good week in advance, I had a few choices: post now? or try to hit a new length record and post on June 6? I opted for the latter, and made it up to a ridiculous xx-page length. At the moment I'm pleased with this decision.

The most important take home points I'd like to make, though, are regarding the content itself of TIH. From the beginning I knew it was going to have tongue-in-cheek remarks against women, jews, ethnic minorites, etc - it was never going to be PC at all. The questions were: HOW un-PC is ok? and how much specific detail should I go into about my own life and, say, very specific people? To address the first question, "As UN-PC as humanly fucking possible." I would prefer not to comment on the second question except to say that many, many details have been highly, highly distorted-and-exaggerated for maximum comedic/offensiveness/ridiculousness/un-PC effect.

So naturally there's no accounting for taste. One of my implicit (or not-so-implicit) goals was to push the envelope as far as it could go, trying to make jokes about things so offensive that no-one's tried to make jokes with them at any point in human history. There's an obscene amount of racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and violent language. People could very well call it a "MANIFESTO" or "INVECTIVE" or a "TIRADE" or a "RANT" etc. Well, I'm not particularly offended by the term "Manifesto," but since it does carry negative "Psychotic" connotations that I think are unfair judgements of TIH, I'd prefer to think of it more as a samizdat: subversive, transgressive, underground, DIY humour-revolution.

Some of the material is borne out of pure, uncomfortable vitriol and violent rage - I do have some pretty "black days" now and then. Other days I am much more jubilant and cracking myself up laughing over the sheer ridiculousness of what I'm writing. Either way, I don't think it's best to work on "TIH" every single day because it is in some ways potently poisonous at worst and cantankerous/crabby at best. Sometimes it's best to spend this time enmeshed in things we actually like rather than isolating ourselves away from them and writing about the not-so-pleasant things in this world. However common-sense this may be, for people that might be most prone to read (or write) something like TIH, this advice bears frequent repeating.

I've been absolutely obsessed with politics lately. Local and national. I have vowed to vote in local elections this year and to become informed especially about the goings-on in my home congressional district. There is a democrat campaigning to unseat the incumbent republican, so naturally I should want to vote for the dem. This is especially important, as it turns out I live in a completely different congressional district than I thought I did. There is a dividing line very close to my residence between the 10th and 12th districts. I thought I was in the 10th (Sandy Levin - D) when really I'm in the 12th (Candice Miller - R). So, there you have it. Sen. Carl Levin-D is also up for re-election this year, and there's a western Mich R named Hoogendyk running against him. I should think Levin should win by at least a 10 percent point margin as he has done ever since the 80s and he'll continue to hold this seat he's held for about 30 years, considering also that I've heard absolutely nothing about Hoogendyk. Whatever the case, it would be ideal to go into '09 with two Dem senators and as many Dem Haus Reps as possible. I don't think the "lunch bucket" folks in Sander's district will vote him out, as he's been in office almost as long as Carl, but this is the historical home of "Reagan Democrats", so I wouldn't rule anything out. We might also hopefully see some hot action and get Repub's Joe Knollenberg and Thad McCotter out of their nearby districts. It kinda sucks that I'm getting so into this right now. I mean I'm watching C-Span all the damn time. If I was more interested in this when I was at "The Public Ivy" I could have focused my energies towards maybe eventually becoming one of these politicians. The $160 grand salary ain't too bad either - but most of these folks have law degrees from hot-shit schools. Goddammit.

I've been getting back into music again, but unfortunately I have run out of discs to make my famous mix CDs. Grrr. Lately I've been digging (non-metal) The National, The Twilight Sad, Autechre, Magnolia Elec. Co. / Songs:Ohia, and in the metal realm I've been getting back into Slayer and more raw black metal and doom metal: Judas Iscariot, Leviathan, Skepticism, Xasthur, old Mayhem, all pretty classic stuff. So yeah, the musical life is going quite well, but it would be solid gold tetons to actually have an iPod and be able to really LISTEN to this stuff.