10/31/09

Halloween's always been very special to me.  Fuck if I know exactly why.  Maybe because my favorite season's autumn, and Halloween captures the spirit of its respective season better than any other (inferior) season-holiday pairing (Easter and spring?  Meh.  Fourth of July and summer?  Getting there.  Christmas and winter?  Have you been to Chicago?).  Maybe I really enjoy putting costumes together and this is the only time I really have a reason to do it (the prices for conventions are

Goddamn it man, that was my line!!!

Maybe it's cuz I fucking loved monsters as a kid and a huge part of me still loves shit that's macabre, twisted, dark, bigger than life... ahem.  This post is about a particularly special Halloween.

This was the year of the lazy Halloween costume.  I think.  I can't actually remember if I was planning on going as Lazy Ghost Rider that year, if that was the year I bought that silly grinning Calavera mask and tossed on my leather jacket, or if I had that all on hand since last year.  In any case, a couple friends showed up at my doorstep on Halloween afternoon.  I didn't really have a costume ready, nor was I really in doing-stuff mode when they showed up.  My friends were playing for a Halloween block party later that night, but other than that I didn't have the slightest idea what I was going to do until they showed up.

But show up they did.  Friend 1 (who I am no longer friends with) creeps on Friend 2 (who I was madly in love with) as we go get Friend 3 (who I'm giving a descriptor for the hell of it) in Friend 1's car.  We go get Stupid College-Age Idiot (a friend of Friend 1) from his college so he can buy alcohol.  They get beer and some Smirnoff Ices.  They hotbox.  At this point, I desperately want to go home, but I'm now some several miles from home, so that's not really an option.  They drop off College Idiot, go back to the woods, and drink.

Whoever the fuck said that shit about high school being the best years of our lives deserves a Falcon Punch to the goddamn crotch.  Not sure what this picture has to do with that, but it seemed appropriate.

At this point, I haven't really acquired a taste for alcohol.  I had ample opportunities to try (come on, it was high school), but my friends never really did it, I didn't go to parties, I drove pretty often (...that excuse sounds a lot weirder out loud), I was in athletics and whatnot, so ultimately I figured "I can do without this".  But here, we had a few Smirnoff Ices.  I'd tried almost exclusively beer up to this point, and hated the taste.  Nevertheless, I tried one of the Ices.  And fuck y'all, girly drinks are the shit.

JD knows what's up.

So I polished one off, and mercifully not-much-later, we had to bring Friend 2 back to her house because she was perpetually semi-grounded (for good reason, honestly, but that's a horse of an entirely different color).  Friends 1 and 3 planned on... I don't know, doing more stuff about as invigorating as drinking in a car in the woods during the day, so I took what may have been my last chance to bail and did just that.

Somewhere along the line, I met up with another stoner friend of mine who was fond of me giving him rides.

Funny, what's that picture doing here?

Naturally, I was giving him a ride somewhere.  This time, it was at least to a place I was also going - my friends' show.  He brought his broke-ass guitar along (cracked neck, missing the third string) for some reason, tossing it in the back of my mom's minivan.  Which I was driving.  Fuck a duck, I was 17.

Uh...  On second thought, maybe don't.

Back there, among the tennis bags, grocery bags, dog hair, and David Cook CDs (was he a thing back then? well, the 2009 equivalent anyway), it was promptly forgotten.

We get there, show goes awesome, the band (bands? was there more than one?) play/s well, block party's fun, bla bla bla happy.  At some point, I had to run stoner friend back to his house on the other side of Earth.  Okay, it was the far end of the next town over, but seeing as our world consisted of those two towns, this was more or less true.  I didn't realize until hours later, when I'd pulled back into my garage, that holy shit: he'd left his guitar.

I'd been considering picking up the guitar off and on for a while now.  At the time, I played bass, but for whatever reason, it just wasn't enough.

Okay fuck that; enough foo-foo talk about hopes and aspirations.  Basically... I had this guitar now... and I still haven't ever given it back.  Even now when I have an acoustic guitar that isn't broke as fuck, I still have that beat-up piece of crap that I learned on sitting in my bedroom back at my parents' house.  Same guitar where I sat, shirtless, at one in the morning or so, at the computer downstairs, learning Brain Stew, The Beautiful People, and Mein Herz Brennt.

Mostly because of the Hellboy 2 trailer.

My sappy theory: I can't toss it or give it away (yet) because to me, it represents the stuff that didn't suck about my last year of high school.  It reminds me of adventures, friends gone by, sitting in my attic learning guitar when I should've been doing what little homework I had my senior year.  It reminds me of finding something new, of finding a nugget of gold in a mire of shit.  I still play that guitar.  Whenever I go home, I tune it by ear and pluck and strum, and I remember being something that I never quite was: a happy teenager.

One-Hit-Wonder Wednesday Number One!!!

Welcome welcome, women, weirdos, and wieners, to One-Hit-Wonder Wednesday!  I'm your host, Thomas, and this is a something something!

I had more to that introduction.

...Don't you give me that look.

Aaaahhh, first One-Hit-Wonder Wednesday of... well, of ever!  How refreshing!

Why did I decide to do One-Hit-Wonder Wednesdays?  Why, simple, my dear readers, all five of you!  As you probably know, assuming you've ever seen a radio in your life, every decade is full of its fair share of zeitgeist-defining made-for-karaoke chunks of catchy, all the talent of these practically nonexistent bands crapped out into a single gilded turn of awesome.  Well... usually awesome.  Sometimes.  A lot of them are.  Okay, my point being, it is my humble (lol) belief that the nineties has the best, or at least most consistently tolerable crop of one-hitters.  And if I hear 'the sixties' out of your stupid face I swear, I will take an unwashed flyswatter to your goddamn mouth.

If three years ago you'd told me I'd one day end up publicly acknowledging the existence of Iron Butterfly, my urine would have ended up on at least one part of your body.  Such is progress.

So in the annals (hehe annals) of this here blog, I will celebrate the heroes, both fallen and unsung, of a truly special decade.

Speaking of "unsung", let's kick this shit off right.

"Unsung" by Helmet, everybody.  Enjoy.
All credits go to... credits.  Helmet made the song, some dude made the music video.  Probably Helmet.

Identity Crising Hard Here, Folks. Crising = A New Word I Invented.

I gots a problem, folks.  I got a conundrum in my head.

I'm not sure if I'm a real 90's kid.

Please, please!  I assure you, this doesn't do anything to mar my credibility as a 90's-music enthusiast/blogger-dude!  So I implore you, before you go out and burn all your Thomas Gumbel paraphernalia, please... hear me out.

That's what all you birthers are on about, right?

I love 90's shit to death, as you know.  90's music?  Well... obvi.  Cartoon Cartoons?  Oh my bloody fuck yes.  90's games?  Please, please just stop.  90's movies, such as sci-fi epic The Matrix?  I SAID STOP IT, DAMMIT.

Here's that shit I don't like: all the goddamned "Herp derp if you were a nineties kid you'll totes remember this but if not you like Nicki Minaj and Lil' Wayne and hurr durr durr" posts.  That's a very long descriptor.  I know.  But goddamn it, if you have a Facebook, you know I'm right.

To all you who make those posts and just won't stop: I get it.  Nineties were awesome, nineties were different, nineties produced an arguably (VERY arguably) more well-balanced generation of kids than this generation has so far.

Also to them peoples, I posit to you: how much of the 90's do you actually remember?  I mean yeah, I remember all the toys and the existence of the shows and stuff, but I sure as fuck wasn't a conscious enough human being to put it together into one cohesive decade of experience.  Part of that's because I didn't experience the whole damn nineties.  I was born two whole years before Kurt Cobain ate gunsmoke.  Shit, I was eight when Y2K didn't happen.  I mean like, the computery business and the nuke-launching, not the turn of the century.  Cuz that like, totally happened.

Hardy har har.  I'll have you know I moved out from there several months ago.

Get it?  Cuz I was living under...  Oh forget it.

Anyways, I'll tell ya right now, the oldest person I saw post one of those things, since they were "the thing" to post, is maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe mAyBe maybe m.a.y.b.e maayyyybbeeeeee maybemaybemaybe MAYBE ah say MAYBE twenty-four now.  That's compared to my current twenty-one.  I was born in 1992, so yeah, the oldest person I see screaming in everyone's faces, "REMEMBER THE NINETIES, GUIZE??!!" was born in 1988.  That's... okay, I guess that's fine.  You were well on your way out of middle school when you were holed up in your basement with crates of Twinkies, canned soup and bottled water, your dad guarding the door with a double-barrel.  I'm sorry, you'll have to speak up a bit.  What's tha- What do you mean "just you"?!  I...  Okay, whatever, quirky family get-togethers notwithstanding, you see what I mean?  Everyone that actually remembers the nineties, those who lived and breathed that particular zeitgeist, who actually had ups and downs during that period beyond 'ow I scraped my knee' and 'wah I can't find my Happy Meal toy' - I had a way to end this sentence.  Something about them not doing that.  Well.

Hey, I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.  Okay, here, to make you feel better:

We sure as fuck ain't this generation.

...Criminy, I'm sorry.  I had better images in mind, but I guess Google decided to get rid of every fucking image that makes fun of kids these days.

Here's the stickiest part of the wicket, folks.  We ain't exactly 90's kids.  Sorry, that's the double-truth, Ruth.  But neither are we 2000's kids.  There's no decade between 90's and the oughties.  So uh... what the fuck are we?

Shit.  I blew my own mind there.  Gonna go think about this for a while.  Might do a follow-up post where I actually answer my own questions for once.

L011a

Lollapalooza 2011.  Saw Deftones a few hours ago.  It's already a good day.

I'm drunk; not on booze, as I came alone and didn't feel like shelling out ten dollars to a stranger (ten dollars I may never see again) for a single music-festival beer.  This is my first and so far only Lollapalooza.  I don't know how to sneak things in.

I'm drunk and here alone.  Drunk not on booze but the energy, the enchantment of shows I've seen by people I normally don't even like or that I've just come to appreciate (see above).  I'm a zombie, a damned gluttonous soul looking for more experience, more sound, more songs I don't know to scream along to, more movement and bodies to roll in.  Between sets, I meander.  During them, I'm part of everything else.  I watch, learn, and before long, I'm moving like they do.  Leaping, gyrating, heads banging, even to things that aren't remotely metal, a dance of chaos.  That's music to me.

I'm here alone and I can do this.  To me, that's special.  I'm alone, but yet... we are legion.  We're all here for one reason, the reason on the stage at the time.

It's night.  Evening.  Whatever.  Headliner, in the Big Damn Field.  Eminem.  Spirits are high.  So are the people.  Like, everyone but me.  Not upset; I don't smoke.  I look around.  It's the first time in this whole day that I've really observed rather than experienced.  For the first time that day, I feel as alone as I am.

These aren't exactly my people.  They're not even the people from before; they're not who I saw Fitz and the Tantrums, Black Lips, Death from Above 1979, and Deftones with.  These...  These are people from my high school.  Not actually - that's a small blessing.  But they're the same concept.  Bros with neon tank tops, Kanye glasses, dumb tattoos, snapbacks.  Girls with brown roots in bleached hair, cutoff shorts, pierced belly buttons, ridiculous eye makeup.  One hanging off the other, screaming their asinine jokes.  The lion's den, folks.

My judgments and reservations washed away soon enough, right when the sun went down and the music began, when Slim Shady himself took the stage.  I survived the show unmolested (in any sense of the word), loved it as much as any of the others.  One of those girls - the ones with their obvious bleach jobs, wearing next to nothing, slippery with sweat that isn't all theirs - one of them asked if she could get on my shoulders.  I obliged, of course.  There she remained for the latter half of the set; my face in a vice grip between thick pink thighs, her buttocks on my upper back (thank you scoliosis), her cooch saddling my neck, her stomach caressing the crown of my head with each heavy breath.

This isn't the story of how I fell in love at a concert with a girl whose name I never knew.  No such thing happened.  The only attraction was purely animal.  I'd have liked to screw her, but I didn't.  I didn't even get a number.  I was used, and it was awesome.  Strangely enough, she was there with a boy.  Several boys, but one boy in particular, I could swear I saw her kissing earlier, unless my ridiculous contact high was playing tricks on me and I was an idiot for being so chivalrous.  Out of all her friends, including possible-boyfriend, she went with me, some random stranger, there alone with his little red pool bag, trusted me as beast of burden, trusted that I could support her (substantial) weight for more of this set than the boys (tank tops, Kanyes, snapbacks) that she came with.

I was used, and it was awesome.

I'm not sure what this story is about.  The one pattern I can recognize is, even when I wasn't among my favorite demographic, when I was a nomad in the enemy state, I had as good a time as them.  Maybe this is a story about my ego boost.  Maybe it's one about how you can't choose your fans, or a story about music bringing people together.  Maybe it's a story about nothing, or a story about me telling this story.

Maybe it's a story about me trying to tell a story, a story where with each story I tell, I get closer to the end, closer to what the story means.

Bye Chi; Like Tai Chi, But Tragic and Depressing

Damn...  Two posts in a week about metal bassists dying.  Sorry if this has been a pretty bummer week, dudes and dudettes, but this is something I feel I need to post about.  Hell, I wish I'd posted about it the day it happened.

Five years ago, Chi Cheng, Deftones' bassist, was in a car accident that left him in a coma.  Just last year, he'd woken up, on the Fourth of July.  I thought that was it.  I thought, "I've heard of people recovering from worse.  He seems like a strong dude, has a lot of support.  Few years, and I can see the original Deftones and it'll be the best damned thing that ever happened to me."  Maybe it was naive, maybe it was uninformed, but goddamn it did I hope.  Just a few short days ago, he passed away due to related complications.

When I'd first seen Deftones, it had already been three years since the accident.  I was familiar with their music, though I wasn't nearly as big a fan as I am these days.  Until that day, I hadn't immersed myself in it, explored every crevasse, spent hours just listening to it, tried like hell to emulate it.

Just as I tried to honor Peter Steele with humor to complement the black tidings, something he was good at, I don't feel like I should mourn Chi's passing the same way.  He was a deeply spiritual man, a thoughtful man, a poet.  That's something I'd like to emulate, if just for a bit.

Again, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that any of the members of Deftones should read this (Chino Moreno, Stephen Carpenter, Abe Cunningham, Frank Delgado, Sergio Vega): I sincerely hope I did justice to the passing of your friend and brother.  You have no idea what your music has done for me.

So much more I want to say, and I'm afraid of not saying it well enough.  I know you shouldn't let your fear rule you, but for once, I'm going to take a step back from myself.  Chi was a greater wordsmith than I can strive to be.  So to close this off, here's one of his poems from his spoken word album, "The Bamboo Parachute".  It's called Braces, and... I don't know why, but I feel it's strangely appropriate.

It's cooler to be in your shade, easier to predict the future of plastic than to be the mess that is you.  It doesn't mean you don't shine, it's just... time isn't taking care of your wounds.  Faithfully with you, a plain pocket caught in turbulence.  Nobody knows what they mean to you.  I have no right to wonder, but I'd miss all my beautiful friends.  Pre-Christ lives, imitating, living.

Manson

All ye of the Christian Right persuasion, you oughta leave now, cuz I'ma be jerking over the Antichrist Superstar himself for a while here.  So unless you wanna catch some 21-year-old fanatical spunk in your eye, I suggest you backdafuqup.  If you aren't one of these silly conservative types that hates those doo-wopping rapscallions and their "rock and roll" doodads where they move their hips and buy each other malts... well, you'll probably still get spermed on, but I'll try a bit harder not to.

Well, now that I've alienated about half of you by talking about sperm, let's begin.

Uh, the whales?  Obviously?

Though I didn't really get into Marilyn Manson until freshman year(ish), I was never part of the other camp, people who took the two things they knew about Manson (plays some kind of heavy music with a lot of swears that no one's actually tried to listen to, and... I don't know, wears makeup?) plus the things they think they know about Manson ("Eewwwwww he's creeeepyyyyyy!"  Your mom's creepy.  "Hurr he got a rib removed."  No, that's not a thing that happened.  "They're the guys that started that riot, right?"  No, that was Limp Bizkit.  "URRRRR He's responsible for Columbine!" eye twitch) to equal: a frightening and unnecessary hatred normally reserved for Osama Bin Laden and exercise.

We'll find a way to get you too, Exercise.  Just you wait.  Smug bastard.

Somewhere down the line I Limewired (yeah, remember that?) a random sampling of his songs on a whim.  I'd heard people speak fearfully of his music, describing it as "crazy death metal" and other surprisingly-stupider epithets.

Yeah.  I've heard numerous people call THIS GUY "death metal".

Teenage-me, even when I barely knew what "death metal" was, figured that had to be stupid on some level or another.  Yeah, whatever, call it teenage arrogance, but it's not hard to tell when someone (or many a someone) has an uninformed opinion.  So I netted a random bunch of songs, mostly singles, and listened to 'em.  I liked the FUCK out of them.  Somewhere in the next sometime (this ain't no history lesson), I went down to my local FYE (sigh... auf wiedersehen, old friend) and, on kind of a whim, bought two of his albums: Eat Me Drink Me (cuz I liked "Heart-Shaped Glasses") and Antichrist Superstar (cuz I liked "The Beautiful People").

The rest of my day after I got home went something like this:

Shut myself in attic (my hangout)

Popped in Antichrist Superstar (came out first, so hey, why not?)

Listened

Did little else

Was like "WTF?"

Stared at jewel case for a minute

Listened again

Fucking "got it, man"

I mean no, I didn't, because Manson fills his lyrics with so much imagery and symbols and crazy artistic shit that I don't think I could wrap my head all the way around it without the assistance of psychotropics, but I "got it" enough.

Mr. Marilyn knows how to write a freaking song, to be sure.  But his strength lies in the albums as full-on sit-and-ponder hour-or-so-long experiences.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnndd Blogger's having a shit-fit and suddenly can't post images.  Sucks, cuz I was about to put something funny.  Now you'll just have to imagine it.

The themes, the way the songs flow into one another, the hidden (and not-so-hidden) narrative, how they end and begin... there's something really special there, something that never fails to captivate me and put me in some mystic, if unsettled, place.

Point is, even if it may not show up in my songwriting (not like there's anywhere to hear my songs... or like I have songs recorded), Marilyn Manson's music is what pushed me into wanting to knuckle down and get serious about it.  Not like "I think I'm gonna be a rock star" serious, but serious like I want to actually be good at it, I want to write a ballston of songs, I wanna have bands, I wanna know bands, play shows, spit beer on my fans, bring down das houses, have people hear my shit, and ya know what?  Maybe even inspire someone like Manson inspired me.  Fuck I gotta go record.

Sunlight, Flashing on your Steele

Let us take this day to remember one of the unsung heroes of metal, one of the last torchbearers of the days of classic metal, a brilliant songwriter, a flame that burnt out and burnt bright rather than faded away.

Peter Steele.

I was going to write "Peter "Fucking" Steele" on that single-line epitaph up there, but if just for a moment, I want to find in myself some solemnity, the capacity to be serious.

Not saying this post is gonna be all white slavery and anesthesia.  I mean, look at this guy:

Or don't.  Either way, he's looking at you.

He was a goofball.  A towering, scary-looking, talented-as-fuck goofball.  So he'd want some humor in a post like this.  So Pete, if I think of anything good, I'll throw it in.

Imposing as he was, Peter Steele was, by all accounts (well... that I've read anyway), a wonderful man: a joy in the studio, on stage, at home, at the bar, in the workplace.  Speaking of the workplace, did I mention he worked for the NYC Parks Department?  Imagine a Peter Steele cameo in Parks and Rec.  Seriously.

Also, since there's weirdly no pictures of him actually working in a park, above is a picture of Peter Steele being sexy in a field.  Which is close enough to a park.

And that's not even touching on how this motherfucker could write a song.  Steele had a way of songwriting that captured intense emotion without being a "look at my problems" kinda songwriter.

Looking at you, bro.

He shared his world with us rather than dragging us down inside it.  More impressively, he accomplished this while filtering his life through the world of horror, using all things gothic and macabre as analogy.  Even more impressively, it's presented in a way that still makes you want to fucking move, that's still fucking metal and catchy as shit.  Even MORE impressively (ya see where I'm going with this?), he (well, they, because this is obviously more up to his band) managed to make this beautiful shit without a lot of studio fanciness.  Do I like studio fanciness?  No; I love it.  Do I think the minimalization of such tricks sort of held Type O Negative back in terms of not putting out stuff that the radio would devour, something they could have been done without sacrificing any sort of integrity?  For sure. But the music's great as is.  When all the paint's been stripped away and you still have a house you want to live in, that's when you know you have something truly special.

I know, Ten Guy.  I know.

So there you go, folks.  Peter Fucking Steele of Type O Negative.  Hope there's Halloween in Heaven, Pete.  Say hi to Dimebag for me.  Not that I knew him, but, you know, that'd be cool.  And like, all the other dead musicians.

No.

And to the rest of the guys from Type O Negative - Kenny Hickey, Josh Silver, Johnny Kelly - should you somehow read this blog (yeah fucking right), thank you so much for some twenty years of amazing music.  If there's any way I didn't do justice to you or the dearly departed, I'm truly sorry.

Also, this.  Fucking this.  Credit goes to VoodooHammer on deviantART.  If you run into this bro, real sorry I didn't actually get permission.  Hope you'll appreciate the usage though.

Plus a funny meme.