No Matter How You Say It, Guti Is Hilarious

 Moreso than the Arsenal-Man U match itself in front of me, not to mention the recent dream in which I rode a bicycle upon a mysterious bridge before falling down a connecting flight of stairs with said bike upon my shoulders and into mid-afternoon awakeness, I'm worried most about semantics. This is partly because the match itself is such a snooze: Arsenal's lack of pace & spark is such that ancillary storylines like "Who Is Prettier: Cristiano Ronaldo or Fabregas & van Persie Combined?" and "Asian Guy Scores! Non-Asian Upper Darby Native Tentatively Thrilled" quickly overrode the game at hand. 

 Anyway, as an American am I allowed to call it football? "Pitch" and "supporters" and "corker" come easily enough, and I've even made a decision to go with the Brazilian "r=h" pronunciation of Ronaldo. But when you get to the big one you feel a little stupid about it. I tried "futbol" but it sounded like I had a speech impediment. What is this, "The Other Sister"? And "soccer", unless you're super lame and say shit like "FC Dallas" or whatever, is for bald men who wear swishy pants. Please. 

 Saying "football" to refer to the sport requires confidence and commitment. When I heard Tommy Smyth, a man of either very little or altogether too much irony,  label an MLS match between Dallas and Houston a "Texan Darby" it was hard not to feel sorry for that presumably squinty-eyed Scottish bastard. Maybe it was Derek Rae. How the hell should I know? They're both awesome. But this is what you've got to be concerned about at this point because van Persie just scored off of a penalty and seriously nobody cares 'cause the Gunners (I'm going there, too) have sucked so damn much. So you've got to BELIEVE in being an American calling soccer football when we've already got a sport called football and this nation hates soccer anyway so why confuse things? Don't be a douchebag, right?

  Luckily, we speak a tongue that holds a strong base in context. So call it a homonym, although one that you can only really use with other followers of the game. If I'm going to the post-office to get stamps I'm probably not going to ask the lady there what she thinks about Wolfsburg's surprising run up the Bundesliga table. But if I'm at the doctor's office or rapping with my cousin Sarah, I'm running headlong into the breeze and saying "football". Not like I'm going to start wearing a scarf or calling French Fries "chips" (I'll call them by their real name: disgusting!) but it's time to be real.  Be honest with yourself and those around you, closested football-sayers: there's a new day ahead. On that day I might talk about metal shit again, but until then, the time is yours. 

Always Being Lazy

 I really like Willie Nelson. Who doesn't? He seems like a cool dude. It's cool that though his voice is not the strongest or the most classically beautiful, he totally makes it work. Like if Tim Gunn eat baked beans cold right out the can. Willie even uses these perceived limitations to his advantage; his sometimes reedy-ass croak becomes quite evocative in conveying feelings of lonesomeness/heartbreak/long lines at the churro place/whatervs. So he def kicks it sometimes and gets rowdy, like on "Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)", but what we probably dig most about him, and country music in general, are the high-lonesome jams, the crying-in-your-beer (or, in my case, strawberry banana orange juice) stuff. Whether over a lone guitar or stacked, Mancini-ish orchestration, dude's lamenting the heartache of loss and shit, and best believe you're buying what that plaintive bastard is selling.

  "Always on My Mind": big Willie style, right? With the backing vocals and grand piano and string meeting with the pedal steel, the waterworks are flowing like Napoleon III never existed. The voice aches, the regret is near-palpable, HE'S IN. Ducks are flyin' fuckin' RIGHT. Where in "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" the subtlety of the music matches the restraint of his vocal line, bitterly kicking your heart in the tearducts, the pop overload of "Always" ain't restrained by jackity nothing. Straight for the kill. If you've ever felt shitty about something, and not even necessarily the mistreatment of your old lady; you can feel bad that you didn't take good enough care of that rhododendron three summers ago, Willie will make you weep. You'll feel like freaking Schindler, anguishing over the realization, in hindsight, that you could have done so much more. Except, uh, minus the Nazis. 

 So you feel bad and Willie feels bad and everyone's pissed at themselves but crying at the same time to be forgiven. Take me back! You're scoring the montage of our good times of picnics and probably slow-motion, sun-dappled flights on rope swings turning to broken flatware and two week trips to "go down to the store to get cigarettes". I swear, they were out of Luckys everywhere but in Missouri! But that's where the flaw of this song lies. I loved it and it always made me misty but, like, Willie kinda acted like a shit. Dude ain't too suave to get out of it, neither. He almost is, with the little choke in his voice going into the chorus again at around 3:00 or the Canadian way he says "sorry", but , man, you gotta own up to it! 

 It's insulting that after all the mistreatment he's heaped out on his lady in favor of carousing with Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings that all a sudden a godlike guitar solo is going to get his ass out of the fire. And it might work for him because he's Willie Nelson, but what about the rest of us idiots? He's making us look bad! I have, as have we all, done my fair share of effin' up but because I didn't record "Sad Songs and Waltzes" I don't get the same treatment. WEAK. It's totally Kirk van Houten trying to win back Luanne with "Can I Borrow a Feeling", except that this particular glove of love is used in jeans commercials or whatevers. 

 And yeah, the typically easy cadence of his voice may underlie a deeper sense of regret blar bar blar but maybe he's just lazy and too busy doing lines off of Julio Iglesias's tracksuit to get it together and sound actually sincere. I just came to this opinion about the song yesterday so maybe I'm way off base but still. I'm not saying you've got to be some emo pussy about it and abase yourself forever, but let's put some wrist into it, fellas! Sometimes you've got to suffer a few grease burns to make roasted potatoes, right? Shit's still gonna make me cry a little bit, don't get it twisted, I'll just recognize the folly of it all a bit more keenly. And probably update this thing with more frequency than I have. 

Enscalpument of the Demagoguery! Phase One

I just watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High for the first time not on Channel 17 and there is nudity in that movie! Nudity and swearing. Awesome! Yet except for the mention of VH, there is no metal in the film. Now I know that the Halen isn't exactly Carcass or anything, but their sheer love of rocking and being fucking awesome all the time coupled with Eddie's shredding and Alex's awful skin-tapping (not even a pound, a frigggggin' tap this guy does, with the obv xcptn o "Hot for Teacher"). However, the film has a semi-secret metal trump card: Romanus.

Romanus's Mike Damone is not explicitly metal. In fact, he's a new wave dude, so he likes punk's wussier, orthopedic-shoes-wearing cousin. His room is decked out with Devo and Elvis Costelo posters, he rocks the skinny tie and thinks that Deborah Harry is a dish (not that she's uggs or anything, but let's just say she's no Lizzy Caplan. Riiiiight??). And though he does drive a Gremlin (a close cousin of the AMC Pacer MIRTH MOBILE), Romanus is still not really very heavy.

Until he sits down!

Because he has a cowskin chair!

It looks like a cow's hide, except it's brownish, so maybe it's one of those cows that produces chocolate milk. In this chair Romanus ascends to a heaviness of nearly-Dio-ian proportions. It's such a freaking heavy chair. It will splatter your brain across most available surfaces. It was no doubt wrought upon the blackest anvil in the deepest smithy of Vulcan, possibly with a pentagram-shaped hammer. I usually feel confident about my ability to analytically discern an object's metalosity, but in this instance the sheer epic-ness of the seat, nay, the throne!, overrides standard neurological procedures. Also, the movie was realy good, though the sexual content and glut of embarassing (though firmly resolved/forgotten) situations therein make me glad that I didn't watch it with a laday. "Hey, dinner was really fun; let's go and watch a movie where young women fellate carrots! I'll squirm uncomfortably and clear my throat if you will!" Banging.

Refuse!, Plus the Band Below Looks Like the Worst Thing Evs

Babababa-boom. No respect to May. I recently read that Marcus Garvey died from a stroke triggered when he read a negative obit of himself in a Chicago paper. Given his place in Rastafarianism and in a Burning Spear record, he seemed like a pretty heavy dude, but getting smoked by your own death is pretty weak; metal welcomes all things demise-centric, even/ESPECIALLY when they relate to one's own bucket-kicking. Like that dude who took himself out onstage at a Death show, except not annoying.

This possibly apocryphal story also says a lot about meta stuff, namely that it will merc on you like the government on Brother Shabazz. Self-referentiality is crafty darts, yet we often opt to instead stick with Laffy Taffy. Simply put (?), the sloppy ease with which postmodernism can be applied in this modern age (a ridiculously wack step in social evolution that for arbitrary reasons I blame upon "Bull" Fulbright dying right before he could have cleared the A-Team in "The A-Team") makes anything meta-related a dangerous proposition. Like picking up someone who you think MIGHT be a hooker but who could just as easily be Greg Luzinski.

Yet the chance is sometimes worth taking. I refer, of course, to how The Matrix is alla sudden getting on my nerves in a heavily macro way. When the "CSI" was on at the lanes the other night, the fuzz was getting the grill in a press conference by some ratty-ass blogger dude. The televisions were muted but I could tell that the fool was floating some inquisitive business and smart-assedly being a butt to the cops. Karankaredes or whoev doesn't need that shit, kids! So he was being a butt and is way too satisfied with himself I'm trying to bowl, wondering the whole time why he isn't getting beat up. He's talking about computers out loud and one of the Alpha House goons isn't there to administer his deserved swirlie? Gwuh.

And it's the fault of that Matrix picture. It made computers/being computer-savvy much more socially acceptable than anyone could have previously imagined. All them dorks running around hard-driving and booting or what have you and nary a nosebleed in the bunch! I think that some of them might not have even been virgins. And jesum crow, it ain't fair. Neo et al. subverted the time-honored nerd/not-nerd paradigm by establishing the computer-literate as heroic and sympathetic from the outset rather than as hopeless misfits who, through a rigorous battery of hilarious pranks, de-bra-ing and hearty, self-affirming partying, subsume the (initially) more socially acceptable jocks. What's the point if the nerds are set up as capable, even deserving victors from jump? Their status as social outcasts needs to be overcome and function as a display of collective subcultural worth to the hegemonic observer. In The Matrix, the outcast role is embraced and gaily brandished so that the nerd stands as an aggressor, eager to impose his/her (who are we kidding, his) dorkgenda on the so-called "unenlightened" masses. Marrone!

And next thing you know it's cool to know what a gigabyte is and action movies are all about typing shit instead of blowing shit up. It's as if Tango & Cash, which sucks super hard already, had Clint Howard's hacker dude as the lead character instead of the asshole stockbroker Stallone and the xenophobic Kurt. That's a dismal example because T & C would be 70 millions times better with C to the H in the lead, but that's beside the pizzointzz. Computers are wicked renarded and never cool.

But I'm using a computer to broadcast this and if anyone reads it they are likewise using a computer to receive the message. I would almost feel like a shitty "anti-capitalist" band like Anti Flag (more like Anti GOOD!) or Rage Against the Machine (more like Boring Blah Blah Blah I Got No Heat Jah) or Captain & Tenille (more like DRAGON & His Partner) who, like, are totally hypocritical and, um, profit from the all-too-comfortable machinations of capitalism totally totally IF NOT FOR THE FACT that I could at this point echo Duke's words in Repo Man because through it all, I blame society. And The Matrix. But also society.

So Let It be Written, So Let It be Rocked

O! So I had wanted to make posts on this post on a more regggalar basis but in addition to the usual crank distractions like work and school, two things in particular have seriously roadblocked the blogging. One, my Sopranos addiction has resurfaced in a big way. I had stopped watching the program a couple of summers ao after Tony's behavior became increasingly dickish and he whipped the pickle dude from that crappy pickle movie that I hated. Hebrew school a message to you: suck it forever! Well, like a relapsing pie fiend I have been consuming slices of the show at a seriously unreasonable, harmless rate, staying up until anywhere between three and six in the morning oy to watch episodes. Marrone, right! Meadow still makes my skin crawl like bad soup made by Lodge Kerrigan, but face can't get enough; even while watching that Forgetting Sarah Marshall picture t'other night, which was a kinda cool movie and business, the brain frequently turned to thoughts of watching the Sopranos on the couch. Bone us.

The other major impediment to bloggage is Passover. That's right. Pesach. Religion is typically regarded as the thing most diametrically opposed to metal and metalosity since Man discovered that melon ballers could be used for purposes other than carving out the eyeballs of thine enemies, but that hatred is usually reserved for Xianity and stuff. No one carves upside-down Mogen Davids on their forehead or starts Viking black metal bands to protest the subjugation of Scandanavia's Pagan forbears by Izzys and Sauls and, uh, Naphtalis. It just doesn't go down like that. Even when NSBM shit starts up, they're just hating on the Jews for spoiling the purity of ugly cavedudes from the North Pole or whatevs. Apparently some cats still hold a grudge for how we capped Santa Clause at his boss's wedding in 1974.

And that's cool. True metal bros know that Judaism is wicked metal what with the fasting and the leather straps and the beards. What the Presbyterians have? Ambrosia and shitty haircuts. Don't even get me started on the Lutherans. Mainly because I forget what they do. Of all Jewish holidays, Passover is easily the most metal, however. Not only is it the basis for fuckin' "Creeping Death" and parts of Powerslave, two pillars of classic heaviness, but come on: on this box of matzah my sister brought over for the seder the legend reads, "THIS IS THE BREAD OF AFFLICTION". Read it again, maybe even out loud. THE BREAD OF AFFLICTION. Weren't they on Metal Blade at some point?

Not only do we rock the memory of having been slaves, bringing unbelievably metal plagues (obviously the death of the first born and the descending locusts, but frogs too! Fuck yeah frogs!!) until using the power of the ocean to slay the chasing pharoah and his crew and then talking to a fiery shrub and throwing giant stones and making earthquakes... sorry, but is this a fucking Manowar song or something? You can't mess with how hard Passover rocks, even if it does involve gefilte fish and being hungry for eight days because you only ever eat bread. Next year in Jerusalem, bitches. On a scale of one to ten, Passover rates a metal score of THE TIME HAS COME! And folks can't even count that business.

I'm Meta, Like Tony Soprano's Lousy Daughter

Yo, it's time to stop fronting: Kaminsky ain't metal. The readership (Perry?) mighta gleaned it from my Moz ref t'other day, but like your closeted dad I decided that I needed to be honest with both yourself and myself. I'M TIRED OF LIVING THIS LIE! I listen to a lot of metal bands, wear an Iron Maiden hat pretty much every day and consider Lemmy to be my personal savior, but let's face it, it's not happening. For every demin jacket I own (uh, one) I have like five articles of turquoise clothing. As much as I listen to Sabbath and Electric Wizard, which is a lot, admittedly, I rock the Beat Happening and Galaxie 500 tips. Though they may be awesome, Young Marble Giants and JD covers aren't exactly rubbing shoulders with odes to the supreme majesty of the Dark Lord. And let's not even get started on my green eyes. Hazel is obviously the metaller hue, but there's only so much a man can do, dammit!

Nurrtheless, the important thing is that I could grow a moustache if I wanted to. I shaved off my beard except for the upper lip and it was muhfukkin handlebar city. You could name a leather bar after my 'stache it was so metal. And LGBT to the maxatrax. Second point of importance: Just because I am not the metal doesn't mean I can't appreciate, if not love, and summarily comment on the form. In fact, my lack of real connection with the metal subculture has many beneficial aspects as it allowz me to observe the machinations of heaviness with a greater objectivity than if drank Schlitz and had cool/kinda dumb tattoos and hung out in parking lots. Additionally, can a boy be a fag hag for gay women? If not, then I will see you in court! Thus, I can still totaly dig metal and sing "Aces High" at karaoke every time even though I'm like totally a lady.

I know what the streets is saying; I've heard it before. "But Jake, you're the heaviest! And not in a fat way or anything. In the drop D way. You have shattered my lives" Respect to the youth, but it's time for realness. Yet let not this be a deterrent to stuff and all that! My powers of of metal perception are undiluted by this recent truth; in fact, they're stronger than ever and make all your children embarassed to know you. Case in point: soul patches are never cool. CONSIDER THINE MIND BLOWN, CITIZENS OF PLACES SOMEWHERE.

The kids ain't never heard this shit before, but it's true; Halford could have several s-patches festooning his otherwise uncontrovertibly hard rocking person and they would still be weaker than a broken hanger over brunch. You could be a person who can get away with speaking in Jamaican patois and saying "I and I" all godddddam day but the patch would still be ten tons of gubbagublah. Heard? Jamrock, am I correct?

Yo, Too Many Fathoms to Count: Quint Turns the Life Radio up to Ten Hardcore

Yo, errone knows that Steven "Perpetually Bar Mitzvah Age" Spielberg is not metal at all, but that Jaws rules hardcore. Just ask Marci; she's like the most metal dude ever. Not only does Jaws feature a dude getting eaten in half followed by an explosion of guts by the gestator, and, you know, a wealth of canonical lines and interesting shots blib blab, but fuckin' Roy Scheider is awesome and even more importantly, seabeasts have a well-documented history of metalosity. "The Thing That Should Not Be"? Seabeast. The Mastodon album Leviathan, which includes a song called "Seabeast"? Also a seabeast. From krakkens to the Loch Ness monster to angler fish and Godzilla, pretty much all of the creatures dwelling in the ocean's unexploreable bottom reaches rock ridiculously hard. It may be because at such depths they are closer to Hell than other animal dudes and can thus more easily chill with Satan. Also, Ronnie James Dio, though officially from New Hampshire or some crummy New England state, has dual citizenship to the ocean's floor, mutually enhancing the extreme heaviness of both parties. And you didn't even think that was possible! ___________________________________________________ Moreover, Jaws comes from a novel by the one and only Peter "The Bench" Benchley, a dude who rocks harder than pretty much any other five or six dudes who aren't Lemmy or the Phillie Phanatic combined bitches. Comparatively, an otherwise "tough"-seeming writer like Cormac McCarthy or Deuteronymous rates a little bit below "Party of Muhfucking Five" on the Rockhter scale. When I was waiting in line outside the Mann Center (yucks) to get first dibs on Morrissey tickets (perhaps the least metal sitch ever, but whatever! Steven Patick is an exception to most life standards) I passed the time by reading Bench's Beast, which is basically Jaws except that there's a freaking GIANT SQUID instead of a squallus. Architeuthis always wins, Benchley is awesome, Beast rules and the dude also has a book, much discussed but never actually read by Sean and I, called Q Clearance, which is apparently a political thriller jawn. Whakky! And for some reason I can't separate one paragraph from another! Wack. The bad one. __________________________________________________________________The best thing about all this, though, is effin Quint. He's ultra grumpy and hardcore, as evinced by the whole U.S.S. Indianapolis deal, and knows how to run his vessel. But my favorite aspect of his character, and this is what makes him, and, by extension, the film as a whole, so metal, is his unreasonable class discomfort manifesting itself as a severe dislike of punkass Hooper. Fucking Hooper. No one who is cool likes Richard Dreyfuss unless he's talking about things biting other, unsuspecting things in the ass. Even then he wears with the thinness. But Quint's hatred of him seems to not be based on how much of a dorkmeyer the dude is, it's because he's rich and went to college and stuff. Way to get kinda innappropriately defensive, homes. I mean, I hate soft hands as much as anybody (duh, lie number one. Who moisturizes more than me? You can't shred if your arms are all ashy) but I don't think I'd necessarily base my opinion of a shipmate on that fact. ___________________________________________________________________When Hooper is all, "Gwah, I don't need this working class hero crap" it's one of the few moments where he's not being a whinyass robobaby for life. He's just genuinely perplexed as to why this crusty MFer is harshing on him so harshly. SO HARSH. This unruly displacement of class anxiety is pretty freaking heavy in my book because Q man is just throwing aside the surface tensions atwixt Hooper and him and getting right down to the subtext, like a Corrosion of Conformity song or something. Interpersonal minutiae is clearly the province of hardcore, where the "you" address is usually directed at a specific person (typically a TOTALLY UNFAIR MOM WHO WON'T LET ME CUT MY HAIR HOW I WANT GOD!!1 or former friend who, snort, is still totes into, plurgh, Green Day but more importantly is a liar). Metal, as we've discussed before, thrives on generalizations, both functioning as and lashing out at a collective entity. Like in "Crazy, Crazy Nights," where the army of rock unites to destroy the army of... not rock/people who refuse to crank it. Quint contextualizes himself in the history of class struggle, positioning himself as a representative of the labor class that functions in direct opposition to Hooper's moneyed landowners and intellectuals. And then he gets rocked by the shark. Sepatow!