Beer Week!

It's Philly Beer Week! I have had some really def beers so far, the deffest being Ommegang's Tripel Perfection. The name ain't half-stepping; it's a strong, really tasty Belgian-style ass-kicker. It has a lot of flavor but is also easy to sip. I had one after their underwhelming, too-afternoony Witte at Sidecar and it rocked super hard. I went down to The Abbaye just to try it again! It's in very limited production so I will take most any chance I get to drink it. A label rep was at The Abbaye and totally bought me a drink (!) so I tried their Belgian Pale Ale. Ommegang seems to do smooth, strong beers very well. The Witte is on the watery side and the Three Philosophers packs in a few too many sensations at once to be truly enjoyable but both the BPA and the Tripel hit the spot. I did drink the BPA far too quickly as a stranger was talking to me and I felt urged to leave the bar but that shit was emminently quaffable. I appreciate the focus of these sweet-spot beers. They do not try to overwhelm you with proggish over-complexity but retain a very bracing intensity.

Speaking of focus, the Starkbierfest at Brauhaus Schmitz yesterday seemed to be devoted to decimating any foolish American lightweight daring to sample the heaviest of Teutonic hitters. Coupled with my sister's delicious Franziskaner Hefe Weisse, the Schneider 12% I had turned our rather mundane visit into a quest of epic proportions. No longer was ours a sample-based experience, but a valiant journey to the heart of the human being engine. Or something. I had planned on getting the 8% Schneider Aventinus but traded up to the 12% when our waitress informed us that the Aventinus was already kicked. And so it began. Combined with the Franziskaner and a glass of water I had a nice come-down scale at my disposal, albeit a filling one, especially since we had actual food. It was a natural transition, from the Schneier to the Franziskaner to the water to some kartoffelpuffer/latkes, making it so that I didn't get drunk but did get super fucking full. I then tried some of my sister's boyfriend's Schloss Samichlaus, the infamous, 10-month-aged 14% face-melter. It did not disappoint.

I am not as used to these amber German beers as I am to golden Belgian ales but they are certainly something I'd like to try more. Still on the horizon for the next few days: Duvel, Harpoon, maybe more Ommegang, Dogfish if I can get out tonight, whatever they have at DiBruno Brothers and the event that I am looking forward to most, the Trappist Ale Night at Grace on Wednesday. See you there!

What a Way to Make a Living

What makes a person think that wearing one of those "The Man/The Legend" shirts would be a good idea? As with any article of clothing, this piece represents the end-product of a complex process. Dude has to procure the shirt in the first place, either by straight-up buying it or by getting it from a like-minded friend. He's got to get home, put it in the drawer, not throw it away or donate it when the drawer gets full and it's time to thin the shirt herd, and ultimately make the decision to wear the shirt out-of-doors and on his person. Through all these decisions he aligns himself with the shirt's philosophy and thinks, "it's a good idea to wear this. To have an arrow pointing upwards with the caption 'The Man' contrasted by a southward arrow reading 'The Legend'. That is a good idea. I want to comment publicly on the size of my penis and its importance to society, and I want to broadcast this comment from my chest." The actual size of this guy's penis is immaterial; the fact that his mental process leads him on this tasteless path is the true issue at hand here. So to speak.

Anyway, there's a really sleazy dude in the porn documentary 9 to 5: Days in Porn who wears one of these shirts, as well as one that reads "Mountain Do Me" atop the logo of the popular mountain people breakfast beverage. A gargoyle in sweatpants and Spencer's t-shirts, Mark Spiegler is an agent of many prominent pornstars. With his Bluetooth gadget he makes appointments and negotiates fees. He is a pimp in the pre-"the sex industry is funny!" vein. Vincent Gallo would describe his body type as being that of a slave trader, I think. Spiegler's entire aura is one of corruption and scum; tellingly, his most reprehensible-seeming acts involve displays of generosity. In fact, few of the men in this movie come off very positively. But 9 to 5 is certainly no hit piece. These fellows are assholes by themselves, not because of editing or soundtrack. I was really down with this film's sense of even-handedness.

This dude Otto is def way worse than the guy with the shirt. He's some crazy, Libertarian, "Death Valley '69" mix of Tommy Wiseau and Keith Carradine in Nashville. He's manipulative and dismissive and belittling to his wife, Audrey, who is also a porn performer. He's even mean to his dog! Goodness! Audrey's submissiveness and lack of confidence stand in total contrast to the film's strongest characters, women who in their relationships with both men and the adult industry are far more self-assured and well-adjusted. Belladonna, especially, totally rocks the house. She be down with all sorts of heavy shit that weirds me out, but even when easing a baseball bat into another woman's anal cavity she's chillin'. Her relationship with her nerd husband is eminently stable and downright heartwarming compared to the imbalance of Otto and Audrey.

Being able to assess these characters in an almost personal way shows the strengths of 9 to 5. It knows how to back off, to show rather than to tell. It's as impartial as a documentary can be. It's also blocked really well, with director Jens Hoffman cannily avoiding showing penetration without desxualizing the film. He does a really great job in portraying the sex acts that compose pornography without being skeezy, shooting with such deftness that 9 to 5 is probably the least titillating porn documentary ever made. And this is to the film's credit; in the porn world, sex is nothing but labor. It takes many forms and elicits various responses but is ultimately a capitalist mechanism. A German performer profiled in the film takes this concept to its extreme, designating her body as a site of labor in transitioning from porn to prostitution without reticence. Functioning as an exchange of goods/services for capital, she sees the two as essentially the same thing.

In its refusal to either condemn pornography or outrightly praise it, 9 to 5 takes a very interesting look at a subject whose divisive nature typically demands a specific stance. But by taking a clinical, objective look at the industry and the extreme acts that help grant that industry's reputation we see the pornography business as just another institution. It's just another job, albeit one that includes phrases like “double anal” and “milk enema” (still trying to figure that one out) more frequently than “board meeting” and “expense account”. And there's a scene where two of the dudes sing "Nazi Punks Fuck Off". Cool. I was down!

The Circle of Iron

Yooooooouuuuu.... so I have been writing reviews for TLACult.com recently. Here is my write-up of the David Carradine picture Circle of Iron. Carradine plays four different dudes in this movie, including a guy in a horrible half-monkey/half-man costume. The film gets a lot of comparisons to Zardoz, which is especially accurate in that the bulk of both films' budgets seem to have been spent on ridic amounts of cocaine. You get the vibe that the night before shooting the writers went, "Oh geeze, we've done nothing but inhale this booger sugar for four weeks and haven't written anything! Uhh... let's make it about a dude who searches for a book or something! And then do more blow!"Not so much a vibe as a daydream, perhaps, but whatevs.

Looking like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and super-ripped Uruguayan striker Diego Forlάn, Cord (Jeff Cooper) seems more comfortable as one of the grizzled arm-wrestlers in Over the Top than as a man apparently seeking the source of ultimate knowledge. Yet as the main character in Circle of Iron he is required to synthesize these two personas, kicking ass and braving the elements in a quest for enlightenment. Or something like that. In dealing with self-discovery, Circle of Iron tackles a subject that is extremely difficult to portray cinematically. How do you show somebody who has achieved enlightenment? Do they suddenly glow? Is there hair where there was no hair before? And, apart from trying to illustrate an unseen sensation, what does enlightenment even mean? The object of Cord’s journey is murky at best, but the film does its best, for the most part, to include a nice amount of high kicks and martial arts showdowns to compensate.

A lot of Circle of Iron is pretty enjoyable, albeit in very strange ways, like when Cord meets a man in the desert played by Eli Wallach in one of those weird Orson-Welles-in- Transformers: The Movie end-of-career roles. Dude is trying to destroy his penis by slowly dissolving the bottom half of his body in a barrel of oil and he and Cord have a nice, casual conversation about castration. It’s like watching two ascetics shoot the shit after finding themselves seated next to each other on the train. When Cord remarks that the dude’s weiner is “no bigger than a pimple”, his tone is definitely one of admiration. I hope they exchanged numbers. But cool moments like this vanish once Cord starts following his blind teacher (David Carradine in one of his four roles in the movie). We get a notable absence of butt-kicking as Circle of Iron ramps up Carradine’s New Age platitudes and Pure Moods soundtrack. Once Cord makes it to the island to receive the sacred book from depressed monk Christopher Lee, I had kind of forgotten what movie I was watching.

Circle of Iron’s schizophrenia is perhaps unavoidable, as evinced by the film’s two names. Originally titled The Silent Flute, it oscillates wildly between the fantasy fighting-fest you’d expect from a movie called Circle of Iron and the schmaltzy wimp-o-rama suggested by The Silent Flute, producing an intermittently fun zensploitation picture. For the first twenty minutes or so, the film delivers the goods and has practically everything you could want in a movie: really shitty kung fu, gnarly ‘staches, killer monkeys and a path to enlightenment that apparently involves cruising for dudes in fur boots. And I should mention how horrible, if bizarrely endearing, the kung fu is; Carradine’s blind wushu is even lazier than Chris Mitchum’s in Ricco: The Mean Machine, the previous standard-holder for awful fisticuffs. But then the picture gets bogged down in a bunch of flute-y crap and the fighting ceases. What had seemed like an endlessly promising premise (a fighting tournament filled with Village People look-alikes!!!) and in the last half-hour somehow becomes a jokeless buddy picture with illusions of spiritual depth. Circle of Iron, we hardly knew ye.

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.