Week XVII: Evisceration plague

This blog is meant to be played LOUD!!

How do I circumscribe order upon chaos? What word, what description can I use to encapsulate madness? The very act of committing it to a page creates organization where there was none, orderliness where entropy reigned. In fact, I think that's what I'll call my forthcoming imaginary tech-death metal album - No Order Where Entropy Reigns. Has a good ring to it. It sounds like a song that Archspire might play...

Best segue ever. This past Tuesday, I saw the Decibel Magazine Tour lay waste to the occupants of the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver. The aforementioned Archspire opened the show with an epileptic fit of jaw-dropping technical death metal. West coast metal, represent! The band recently signed with the auspicious French label Season of Mist, who will release their forthcoming full-length album. They executed their tunes with stunning precision and were such fun to watch. See their guitarist, Dean Lamb, play through "Rapid Elemental Dissolve" below. Sample lyrics: These things planted seeds inside of me nocturnally/Breeding an alliance to defeat the Ghosts of Silent Tongue. Esoteric!

I'd never seen a show at the Commodore, but I had high expectations. Most death metal performances I attend take place in dingy bars with inadequate PA systems and less capable sound engineers. Imagine my delight (expressed through headbanging, roaring, and raised fists) to hear every note, every snare hit, every screaming lead with clarity. A good start to an evening of muscle pain and permanent hearing damage.

Next up was Beyond Creation from Quebec, a band I hadn't been terribly excited about on record but that I was definitely interested in seeing live. They had some guitar feedback issues during their performance, but it was otherwise a visually and technically impressive feat of extremely heavy music. In doing a bit of research prior to the show, I discovered their drummer Philippe Boucher also plays for Quebecois metallists Chthe'ilist. I recommend listening to their demo on a moonless night in the middle of the forest. They walked off the stage to a resounding cheer of appreciation from the crowd.

Then came the heavyweights. The room was filling up - an amazing turnout for a Tuesday night - and the testosterone-fueled energy was spilling across the floor along with the beer and sweat. Long hair and beards and all-black t-shirts with illegible band logos splattered across gory imagery twisted and writhed in front of the stage. Bodies collided and drinks splashed. The mosh pit grew tremendously as Immolation took the stage. This was a night to hail the old guards of metal. Immolation have been playing together for 25 years and have released some all-time classic death metal albums. They still perform with passion and raging zeal for heavy music, and the crowd ate it up. "Do you want something faster?!" Yes, we did. Their 2010 record 'Majesty and Decay' remains high on the list of my favourite straight-ahead death metal albums.

Immolation started the fire, then Napalm Death blew everything up. I saw Napalm Death play Victoria last year, and I knew I was going to love it. But I was unprepared for what was about to happen. By this point the room was at full capacity and the fuse was lit and burning. I direct your attention to my introductory paragraph - here's where it really applies. I'm at a loss for how to convey the insanity that took place when they attacked the stage. Concert reviews are a challenge, and this is an instance where you really just had to be there. The experience was incredible.

Napalm Death are unparalleled. Hailing from Birmingham, England, they're one of the pioneering bands in grindcore, and they've been doing it for as long as I've been alive. By the wealth of their recording and touring experience, they've become absolute masters. Their performance grabs you by the throat with shocking violence and throttles you with unrelenting ferocity before dropping your defeated body on the floor. I had an inkling of what was coming based on my previous concert experience, but it was nothing like this.

The energy in the room could have launched a missile. The band blasted through their back catalogue, playing hit after hit after hit, and the crowd was loving every bone crushing second. I could feel them feeding off the audience response, cranking the intensity, and feeding it right back to us. Screams of NAPALM! NAPALM! NAPALM! shook the hall. I've seen a lot of metal concerts, but this might have been the best live performance I've witnessed in my life. Barney Greenway is without a doubt one of the all-time greatest frontmen in metal. The whole set I felt like I was being blasted in the face with a music cannon. Try to get some sense of what that was like by watching a few minutes of their set from Hellfest last year. Skip to the 10 minute mark for a quick taste. Absolute chaos.

And I barely had time to catch my breath before the splatter and gore started flying from the stage. Here's something I learned this week - human bodies are not designed to take in 5 extreme metal bands in one evening. Somehow, though, I willed my exhausted carcass to the front of the stage to bask in the blood-soaked aural massacre that is Cannibal Corpse.

My ears hurt and my neck and back hurt and my throat hurt, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything. I've seen Archspire and Napalm Death play before. Cannibal Corpse was among the last on my list of great heavy metal bands that I've yet to see live. I've been a massive fan for years. They're my absolute favourite death metal band on earth. And I stood 10 feet from their bassist, Alex Webster, and watched the madness unfold in all its gut-wrenching, eardrum-eviscerating glory.

To cap off the unholy triumvirate of old-school legends, Cannibal Corpse exploded with 25 years' worth of B-horror film inspiring brutality. Their members are pushing 50, but haven't slowed down or turned down. The opening bands were certainly technically impressive, but their songwriting can't hold a candle to Webster, guitarist Pat O'Brien, and drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz. They manage to put mind-boggling precision and technicality into an unrelenting, vicious, headbanging groove. Song after song, the mosh pit sucked people in and spat them across the floor and the front of the stage. Fists pumped, hair flew, drunken masses of unwashed metalheads bellowed in appreciation. This is death metal at its absolute pinnacle.

I couldn't believe the band's stamina. They played for 90 minutes and it being a weeknight, most of the audience didn't stick it out. By about halfway through their set the crowd was noticeably smaller. Especially after the performance that Napalm Death put on, it was difficult to muster the same intensity in the crowd. The energy just wasn't quite at the same level. I barely made it back to the couch I was crashing on for the night. It was sheer force of will and inertia that kept my feet moving. And I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. Or a blast beat.

Word count: 1,187

Week XVI: Benediction

I couldn't resist. It's Week XVI after all. Using Roman numerals to count the weeks was a decision that I made to distinguish this latest round of entries from those that I wrote last year. A blog in two parts, if you will. I wonder if this blog will make it to the point where I have to look up the number. What's 50 in Roman numerals? I don't know offhand. D? I'll have to check. Nope, it's L. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked. I hadn't thought about it when I started writing what became this week's smattering of words, but seeing as how we've recently bid farewell to that creepy, Emperor Palpatine-looking dealer of misery and defender of child molesters, and seeing as how he was a XVI himself, I'd like to spend a few of my 1,000 words to say "see you in hell" to Joseph Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI. He's the first Pope to resign the papacy in 600 years. I guess the cries of all those thousands of abuse victims that he ignored as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the Catholic organization that shielded child rapists from prosecution - must weigh pretty heavily on the conscience. You can't just walk off that type of malignant soul cancer at his age.

Of all the sickening things about Benedict XVI's lofty reign atop a mountain of suffering children, condom-burning bishops, and regressive politics, there is perhaps nothing I find more despicable than the words he and his co-conspirators uttered as they promised to shield abusive priests from justice:

"...and that I will never directly or indirectly, by gesture, word, writing or in any other way, and under any pretext, even that of a greater good or of a highly urgent and serious reason, do anything against this fidelity to secrecy, unless special permission or dispensation is expressly granted to me by the Supreme Pontiff."

I guess that reciting it in Latin makes it okay, though. Tradition. Keep the faith strong and whatnot. As long as it can be shrouded in mystery and chalked up to the will of God protecting his chosen institution on Earth, they can get away with just about anything. Police, politicians, doesn't matter. Can't get through. God's on their side.

The problem of child abuse by priests in the Catholic church is so widespread and the clergy so corrupt that there is now an international Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. The existence of that organization speaks volumes about the sickening corruption in the Catholic church - far more than I could ever express inside of 1,000 words.

Despite knowing about many cases of abuse, both as pope and prefect, Ratzinger and his (I imagine) hooded clan of soul-sucking pedophile mutants hoped to protect the reputation of the church by spiriting child-molesting priests away from the public eye and into new congregations with a stern wag of the finger and an admonishment to stop raping children, which many summarily ignored.

And here he sits upon his velvet cushion of diplomatic immunity, locked away in his waning years, left to consider how best to put a fine point on a career of sickening tragedy and crimes against humanity.

And thus, I dedicate this poem to the man himself for his years of global disservice. The Latin is a parody derived from the oath referenced above that Ratzinger and other Catholic officials took as they promised to keep ongoing sexual abuse of children by priests secret from the public. Summorum pontificum means "of the Supreme Pontiffs." And without further ado,


Benediction

Alas, incongruity wasted the day
And the putrefied paste of their moral decay
Fell like the wheat trodden under their feet
As the bones of contention were lifted away

The last skeleton in the burial ground
Scarcely heard, as the guns and the larks all around
Cursed land and sky with a holy war cry,
The laureate kings of a weaponized sound

The nourishing mother was drained of her milk
For the taste and the succor, intransigent ilk
Idolatrous waste, the venerable caste
Who ravaged her corpse behind spun gold and silk

All glory and honour to christ on the cross
Whose inversions became alabaster embossed
On faces and chains, 'round necks of the cranes
Replace them with nooses, consider the cost

And we but the pendulous, left here to choke
And to absently swing at the end of a rope
Shrug at the pain and recant our refrain
And call down a fire on the head of the pope

Behold as the fat gilded phallus of Rome
With his arms wide outstretched stands and casts the first stone,
A papal bull who leaves gore in the hole,
Then shrinks to his den with a pick and a bone

With censers they clouded the eyes of the mass
All the blind lame and sick, and denied their repast
Woe betide you, lest spirits that guide you
Some day lead you back to the spiritual path

So cinch up your cilice, lay down with the priest
And be filled with the warmth and the love of the beast
Sins need confessing, wrongs need redressing
Come closer, my son, and you'll feel the release

Crimen pessimum, confess as you lie low
Summorum pontificum, motu proprio
Nutu, verbo, aut alio modo
Ego spondeo, voveo, ac iuro

I solemnly swear that the screams I conceal
Will rot in my mouth, grind my jaw into meal
I sin with my tongue and punish the young
And dream that my visions of hell are not real



Word count: 886

Week XV: Rehab

"We are [...] developing a situation where there is one rule for the rich and famous and another for everybody else – the rich and famous who use the paparazzi when it suits them but complain when they are doing something in public they don't want recorded." - Darryn Lyons, owner of Big Pictures paparazzi agency, responding to Amy Winehouse's injunction against his company after claims of harassment on the part of his employees.

I wonder if any personal tragedy has been as widely publicized as Amy Winehouse's life and death. It seems to be the great irony of her life. There was perpetual conflict between the adulation for her music and the antagonistic, demeaning portrayal of her personal life. She died right in front of us. Couldn't but sit and watch.

My reactions to celebrity deaths usually mirror my reactions to mediocre food. How unpleasant. Moving right along, then. When Amy Winehouse died I felt it. I was a bit incredulous at my own emotions. I felt it right in my stomach. I kept thinking about her voice and wondering whether we'd all abused it somehow. Complicity, writ small perhaps. Her singing was surreal beauty. It reminded me of another surreal beauty I knew who died too young. I remembered hearing that her father was pleading with people not to buy her records or concert tickets because she'd spend all the money on drugs. I listened to Back to Black, and felt sad.

Maybe we could have done something to help her. I don't know, I probably couldn't have. How far down the line do we need to go before somebody might have done something? The good Lord helps those who help themselves, maybe. Could be she didn't want to live, and there's not much that we could've changed. Could be... The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. It's not for us to decide.

I wish Amy Winehouse hadn't died. I want to hear her next album. I don't get to now. I can listen to her albums, but there will never be anything new. When I look at the records that characterize her life, too many of them are these repulsive pictures, these tragic, pitiful representations of a lost, sad girl tormented by rabid, scandal-hungry press. It's not fair. They reduced her to a strung out caricature of herself, they told us not to look deeper, just to mock and scorn. This is the legacy. The music and the crack fiend half-dressed and sick in London at 3AM. Look and see a life in shambles and be entertained.

This is what I'll leave behind. Remembrance of things past. This is where I'll be found. Until the power goes out. Maybe they'll find my notebook and be absolutely horrified by everything that I didn't make public. Maybe they'll remember me. I remember her.

I don't know anything about pop music. I don't really like it very much. I find it boring. Style over substance, rarely outstanding. There are so few pop artists that I genuinely love, that I would consider truly exceptional - David Bowie, Billy Idol, guilty pleasure nod to Justin Timberlake, and in a league of extraordinary women along with the Nina Simones, Etta Jameses, and Sharon Joneses of the world, Amy Winehouse.

While I was preparing this week's entry, I spent a lot of time listening to Amy Winehouse's music and reading about her life. For her entire professional career, she was generously, quietly donating much of her time and money to all kinds of charitable organizations - the side we didn't get to see, Amy the philanthropist. We could have if we'd looked, but we were all watching the spectacle of alcohol and drugs and violence and failure. She was admitted to the hospital more than once because she had been chain smoking crack. How do we keep looking at the beauty in the face of such ugliness? The voice, it's all she had, and she was destroying it.

I'm glad that we have something on record. As I've been writing this, I've been thinking a lot about my friend Lisa. It was almost inevitable - they were both beautiful young women who loved to sing, and didn't live long enough. Is it selfish to wish someone alive for the sake of hearing more? Maybe they were here for just the right amount of time, to give what was theirs to give, to leave what they could behind before departing from this world. Or maybe that's a load of shit. I don't know.

We don't get much else, but we still have Back to Black. Mark Ronson produced, a lot of the songs were played in the studio by the Dap Kings - Sharon Jones' band. They were her touring band. A brilliant group of musicians. It was a transcendent moment in pop music, one of the few. The planets aligned, the Gods conspired to make it so. By whatever the mechanism, it triggered one of the best recordings of all time. A few minutes of music that truly says something, that breaks out of the generic fabric of pop music, that can be appreciated as a piece of art, that stands on the merit of its clever songwriting and beautifully polished sound.

It's the old soul - the feeling that the sort of maturity in her singing ought to come from someone a lot older. That's how I see it. Do we all weep for want of more? More songs, more poetry, more beauty, more music? She only made it to 27 years old. Not enough time to grow into her voice. Next year I'll be dead. How does that feel? Janis, Jimi, Kurt, Layne, Jim, all died at 27. It's a bad year for musicians.

How to quell the desire, the ache for the potential, for what might have been? How much hope do we keep for what was left behind, to see that it will stand against time? How many years before we start to forget all the messes and the courts, the divorce and domestic abuse, the wasted shell of one of the most unique and stunning voices ever to emerge from England? How long before the picture of a drug-addicted young woman in London falls from the public eye, away from the disgusting gaze of the tabloids and what's left is the resonant sound - the digital echo chamber. When will it filter out the pain and the anguish, the sickness, and just leave the love of songs and music, the bewitching moments that we try so hard to capture?

A recording isn't real, it's just a simulation. It's an attempt to re-create what was. The performance happened, and the magic is to capture it and encapsulate it without losing the realness. We try to put a fantasy in a jar. To shine a light on it and make the magic happen again. But it's not real, it was just a fantasy. Maybe she was just a dream.

Word count: 1,158

Week XIV: The week that I slacked off

I have many drafts in various states of completion, but none that I'd be proud of posting. I didn't write much this week, I was visiting relatives in far away lands. Legitimate excuse? Surely not. I'm not going to try to pass of some last minute ramblings as a piece I'd worked on all week, I'd be lying to myself and everybody else.

I've been reading this book by Stephen Pressfield called "The War of Art." It's all about overcoming Resistance (capitalization is his) and seeking inspiration from the Muses through ritualized work schedules and invocations and the like. It's a rather elevated treatment of a simple concept - shut up, sit down, and put in some hours, don't be an idiot, don't give into distractions and temptations that keep you from your art.

I like what he's saying overall, but I really don't think that it's necessary to anthropomorphize Resistance. I don't really think it's necessary to externalize creativity and inspiration as the words of God or angels or whatever else. It's an interesting thought, the idea that when we work at our artistic endeavors, that we channel some kind of otherworldly power that allows us to receive words and thoughts and visions.

Religion is interesting for that - people have used God as inspiration for untold volumes of art, writing, music, you name it. Credit to the big guy upstairs. People put a lot of things on God. That's another essay for another time. Pressfield gives kind of a "if God makes you uncomfortable, think of it as some greater, unseen influence, some kind of spiritual higher plane without a name or face" treatment to the subject. I understand that he's trying to make his work accessible to a larger audience, but it doesn't totally address the issue I have, being that he's overdoing it.

If God or angles or whatever, if they help you to be a better person, a better artist, then pray and love and feel the hands of the angels guiding your brush, your pen, your carving knife, what have you. I don't understand the need to externalize influence.

There's a terrible danger in developing a huge ego when your art is well appreciated. Look at me, I can create! Love me! Love my creations! The God complex. It's complicated. It's so important to keep the ego in check, I can't imagine many things that keep people further from their potential as artists. Humility is vital, it's absolutely critical to making good art in my estimation.

It's funny, I sat down to write a couple of sentences about how I slacked all week, but just the act of putting in the time and staring down the clock at a fast-approaching deadline, and here come the words, just pouring out. Have I just conditioned my body for it? I knew that I hadn't written anything I was proud of this week, despite numerous attempts. I have drafts in the can for essays about math and geometry, a good rant about broken hearts, and a poem that I may post in the future that somehow turned into an epic composed of limericks that expresses my disdain for the pope and the Catholic church... stand by for that one, we'll see where else it goes.

I was unprepared this week, I didn't fight the good fight in the War of Art. But in some senses I did, I suppose. Nurturing the artist within or some other sort of new-agey silliness. Giving and receiving a lot of love, being with my family, seeing old friends, making music. Now I just have to organize all of that good material in my brain and produce something worthwhile. This isn't good art, it's just whatever I can crank out before the deadline.

I promised myself when I started this blog that I would post every Sunday by 11:59PM, regardless of what I'd produced that week. When I sat down to write tonight, I was disappointed in myself. I'm fulfilling my obligation, though. The thought of leaving a blank page wasn't acceptable to me, I had to fill it up.

I won't have time to edit this much, it'll come out more or less exactly as I wrote it. I usually agonize over numerous drafts, picking through every word and phrase with a fine-toothed comb. Perhaps I need to surrender to the Muses more often and just let the words come out as they see fit. I'm not worthy of composing or creating my own thing, maybe. I don't know how to feel about that at all. It's nice to hear kind remarks about my writing or music, but I've never taken compliments about talent to be particularly complimentary. I think that when you have an appreciation for someone's work, you shouldn't tell them that they're talented or gifted, or make a big fuss about how the Muses created this amazing thing that they had the fine privilege to channel into the earthly sphere... I think that it's a much deeper compliment to acknowledge the work and time and practice that came before the presentation.

In that sense, I deserve exactly zero praise for what I've done here. I sat down to write at 11:40PM, it's now 11:49PM and I'm calling it. Nine whole minutes of creativitiy. Stephen Pressfield would be disappointed, and rightly so. If you want to be a writer for real, which I honestly do, you can't just put in 9 minutes, or even 9 hours a week and expect that things will take off for you. I've struggled with maintaining discipline all of my life, and this week was no exception. That I was away from home and visiting with friends and family isn't a good enough reason to miss a deadline or post and empty page. 1,000 words is not a lot to ask, and it's not a lot to give.

Sometimes when a goal is met, it's time to move the yardsticks. Keep moving down the field. I've thought about upping my weekly word count to 1,500, or maybe even 2,000. Would you sit through 2,000 words? That seems like an awful lot to ask of an internet audience, but I only know my own attention span, and the immediacy of social media and mindless web browsing has not helped it. I might take it for a test run. Until then, I slacked this week and I should feel bad. And I do. If you're still with me, thank you for you patience.

Word count: 1,076