Now I'm Really Broke....

So for those who don't visit me at work all the time, which is pretty much everyone i know, know that i've been given a small space in the store to showcase bizarre/troubling/disturbing books, whether they're novels or graphic novels or art books or whatever. In terms of the art stuff, since i know very little about what's going on in the actual art world, i asked my coworker Gina (who is an artist herself) to point me toward some cool artists/monographs. Pretty much everything she showed me is super cool, like good 'ol Pictoplasma here, and unfortunately, i know find myself hooked on these gorgeous art monographs. I don't have the money for this! Between all the cds and dvds and literary journals and books i'm just fucking finished...it would be different if this material weren;t so goddamned rare and only available for short periods of time. Matt and Ray, i'm guessing both of you are familiar with these sorts of books-toss me some suggestions for things to show off at Barnes & Noble! Recommendations are always appreciated!

Spreading Herself Waaaaay Too Thin

Some news in from the Scarlett J. camp (and you know how close i am to that particular pop culture goldmine.) Seems the gorgeous iconoclast is going to sing backup for the fucking Jesus and Mary Chain at one of their three (?) reunion shows (she's set to appear at the show in Pomona.) This seriously weirds me out- i love Scarlett, i really do, and i try to keep what she does in perspective and not judge her too harshly for what i consider to be "poor decisions" (i.e., making romantic time with Justin Timberlake) but i just can't get behind this. And i won't hold the JAMC unaccountable for their part in this worthless display of crass counsumer opportunism either-this pairing is just fucking dumb. What is either party hoping to accomplish? I can just imagine the Reid brothers sitting around shotting some heroin saying, "How could we really make these reunion shows fucking memorable? I know! Let's get someone with zero muscial talent but tremendous cultural appeal to ruin our songs for us!" I stand by it- Scarlett cannot sing. She's barely adequate-i've heard some of her stuff. Not that the Reid brothers are great singers either, but really, if you need some female vox for your shit, fellas, then just give Hope Sandoval a call. You know she could use some higher profile work. And she can actually sing, and she appeared on one of your albums already. So there. The whole thing is just beyond ridiculous. Waaaaaaaaaay beyond.

"The Road" written by Cormac McCarthy

I'm not a big fan of Oprah, and i'm even less of a fan of her book club. Pretty much anything she hawks on her show, we will undoubtedly blow through 100 or more copies at Barnes & Noble the next day. And the books she picks are usually pretty fluffy nonsense. That being said, this is her new book club pick, and having said that, i had meant to read "The Road" a week or two after it first came out due to recommednations from friends but never got around to it. So a couple weeks ago one of my coworkers, who is into some of the saem shit as me, asked me if i had read this one and went on to tell me it was just bleak beyond bleak and violent and fucked up and pretty much everything i like in a book. So i read it. And i read it fast, because no shit, this book is fucking AMAZING. It's the story of twon unnamed characters, a boy and his father, who together work their way southward across the highway after an apocalypse of some kind devastates America and turns all to ash. As well as turning most men into ghouls who enslave each other and imprison each other for cannabalistic purposes. It's a story full of violence and devastation, of ruined dreams and a past long buried by the will to survive. At the center is the relationship between father and son and how each one copes with the other as well as with the outside world and all its merauders. Cormac McCarthy is a master stylist, the books is written so beautifully and so concisely-there are passages in here that will make you want to cry but it's done with such an economy of language-it's not flowery or overbearing, it's simple, dry, to the point and gorgeous. It reminds me a lot of Bret Easton Ellis' style, but while i love BEE and his ability to say a lot with a little, Cormac McCarthy leaves him well behind. This book absolutely deserved the Pulitzer it was just awarded. I found myself picturing every image in maximum color, it was like i was watching it more than reading it-it's beyond suggestive in its illusory quality and manifestation. I badly want Werner Herzog to make a film of this.

The other thing i want to say about it is that everything here seems as though it could really happen-this is not farfetched, it's close and tangible and this is a very good guess at what an apocalypse might actually be like. I hope that i never have to go through something like this, i'm not sure if i could have the strength or resolve that either the father or the boy has in this story. A wonderful, evocative piece of literature from a true master of letters. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

"Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theaters" dir. Dave Willis and Matt Maillero

So do i really need to even review this? Most likely no. You're either going to see it cuz you're a fan of the show (like myself and pretty much everyone i know) or you don't give a flying fuck cuz you don't care about the Aqua Teens at all. There really is no middle ground with a movie like this. It pretty much delivers in the way you'd expect-it's an episode of the show that just happens to last for an hour and 15 minutes. There's plenty of great one liners, tons of fantastic insults and cameos from the show's best loved personalities, but beyond that there really isn;t anything. Ben and I both expected it to be a little funnier than it was and we both felt that in some parts it was really really pointless and even, dare i say, not so good. But a day later and i still find myself laughing thinking about Master Shake referring to his pythons or Ogelthorpe building a wall of beer cans as a testament to his ability to drink. Or Master Shake playing some weird Civil War game where he's loading an old school musket saying, "Now that's some good pumping!" It's full of crazy funny shit like that, so if you're a fan of the show you're going to dig it. The reviews are pretty dead on-the best part is undoubetdly the opening of the film, the parody of movie theater ads for snack foods that turns into a ripping thrash metal song courtesy MAstodon with an un-fucking-believeable guitar solo by director Matt Maillero-he's got Brendan Small style guitar skills. See it if you like the show-it'll keep Adult Swim aflat and possibly bring more fine films based on our favorite shows to the theaters. Now-where the fuck is the Futurama movie??

LEVIATHAN "White Devil, Black Metal" CDR

So let me open this with something that may or may not taint your interest in this review: there is no bad Leviathan recording. Wrest has set the bar so high for all of black metal and has released nothing but an enormously consistent body of work that can only be categorized as genius. So there's no objectivity here, just massive gushing over the work of one of my favorite musical auteurs. This is one of the 12 demos that preceded the release of the massive 2CD "Verrater", which i view as black metal's greatest record, just behind Burzum's "Filosofem." I have to give thanks to Ben for nabbing this fucker for me from one of those torrent sites-crazy that this was floating around out there, but i'm glad it was. I would kill for any one of these demos and this one easily ranks as one of the best. Two or three of these tracks have surfaced, via "Verrater" and "Howl Mockery at the Cross" but for the most part, listening to this today was like hearing a brand new record. And it's amazing. This is probably the most "mellow" Leviathan work to date but it's by no means restarined or subdued, just more gorgeously shoegazey and melodic. Three of the tracks even feature extended acoustic sections that are damaged and fractured and just beautiful, weepy style beautiful-who knew where Wrest was at this point of recording, cuz acoustic guitars on Leviathan shit is a rare treat indeed. The other departure is in the form of a nine minute bass rumble providing framework for a constantly swelling cloud of minor key delyaed out guitar chords, thock with fuzzy distortion and heavy with mournful melody. It's amazing stuff, i was really floored by it-i almost wish i would get more of this stuff from Wrest cuz it's definetely carving out space in the shoegaze/BM hybrid worlds that are popping up now (but hell, seems Wrest was there first on this record, about 5 years ago!) And then there's the black metal-grim, true, buzzing, hateful, painfully and hyper distorted (the vocals are so processed it's almost painful for the ears, the distortion is so grating!). Every riff throned in magnificent majestic splendour, psychedelic guitars floating all around and of course the thin and disorienting sound of the famous V-Drums that Wrest has used on every record (except for the split with Sapthuran, where a real kit was recorded.) So yeah, this record is pretty much essential for anyone looking to keep up with where black metal has to go. It's a fucking crime that this stuff was never released properly-Wrest should authorize some labels to get this stuff out there-there are some Southern Lord reissues that i could actually get behind. Find it if you can, it's obviously out there, and get ready to be thrown into a seriously dark, hateful and fucked up world of blackened metal spacetime. Superb beyond any real review's ability to convey.

"Grindhouse" dir. Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino

Just saw this tonite. I'm not so great at doing film reviews because i'm not a truly serious student of film the way that i am of music-i just can't play "six degrees" as thoroughly in the film universe. But i know a little bit, and i know what i like about the directors i admire, so i think i can wax philosophical about this one for a bit. "Grindhouse" is two films billed together, being R & Q's love letters to the silly gore/exploitative films of an era gone by. Total trashy drive-in fodder done with the eye of an auteur. The two films are actually quite different from one another. Rodriguez's film is called "Planet Terror" and it's pretty much just a zombie gorefest filled with violence and gross outs everywhere. The frames are filled with blood, and it's very very reminiscent of "From Dusk Til Dawn." He's not treading any new ground here, but it's definetely fucking cool, shot to be amateurish (the film is super grainy and out of of focus and there are missing reels and the camera movements are shaky) and the acting is ridiculous in every way. Very hammy and over the top. And oh, the violence-so much beautiful beautiful pointless violence. On the bad side, the movie wears thin kinda quick and it gets very redundant towards the end, and it also becomes very convoluted. Things get hard to follow but i think it's more a case of the story just being really flimsy-which could also be part of the joke.
After the film ends we get hit with three previews for "coming attractions", which are pretty fucking hilarious, directed by Rob Zombie ("Werewolf Women of the SS"), Eli Roth ("Thanksgiving') and someone else who i forgot. There's also a preview right before "Planet Terror", called "Machete", that i wish were getting made into a feature, cuz it looks fucking awesome. Also sad that Roth's movie isn't getting made, cuz it looks as good as any premise he's made. Anyways, on to Tarantino's film, "Death Proof." It's pretty much a car chase film, with plenty of death and adrenalin fueled moments. It features a fabulous Kurt Russell as a washed up stuntracer who is also a stalker/murder of young Hollywood starlets, and he kills them with his fucking car-and the deaths are pretty damn awesome. The high point is the auto duel that compromises the last thrid of the film, but all the other Tarantino trademarks are here-smarmy homages to older films, tons of foot fetish shots, inside jokes galore and of course his amazing dialogue-bordering on inane but always fascinating-i'd say there's more dialogue in this film than action, which is perfectly fine by me. And the ending is one of the best i've seen in a long while-i won't spoil it but it's hilarious. So whose film is the better of the two? It's hard to say, but i'm more of a Quentin kinda guy, so i'd have to go with his contribution. It's definetely a must own, and as a love note to trash film, it works well beyond well. I wish more people were making films like this. What i really wish is that we'd be getting Eli Roth's "Thanksgiving"-but i guess i'll just have to wait for "Hostel-Part II"-coming in June!!!

Unfairly Maligned for a Fucking Lifetime

I've been on a huge Megadeth kick lately, listening to a bunch of the older stuff (as well as some of the newer) and loving every second of it. And it's led up to a need to say yet again-is there anyone who has gotten more of a raw deal than Dave Mustaine? I love Dave-he's one of my true guitar idols and i feel that people don't give him the credit he deserves for really being a musical visionary. The man invented speed metal, for fuck's sake. You can't discredit that. We should bow before him. Slayer wouldn't be here if it weren't for Dave's incendiary guitar trailblazing. If you really wanted to get jiggy with it, you could trace everyone back to Judas Priest-and that would be okay too, but they weren't quite the extremists that Dave is. After his dismissal from Metallica (one of the biggest bitch moves in all of rock history) Dave vowed to be faster, more aggressive, more complex and better. And he succeeded. Every way. Every album. There is nothing in Metallica's catalogue that comes close to be being as fast or as intricate as Megadeth. You can reduce it to this, pretty much: "Battery" vs. "Holy wars", and i can tell you, "Holy Wars" is a hell of a lot harder to play (and i still haven't mastered either song!!) But despite all his successes Dave has been overshadowed by the goons in his former band and attacked for being egomaniacal and self-centered. He's had a shitty run! Cut him some slack-he's a recovering drug/alcohol addict, he beat a crippling hand injury in both arms that doctors were sure would never allow him to play guitar again, and he recently lost his family to divorce. He's been through a shitload of bandmates, some of whom have been amazingly talented (Chris Poland and Marty Friedman) but their comings and goings have never altered the Megadeth sound-and he even bared his soul in Metallica's shitty shitty film "Some Kind of Monster", laying himself completely on the line just to be shit on again by Lars and James. One of the worst, saddest things i have ever witnessed in my life was seeing that film in the theaters and watching the whole crowd erupt in booing when Dave came onscreen. Fucking morons, all of them. MORONS. Dave was the only one in the film who said anything real or of worth at all (except for Jason Newsted) and the idiots of the metal universe just shit on him again without really listening. The music speaks for it all, but everyone's ears seem to be closed. It just makes me really disheartened. So this is in tribute to Dave Mustaine-idol and true musical genius. May the rock always remain!!!