MAN you know what my v. favorite part about the v. evilest Norwegian black metal is? How a substantial percentage of the songs start with the vocalist making that super-Luciferic evil-vomiting noise, that short, rasped, infernal-retching bark. It kinda always sounds the same, but the venom warms my heart every time. Satyr from Satyricon did it best, in his early days. Hails & all that.



Funny thing about Satyr is, fans know how ridiculously personable and mellow he is. He's Norwegian after all. Pleasant and would love to make party with you, even if you're not a complete fucking Satanist.

Though of course absolutely no one has ever sounded as majestically evil as this child did at the time,



but he had to go and go and muck it up with murder and etc. Varg, you were a Viking jailbait dream come true before all that mess. With that ridiculously sexy scar and all? What splendor you wasted, and good grief the talent. Yet my moral repugnance aside, nice going showing up for court like so -

- just in case anyone missed the Viking part.

Fucking seven days after I post the below photo, the #2 sexiest boy in the East Bay voluntarily dissolves his longhair status and shows up for work with that hair gone. Fucking 3 girls in my dept. inc. myself were ASHEN when we learnt it & saw. But through the day we moved from shock and grief, to numb acceptance, to “Well shit, I kinda can’t believe it but he’s still that hot." Still and all. A thing of beauty is lost forever and all should mourn. It reminds us to be thankful for ones like the #1, who when asked when/if he will cut his off*, cocks his head rather severely and half-closes his eyes before answering “Never," with all the seriousness of the crypt.

There’s an element of social recklessness to posting this sort of thing** about Aleks. But I’m tasked with vanquishing the infuriating cautiousness I somehow picked up over the past several years, so fuck it.

*Most recently asked of him by a local natural foods grocery security guard, a middle-aged woman with a known hard-on for this particular blue-eyed thing. She asked it - not for the first time - after stating “Ooo you pretty as a Chistmas tree ornament, you so pretty, I want to put you on my tree.” (His response was to inhale sharply through his mouth, throw his right arm behind his back, over his shoulder, as though it were being dislocated by a poltergeist, and muttering ”Of all the things to say”. He being the most godlessest and all.)

**”[T]his sort of thing” mostly meaning “things I’m too high to filter before publicly releasing”

I've realized why it's such a rabbit punch to my heart every time Kierstedt states that Black Sabbath is classic rock only, not metal, or some related sass. Even if he likes Black Sabbath's (very imitative but majestic & invaluable) stoner metal progeny, like Sleep & Electric Wizard and all them godsends, rejecting actual Sabbath means that at a fundamental level he rejects the to me obvious truth that metal gets heavier the more you slow it down. In some unions you've got Democrat v. Republican at permanent unamiable loggerheads; in this one you've got Doom v. Thrash, and it's no less foundation-threatening. How SILly, Lord. And yet I will not ever renounce endless bickering about subgenres*, not ever, hear?

*and sub-sub, easy, and sub-sub-sub not at all out of reach

Additionally: Even after accounting for my pathetically damp-eyed (and -elsewhered) Battleship fandom, surely even a nonfan might agree that this photo is seriously exceptional and would belong in a coffeetable book of punk rock photography were such books not a bunch of bullshit:



I saved this photo, creepily stolen from Battleship's MySpace page, to my desktop as oh Aleks SERIOUSLY.jpg, and I think that understates it.

I have been granted permission to reestablish viewing of Antiques Roadshow, but only if I consistently refer to it as "The Arbitrary Values Assigned to Garbage by Rich Pieces of WASP Shit Show". (I have also been told, without having asked, that abbreviations will not be tolerated.)