The 'El seemed a touch cross about our nonconsensual "sanitizing" of his record collection - hey, we would have asked you, blondie, but you weren't home, and since you live alone there was no one to leave a note with, and also maybe we shouldn't have keys, hmm? - but just as Lil' Copenhagen refuses to swallow the semen of meat-eaters, so too do I with that of people who willingly expose themselves to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. No way. Perhaps we could've let him keep the Queens of the Stone Age, but the Cypress Hill positively screamed for chucking. I thought but did not say "They're really good MCs skillz-wise though", because I did not want the Who The Fuck is Standing Next to Me? look.

Actually The 'El should thank me, since had Copenhagen been alone he'd have no post-'86 Metallica. I grabbed his wrist and said "You're going too fucken far now! Some of us really need access to 'Sad But True'!" Copes mulled this at beard-tugging length, then ruled. "Kid can keep it, except for Load, Reload and St. Anger, but only for practicing to if he's away from the kit for a while." This actually makes elegant sense, since Mr. Ulrich's drumming is so plodding and pedestrian it's for warmups only. It's like a hamstring stretch for a lead singer, perhaps. I'll ask Davey what he thinks next time we bump hands reaching for vegan mousse at Whole Foods OAK-LAND. No frontman's hamstrings are more limber, you know.

This, from a friend: "A really cute thing about you guys is how you'll pull up and both be wiggling and dancing and bouncing in the truck like you're listening to Green Day, and then the door opens and this horrible wall of shrieking and Satan-worshiping that isn't exactly even music comes pouring out."

Yeah, it is pretty cute. The real ass-shaking happens when it's Lamb of God though. Compared with the frosty hinterland sound of the black metal that's our dietary staple, they lay the grooves down, fat muscular Virginia fuckin' jamz. Makes us get up on tables.

Hey, remember when this site featured commentary on non-rockin' out-related topics? A taste today, a trickle comes, as my breakfast was almost soured by a reopening, w/Yuoshka, of the only topic more searingly divisive for us than whether Maiden's first singer was worth a damn.  (That I won't even name the dork should imply my position there.) The one that can make us go days with nothing to say about the other the other than "Fuck that faggot."  

It couldn't be helped, it was broached by another, an innocent, an unwarned soul, who asked us over ice-loud slurps of Coke "if we were of the same mind on Israel v. Palestine, or is that something you fight about too?"  (We had been, Yuosh & I, ignoring the rest of the table in order to almost holler, in the packed bistro, about whether writers and producers of "The Brady Bunch" ever slipped subtle subversions into the scripts, which Yuoshka's insistence upon is perhaps the sort of retarded over-optimism one can associate with people who allegedly want to see Communist rule spread.  He does, look in his wallet - card-carrying!  Thinks it can work!  These people still exist!  Ad people call Li'l Copenhagen the throwback, the museum piece?)

Bellowing over the crepes this morning didn't purge all the bile that needed purging, so I ask the Internet's ether, what online pharmacy can provide me with the crazy pills taken by people who think the media are, I'm chuckling as I type it, "pro-Israel"?  When the daily rocket attacks on Sderot are nearly without exception described as "seldom fatal"?  It's a striking dismissal.  Usually only property damage and maybe some serious injuries and the constant possibility of a fucking rocket blowing your house up.  But only a couple-few civilian fatalities a year, so certainly not anything for the Israeli military to feel compelled to act upon, daily rocket attacks compliments of people whose stated desire is your extinction.  

And almost exactly the same goes for the coverage of suicide bombings when a few months have passed without one.  No one can get more than 4 sentences into their piece without saying something very close to "the first such attack in months".  It's usually in the first sentence.  Why, it's been months since baby bits pinkly frosted a donut shop, and one teensy-weensy bombing and Israelis want something to happen because of it?  The swine, the Jew swine!  Can't they just negotiate and compromise?  With the people whose stated desire is their extinction?

Nothing in me, no uncertain cell, desires to resist stating that Jonny Greenwood's score for "There Will Be Blood" is the greatest thing ever composed to accompany a film. Hyperbole's not even up to the task. When permitting it to penetrate me via iPod in the Whole Foods, fr'instance, I sometimes am so struck by the adrenaline-stinking dread I abruptly stop all motion and my mouth falls open and I assume an expression that must appear as mute horror, horror, like there's a toddler's chubsy severed leg amongst the grapefruit. It's a cadaver's salamander-cool tongue pressed to your spine. In its climaxes it's like hearing a strange clicking approaching you from behind and turning to be hit in the face with a plague of hornets whizzing sting-first. I mean Christ. I mean dripping impaled purpling Christ on the cross.

My Thom Yorke devotion has long made me wave off people who insist Greenwood's importance in Radiohead's astounding brilliance is grossly underrated: my goodness, imagine what I'd've done if one of them'd said he'd some day do some possibly more important than Radiohead! It gave Li'l Copenhagen a high fever the first time he got to "Henry Plainview", and has since made him halt several times, like me in Whole Foods, and clasp his head in both hands and moan "Oh no!" Only it's when he isn't listening to it.

Hails to Figgis for letting me use this in my upcoming black metal photography coffee-table book. Horns facing down, though, for briefly believing me when I said this here blog was called Vegan Gauntlets.



Speaking of dishy horde members. Homepiece here doesn't getting enough credit for overall Nailing It, possibly because his band wears costumes & possibly blush - sorry, y'all do - but dude just leaned out our door to admonish the postman for wrenching open & violently slamming shut our mailbox while shirtless and with a joint in his hand, saying only "People resiiiide here man", and seriously, maybe 1 of 25 listeners would've guessed he moved here from Sweden a month ago. It was all late Sixties Cali stoner, with the stress rising in the middle and trenching at the end & no verbal comma whatsoever between "here" and "man". All of which is a verbose and tiresome way of saying: the 'El gets slept on. Rekkanize it East Bay.

Surely there could be no credible aesthetic objection to basing a large tattoo around the chorus of The Mars Volta's recent phat-azzed hit single "Wax Simulacra": "Am I waiting now?/Does my waiting howl?" Jesus Lord have you seen a better two-line poem? It shall involve buzzards.