i mean yeah, people in power aren't going to care about the environment until it affects their bottom line, i agree with that. i don't see how it follows that the billionaires are going to save us. forgive me if i'm skeptical that one man's luxury car company is going to have any kind of meaningful impact on climate change.
i braved the trip into Manhattan and went into the office to patch our firewall and managed to steal 3 left-behind bags of coffee and the office Switch! happy May Day everybody! what are some good Switch games, i already have the one where you are a mean goose who does crimes.
picked up Screaming Females- Rose Mountain, Frances Quinlan, Burial- Untrue, as well as some Slugdge, Venom Prison, and False to annoy my fiancee with on Bandcamp today. but what i'm really excited for is the new Esoctrilihum. just look at this thing:
https://i.ibb.co/BLHBjkk/red2.jpg
what'd everybody else get?
incidentally, i just finished Kentucky Route Zero. what a special game that is. Will Oldham has a wonderful part in it (i think he has the only speaking role in the entire game). and the soundtrack is a phenomenal mix of ambient and Americana.
fuck that was long. here's a short one:
let there be new flowering
in the fields let the fields
turn mellow for the men
let the men keep tender
through the time let the time
be wrested from the war
let the war be won
let love be
at the end
-Lucille Clifton
one of my faves:
Underneath William McKinley
by Zachary Schomburg
It's unclear how you know a man at his piano will be crashing sometime soon upon your town from above, from the clearest sky in weeks—maybe it's intuition or the new telescope you've been tinkering with. But you do know, and your sense of wit and subtle irony allows you to assume that the school of music near the town square is the likely target. You envision a collapsed roof and perhaps a few flattened young cellists, so you go there and warn them.
At first they seem concerned, then suspicious. You tell them about the roof and the cellists. They have questions to which you don't have the answers so you begin to answer without hesitation, making shit up and being as specific as possible. You consider your fear of being cornered as they surround you, poking your chest with their bows, and obviously, your anxiety over this fiery meteor of a man playing his piano while you stand dead center in the building you believe to be the target.
They ask who is it? Who is this man playing the piano while falling to earth? And remembering specifics cast the least doubt you quickly create a name, McKinley, and they say the president? And you say yes, of course the president. You go on to tell them he is playing an unusually somber rendition of Tchaikovsky's sixth and final symphony in b-minor as he tears through the thermosphere and they ask if the man isn't Tchaikovsky himself being that it somehow might make more sense, but you stick to your story.
Days pass, weeks, months, and the whole town turns on you. Leaves fall and curl up, die afraid and humiliated, but grow again and soon you forget your original intuition, or your original sighting—you become ashamed and escape it by letting the lies swallow you whole. In time you forget your own name and bandage your hand like Leon Czolgosz to tempt McKinley from the heavens, perhaps to crash down upon your own body in the name of vengeance, impel you deep into the ground as your head splits a few steel strings and, by chance, plays a few beautiful chords in sequence that are lifted from the smoldering hole where you and the president embrace each other in death, into the warm vernal breeze smelling of moss and rain and poison sumac—a b sharp, then an e, then maybe another b sharp.
Listen. Tell me you hear them floating there above the entire town like church bells. Tell me you hear laughter and the shuffling of feet as the townspeople dance in the street because of these notes and not in spite of them.
i must be one of the few poetry fans who really doesn't care for spoken word. i greatly prefer reading poetry on the page. i hate going to readings and actively avoid anything labelled slam. most poets have no idea how to read their work aloud. i recently heard an audio clip of E.E. Cummings reading one of my all time favorite poems, "anyone lived in a pretty how town" and it was just awful. he read the whole thing in "poet voice", i.e. slow, solemn, over-enunciating every word. it's a psychedelic nursery rhyme, Estlin, why are you reading it like the goddamn Gettysburg Address? anyways, Lana's reading voice is actually alright but the poem she's reading in that Instagram clip is very bad and i don't think it would scan any better on the page. cool title, though.
"convinced that reading Lacan is a better use of your time than watching Pixar films"
i think Zizek would suggest you do both, preferably at the same time
i've been getting into pedal steel music again, and there's this great juju album by Demola Adepoju called Olufe-Mi full of really wild, funky pedal steel action and it's not on any streaming services.
and Default Genders!
anyone who fucks with experimental metal needs to give the new Igorrr album, Spirituality and Distortion, a spin. if you're familiar with Igorrr, it's as unapologetically bonkers as you might expect, veering from death metal to opera to breakbeats with seeming abandon, but it's not utter chaos. each song has a core idea even if it gets dragged through the funhouse on the way there.
also i pre-ordered the new Esoctrilihum on vinyl based on the album art alone:
[img]https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3230531509_16.jpg[/img]
Greet Death- New Hell (not really hardcore, more like sludgy emo, still great)
Birds in Row- We Already Lost the World
Loma Prieta- Self Portrait, I.V.
Touche Amore- Is Survived By, Parting the Sea...
anything by Trap Them or Victims is great if you're into d-beat
i honestly didn't think i'd have the patience for a 2 hour atmoblack album, unlike a lot of the other metalheads here it is far from my favorite metal subgenre, so when i heard "double album of cosmic USBM" i fully expected endless soundscapes and tedious twinkling crescendos, but holy fuck this thing is a real monster, constantly moving, shifting styles, genuinely evil-sounding in places, with just the right amount of ethereal bullshit. remarkably well paced for such a long album. this thing fucks, y'all!
doom fans should also check out the new Rotting Kingdom. feels appropriately apocalyptic. oh and Oranssi Pazuzu released a new track! it's creepy as fuck!
Bib are a band from Omaha that play a particularly noisy and distorted version of hardcore. metalcore vs metallic hardcore is probably splitting hairs a bit and also probably an attempt by bands who combine elements of both metal and hardcore to differentiate themselves from the many terrible bands who ruined the term "metalcore". it's basically a metalcore band's way of saying "no no, we're not like As I Lay Dying".
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