The Cult: Electric (Best Album of All Time?)

This blog got over 2,000 hits this month, so we'll celebrate with Electric by the Cult. I've long been fixated with the backstory about the making of this album. The story goes that 1986 The Cult were working on a lengthy psychedelic album that was taking forever. That is to an extent true By chance they met Rick Rubin who had just produced License to Ill for the Beastie Boys. The story goes that Rick Rubin offered to do an album with them starting from scratch. When the Cult arrived in New York Bill Duffy was supposedly given a rented Les Paul and a Martin amplifier. No pedals were used and there are no guitar solos longer than 30 seconds on the album. If I'm not mistaken there are only two overdubs on the entire record. Ian Astbury's voice has a kind of perfection to it. If you've heard the first two Cult albums they are very different sounding- The Cult started out in the same scene as bands like The Cult and Joy Division but they were very different in so far as that they had thing for what today is called "classic rock" radio. The general consensus is that The Cult sold out and became a hairband. I don't think that's an entirely fair description. I am 100% in favor of the approach to making rock and roll that The Cult had on this album. There are goth bands that are able to do something more atmospheric and get away with that, and the Cult themselves had covered that ground fairly well on Dreamtime previously. It does include a cover of "Born to be Wild". It might be the best rock and roll album ever. War and Pain by Voivod is pretty good, but that's another very stripped down album, it's jet that Voivod used a lot of very odd chords and dissonance. I want hipsters to come to the fore and claim they've made a better album. It hasn't happened. They won't do it. It will never happen. iI's against the laws of physics.

Barr and Tracy +the Plastics

I know the drummer Kevin Shea well and have for years, he's kind of an enigma to me. I've written about him a couple of times on here. I've never meet anyone with that much skill on the drums. However, for reasons that have to do with money and/or because of pressure from friends he ended up playing in mediocre if not poor bands frequently. As I'm writing this text I'm listening to the album Electric by the Cult. Kevin never made an album that came even remotely close to Electric. A big part of it is that the Cult did not use any effects pedals on Electric and no guitar solos longer then 30 seconds in length, in sharp contrast to the Cult's two prior albums. Kevin's buddies and bands connected to them directly never really had that attitude towards rock at all. They got pretty ridiculous because of that. It's strange. In terms of sales those Williamsburg bands were all being annihilated in sales during the 2000's by two metal bands from Finland, H.I.M and Nightwish. I mentioned them to Kevin recently he didn't even know who they were. Indie rock was getting a fair bit of press during the 2000's, but most of those bands remained small club bands. There was more general interest from the public during the 2000's in Nightwish. The Williamsburg bands were probably in a sense out of touch. I'm not clear why all that Williamsburg fecal matter existed at all in retrospective. The worst band Kevin played in by far was Barr, who may also be the worst band I've ever heard. Barr is hideously unlistenable. This guy Brendan Fowler was the editor, I think still is, of this leftist hipster publication called ANP Quarterly. Fowler would do spoken word poetry about things like getting treatment for his OCD with indie rock in the background. He would sing about how he just wanted to hold someone. It's some fairly infantile excrement. I There's this other band that Brendan Fowler cited as an important influence from those same years that's even possibly more unholy. That band is called Tracy + the Plastics. When you get down to trying to discern which is worse Barr or Tracy + The Plastics, it gets to be like arguing what shade of brown fecal matter is. Tracy + and the Plastics consisted of a performance artist named Wynne Greenwood who used the word "like" excessively talking to pre-recorded videos of herself about things like what it's like to be like a radical lesbian, and then they would break into song. Not only was that a real "band", but Grenwood wrote lengthy "artist statements" about what this was all supposed to mean. Reading such artist statements is like watching flies fornicate. Brendan Fowler and Wynne Greenwood seem to think they're doing something intensely interesting. I think they were in the right place at the right time to get in an art magazine or two, that's about it. They never crossed over into mainstream audiences because no one really cares. Hipsters are an odd, insular, little pocket of the population, generally politically far to the left of the rest of the United States, anomalous in many ways. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that either Greenwood or Fowler are involved in the Occupy movement, which is not a populist movement but rather a smallish fringe of leftists, many of whom came out of the liberal arts colleges. More than 99% of Americans have never taken assaulted a police officers as part of a political protest or burned an American flag, I assure you. However, even given that margin is the context, I'm not even sure how much respect Fowler or Greenwood had within that context. I think there can be a tendency to overestimate the impact and influence someone like Fowler has. I assure you in Vegas it would take a while to find someone who even knows who he is. I think I've seen that ANP magazine around in New York, but Barr aren't even on Spotify, for example. The last issue of ANP Quarterly was Autumn 2010, over year ago. Again though, trying to discern such things is like arguing what shade of brown fecal matter is.

Film Review: Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde

A blaxplotation film version of the old Dr. Jeykyll and Mr. Hyde where the good black doctor takes a serum and becomes an evil white man? They probably couldn't do it today, but they did it in 1974. Is it worth watching? It is actually halfway watchable. Not only is it hilariously based on now considered derogatory racial and gender stereotypes, it's also in all other conceivable ways mongoloid. For some reason there's a whole lot of hookers in the script, and a pimp named, of course, Silky. The doctor treats the hookers for the VDs at the Watts free clinic, but when he injects that serum he's working on to cure liver disease, look at hookers, he becomes a superhumanly strong white man! Which of course means he kills hookers! I think even at the time this thing only would have shown at scumbag little grindhouse theaters. I like the overriding message that a black man getting a med degree turns him into a white man that kills hookers. Hay, I'm a white guy I've got a couple dead hookers stashed in my apartment. That's what being a white guy is all about, murdering prostitutes! In fact that's the secret initiation into being a white guy, you have to go bag yourself a hooker. If you kill a hooker your like to find more money in her purse than was used to make this film.

Right Wing Radio's New Messiah!

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Review: MC Randumb and Jewish Dave "Songs in the Key of Murder"

I was asked by Chad Freeman at PollyStaflle to review this album. I'm not a hip-hop fan but this act is Vegas local and I see it as maybe semi-useful to have some solidarity with other local Vegas "arts" type folks. Maybe. Hip-hop does not excite or interest me at all. I think the argument could be made and made well that is contributes to societal problems. At the very least it is indicative of them in a big way. I think it is quite clear that Mc Randumb and Jewish Dave, however, aren't from the hood unless the hood happens to be a UNLV dorm and that they're more or less joking. It is kind of the same joke over and over- all the lyrics are about murder for the entire album. A lot of the lyrics involve sex with and eating of the dead after such murder takes place. It would have been much better if the same lyrics had ended up being used for a B-52's album. It does posit the interesting question as to whether having sex with a dead guy makes you gay, which would be an excellent question to pose for these republican presidential debates we've been having. I'd like to see in particular Rick Santorum's take on this issue, which seems of the highest contemporary relevence. It also gets points for referencing the Human Centipede films, clearly an obsession of mine. However, Human Centipede 3 isn't going to be released for more than a year, and this Prometheus Alien prequel is going to be out in June, so I've actually got Prometheus much more on the brain right now. This album is okay, I chuckled a couple of times. Again, I don't care for hip-hop. I do, however, love the Human Centipede films and in general mongoloid excrement about serial killers.

There is Little Chance I Won't Review Prometheus

My biggest current project is a relatively realistic collection of short stories based on blue collar/local life in Las Vegas. It would contain certain elements of crime writing in it, taking cue from Joseph Wombaugh and Derek Raymond. It would also take cues from Cormac McCarthy and very early Burroughs, specifically the Burroughs of Junkie, except that I have a tendency to prefer the vignette form. I even plan to pick up some Raymond Carver at the local bookstore today, as I've heard he did a lot of vignette work on blue-collar type characters. I don't have a publishing deal so that is likely to appear as an e-book release. The stories about Vegas tend to write themselves and they come very much out of my daily life.My political ideas are more likely to attract attention on the format of internet radio, because I'm a conservative of the libertarian strain and the political right has a real fixation with talk radio for some reason. The pilot type episode I did for a radio show this summer actually got something in the neighborhood of 700 hits, which was more hits than any text blogs I did on the subject ever got, so it's unlikely that I will be writing a lot on the political end of things directly, since internet radio is where such commentary is likely to get more notice. I don't know what it is with American political conservatives and talk radio, but there's obviously a very strong relationship. I'm not abandoning the horror film angle completely, not by a long shot. Films like Human Centipede 2 and the Bunny Game are good to write on because of questions involving the whole censorship issue, but I think the big horror film for 2012 to really speak on will most likely be Prometheus. If my most read blog has been a review of Inseminoid, which is in certain ways a slightly poor and low budget version of Alien, then the Alien prequel could be huge. So, relax, there is little chance I won't review Prometheus. I like horror films and I have the habit of playing black metal and goth music playing while I lift weights or perform other tasks. Those are good angles to explore in that there's a lot of public interest in them, but there's only much time you can spend decoding the aesthetics of a band like Sleep Chamber or Christian Death. Even William Powell over at the Sci-fi Center in Las Vegas, a kind of sic-fi/horror purist has people coming in on Monday nights to screen films like Holy Mountain. Don't get me wrong, I could not be more excited about the Prometheus coming out in June. That thing looks absolutely sweet. There are also those who abandon the sci-fi/horror film and go off in poor directions. I'm a strong admirer of David Cronenberg, but I was shocked to learn last night that his next film project is an adaptation of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo.Not only do I hate Don DeLillo, I recall that this was a particularly bad Don DeLillo book. I was paid to write a review of it for A Gathering of The Tribes by Steve Cannon, I don't think the review was ever used, and I don't still have a copy of it. That's good because that book is excrement, I doubt even Cronenberg can pull a good film out of it. I think Croenberg would have been much better served to stay along the lines of his earlier films like Scanners and Videodrome. Ridley Scott who made Alien and Blade Runner went all the way back there for Prometheus. That is something I will keep in mind. Prometheus looks frigging sweet. In the beginning of the first Alien film there is that corpse of the creature in the chair, it would appear to have to do with that creature, and an explanation of what that was all about and where the "Xenomorph" alien in the first film came from. It has been clarified that the humans in Prometheus are looking for the roots of the human race.

# M14:OCCUPY WHEATON!

...A CALL TO ARMS against the 1% Hello, my name is William Wheaton. Decades ago, my mother's father, David Mathewson, owned a company named Mathewson Tool. Mathewson Tool is best known as the company that built the original June 1944 T44 prototype of what was to be adopted in 1957 as the M14 assault rifle. That's right, my grandfather was the man responsible for the M14. Another guy named John Garand worked with him, but Garand was on my grandfather's payroll. If you don't like it, you must really have a thing for the Nazis or the Soviets because he was building guns for Uncle Sam as far back as WW11. As an NRA Certified Firearms Instructor, I can assure you that the M14 is still to this day one frigging sweet rifle. But the freedoms my grandfather built the M14 to protect are endangered both in the United States and abroad. This is an international CALL TO ARMS to mark this March 14th (#M14) to take the streets as part of Occupy Wheaton, a peaceful protest of the assault against personal liberty in the United States and abroad. More specifically, Occupy Wheaton is a CALL TO ARMS against the following forces of social oppression: 1.) The travel ban against conservative talk show host Michael Savage from entering the United Kingdom. 2.) The 32 cuts enforced by the BBFC on the film Human Centipede 2 and the out-right ban of the film The Bunny Game from being shown in the United Kingdom, and the ban of A Serbian Film in other "developed" and "civilized" western nations. 3.) Gun laws in New York city that require you to wait 6 months to a year to get a permit to have a gun in your own frigging home. 4.) The virtual media black out of the presidential campaign of Congressman Ron Paul. 5.) the fact that I do not have a cushy high paying government "consulting" job that entails me getting payed huge amounts of money to hang out on Facebook all day. If you believe in freedom, take to the streets for Occupy Wheaton M14! Yeah baby! Take to the streets!!! THE VOICE OF THE 99% cannot be silenced! M14 FOREVER BABY! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!