...get out your copy of Diana Ross's The Boss, whose title track is surely the best expression of joy since Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, and play it? Today? Right now? Awesome, ain't it? Open up the windows and let everybody else hear it too. We have a woman who'll serve the country as Speaker of the House. Every other country in the most-homes-wired-for-electricity world started electing women as presidents & prime ministers twenty or thirty years ago, but the US has clung tenaciously to its position that there's just something about women that's not quite suitable for the big-dog positions. When I say "the US" I leave the punctuation out on purpose: it hasn't been some secret cabal of men conspiring to keep all the cherry-picked spots for themselves. It's been us, the people, the electorate. We're the ones who've gone along with the really painfully strained sort of reasoning all this time, either in its old form ("everybody knows women aren't fit to lead") or in its neo-con remix ("it's just that there are these differences"). There is now a sliver of evidence that we might be getting past all that. Better late than never! Wither and die, patriarchy. Congratulations, Speaker Pelosi.

(NB: if the "I wasn't in control, love was" message of "The Boss" gives you trouble - I don't think it should, and I actually have about 1/2 of a schtick in explaining how that message is more radical than any gender, race, or class-based political angle could ever be, but world enough & time, etc - then I direct y'all to, from the same album, on a different emotional tip but still awesome & certainly as worth your ears today -

"IT'S MY HOUSE")

I gotta be honest with you: I may not spend as much time playing video games as I do listening to or making music, but in terms of impact on my daily life, they're about neck-and-neck. I don't carry a handheld out on tour with me because tiny-ass screens generally annoy me, though I can get into playing Q-Bert on my cell phone when I'm waiting for a plane. Most of my first full-length was written between extended runs at Ninja Gaiden III, Mike Tyson's Punch Out, and a heavy cult side-scrolling shooter called Zombie Nation, which I should probably start citing in interviews as a primary influence on my work. It is to my eternal discredit that I never publicly cited the Katamari Damacy soundtrack as the best album of 2004. I ain't pre-ordering the new systems, since I think both Sony and Nintendo's create-a-shortage-to-build-buzz strategy is exactly the sort of bad business philosophy that alienates customers. But once the machines are on the shelves awaiting purchase, which is where any mass-market item belongs, I'll be taking home one of each, thanks, and locking myself in the upstairs room 'til my wife complains that I swear at the television too much. All of which is just the long and pointless intro to asking: what the fuck is this? I'm as sick to death of people whining on the internet about the greed and avarice of copyright-holders as anybody else, since I think the underlying sentiment of most such whines is "I want everything for free & am entitled to it & am gonna talk shit about you if you don't gimme, lolrs8z pwn3d!! j/k add me plz," but people pulling stunts like this is fuel where there needn't have been fire. Fair use allows for parody, moronic ESA people! This is not hard to grasp! Kotaku, Last Plane has got your back in all situtations foreign and domestic. If you get comped a free Wii y'all got my address, right? k kewl just checkin. And so forth.

Agalloch's Ashes Against the Grain came highly recommended, but when I got a copy of it about six weeks ago, I didn't cotton to it right away. It was still pretty hot here in North Carolina. You can listen to death metal in hot weather and get sweaty with it, but black metal is ritualistic music, and works better in controlled environments. The right death metal song can even be weaseled in between techno tracks, if the DJ's clever enough; black metal is less flexible. One could make the case that that's sort of the point.

one

sometimes I resent,
on no particular grounds,
the trend in black metal
toward one-man bands

maybe it's that it seems unsporting
and and a little suspicious, philosophically:
you don't really love the volk
if you don't hang out with the volk

the ideological consistancy
of black metal bands:
the secret theme
of the 2006 elections

tomorrow: two

two

Whether I approve of his methodology
or not, friends,
there is a man in France

who, once in a while,
steals an evening in a local studio
or perhaps only in his bedroom

overlooking an alley
or a field
or a street.

Sealed safely away inside,
he dreams out loud the original sound
of all the world's volcanos

at the great moment
of their simultaneous and unknowable
awakening.

It's not the volcanos that do it for me.
It's the guy in France
in the room I can half-imagine

chasing sleep down like a starved hound
standing at the precipice of his dream
shielding his eyes.

tomorrow: three

three

digging for the source
of the original light
but being bored to death
with mayhem

I cracked open
this dissection reissue
and while everyone else
on my block

went about their business
happily or otherwise
my living room
exploded into frost

it's a long way
from 1995
and there is no new
dan swano

and everyone hates
metallica now
and dissection
can't ever be bettered

which is kind of the point
of our new hero
and kind of the point
of departure:

cosmo kramer
consumed by rage
you will know
the signs of the age

tomorrow: four

four

Mayhem
you don't wanna talk about 'em
you gotta

Mayhem
everybody's all about 'em
you're not

Mayhem
Dom Mysteriis
whatever

they set the tone
sure fine ok
they're the Beatles

it's one thing
to set the tone
it's another thing

to carry it around
like a sack full of skulls
when no-one in town

will be surprised
to see you coming
down the street

with all those heads
bang bang banging against
the cobblestones

crossing at the stoplight
passing the patisseries
hungry all day

tomorrow: five

five

I didn't know you was a one-man band
I didn't know you was a one-man band
I didn't know you was a one-man band
I found out on the in-ter-net

I coulda guessed the truth, I suppose
hey how about that guy Mortiis's nose
ol' Dead from Mayhem used to bury his clothes
whaddaya know about that

I wonder if you ever play out live
XXe arrondissement, smoky dive
load up your Swatch car full of gear and drive
radio turned down low

I like the image but I doubt it's true
beautiful Parisians staring up at you
guitar & drum machine, sacre bleu
screaming like the Windigo

I'd like to dedicate this verse to Joel
whose style I'm biting like a dinner roll
he also has a one-man band, you knowll
actually, he's had three

one full-length album and a new EP
one three-way split you guys will never see
that is the whole to-date discography
all of your songs sound really good to me

I didn't know you was a one-man band
I didn't know you was a one-man band
I didn't know you was a one-man band
I found out on the in-ter-net

yeah

tomorrow: six

six

If I'd had my wits about me
I'd have numbered these poems in French.

Une. Deux. Trois. Et cetera.
It might have seemed clever, in a quiet sort of way.

Of course there are those people these days
who are put off by French things.

I wish all those people would die
in a gigantic flaming auto accident,

the acrid fumes spewing from molten steel,
melting plastic, and burnt bone

causing recess to be cancelled
at a nearby elementary school.

So many sad children.
One happy black metal dude.

seven

Why sir do you dwell on the place our man is from,
when this is only a detail, a biographical note
for the press kit perhaps, if he had one.
What does the music sound like, what is its mood?

Ma'am if it please the court,
black metal at the end of the day
is a cryptically written personals ad
whose abbreviated details form half the substance

of their referent:
SWM, Paris, d/d OK,
hates crowds,
loves nothing,

into stuff you probably don't like;
I get a particular feeling
looking at castles in the countryside,
don't bother to call.

eight

Dawn flooded Saint-Ouen
on a night when I could not sleep.
I had a secret,
though I didn't know it yet.

Went down to a cafe
whose name I should have written down;
I will probably now
never know it.

Somewhere meanwhile in town,
unbeknownst to me,
there slept, or did not sleep, this guy.
I put two sugars in my coffee.

When in Rome. I wonder
whether Drastus even existed yet
or whether
it lay dormant in a brain and body

asleep or not asleep,
clear across town or around the corner,
collecting aware or unaware
the stray threads of its gathering howl.

nine

you get the drastus/cyt/hostis 3-way split
you admire the packaging
you attempt to read the black-on-black liner
you give up

you attempt to file the A5 CD booklet
you file it with the books for a while
you leave it by the stereo a while
you consign it to limbo

where have you come from
walking along the earth
walking around down there
that's what the book said

not "seeking the ruination of men":
that was a gloss

you get the drastus/cyt/hostis 3-way split
you listen to it
you listen to killer mike
you attempt some unworkable math

you think about wagner
you think about anger
you try filing the A5 CD booklet again
you admire their tenacity

and when you notice
that drastus has a song called "drastus"
you want to praise God
in His high heaven, smiling down upon the earth -

or perhaps not smiling: c'est la vie,
say the old folks, goes to show you never can tell

ten

you know, the last song on the new Drastus MCD
reminds me a little
of Wonderama's "Padre Pio: the Stigmatist"

ok there I've done it
I knew what I was going to say
and I said it

now one day,
when I wake up in Hell,
I'll know why

eleven

where is he now:
the young man who cries while listening to Drastus
whose eyes fill with tears
when he hears the pickslide

who, listening, thinks a little
of Philip Jeck
and wonders if he will die alone
unloved

where is she:
the girl who writes Drastus lyrics
on her jeans
and gets yelled at

You have ruined a perfectly good pair of jeans
Shut up they're my jeans
I hate all of you
that sort of thing

where are they,
the Drastus youth,
whose hearts are opened
by these dark fathomless fugues?

there are no such creatures, such people,
God damn your eyes
this is not that kind
of music

twelve

listened all early afternoon
only to black metal
three albums in a row

paragon impure
merrimack
clandestine blaze

in the end I must always love
the one I can't get my head around
the one whose vision

seems bigger than the vehicle
given to convey it
drastus

my man
you've got
the look