Permaweird

Greetings, dudes. I've been plugging away lately at my translations of Judith Teixeira, tinkering with a mystery novel, and submitting poems of my own to magazines, so I don't have much to offer you in that regard. 

If you're like me, life during the twilight of the COVID-19 pandemic isn't a whole lot different than it was during its more brutal periods last year. When I say twilight, it's less that the pandemic is fading away— as much as everyone wants it to— than that we're living in a permanent half-light. I'm not as housebound as I was, but there's a heavy psychic weight still bearing down on me and everyone I know.

2020 pulled the waxen death mask off the twitching corpse of American society, only for us to find out that a whole lot of our countrymen consider that death mask an ideal reflection of themselves, and they desperately want to keep looking in the mirror. 2021 feels like we're shoveling dirt on the aforementioned corpse, but the knowledge that it's gonna spring out of the grave sooner or later—probably sooner, given the headlong retreat from democracy across the country— is embedded in our exhausted brains. There doesn't seem to be a break in sight from the struggle against fascism, ecological collapse, and generalized human awfulness. There's also a surreal quality to everything that makes day-to-day life even weirder than it has been. That, too, isn't going away anytime soon, if ever. Things are permaweird now.

As grim and circumscribed as things are, though, life is still here to be lived. While the fight to build a better world is endless and tiring, it can also be rewarding in its own right. And then there's 生死大事, the great matter of life and death, to be wrestled with, which is probably the most important task we have. "What is this?" is a question we have to try and answer in every minute of our existence, even when that existence is a total drag and the last thing we want is radical self-inquiry. 

So I'll keep on truckin', trying to get to the bottom of things and pushing for a freer, less greedy, less delusional world. Reading the work of Rinzai Zen priest Cristina Moon, organizing with the Democratic Socialists of America, and digging through the Autodidact Project will help. And, since weirdness is (and really always has been) the name of the game, you can soundtrack it with the vast back catalogue of Kawabata Makoto or this rad collaboration between thisquietarmy and Voivod's Away. Whatever you do, don't despair. I can't say things are gonna get better, because they probably won't, but there's something to be said for giving it our best shot. After all, we're all on borrowed time, so we'd better use it well.

See y'all soon.

MMXXI

Even before COVID-19 smeared plague across the globe, 2020 was already going to be an especially ugly, desperate year here in America, thanks to the election. As it stands, we—Americans, that is—have collectively limped past the December 31 finish line (an illusory goal if ever there was one), having only barely gotten our shit together enough to vote Donald Trump out after his administration spent the past eleven months doing nothing about a disease that much of the world managed to handle with at least a modicum of common sense and rationality. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died needlessly, huge swathes of the population are unemployed and/or about to lose their homes, and around the world nation-states (including the US) are starting to rehearse for the next phase of the ongoing and ever-worsening climate crisis, which usually means foregoing the sort of species-wide solidarity we actually need in favor of shoring up artificial borders, dehumanizing outsiders (or insiders who don't meet the criteria of a "real" citizen, a category that grows narrower by the day), and generally doubling down on the us-versus-them mentality that got us here in the first place. 

So yeah, 2020 was been a bullshit year. It was by no means the worst in human history, but that's cold comfort for everyone who suffered, or is still suffering, at its numb, infected hands, and it feels like History (capital H) decided to give us a tightly-scripted preview of what awaits us over the course of the next, I dunno, 50 or 100 years. It ain't pretty, and I am not at all sure that humanity will rise to meet the challenges we've created for ourselves (and every other species on the planet, but it's been pretty well established that we do not give a single fuck about them or anything that stands in the way of making profits and fulfilling the sad-ass failures of imagination that pass for "dreams"). That said, barring a heavy-duty nuclear exchange that renders the whole thing moot—an outcome as possible as it's ever been—I don't think we're straight-up doomed. Shit will get bad in unimaginable ways, but the species will scrape by. Hell, we may even outgrow some of our worst traits. I have no idea. Or, more accurately: I don't know.

Not knowing is one of those skills I'm always honing. Not knowing isn't ignorance, though of course ignorance involves not knowing; not knowing is a refusal—albeit not too militant a refusal, since that leads to its own set of conundrums—to mistake one's one thoughts and feelings for reality. In this case, reality as it'll play out in the future. Forecasting the future is a sucker's game, and like most such games it's sometimes just lucrative enough to make us think it's a worthwhile pursuit. While I like throwing around ideas of what may be coming our way as much as the next dude, I like to think I have a sufficient grasp of how complex the world is, and how unpredictable people and nature can be, to avoid conflating the notions I toss out on IRC or over beers with what's actually going on. But again, I don't know, so I generally avoid prognostication. You're better off consulting the 易經 I Ching/Yi Jing than talking to me.

This blog is entering its 18th year. I still don't really know what I'm doing with it, but I plan on keeping it around. Maybe I'll do more writing and less translating this year. I wouldn't mind sorting out some of my ideas about, say, Buddhism or martial arts, or trying to write more critical album reviews. I may write more in Portuguese. 2021 is still a newborn, though, sticky with afterbirth, so I may let things unfold at their own pace before worrying too much about what exactly is said when The Corpse Speaks.

In the meantime, I'll direct your attention to Erik Davis' new venture, the wide-ranging and always compelling Burning Shore newsletter; the Korinji Rinzai Zen community, home of some deep Zen practice; Herman Melville's marginalia; the Ploughshares Fund, working to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons; and the mind-shattering vajra doom hammer that is the music of Neptunian Maximalism.

Happy MMXXI, y'all.

 
微臣
史大偉/D.A.S.

Our Time is Up, We've Had Our Chance: Allagash's Cryptic Visions

I don't remember how I first heard about Allagash (named after the 1976 Allagash abductions, not the brewery), but odds are it was from my friend Shari, a Newfoundland native and fellow metalhead. Neither of us is old enough to remember the peak of Newfie UFO madness, and I doubt the dudes from Allagash are either. But that's okay. Heavy metal, after all, is bigger than us all, and may even be a new form of religion developing before our eyes, somewhat along the lines of what Diana Pasulka argues about belief in UFOs in her intriguing but sometimes too-good-to-be-true book American Cosmic.*

 Cryptic Visions begins with the intro piece "Take Warning," which presents a vision less cryptic than it is idealistic; and given the source of that vision, it's easy to read it as pure speechifying bullshit, since during the course of his doddering, star-poisoned presidency Ronald Reagan was more than happy to start or foment wars, including those that could have led to the extinction of most of the planet's human population. That said, the sentiment is completely in line with the apocalyptic alien-encounter themes that have run through all of Allagash's albums**, and it serves as a callback to older thrash bands' fears of nuclear annihilation and other late Cold War dreads.

It only makes sense that "Beware the Light," the first song—no, I'm not going to prod every song as if I was some almond-eyed Grey mutilating cattle; well, not too much—relies upon Ronnie Raygun's even more spiritually and economically bankrupt, exponentially less appealing, yet possibly far more destructive political descendant, Donald J. Trump, for its title and closing sound bite. ("Sound bite" — as if that semen-stained frat-house pillowcase of a man were capable of speaking at length about anything other than a handful of masturbatory topics.) This total ripper uses the contents of that sound bite for its chorus as well, only to decry the misery that would fall upon everyone after unleashing the fire and fury with which Trump threatened North Korea (which I'm almost 100% sure he can't find on a map without an aide's help). As in every song that follows, the rhythm section is incredibly tight here, and it contributes immensely to the overall awesomeness of this album.

Whenever I hear "Evil Intent" I think of Judas Priest, specifically "Leather Rebel" from Painkiller. The songs aren't dead ringers by any stretch, not least because Mooncrawler's vocals are nothing like Rob Halford's and nobody can recreate the Downing/Tipton magic, but fuck me if the riffs don't tear along at a similar breakneck pace and the energy isn't on the same wavelength. In my book, if you can be honestly compared to Judas Priest, you're doing something right, and while I've been a fan of Allagash for a while, this is the first time I've thought of Priest while listening to them.

And goddamn, they keep doing things right. "Strange Metal" pairs triumphant guitar work and up-and-down speed that belies the rather underwhelming evidence that came from the Roswell debris field, closing with a sample of someone explaining that sunburned New Mexico event. "From the Dark" follows a similar trajectory, but this time the chorus plays against expectations by never actually using the song's title, but instead builds a sort of reverse coda from a general description ("back from the shadows") to the details of an alien abduction or imprisonment. Once more, the riffage is just fuckin' killer.

"Privacy Invaders" is the weakest track on the album. It's not bad, but man, the cadence of the choruses falls flat. The lyrics are hit or miss, too; in that sense they feel like a lot of other metal songs that over the years have warned listeners against encroaching technologies and social changes, so I cut them some slack. Still, not my favorite song here.

"Under Watchful Skies" and "Eagle Lake"—the latter being where the Allagash encounters supposedly happened in Maine 43 years ago— open with the clean acoustic/partial synth intros that Allagash have used on a number of other tracks (my favorites being "The Truth is Out There (It's Getting Closer)" from their first record, and "Canadian Encounters" from the EP of the same name). After the lead-in, the former song launches into a frantic four and a half minutes that echo, musically and lyrically, the paranoia of ages past, not just about aliens but our own fucked-up human situation. Allow me to cite the lyrics:

there is nothing we can do to change this mess we've made
so sit back and relax
the damage shows destruction's here to stay
there's no turning back
they wait and watch for us to change our ways
but we no longer care
our time is up, we've had our chance
the end now lingers in the air 


the day they come
don't be surprised
we know something's wrong here
under watchful skies 

I'm not one to argue with those who claim that we're neck-deep in the Anthropocene, that humanity has basically fucked itself (and, far more sadly, countless other Terran species) out of prolonged existence, but I don't think aliens are watching over us and weeping at our idiocy, no more than God(s) is/are sitting around in the empyrean hoping we'll get our shit together. No, humankind has doomed itself, and if there are extraterrestrials looking on, they're simply waiting to pick up the pieces. Why wouldn't they wait until this blot on an otherwise unstained planet has faded and come in to enjoy it in ways that homo sapiens couldn't? (They'll probably act like us and assume everything is a resource for their own use, of course, and simply be ETI scumbags to our terrestrial parade of selfish dunces, so it's not like I'm eager for aliens to show up. Space brothers they ain't.)

But I digress. "Eagle Lake" continues the Allagash tradition of ending albums with an instrumental piece, though in this case it's even longer and more varied than "Canadian Encounters." It's exactly the kind of interesting and thought-provoking piece that this music demands. You get some samples, some synth, some intensity—it's all there.

In lieu of some kind of summary paragraph, I'll leave y'all with this line by Charles Foltz, one of the Allagash abductees. Take it as you will, 'cause I'm sure as shit not nailing it down to one specific use.

"This happened. If you believe, that's all right. If you don't believe it, I don't care."
 
Stay weird, dudes, and enjoy this album. I know I did, and will continue to do so for a long time. Maybe even until the Greys arrive.

DAS



*Someone could probably write a religious studies paper about the mystical aspects of heavy metal, including things that might be considered its miracles, and convincingly tie it into the weird, dubious continuum of ufological belief and experience; for example, I (uh, I mean, they) could talk about Hypocrisy, whose alien thematics are frequent and reflect existing UFO paranoia and pop culture, while adding a layer of ominousness that only the best X-Files episodes could manage, and whose frontman, Peter Tägtren, is arguably an extraterrestrial himself. (Maybe it's just me and my brother who think that last bit, but hey, don't rule it out.)

**Cryptic Visions is technically Allagash's second full-length, with Canadian Encounters serving as the EP between them. But once upon a time, there was a second album called Dark Future that never saw the official light of day; it was on YouTube for a while before it was taken down. Note that the link will lead you to a dead end, which is intentional; consider it Allagash's episode of missing time. You may be able to dredge up the album elsewhere.

Some other shit that matters

I was working on a post about a classical Chinese textbook I like a whole lot, but that shit can wait. Right now I only have two things to say, neither of them related to translation, Chinese, Portuguese, or books.

1) Skateboarding rules. I've been skating a bit off and on since I quit working at the Jamail skatepark downtown almost eight years ago, but nothing more than a beer run to the convenience store, working on ollies in the driveway, or hitting the occasional parking block in the hopes of finally learning to grind or boardslide the damned things properly. Today, though, I went up to the North Houston skatepark, AKA the Spring park, for the first time since its construction a few years ago. I ate shit only once but bailed a lot, since it's fast as hell in places and I am woefully rusty when it comes to skating transition. Nevertheless, I left feeling like a fucking champ, because skateboarding does that. Also, Houston's own Pro-Designed pads deserved a shout-out, especially their wrist guards, which are the best out there, hands down. (Pun intended, since they saved me from shredding my palms earlier today, as they have many times.)

2) Listen to Yawning Man. I heard of these dudes ages ago, when they were a semi-apocryphal yet highly lauded band in the desert/stoner rock scene—and one that hadn't put out any records. They finally started releasing albums in 2005, and I finally started listening to them last year. 2010's Nomadic Pursuits is my favorite so far, though admittedly I haven't listened to the others nearly as much.

Até próxima, and take it easy, y'all.

End transmission.

Reflections upon the Warrior's Spell: Tasmania's Tarot

On my way back from Macau last summer I had a 15-hour layover in San Francisco. I dropped my bags off at the left luggage desk and took the train into the Mission, where, among other things, I loitered at Borderlands Books (and missed meeting Nick Mamatas by a few scant minutes), ate vegan food and drank beer that wasn't Tsingtao or San Miguel at Gracias Madre, and visited Aquarius Records for the second and equally triumphant time.

As you might expect, I found a number of albums worth purchasing at Aquarius, home of killer poetic album descriptions, and and the staff was kind enough to pack 'em up and ship 'em to Texas for me. Among those albums was Tarot's The Warrior's Spell, a compilation of their cassette-only demos (something I didn't know at the time, but would come into play when, a year later, they'd release their first full-length: see below). Like so many underground metal releases, the album art struck me as what I can only describe as amateurishly perfect. The title itself had the same effect: as a lifelong D&D player, the notion of a "warrior's spell" was just wrong, since spells are strictly within the purview of magic-users and (ugh) clerics, but it sounds cool, so who cares?

Here's the write-up from Aquarius Records:

The wizened seer tentatively flips the last card, her eyes illuminated by the dancing firelight. Her eyes widen as she gasps, before letting out a croaking grotesque cackle. "In your future...I see... MUSTY TASMANIAN WIZARD ROCK!" Well, congratulations! It must be your (Magician's) birthday, because no finer fate can await gods nor men than the prospect of delving into this arcane helping of mystical, mythical, organ-driven heavy folk prog from far off Tasmania. The Warrior's Spell comes hurtling across the astral plane courtesy of Tasmania's Heavy Chains Records (undoubtedly one of our fave new sources for weird & wonderful heavy rock and metal, along with Minotauro, having recently brought us the Outcast ep and latest The Wizar'd album), and conjures all of the torchlit corridor mystery & dusty crumbling aroma of some of our favorite proto-metal, proto-doom & witchy folky proggy rock bands, all swirling Hammond organ, plucked acoustic strums, seriously epic heavy riffing, plaintive flutes & distant nasal vocal prophecies. Uriah Heep is obviously a major touchstone here, the album title and cover clearly paying homage to the technicolor fantasy wonder-realm of Heep's 1972 opus The Magician's Birthday specifically. But just us clearly one can hear the sepia-toned Medieval echoes of Rainbow and the crackly mournful dirge of Pagan Altar. Tarot also shares their vocalist with another one of our favorite obscure quirky heavy acts, The Wizar'd! And while here he sounds significantly less theatrical and maniacal than in his other wilder doomed project, his more restrained approach in Tarot lends the music a much more sombre, majestick, archaic air. Very highly recommended for fans of all of those aforementioned groups as well as anything from early Wishbone Ash to Witchcraft to Comus to The Lamp Of Thoth to the Darkscorch Canticles compilation. Consider us well and truly... under the spell!!!


The Aquarius dudes nail the feel of the music itself, but like the Astral Rune Bastards record I wrote about a while back, listening to Tarot conjures up more than lyric-related imagery. The Warrior's Spell, less polished than the full-length Reflections (itself quite faithful to the analog sound of its influences, even though it was recorded with modern equipment), is particularly good at evoking the sort of scenes that one might imagine giving birth to the music itself. It's more than nostalgia for the days of '70s metal and hard rock, which neither I nor the members of Tarot ever experienced. It's the feeling of letting your imagination wander deeper and deeper into the fantastic as you kick back in your bedroom or basement with some albums borrowed from your buddy (say, Uriah Heep's The Magician's Birthday, like Aquarius Records suggested, or Reflections, Tarot's newest), a stack of Moorcock and Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks, the first edition AD&D Players Handbook, and maybe a joint or two.

People have been enjoying this kind of experience, with any number of aesthetic tweaks, forever, and it's one I continue to seek out. Heavy metal and the other trappings I mentioned above remain my primary method of doing so, and Tarot's ability to provide a killer soundtrack means that I can spend many an afternoon or evening lost in contemplation of not just wizards, fate, solitude, but a version of the 1970s that never quite was, or maybe just bled across time and space into our present day and the minds of a few dudes from Tasmania.

Check out Reflections here and The Warrior's Spell here, and get your fix of sweet riffs and organ lines. Don't forget to eyeball that album art while you're at it.

Later!

D.A.S.

Miscellanea

I'm not pleased that it's been a month since I last posted, and the posts I have in the works are, well, still in the works, so here are some links and such, just like a traditional weblog might offer.

-Carpenter Brut is one of my favorite musical acts as of late, and always makes good videos. Turbo Killer is great example of why that is. Foxy dames made even more so by the glowing inverted crosses on their foreheads, weird dudes sporting gas masks or shotguns, sweet cars, cruciform spacecraft, and a general air of glorious trashiness- if that ain't good viewing, I don't know what is. Carpenter Brut's other videos are worth your time, too.

-I missed 2016's annual literary festival in Macau, the Rota das Letras, but reading about it online introduced me to the poet Matilde Campilho. A native of Portugal who spent a few years in Brazil and as a result has acquired, from what I can tell from some of the interviews with her I've listened to, a Carioca accent when she needs it, I've found myself intrigued by her work. As someone who's studied Portuguese with teachers from Brazil and Portugal, I've tried to find the sweet spot between the two accents (which, like English, are really groups of numerous regional accents), so it's cool to actually hear a native speaker of Portuguese do the same and do a good job of it.

-If you're interested in leftist politics (the real kind, not those of the Democratic party here in the States), Jacobin magazine is an accessible start. The graphic design is eye-catching as hell, too. There's also Salvage, edited by China Mieville (among others). Unsurprisingly, it's a denser read, but no less rewarding for it. "Bleak is the new red."

-This may be the last night of the year we can have a fire or turn on the heat here in Houston. (Observation; no hyperlink provided.)

-If Internet history and pre-WWW protocols (which, alas, I mostly missed upon my initial visits to the World Wide Web back in '96 or so, but which I utilize now) are your thing, make sure your browser is gopher-capable and visit Floodgap's gopher server, which serves as a clearing-house of modern gopher activity.

And on that note, I'm out. This corpse is tired. Boa noite, amigos: I'm gonna listen to Carbon Based Lifeforms' "Photosynthesis", reminisce about my buddy Pete's first post-college digs up in Dallas and the gloriously pre-2001 tech crash nature thereof, and call it a night.

It feels good to just write shit again. I need to do it more often.

Agent Jeffries was right.

As I'm sure you know, Twin Peaks is due to return in 2016. This is huge, huge news for me, but rather than speculate about what it'll be like or even whether it's a good idea, I'm just going to wait patiently and, as the rambling anecdote below should illustrate, revel in the mysteriously wonderful/wonderfully mysterious nature of existence.

Sometime last week, while listening to Stars of the Lid's "Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30", I thought about the fact that said song imagines something I never expected to exist. Sure, David Lynch has made remarks over the years about revisiting Washington's most famous fictional town, but how likely did any of us think that really was? And then, last year, came the news that Lynch and Mark Frost are going to write and direct another nine episodes of my favorite TV show ever.

"Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30" is now no longer a reference to something that never was or would be. While the new episodes of Twin Peaks will probably not start with #30, there will finally be something after episode #29, and thus the SOTL song, unless it's used in the show (which is unlikely, I think, as long as Angelo Badalamenti is still alive) becomes the music of an alternate history. Not long ago we lived in a world in which there never was an episode #30; now, we have its equivalent on the horizon, but it won't be what Stars of the Lid envisioned in 1997 (the year, incidentally, that I got into Twin Peaks). What was once a song for a nonexistent event becomes a song for a different nonexistent event.

This strange convergence/divergence of artistic purposes may well be proof that Agent Phillip Jeffries was right: "we live inside a dream." I think I can handle that, but then again, Dale Cooper thought he could handle the Black Lodge, and we know how that ended.

A quick reminder that I love Kitty (Pryde)

It's been a while since the Corpse spoke of his favorite Internet rap sensation, Kitty, AKA Kitty Pryde. Why is that, you ask? Is it because yours truly has given up on Florida's finest red-/green-/pink-haired daughter and her talent? Has said talent dissipated at an alarming rate? IS THE WORLD ENDING?

Fear not, caro leitores! I still love the shit out of Kitty, she continues to put out great songs, and the world isn't ending. You may need to readjust your tastes if you're expecting straight hip-hop, seeing as how Miss Beckwith has become adept at cranking out dance floor bangers, but she's still as witty, relevant and, dare I say, lovely as ever. I look forward to seeing where her career takes her.

In the meantime, I have to go pick up dinner, so rather than read my tired-ass words, listen to Kitty herself and enjoy the pleasure that comes with seeing a really good artist do her thing.

Scott's Stash: Cursed

The storage box wherein all the CDs my brother gave me a long while back still gets opened from time to time, either because I get tired of what's on my hard drive and in my LP collection, or I'm in the mood to listen to something new that is also old while driving, since I probably ain't never gonna give up physical media. (老頭混蛋萬歲, motherfuckers.) Anyway, I was digging through said box the other day and ran across Cursed, by German death metal band Morgoth. I suspect this one of those albums that my brother got, for whatever reason, from Drew, because it isn't something I imagine him buying.

I'll keep this short, because there isn't a lot to say. My overall impression was neither positive nor negative, because Cursed is a perfectly serviceable album. Released in 1991, I can't imagine anyone being overly stoked when they first heard it, but I can also see it getting something along the lines of an honorable mention in year-end lists. There are some good riffs here and there, and the vocalist, Marc Grewe, often makes me wonder if I'm listening to a side project of Chuck Schuldiner's. A few songs have doomy passages that I dig, too, but overall Morgoth doesn't leave an impression, save that of a band that put out a record that couldn't stand up against those released by their Scandinavian (viz. Where No Life Dwells by Unleashed) or Floridian (e.g. Morbid Angel's Blessed Are the Sick) cousins that same year. 

That said, you could still put on Cursed at a party, or as background music at a meeting of non-metalheads, and probably draw some looks or disparaging comments from non-hessians and associated boring fucks. If, say, you're too busy pumping the keg at said party to rebut every snide remark, yet refuse to let someone else control the music, then Cursed is a safe bet: you, the metalhead, won't hate listening to it, but you won't get pissed if you get distracted by doing your friends the inestimable favor of pouring them drinks.

The above may be damning Morgoth's Cursed with faint praise, but according to the Encyclopedia Metallum, they got increasingly shitty as the '90s progressed, so I think a review wherein one's band is compared to Death and not mocked for later missteps is an of ex post facto thumbs up. And really, dudes, it's a decent record; if you come across it, give it a listen, but I can't recommend seeking it out.

On that note, time for some fuckin' Morbid Angel and annual fretting over (one of) the heavy metal novels I intend to write, I Was A Teenage Beast of the Apocalypse.  Later, dudes!

How to spend a Saturday afternoon (and then write about it two days later)

Bom dia, dudes. For best results w/r/t reading the following, do as yours truly: fetch yourself a fairly high-ABV beer and sip it slowly, letting the booze wash over but not drown you. Here we go.

Work on the novel proceeds apace, albeit not as quickly as I'd like. (This is a sentence I should probably have stashed away in a text file on my desktop for rapid cut/paste purposes, given how often I seem to use it, even in correspondence with myself.) I've been busy editing a book for a former professor, but more than that I'm having a hard time keeping focused on the early 16th century: I'm continually reminded, via the books I read, that all the cross-cultural action in the Indian Ocean and environs really starts heating up in the latter half of that century. Still, I'm not going to abandon Anacleto and Agnese Stornello. We've gone through a lot, and as difficult as it's been to tell their story, I'm going to see it through.

Speaking of reading, my friend Linda recently convened the first meeting of a sci-fi book club, which was a lot of fun, and we're going to be reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion next. I picked up a copy at Kaboom Books, Houston's best used book store, and will start it as soon as I finish C.R. Boxer's Fidalgos in the Far East 1550-1770*, which I'd wanted to read forever and is overflowing with great stories about the Portuguese empire's outposts east of India, i.e., Macau, Timor, and, while it lasted, Nagasaki. Boxer is a really good writer, and it's a damned shame that his work is mostly out of print and therefore runs to the costly end of the spectrum; in the Portuguese-language sphere, the similarly prolific Padre Manuel Teixeira suffers the same fate. During the same visit to Kaboom I also found a couple early '70s Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks, which I think represent the first of his books I've held in my own hands. Color me excited. Also on the reading list is The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions, from which comes the title of the excellent weird/horror/supernatural fiction blog The Stars at Noonday and of which I've begun the first story, "The Beckoning Fair One". Since last night I've been waiting for bedtime so I can find out how it ends.

Perhaps the day will come when I have a ton of money and will reprint some of the many books that have existed and fallen into undeserved obscurity. Demand won't be high, but who cares? There has to be at least one or two other dudes out there willing to pay to read decent editions of little-known tomes. I know that for a fact, since I'm one of them.

I'd originally intended to talk about music as well as books, but I've got enough music-related thoughts piled up to justify another couple posts, one of which will be the return of the "Scott's Stash" series. Something'll be up within a couple days, so stay tuned.

再見, caro leitor!

-D.A.S.


*N.B. Between the time I started writing this post and when it actually hit the World Wide Web, I finished Boxer's book. Predictably, it was great.

This is the last day of 34 years' worth of days.

Since I'll be 35 in six and a half hours or so, I thought I'd chime in with some observations about life as a dude who hasn't quite reached the median age for white males of his particular nationality.

 (Some of these things are knowledge gained since my 30th birthday; most of them are slight variations on the same slack-jawed opinions I've held for a decade or more. In some cases, those opinions are watertight to the point of being balls-out facts, and should be identifiable as such; arguments against will be regarded as evidence of mental deficiency on the part of the arguer. Under no circumstances should anything I say be taken as gospel, save for those words which are pure scripture, of which there are far more than one would imagine.)

-English is a pretty awesome language, primarily because it knows how flexible it can be in terms of grammar and its absorption of foreign words and terms. Other languages are just as flexible, however; thinking only of those of which I feel I have a decent understanding, Spanish, Portuguese, and Mandarin are all equally chock full of loanwords and comparative homonyms. (Please don't let my own ignorance stop you, dear reader, from finding examples of your own.) English has particular words that are utterly amazing: among my favorites are sigh, wreckage, hoard, sword, eave, roof, lamp, betwixt... the point is, it doesn't matter. Every language has a bevy (add that to the aforementioned list of awesome English words) of words that are just fucking awesome, and the full comprehension of which requires some knowledge of the native tongue. Long story short, learn thine own tongue well, and learn others as equally as circumstances allow.

-Heavy metal, as Helloween and I have both stated repeatedly, is the law.

 -Sleep (the band, and the experience, too, though the latter isn't under discussion here) is still deserving of a church dedicated to their music. If I ever find myself alone in the world and in possession of serious funds, I will erect a temple in which the massive hymn known to the world as "Dopesmoker" or "Jerusalem" is always played, to be accompanied by censers of the finest ganja swung by priests of the highest, and highest, caliber.
 
-With age, friendship becomes an increasingly valuable commodity, supplanted as it can be by family ties, work, and distance. I've long valued friendship as one of the greatest of human endeavours, since it is not based solely upon biology or habit, and is one of the most underrated and under-described of relationships. It's a shame, seeing as how since friendship requires- or at least implies- an equality rarely required of other relationships. Friendship can be boon or bane, but for those who take part of it, the benefits or disadvantages do not matter, and that is wherein lies its greatness: hearts and minds are tethered, by choice, to a common purpose, and severing such a bond is no easy task.

-H. Bruce Franklin's introduction to Herman Melville's Mardi is wont to make one put said novel down before reading it. Fortunately, for those with stronger literary constitutions, the book is somewhat easier reading than the insane introduction would have one believe. (I may change my mind once I'm further along in the book, of course.)

-If you want to lift weights at home, use kettlebells.

-Smoking is fantastic, but it's probably a good idea to quit.

-Read more.

-Read more. (Redundant, surely, but it's the best advice I could ever give.)

-MC Lars rules. So do MC Frontalot, YTCracker, and Adam Warrock: all of them have written songs that have helped yours truly get through some hard times, and I all but guarantee that if you look, you'll find one that'll help you too. Nerdcore is rising, perpetually. Disagree? Format c:/ and move along.

-I've learned to dress well over the past few years. One aspect of putting your sartorial shit together is shoes. The Corpse recommends Sawa Shoes, which may cost a few more bones than you're used to paying for casual footwear, but trust me, motherfucker, they're as comfortable and durable as they come, and far more stylish that you are capable of appreciating at first glance. These shoes are awesome, end of story.

-"Don't be a dick, be a dude!" You will always underestimate, usually without knowing it, how much you value folks. Not just friends, but family, coworkers, acquaintances, enemies, significant others, friends' significant others, relatives, pets, waitstaff, mail carriers, apartment managers, bartenders, neighbors, the dudes (m/f) at convenience stores. Say hey to them all, treat them as people, give 'em the thumbs up or a high five. We're all dudes, and a world with more dudes than dicks is a better world.

- Be kind to animals. Whether or not you eat them, you can't go wrong acknowledging the inherent dignity of nonhuman species. Decency toward animals, I've found, usually reflects in decency toward humans. (Note that I say "usually".)

-"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will."

34 down, 51 to go. Later, folks, and thanks for sticking around with me for as long as you have.

Your friend,
D.A. Smith

Possessed by the Wrath of the Ale Whores of the Staffordshire Hoard, or, Some Thoughts on Symbel

A couple years ago, when I wrote about the Astral Rune Bastards album I liked so much, I mentioned that Sceot Arcwielder, the dude responsible for it, was a member of Bretwaldas of Heathen Doom. He's also the sole member of Symbel, an outfit (if a one-man operation can be called such) whose songs specialize in, to quote part of their first album's title, "hymns and counsel of Anglo-Saxon heathenry". I've enjoyed Symbel since I started listening to them, though if forced to choose a Sceot Arcwielder project I'd probably pick Bretwaldas. Symbel has been patchy in its output, with too many memorable choruses or riffs watered down by generic pagan/black metal passages. Ale Whores of Mercia and We Drink- Hymns and Counsel of Anglo-Saxon Heathenry are by no means bad, but they're not masterpieces, either: they're unsophisticated and raw, and the songwriting and performance sometimes just barely competent, as one would expect from such an atavistic celebration of pre-Norman England. If you aren't already into this kind of metal, style- and production-wise, Symbel could be either a great or terrible introduction, and I encourage you to find out for yourself. Read the next paragraphs before you do so, however- not because it invalidates Symbel's early work, but because I have more to say about what comes after the aforementioned albums.

In 2013 Symbel released Gyddigg- Possessed by the Fury of Wod. The production is better, the songwriting stronger (but still not perfect, as many songs are longer than they probably need to be), and the dedication to pre-Christian heathenry as vital as ever. Heavy metal's penchant for history is one of my favorite things about this kind of music, and Symbel, for all their faults, don't fail to deliver the historical goods. The dude from Astral Rune Bastards who spent so much time watching the X-Files and looking for UFOs in an English field also clearly spent way more time in museums, archives, and the English countryside learning about the history of his country- experience he applied to Symbel.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the song "Folded Cross", which was released only a couple days ago as part of the Hammerwych EP. Based on the recent discovery of the Staffordshire hoard of Anglo-Saxon artifacts, "Folded Cross" is Symbel evolved. The production is along the lines of that heard on Gyddigg, which makes sense as it was part of those recording sessions, yet there's something about this song as a whole that just fucking nails it- "it" being that intangible chord buried so centrally in the hearts of all metalheads that when struck forces fists into the air, beers down gullets, and hearts to surge with excitement and passion. I like to think of myself as a rational, reasonable dude, but "Folded Cross" makes me want to pledge my proverbial sword to the pagan king of Mercia, who is the subject of the song, and stand against the encroaching Christian masses. That's what good heavy metal does.

Symbel may never rank among the greatest of pagan metal bands, but who cares? Paganism isn't about conformity, and it's certainly not about polish. If it was, chumps would still be erecting temples to Athena, Saturn, and all the other god/desses who demanded as much time, effort, and devotion as the impaled Nazarene (GET IT? GET IT?) who has commanded so much of the world's attention for the past two millennia. As far as I'm concerned, gods are only as good as the art they inspire, and by that standard, whatever deities Sceot Arcwielder worships are doing themselves a favor by imparting increasingly promising gifts of music upon this particular mortal follower. Symbel rules, and it looks as if that will be the case for a while. Here's to more heathen drinking metal!

Later,

D.A. Smith