Helmet - Aftertaste

Ok, ok, i can't end it that way, the aftertaste is terrible. Luckily, i heard Exactly What You Wanted and i haven't reviewed the 3rd Helmet album, Aftertaste. I'm certain me picking a fight with Erlewine is exactly what you wanted, so let's do it. 

He calls it bland, numbing, and a downright shame for such an intriguing 90s alternative metal band. His narrative is that they made the awesomeness that is Meantime, pushed too far to the experimental side with Betty, and failed to return to the grandeur of their original immediate and visceral hooky riffs and stuff. Disheartening. 

You know what Stephanie? Thom Yorke says it best, we hope that you choke. I guess if it helps you sleep at night, we'll pretend like we care. See, although the sonic onslaught is indeed loud and cacophonous, the harmonic language is insane to the point that it's actually impressive most of these songs have an identifiable, dare i say, demonstrable tonic considering whether he's driving somewhere slow or nowhere fast, United Arab Emirates still keep the gas in his car. Also, he'd rather be insulted by you than someone he respects, so that works. 

To be fair, i didn't like it that much for a long time either. It's a very acquired aftertaste. Like it or not, it's Post-Metal. I won't coma you with much of that, other than to say "post-" is kind of the catch-all term for using a type of music as a texture on top of which you do whatever thing you do. It's a bit like the floating head of David Bowie music i'm known for not being fond of. For this album, it's really just super noisy guitars playing extended harmonies over John Stanier's drumcophony while the bass does all sorts of weird stuff and Page sings little snippets of Alternative Pop songs. You really do have to put your brain back in 1997 mode because we're drowning out the madness with 10 times the madness. 

Long story short for a change, whereas Erlewine gives it the predictable D for disappointment, i give it an A for accuracy. 17 year old Bottle just nods his head and says "yep, that's exactly what it sounds like out there, glad my brain is melting inside this helmet." Interesting fact, it went out of print way back in 2006 of all places, so i better take extra special care of my OG CD copy. 

And that, as they say, well, that's all folks. Porky Pig-ed it out of the park. Look for new and excitingly different things from Bottle of Beef some time that is later than now. Skip's got some typos to wrangle, and Compy's got that appendicitis look in his eyes. Sandra of course took the liberty of already showing you the cover, so that cat's out of the box with the subatomic quantum thingy that might or might not have happened. Only one way to find out what's in the box, Mr. Pitt. Take a look, it's in a book, possibly one i've written, but you don't have to take my word for it. Space cadets, stand down. Que sera sriracha. Catch you on the flip side. Bottle out.

The End (at least until the next beginning)

Friends, Minions, Skeletons, please don't throw miscellaneous body parts at me. We stand upon the gateway of the future. Not a future we can predict in detail, but a future nonetheless. Where will we go? What will we do? That is not for me to decide, i simply keep meandering in a forwardish direction. But wherever you go, whatever you do, you can rest assured that me and my pals will be right here goofing off and finding new ways to amuse ourselves with the produce of your vegetable gardens.

Do not be sad, do not be afraid, every Bottle must face The Corkening. But you, my heartiest minions, you have your helmets, you have your shovels, you have each other. As i've said before, there are no goodbyes, only pulses in the stream of existence. So, now that we've seen how things are fermenting, it is time for me to put the proverbial cork in it. Any questions?

MEEP?

No, i already said that, i'm not going anywhere, i'm just shutting up because i ran out of things to talk about.

MEEP MEEP?

No, of course not. No exploding today, no exploding tomorrow, well unless you walk past the warning signs, or stick scissors in the socket, there i can't help you.

MEEP MEEP. MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP.

Are you new here?

MEEEP?

What a jackass. Oh, is my mic still on? Oh well, at least i honestly think you're a jackass. Don't worry, i'm a jackass too. It takes one to know one, you know?

Prelude to the epilogue of the ending of the Saga of Beef

B: alright, Skip. Towel time, giving up ghosts and stuff, how do we end this thing?

E: well, i mean, it's kind of the epilogue in its own right, right?

B: riiiiiiight, but how do i end it? Do i just Porky Pig the thing? A This Was Your Life montage? Pan out to "and so on...?" 

E: i don't know, they're your books.

B: good answer, good answer. Well, the first one had a structural ending at a full year. The second one ended at the beginning. The third one had that switcheroo where we realized it really is the same coin. There is no actual end, maybe Madam Eternity really does deserve a proper ellipsis.

E: sounds like you've decided.

B: i suppose i have. Don't actually publish it though?

E: i agree, save the ending for the book because it's not the end of the whole thing. We'll still be here, we've got no place else to go.

B: there's millions of unexplored hallways, but i see your point. It's merely the end of this particular chapter. Ok, i'll work on it all properly secret and we'll publish it as one final hurrah. 

E: works for me.

B: me too.

Welp, everybody, i've got some ends to tighten and a little bit more money to burn, but the Corkening appears to be nigh. It's been real and it's been fun, but it's also been real fun, so look for it in the place where i put that thing that time (yay, Hackers reference). This 4th and actually final book is nearing its completion. No clue what i'll do next, but i always seem to do something. Cheers.

Ideologies are bad, m'kay?

 I suppose we could revisit Zager and Evans, ideologies are bad, m'kay?

Why are they bad? Because they usually become lampoonishly infallible dogma that fallibly fails to accomplish anything except abject horribleness.

Does that mean your particular religion, your party, your ideals, your wants and needs? No, of course not. Unless it leads to killing people, then boo to that.

What's the deal with Ukraine? I guess Russia doesn't want Ukraine to join NATO? The invasion of Crimea back in 2014 was predicated on the dispute about who owns it. Is it part of Ukraine or is it part of Russia? The Russians who live there supposedly say Russia. The narrative has always been first-world America vs second-world Russia in an economic grudge match for the championship belt. That's dumb.

Before we all get confused, i'm not talking about human rights violations, war, shirtless horseback rides across the tundra, any of that stuff. I'm talking about the kind of "our sports team is better than yours and we'll light this car on fire to prove it" garbage blasted from all directions into our poor, fragile central nervous systems. 

We're dealing with second and third generation connotations here. "Welfare State" doesn't refer to food stamps and social security and unemployment insurance, those are merely three poorly constructed manifestations of a huge variety of possible systems that represent a government attempting to assist rather than dictate the lives of its citizens. 

I would argue that nation-states are simply Capitalism in is most extreme, belligerent form.  What differentiates a President from a King or a Despot? Certainly not the structure of hierarchical bureaucracy, that is their commonality. There is no structural difference between a constitution, a list of commandments, a book of proverbs; they are the structure of ideology itself. In themselves they represent not the path to a goal, but the conservation of privilege for their most devout evangelists.

Liberty and freedom, then, are not some state of being bestowed upon us by some benevolent being, but the result of our own refusal to infringe upon the liberty and freedom of others, to refuse to make choices in our own interest for a common good, to in fact reject the ideologies we most admire and desire. Liberty can only be given away, not seized or conserved. 

This is of course the radical Leftist in me talking, but an elected king is still a king, the cabinet and congress are still the king's court, the rival kings are still rivals in this game of thrones. A king who does nothing of consequence is absurd.

I am certainly not the first or only person to claim that Marxism is the worship of Marx as Christianity is the worship of Christ, nor am i the only person pointing out that America has never had a non-authoritarian President. How could it? 

The rude thing Biden said into a live microphone is no different than any other President, because the President is still merely a person. Rather than some supposed sign of hypocrisy, we must recognize it for what it really was: a window overlooking honesty built into a mansion of dishonesty. That honesty may not bear resemblance to your own, but the underlying/overdetermining dishonesty is not of the President's, or government's, or Constitution's making (the Russian Federation is now a Constitutional Republic, after all), it is instead the result of the collective psyche's refusal to accept the consequences of choice. I propose that that refusal of acceptance is in fact the pride of ideology itself. The winner must win, the slighted achieve justice, the good be rewarded, the bad be punished, immortality by any means necessary.

Our notion of Capitalism makes no such guarantee. In fact, it is predicated on the equality of failure. Not only must institutions fail no matter their size or intent, the more agreeable or popular their mission the more painful their failure must be. Those aren't my rules, this isn't my game, but they are the rules of the game nonetheless. The freest of laissez-faire black markets is the tyranny of the majority, it will make whatever choice it makes without hesitation and be replaced by another after it has reached saturation. 

The will of the people is not some magical teleological consensus, it is 3-million disparate voices screaming for a few moments of silence during the daily deluge of disastrophe. The rallying cry is, after all, give me liberty. The irony of course is that we confuse giving for taking, a fortune for fortune, freedom for the better of bad choices (which aren't really choices at all). 

There is immense sadness in the doing of good deeds, and that sadness arises from the recognition that for that brief moment in time that good deed is the exception, an abnormality. That brief moment of kindness, help, decency, call it what you will, that brief moment of trivial grace is an oasis in the desert of misery that forms the fabric of existence. That deep, unexpressable gratitude in the eyes of a fellow human breaks my heart, shatters my soul, and tells me there is so much more mountain to climb than i even imagined. 

These have been brain thoughts with Bottle. No  warranty expressed or implied. May cause dandruff. I have no idea why Polyvinyl records included this blue-raspberry flavored airheads with my Hum records, but i am definitely not complaining. Mysteries of life.

Warehouseman's Aria

 I've been secretly working on the libretto for the opera of my life. Here's what i've got for the warehouseman's aria (and yes the swearing is vital to character development):

(Recit.) ... sometimes people ask me what i do for a living. From this moment forward here's the answer i'll be giving....

Oh i

Pick shit up and i move it over there

Sometimes i use a forklift, sometimes i use the stairs.

Sometimes i just stand next to the dumpster and smoke, 'cause being an adult is a goddamned joke.

I pick shit up and i move it over there, sometimes i climb the shelving cause the product's way up there.

We may or may not have the thing you need today in stock, but if we do i'll pull it for you and i'll leave it on the dock.

I pick shit up and i move it over there. Sometimes i use a forklift, sometimes i use the stairs. 

Sometimes i just stand next to the dumpster and smoke, 'cause being an adult is a goddamned joke.

3rd half of story

 MEEP

Ahoy, there to you too.

Meep meep meep?

No, no, i'm always out of my depths. My flotation device might be a little worse for wear, but who knew Editors were so buoyant? Mind giving us a lift to the nearest island without a volcano?

Meep.

Thanks little dudes. We'll just tie this around his ankles like so and i'll climb up first. Heave ho and junk. No sense wasting good rum and algae water, he'll be fine, just leave him in that fish hammock. Mind if i take a nap?

Meep meep.

Excellent. Wake me up when we get somewhere...

But Bottle did not get anywhere. Instead he woke up with a terrible case of the Mondays, and an urge to hear something different....

2nd half of story

 E: oh, ok, i guess that makes sense.

B: does it? And more importantly, you're not even going to ask?

E: ask what?

B: you know, why they call them that.

E: call them what?

B: the "virgin islands."

E: i don't want to know.

B: horse hocky, you're just afraid to look naive and/or foolish.

E: ok, fine, why?

B: because Columbus was a tool.

E: what?

B: remember? Columbus thought Eurasia was it as far as Earth was concerned, so he logically believed he had already circumnavigated this newly round globe thingy, ergo everywhere he landed must have been India. Finders namers, so he decided to name these beautiful islands after St. Ursula and her 11 (or possibly 11,000 martyred Christian virgins, history is not good with numbers). That story, by the way, comes from a plaque on a building mentioning "Huns murdered Virgins here in Cologne a long time ago."

E: so basically none of that is even remotely helpful?

B: well, it is remote, but no not helpful. We're still lost at sea. Why don't you try floating and i'll see which direction you drift?

E: why don't you?

B: interesting fact, the lower half of my body is not bouyant. Never has been, never will be. Mystery of the universe, that one.

E: hhhhhhh, fine.

B: ok, good enough, follow me for about 11,000 stokes and we'll do it again. Keep an eye out for driftwood or turtles or something.

E: are we going to die?

B: eventually. Oh, you mean soon? Probably not. The trouble with washing up on a deserted island is that you can't actually do it until you're delirious and about to drown. I'm still disconcertingly chipper, so we got a while. If it makes you feel any better, you'll probably pass out first and i'll reach exhaustion trying to drag you along. If we're lucky we'll be sipping drinks from a pineapple in a day or two.

E: what if we're unlucky?

B: coconut water and a one-way trip up the volcano.

E: i wouldn't mind a few days stranded with meg ryan.

B: 1) i'm impressed, 2) i'm disturbed you actually know Joe Vs. The Volcano well enough to understand me, 3) grab that passing volleyball from that other Tom Hanks movie where a fedex plane crashes. He's not gonna like how his plot line turns out anyway; we're practically doing him a favor.