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Wed, Jan. 7th, 2004, 08:04 am
Brethren and sisters of my circle
I acclaim thee all
When guiding stars are clouded and deranged
Fear not to take my hand
The bonds of trust and unity
As gods received
Till the end. -- Emperor, "The Acclamation of Bonds".
I guess the difference between me and you is that you'll tell anyone who will listen and make sure you divulge every last subjective detail (but only after it's been through the filter of the perspective of one who truly relies on themselves for nothing and doesn't know what it's like to have no one to rely on, despite the melodramatic V.C. Andrews spin you like to put on everything). Whereas I give the barest details to two of maybe ten or eleven people who inquire on a regular basis, and I only give those sparing and cryptic answers to these people because I care about them as much as they care about me.
And I think it's beautiful that only one person right now would know exactly what I'm talking about, but I'll still get verbally bashed for it all later, despite the fact that even you yourself are ignorant of what I'm saying. This is part of what I meant before when I said life's too short to spend it all explaining shit to people. Sat, Jan. 3rd, 2004, 05:10 am
The Talon is back on the road with a new blue fender and black mirror. As long as you don't look closely in the sunlight it looks okay. The camber/toe/alignment settings were so fucked that Brandon had to actually remove the passenger side strut to get the camber angle set right. Impact damaged it, but not so bad that I have to get new ones right away. Oh, wait, I've needed them for months, haven't I?
So let's see here. That was $100 for the parts I collected and had Jamie help me put on (plus the passenger side-marker light is fucked and needs to be replaced because of a simple bracket, and part of the front fascia is cracked and needs to be repaired or replaced). Then there was the $190-something bill for alignment, which I didn't get to pay completely. They let me off because I'm a good customer. Now there's the possible price for repainting the door and fixing the small odds and ends the guy fucked up when he hit me.
The police say the guy gave conflicting stories and seemed unwilling to cooperate, not to be surprised if nothing happened for a long time - if at all. It was apparently a company vehicle and there's no way to tell if the guy who said he was driving that day was really the one driving that particular truck or not, so we have a company buddy-system at work here. And he also claimed that we stopped and talked to each other and, I quote, "everything was fine." Yeah. That's why you slammed my alignment off over 1/16 of an inch, crushed my sideview mirror, fucked my front end and door, too, right? Because "everything was fine"? You cocksucker. And to top it all off someone claimed to have been riding with him and verifies that I said "everything was fine".
Can you believe this? I can. I'm paying for someone else's stupidity and recklessness, someone I don't even know. That makes me feel like a real hero. Thu, Jan. 1st, 2004, 08:09 am
I will not reverse myself for anyone, even if it totally changes how they feel about me. Does that make me egotistical... or honest? I will willingly and quickly sever ties with someone in my life who feels strongly about me if our relationship is harmful to either one of us. Does this make me cruel... or kind? I believe that loving someone means being able to let them do what makes them happy even if it doesn't make you happy. Does this make me liberal... or mature? I think it's more important to have a healthy life than it is to have a long life. And I also think it's important that a relationship happens at all, with little importance attached to how long it lasts. Do these beliefs make me shallow, or do they make me intuitive?
You be the judge of these things as you always have, readers. I've spent so much time talking into a dead phone now that I don't expect any kind of a sane or reasonable answer from anyone in any walk of life. Yet meeting and speaking with people on here has made for a few positive affirmations of my general suspicion that somewhere out there, there is intelligent life. I like that year after year we approach one another, at times reluctant or hesitant and at other times positive and confident, and that we find empathy in one another on the rare occasions that we do. I think what terrifies me most about the human race in general is the overall indifference we have towards one another. The only life held in high regard is our own, and of course this means me as well as others. We all possess the passed-down genetic memories of struggle and conflict unique to our backgrounds. For Jewish people it's centuries of persecution that seemed to culminate in the holocaust, for Irish people the centuries of slavery and wonderfully decadent years of subsequent alcoholism that made us self-destruct repeatedly on large and small scales, for Asian people it's the twofold gift and curse of self-restraint, of biting the pillow when they should've been screaming their throats bloody. And there are countless others. Self-preservation is vital, self-interest almost the icing on the cake.
The Catholic-esque drive to make others feel guilty for the way they feel is a sick thing, and so it is also when a person consciously uses guilt as a means to make someone assimilate behavioral patterns more suitable to their desires. Who are you to change me? Who are you to defy that in which you hold such a dear, close interest? Dare I say that people don't really experience love until it's experienced as a synergystic force? I think so.
I will never understand love. Experiencing it is another story. You don't have to understand it to know its power. And you don't have to understand electricity to know that it shocks and kills and is fully capable of setting your miserable corpse on fire after you're a piece of human toast. Tue, Dec. 30th, 2003, 07:18 am
Mon, Dec. 29th, 2003, 06:18 am
Wow. Some people are open to the worst kind of influence. I'm almost hurt. Sun, Dec. 28th, 2003, 08:07 am
Taken at face value this year was not a bad year. Looking below the surface one could say it was a horrible year. In all it's what you make of it, I suppose, and where you were in relation to me when certain things happened. It's like any other year, and despite this I feel an urge to sum it up with something simple, some consecutive text to make it all concrete. Things I've discovered this year:
- Time should not be wasted on people who take everything literally. Life is way too short to spend all your time explaining shit to people.
- People learn the most important lessons easiest through tragedy or misfortune.
- Whether we know it for ourselves or not, everything we want from life is within our reach. We just have to learn how and when to take it.
- Negative people are not to be scorned - they're in search of something (happiness, contentment, accomplishment, whatever) just like everyone else. They just have more frustratingly stupid ways of trying to find it... and often need to teach themselves a lesson through tragedy or misfortune to understand the way. While these people are often not worth time or effort to help - whether they seek advice or not - they can still make wonderful friends that you can learn a lot from.
- Common struggles bring people togther, common differences push them apart. This is the way of humankind, and the groundwork for all our desires, needs and wants was laid before we had the capacity to understand it all. This noted, it should be obvious that we'll never find what we're looking for on this side of life. We should be happy that we can make the choice to strive for something in life... whether we do it or not isn't the important part. What's important is that we try.
- People choose the easy way out of laziness, not out of stupidity. It's stupidity that makes them choose the easy way even when they know it's the wrong way.
- The more I learn about human beings, the more I hate myself for being one.
Thu, Dec. 25th, 2003, 08:43 pm
TERROR ALERT: ORANGE
The United States government's obsession with "terror" terrifies me. It's a Red day! No, Orange! Yellow!
Life is now a tour through a fucking Crayola factory. All we had to do was color-code it.
Thu, Dec. 25th, 2003, 08:01 am
I can't stop listening to Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. I remember being 15 or 16 years old and sitting in some old car with Jamie, dead of winter, getting stoned. So stoned that we couldn't find the keys to start the car... and then realizing after fifteen minutes that the keys were in the ignition and we'd been listening to this very album the whole time.
How warped. So much Iron Maiden to listen to, so little time.
Jamie's not much on couth, discretion, restraint or judgement. But he always has had good taste in music, other than the occasional purchase of a really bad death metal CD. When you get right down to it he had a hand in me being such a music freak, actually, because he's always listened to underground or offbeat shit. He's the only person I know other than myself that has kept Reign In Blood in the CD changer for months at a time.
For those who are wondering, I guess I'll post my current mp3 list. Most of it is just stuff I've ripped myself from my own collection. I've got about sixty or seventy CDs to rip still, so the list is a little light... :-\
There's still so much Slayer to rip, and a fuckload of NIN and Tori Amos. I'll probably post those lists separate from here if I get it all done any time soon, but I doubt I will. Every time I go to rip a CD I get a new one and get lost in it for a few days instead. And speaking of Tori the new double-disc thing she did is pretty good - I don't care much for the remastered old tracks, but the bonus DVD is well worth the purchase ($14 at Best Buy). There's a frustrating photo gallery with background music (instrumental "Putting The Damage On"), some audio tracks of other stuff with more photos going over top of them, and some live performance shit that absolutely cannot be missed by any serious Tori fan.
The "live" performance stuff was shot at sound check, so she's not only off-guard because there's hardly anyone there to hear it... but she seems a bit more open with how she does the songs. She seemed to really enjoy doing "Pretty Good Year", and she almost tore my heart out with "Northern Lad". Interestingly, "Honey" was very hollow, almost dead-sounding like she didn't believe a word of what she was singing. But that's neither here nor there, it was still nice to see the old girl after all this time. Especially since I missed her not once, but twice in a row in Philly.
( So, whatever - here's my currently puny mp3 list. )
Some time late last year or early this year, someone posted a question on the internet at either some UBB or on here. It was what I think about the Judaeo-Christian figure of "Satan". I don't know what this person was expecting, but he ended up with a 14-page rant (in 8 pt. text) on what I thought of the whole thing.
I can't find the file anywhere no matter where I look despite the fact that I only have two geocities.com accounts and the goddam thing had my name in it. Of course searching for simultanaeous use of "Satan" and "Matthew Kelly" in Google yields countless results - which is a sure sign that I'm evil. But I'd recently re-thought a few things that were said in the original document and wanted to add in a few things based on the new information.
Said new information will be recorded here until I can either find the document or rewrite it.
( The Continuing Saga of What Matthew Thinks, If Anyone Cares... ) Fri, Dec. 19th, 2003, 05:43 am
I think what someone needs to stand up and say is that there is no dramatic stage, there is no grandiose universal platform upon which each and every one of us lives our lives, connected and unconnected, so that our lower faculties may entertain themselves whilst our true consciousness rests beneath the veneer of comfortable, albeit burgeois and "democratic" American living. This is simply not an existing plane upon which we may project the impetus and thrall of our desires, one and all, though it be known as "reality" and "life" to so many people in this strange, dark era.
No, these things aren't "real". The things you "believe" in, the things you take for granted and the things you harbor "passions" for are not "real". So many quote en-quotes for such a small paragraph, and yet this is how reality lets us bend it to our own will and need. Such is the weakness of the human condition, I suppose, and even it has become a cynical parody of itself 'twixt our own endless obssession with vanity and everyone else's conviction that they are the center of this imaginary stage or grandiose platform. Even cynicism is cynical now.
Take yourself down from this platform of illusions and put yourself on another level for one moment -- allow yourself to realize how fake the things we say and do are, how empty and meaningless it all is. The functions of our daily lives can be satisfied by the lowest level of psychological and physiological reactionary systems. It's pathetic, really, how many of us catch ourselves doing something fake and brush it off as "life", as working for a "cause" or a "goal". What do you really believe in?
You're brought cold and naked into this world, alone and shaking... and that's how you're going to go out of it. What comes in between can be sweet or agonizing, we can satisfy the true human drive to learn and progress or we can just stay dumb animals; I really believe it's up to each and every one of us to make it whatever we want for ourselves. We can't wait around for others to bend like the willows the way reality can if we want it to. We can't do this because life is too short, and while we're fucking our own lives up we're fucking someone else up too.
Remember that the next time you make a decision: how many people are going to suffer for it. And don't put them on some imaginary stage, acting and reacting in a suitably uniform and human way. Let them react as dumb beasts, watch them foam at the mouth and shudder and piss in the dirt the way we all do from time to time when we forget our humanity and become what lies at the center of our wonderful existence: energy that cannot be expended at even half the rate that it generates and regenerates itself.
I think all I'm trying to say with this is that I'm not writing for myself here. I'm writing for anyone who has the eyes to read and the brain to understand what I'm getting at. Christ knows there's at least two of you out there. And you probably know just who you both are. Fri, Dec. 19th, 2003, 12:17 am
Holy fucking shit. The Mitsubishi Graveyard in New York has offered me a door for $45 and a fender for $25. The only down-side is I'd have to pick the door up myself because they don't ship. I can't imagine what shipping would be for the fender anyway, so I think I'm going to New York before the end of the year.
Man, it would really kick ass if I could get this stuff in the right color. Or even something close to the right color. Black or green. There's only one 1G DSM green color, so... fuck... oh, man... this is too much. Thu, Dec. 18th, 2003, 10:08 am
Well, the police have done nothing and contacted me not once since the last two times I called and harrassed the officer who was supposed to be finding out something, anything about the asshole that fucked my car up. Officially, I have given them until Saturday to do something, and after that I'm just going to give up and start saving money to get a new fender, new door and whatever suspension parts are going to be needed to get the car back on the road.
Unofficially, however, I've already given up and assume that nothing is going to be done for this situation unless I just go and pay for the parts it needs and do it myself. Paint can come later if it's needed, I'm just concerned about getting the car to move in a straight line and for the headlight assembly to stop falling out (the fender's mangled so bad the headlights won't even stay in - how do you like that?). So once again Matthew bends over and takes it up the ass because someone else is a dickhead.
I don't like money, anyway. I'll be glad to give up hundreds of dollars in the next few weeks. Who cares that it's money I should be using for something else, it's just the act and state of not having money that matters most at this point.
( CD Review ) Wed, Dec. 17th, 2003, 08:25 am
I had to do some things I didn't want to do last night. It makes me feel like shit to have treated someone I grew up with the way I did, but nothing short of that or putting him in the hospital would've worked. Doesn't life really fuck you up sometimes when it seems like someone else should be the one who's really hurt?
Well, some asshole in a big fucking truck almost ran me off the road today after I dropped Cheryl off at work. The fucker just kept going after nearly killing me and totaling the passenger side of my car (my guess is he wanted to merge into the lane in front of me because he was going too fast and would've ran straight into the car in front of him).
I got his license plate number though, and the State Police have it now too. And my insurance agent knows what happened. The fact that this motherfucker never even stopped to exchange insurance information looks like it could be in my favor, and it will be really good if I can go back and find a point of impact that clearly shows I was in the lane minding my own business when it happened. I doubt this will be possible, considering all the traffic that goes through that particular intersection. But I can always hope for that and a witness.
The car's totally not fucked for good, it's just been knocked out of alignment and the fender, door and mirror are fucked.
As soon as I get over this mess (or at least find out something more definitive than "We'll see what we can find on this guy," as officer Tagliaferri said)... I guess I'll be posting my review of Emperor's Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk. That and lamenting my poor car yet again. Fri, Dec. 12th, 2003, 01:39 am
Review
Emperor: IX Equilibrium
There are a few ways to sum up this album, one of the last we got from this band before they self-destructed and reformed to make Zyklon without Ihsahn. Okay, Ihsahn was like... Ihsahn was Emperor in the same way that Glenn Danzig was the Misfits: he wrote all the lyrics and most of the music. I think this album is the first Emperor album where you can hear that things were growing beyond what they felt the idea of "Emperor" represented, whatever that means - they're Norwegian, so you can't really pretend to understand them.
Much like a lot of their lyrics. When you read them to yourself out loud you must realize that this is a Norwegian guy who is probably an incredible writer. He just doesn't know how to translate it all to English! And even in the rare instances that what he translated it all to be doesn't sound right, the rhythm and cadence of his singing is still dead-on and work perfectly with the rest of the music. I've found this to be the case with 99% of Emperor's work, which is part of what makes me attracted to them anyway. English is not their native language and yet they wrote so many great songs that we can read the lyrics to.
The lyrics might confuse us sometimes, but we can still read them. ( Norwegian Ramble... )
Anyway. If you like your drum sound huge and cavernous, this album will make you harder than Chinese algebra. Trym, or whatever his name is, is definitely one of the best drummers out there right now, obviously a disciple of the Dave Lombardo school of drumming which states that it's boring to be predictable but just as boring to be pointlessly sporadic. There's a precision at work here that you don't find in many drummers. Say, the guy Andy from Immolation, Dave Lombardo from Slayer, and maybe Ray Herrera who was in Fear Factory are all in the same sort of vibe as Trym, and the fact that he uses tons of processing on his kit just adds to the allure of his sound.
Sadly bass guitar is almost nonexistent on this recording. Ihsahn shines as a guitar player and as a vocalist, but as far as his bass playing and his keyboard skills go, it's really just cut and dry. Nothing fancy, nothing special. It goes behind the scenes and gets the job done, nothing more. This kind of method for these instruments makes the skeletons of these songs, which seem so complex and morbidly melodic, actually very simple in contrast to the keyboard and bass work of someone like Trent Reznor or Jack Dangers, but then again this is a whole different world from electronically-wired punk rock or drugged-out dance music.
In all respects this album is a black metal album. It's Emperor, it's dark Norwegian music that you can either turn on and go comatose listening to or crank up and tear down the walls to. It suits either purpose just fine, which is definitely an integral part of "black metal" if you ask me. The lyrics are just decipherable enough to make you wonder, to keep you guessing what's next. But really what makes the album kick so hard is the togetherness of its sound. Despite what many early Emperor fans have said about IX Equilibrium, I sense a cohesion of sound and playing that's just as strong as anything from Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk or any other earlier Emperor release. It's just that they were all growing in directions that didn't quite fit with what they thought Emperor should be about, I guess?
Ihsahn is a hell of a guitar player - he goes from full-on shred to the sort of double-stopping funkiness that makes Dave Gilmour such a magical player. The high points of this album in a sense of great songs are probably "Curse You All Men!", "An Elegy of Icaros", definitely "Sworn" (I can actually listen to that song twice in a row, something I NEVER do), "Nonus Aequilibrium" and "Of Blindness and Subsequent Seers". The last two seem to go together in some way. I'll have to look into that sometime and see what, if any, connection there is.
The lyrics to "The Source of Icon E" were the lyrics that made me take a step back and puzzle over exactly what Ihsahn was trying to say. Parts of it make perfect sense and go beyond words, venturing into the realm of ideas and concepts rather than anything concrete. But some of it reminds me of Engrish - you know those puzzling little instruction manuals you get with stuff from Japan?
This album deserves a ranking befitting of any Emperor release, and as a result gets no rating of stars at all. This is beyond rating. This is Emperor. And like it or not, this band was one of the best at making thought-provoking and incredible music. Buy it if you've got the guts. Thu, Dec. 11th, 2003, 01:38 am
I've taken it upon myself to make a compilation disc of songs from the 60's and 70's. These aren't just popular songs from that period or unpopular songs from that period that later became cult classics - these are songs that I think of when I think of that period of the 1900s. They are definitive 60's and 70's songs, but not just because they were popular. They're definitive because they captured the essence of music, culture and what have you at that period of time.
I mean, I wasn't alive in the 60's or 70's, but Jesus Christ, anyone can hear a record and think that it stands as a monument for everything they've heard about the period during which it was recorded, right? Anyway... the following is the tracklist so far:
1. The Who, "Teenage Wasteland"
2. Billy Joel, "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)"
3. Elton John, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road"
4. Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"
5. Lou Reed, "Take a Walk on the Wild Side"
6. John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band, "Imagine"
7. Jimi Hendrix, "All Along the Watchtower"
8. The Rolling Stones, "Under My Thumb"
9. The Beatles, "Hey Jude"
10. Warren Zevon, "Werewolves of London"
I'm currently downloading the Manfred Mann's Earth Band version of Springsteen's "Blinded By the Light", and I want to find Barry Maguire's version of "The Eve of Destruction" for this compilation as well, but that's proven damn near impossible so far.
What would you add into this disc if you were making it? Most of my readers are under the age of 30, let alone 40 or 50, I suppose, but I'm interested in hearing what music you guys think defines the most peculiar part of the 20th century. For me it's always going to be summed up in the feedback and overdrive roar of Jimi Hendrix and the creepy echo of The Doors' earlier work... and the above songs, of course. I was thinking of putting some Sly and the Family Stone in there (maybe "(you caught me) smilin'" or "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey")... and it goes without saying that most of what made me really want to do it was hearing The Doors do "Strange Days". That's always been one of my favorite albums ever.
I won't be shocked if no one replies to this at all, but I just wanted to pick some brains this fine day.
-- EDIT -- Okay, now it has 16 songs. The updated tracklist is ( here )
Wed, Dec. 10th, 2003, 07:46 am
Wow.
What is it with all of these shitty 80's-new wave-rehash pop/techno radio-friendly wannbe-industrial bands that use a K in place of the C every chance they get? What the fuck is this - did I die, and is this hell? Where everyone mocks Germanic spelling? It's guys like you that make WinMX a veritable La Brea tar pit of wasted time and overblown egos.
Get a life, fags. You have successfully saved me the trouble of giving your band a listen before I decide I hate you, a priori: I didn't even have to download your predictable, wanky bleep-zap-boom boom techno whinefest to know it's going to suck because your song titles are fucking queer!
Where is the real electronic music these days? Genesis P. Orridge is off designing $5,000 rings and $600 makeup kits. Where is he with his trusty hypodermic needle and vacuum cleaner when you need him? That's real experimentation - using a fucking household cleaning product in your song and making it sound good. Well, not good, but very interesting nonetheless. And where's Paul Barker and Al Jourgensen? Beating each other off and emulating Rob Zombie. Pfff. And people wonder why I've been listening to black metal lately. It's because there's nothing out there. Trent's probably slaving over a tube of Pringles as we speak, tweaking the fader on the reverb for some bass drum that appears once in a two-minute instrumental that everyone's going to hate anyway, pushing it up to -2.23 dB, then back down to -2.37 dB, and asking Danny repeatedly: is this it, or...?
Trent, you are wonderful. I love you to death. But your progress or lack thereof is a pockmark on the face of your reinvention of music history.These epidermal infections are killer. |
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