Books: The Favorite Obsolete Pastime of Virgins and Homosexuals

one of my favorite novels

    
       If someone were to ask me what is my favorite novel, I would say it's a toss up between fake dog shit and the fart whistle, because I am damn sure not responding seriously to a question like that, and also because even if I cared, I'm not exactly sure what counts as a novel. I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter whether the book is fiction or nonfiction, as long as it's hundreds of pages long and nightmarishly boring.
       Well I promise you the reader that today I will be fairly to the point. I'm not going to write an entire novel about how much I hate them, because that would be ironic, though I find that almost anything can be as long as you don't know what ironic means, and believe me, I have no fucking clue. Alls I know is that I never met a book I didn't completely despise. Maybe it's because the last time I read one I fell off my crucifix. Books are old news, people. They have been since the '50's. Why anyone would bother to read one since the advent of television is a mystery to me.

A typical book-reader. Give me your milk money bitch.

       I have found in the course of my research that there are essentially two kinds of books: the kind that sucks by virtue of the fact that it is a book and also because of its content, and the kind that just sucks by virtue of the fact that it is a book. My empirical research which has been thoroughly peer reviewed by your mother and her whore friends indicates strongly that the first kind constitutes 99.979% of books, and that the second kind will always be made into a movie, so you might as well just wait for it. Of course, this does not account for the possibility you like things that suck. In that case you might want to consider an audio book. That way you can just pop that suckiness into the CD player in your suck-a-mobile and listen to it on the drive to Suckington, Minnesucka. The bottom line here is that you don't have to read if you don't want to, my friend, and frankly, you shouldn't, and I think a little less of you just for reading these words. I would respect you more if you just browsed through the pictures and grunted your approval, or disapproval.
       I see you have chosen to continue reading. You disgust me. I bet you have beady little eyes and make a face like you're sucking on a Lemonhead all the time, and I am willing to bet you have a bat in the cave. Don't use your finger. Get a Kleenex for chrissakes.
       If I had my way I would put all your precious little books in a bonfire and burn them. That bonfire could be exactly the size of Massachusetts or some other booky little Northeastern state that thinks they're better than me. Most of the books in America are already in that general area so it wouldn't be hard to round them all up. And then you wouldn't have your precious little DaVinci Code or whatever other religious-themed detective novel masterpiece or other masterpiece you carry around to feel intellectually superior.

True, my name is remarkably ordinary, but my penchant for baby beauty pageants is anything but.

       You would think there would be something vaguely unsucky about a book that has sold roughly 100 billion kilotons of copies, and you would actually be right. The cover is amazing. Let's have a look at the cover right now and see if we can't make some judgments about the book as a whole.

       This cover is incredible. It is literally burning my retinas. The fancy handwriting goes all the way to her nose but doesn't dream of covering up those elusive eyes. I wonder if she has a bat in the cave? Perhaps we'll find out after the mystery is solved. It looks so glossy and sophisticated. Hey, like the narrative.

0/10. Go shit the bed, Dan Brown

       Now let's look at something a little more high brow. Yes, I started at the bottom. I have determined from the cover that DaVinci Code is an absolute dick with no balls of a book, standing chiefly on its elements of intrigue and suspense, and some vague sexual titillation thrown in with stern religious enforcers to confuse and frustrate the audience and ultimately keep them reading. Yep, this book is a 100 percent cynical salacious cyborg prostitute designed to keep the idiotic understimulated masses turning her pages. Your mother and her floozy cohorts wholeheartedly agree that it has no merit whatsoever. So here now is something written by an Aspie instead of a genuine r-tard.

       Ok, all sarcasm aside, this book looks pretty good, but I happen to know that there is also a website for this, and that the website actually preceded the book. So this book was created as a money grab, nothing more. I see right through you, "Robert Hamburger," and I'm so sure that's your real name, too. I'd love to buy this product that will degrade in 50 years time while the digital equivalent is free and will be there long after I'm dead. In spite of all this I give it a 9/10.
      Wow, that might be a book I would actually read, but only if the internet was down and there was nothing on television. And before resorting to that I would see if anyone was willing to read it to me while I stared blankly at something.

0/10. Clearly this book is a piece of shit. They could have at least put a picture of the author on it. Like this one.

       That would have made it a much better book. I swear I should be a goddam publisher. I could have helped this guy make some actual money so he could purchase some clothes.

"...an extraordinary success" my ass

       Can't think of anything I'd rather do on a chilly winter night than snuggle up by the fire with some milk and cookies and a book about a slaughterhouse. Why don't we just bring a carcass in my home so I can enjoy the stench of death while I sip my cocoa? You're an idiot. 1/10.

       More like A Clockwork Lazy. Where is the rest of his face? And why does he have a gear for an eye? Oh, I get it, you're trying to be symbolic. Well try harder, asshole. It doesn't make sense. I wouldn't give this a very good score. Plus, I've seen the movie, and it's basically about how rape is good, in which case I would have to give this a WTF?/10

       I've never seen your face before, Dave, but I have an overwhelming desire to punch it. Oh, right, you were being tongue in cheek with the title, which is why you decided to place it over a majestic sunrise with a fucking frou-frou stage curtain draped over it. I don't know what astounds me more, your grandiosity or your disingenuousness. Fucking goose egg.

                             "I can't imagine any greater delight than coming to Independent People for the first time"                        -chick I've never heard of who apparently smiles a lot.

     
       So this guy is supposedly one of these obscure "geniuses," as evidenced by the fact that he won the Nobel Prize a scant 97 years ago in 1955. So this other "genius" named Jane Smiley, whom we are all supposed to know about, is telling us to read this. No thanks, Jane. I can't imagine a greater delight than coming to Playstation instead, for the millionth time. And frankly I'm not sure you even exist. I have never seen you on television, not once.
       I hope this hasn't been too much of a bummer. I hope this didn't make you feel like you were back in school again, and everyone was calling you a retard because when the teacher asked you a question you would just move papers around on your desk and try to buy time, hoping that the know-it-all teacher's pet would chime in, but she never did, so you were just stuck in this sort of purgatory wanting to die, and vowing never to read anything ever again after you finished eighth grade. That same thing happened to a guy I know.




Tweet

So You Think You Can Dance with the Stars of Norwegian Black Metal

                                
       If you're familiar with Norwegian Black Metal and some of its most lovable misfits then you knew it was only a matter of time before they all got together and starred in a screwball comedy or reality show of some sort, and if you're like me you were hoping against hope that they would somehow find a way of reanimating the dead ones so that they could truly all be united as one happy, incorrigible family again. Well I am proud to announce that that day has finally come.
       I understand that some of you may doubt my ability to raise the dead. I'm going to have to ask those individuals to a) try a little thing called suspension of belief and b) not be such insufferable little twats. Think you can manage? Good. Now if you are at all NBM savvy then you have heard of Euronymous. You've seen him on the cover of Tiger Beat and you've wanted to be just like him and wished you had his hair. But if you don't know about him and are too lazy to click on the link then you can just go and shit the bed because I'm not here to write a biography. In fact do me a favor and don't read the rest of this because you are completely unworthy and Euronymous would agree. So would Dead and Count Grishnackh, or anyone else from the seminal NBM band Mayhem. Euronymous started Mayhem in 1984, and had another dubious distinction of being the owner of Helvete (Norwegian for "Hell"), a record store that became the focal point of the scene. He also had a label called Deathlike Silence Productions which recorded mostly chillwave.

      Euronymous was not a very nice guy. His mother has reported that even in his early teens he would deliberately pee in the tub while she was bathing him. He was also a practitioner of theistic Satanism and a proponent of communism, not in the idealistic, theoretical sense, but in the sense of Stalinist communism, state terrorism and totalitarian rule, you get the idea. It is thought that he believed in these things because he was clinically fucktarded. Dead, on the other hand, was a more complicated figure. He was not so much mad as he was sad--so much so, in fact, that on April 8, 1991 at the ripe old age of twenty-two he killed himself by both slitting his wrists and blowing his brains out for good measure. Unfortunately for Dead's corpse it was discovered by Euronymous, who proceeded to do fucked up shit with it and took pictures, one of which would later become the cover of a Mayhem record. Euronymous also made necklaces out of fragments from Dead's skull and sent them to people he thought were cool. Pol Pot never received his, though.

 Interviewer: "What is so solid with evilness?"

Euronymous: "What is so solid about goodness then? It's just the way it is. I neither can nor will define it. It is basically a hate to humankind. I have no friends, just the guys I am allied with. If my girlfriend dies I won't cry, I will misuse the corpse."

- - - - - - - - - - 

Dead: "I am not a human being. This is just a dream, and soon I will awake. It was too cold and the blood kept coagulating all the time."

       But the most complicated of the three was probably Count Grishnackh. I would characterize Count Grishnackh as both mad and sad, and unlike the other two he was not so much into evil as he was into Germanic neopaganism and being racist. He was sad (and mad) because the Christians had beat his pagan ancestors in a game of tug of war several centuries ago, adding insult to injury by pulling them right into some mud, and they were all wearing white because it was after Easter. And also the Christians may have desecrated some of their graves, though let's keep in mind that this was hundreds of years ago, but the Count was still ripshit pissed about it so he decided to burn some churches, some very old churches that were considered national treasures, and then everyone thought he was hardcore like when Fonzie jumped the shark.

       The problem was that he was now considered to be even more hardcore than Euronymous, who had previously been considered the most hardcore kid on the block. Now there was this new kid on the block who was stealing his thunder. It didn't sit very well. And what was more, this new kid didn't even love Satan, and he didn't even have the decency to espouse Stalinist communism. At the same time the Count and his friends were getting fed up with Euronymous, because every time they burned a church he would try to act like he was all in on it and stuff, even though he so completely wasn't. Then one day it got back to the Count that Euronymous was going to kill him. So the Count decided to pay Euronymous a visit and killed him instead.

"I waited to see if he would attack me again, but he just went past me and tried to kick me, and then I just stabbed him in the head."

       Before meeting his end, Euronymous ran down the halls ringing his neighbors' doorbells, and the neighbors reported high-pitched screams which they believed to be a woman's. Not a very metal way to go. If you're going to go ahead and name yourself after a demon, you might want to go ahead and not die like a little titty-baby, especially when your opponent has decided to name himself after a goddamned orc. I think even the most casual Dungeons & Dragons player could tell you that a demon beats an orc. You have pretty much failed your whole species on this one, Euro.

Son, I am disappoint

       Well it turned out that the orc was actually named Varg Vikernes, and Varg was put on trial for the murder of Oystein Aarseth, which was the actual name of the demon. It turned out they were just two misguided young men, as in earthlings of Earth with no Middle- in front of it. And Varg was sentenced to 21 years, for the murder and a few of the church burnings, but he was released after 15.
       And Dead, despite his statement to the contrary, was an earthling as well. He was Per Yngve Ohlin, and he was just as human as any of us. He just didn't want to be, and on some level I understand. I'm not sure his explanation that the world was not evil enough for him was actually the truth, and I'm not suggesting that he was not evil enough for the world or something gay like that. I just think that in his twenty-two years he never got a chance to look at the world rightly, and I think that's a tragedy, because I believe that he could have.

Not so racist when it's Chad Ochocinco, are you, Varg?

       I've never believed heavy metal was scourge, in the United States or elsewhere, and after learning about Norwegian Black Metal I am even more convinced that it isn't a scourge, because it is nothing more than an allergic reaction to societal norms which can seem pretty oppressive, and often times really are. And I also don't think it's a scourge because it provides a vital catharsis to a large number of people, and yes a few people have killed themselves and others while listening to it, but it has probably saved more lives than it has taken. I seriously might not have made it through middle school without Alice in Chains, and I know that's anecdotal evidence, but I know there are plenty of other people out there who had a band like that, a band which was considered to be unsavory at the time but may have literally saved their lives. Another was Guns N' Roses. Now these bands are almost considered classic rock. I have actually heard Guns N' Roses on the classic rock station here. That's fucking crazy. But it also makes sense.
      Tweet