So long, suckers!

I'm out of here. At about 5:30 am tomorrow I will wake up, shower, get picked up on the way to JFK and I'm done. I'm going off the grid until next week.

Goodbye crappy day job, goodbye MySpace, goodbye band, goodbye drama, goodbye Flickr, goodbye OiNK, goodbye IM and the new virtual punch card, goodbye everything.

Yes I will have continued email access, but I am straight up off the web. If you want me, call or text me. If you don't know me or talk to me regularly, goodbye for now. I'll probably start re-posting around Wed or Thursday.

Lord knows I need a break from everything. I am coming Austin. I will be eating all of your smoked pigs, buying your cowboy hats, and as a New Yorker who has worked around Times Square for many years will photograph everything with impunity.

Stay classy, Brooklyn. I'll see you next week. For now, I'm a ghost floating through walls. I am one load of laundry away from sleeping away the wretched excess of the last week and shedding my responsibilities like a reptile. Find a way to stay Metal in my absence. Go see Sonata Arctica on Saturday at BB King's. Me? I couldn't possibly give less of a fuck. I'm out of here.

Concert schedule - Q4 2007

9/25 Steve Vai
9/26 Megadeth
10/5 Melvins/Big Business
10/9 Qui
10/15 Bad Religion
10/28 Dillinger Escape Plan
11/2 Manorexia (Jim Thirlwell) at the Whitney Museum
11/30 Ween
12/1 Mudhoney
4/1/2008 King Diamond/Kreator
6/20/2008 The Cure (I know, WTF? It was supposed to be yesterday)

Word, er...phrase of the day: Wank Mining

Best thing to come out of the Meg White fake sex tape scandal was the quote from the guy who originally posted it as a joke.

The dude itsmecraig, who is enjoying quite a bit of internet celebrity today said:

"oh shit dudes,

i found this video through random wank mining efforts and put it up here cause i figured you guys would have a laugh. it had nothing to do with meg white when i found it."

WANK MINING. Awesome. And today, a company purchased wankmining.com.

The next time your girlfriend catches you with your dick in your hand remember, you aren't "looking for porn," you are "wank mining."

Once again, awesome.

Fuck. I gotta get out of here. Is it time to go to Texas yet?

Dear leakers of music

We're having trouble again. On this day of atonement I wish to thank you for your recent new releases. Holy crap, everyone who is/has put out a high profile album really knocked it out of the park.

Helloween, Iced Earth, Arch Enemy, Monster Magnet and Down have all made amazing new records. However, letting them all drop at the same time due to internet leaks is making it very hard to concentrate on any one. Iced Earth is so two weeks ago? Helloween is so last week? Damn our accelerated culture. I should *still* be grooving on the new King Diamond but it seems positively ancient, having dropped in June.

Please internet leakers, control the valve of new music more judiciously so I can enjoy and savor these new records.

PS- Holy crap the new Arch Enemy is freaking amazing! Do you actually listen to the music, or do you just leak it? Big props for dropping the Japanese retail version which has them covering "The Oath" from KISS. I know! A Music From "The Elder" track!!! Who the hell covers Elder era KISS? But also this is the best Iced Earth album since Something Wicked and the new Helloween is quite a grower! I need to find time to let it grow!

If this embarrassment of riches has done anything, I'm back on the album! Who has time to fast forward through Deicide and TMBG tracks while on random with this many full albums to enjoy?

Genital Neon

This is what happens when you let my band rehearse on Int'l Talk Like a Pirate Day.

The drawing was a bit of a group effort with Doug drawing Jason, Keith drawing everyone else, and Jason working to make Keith's mic look more like a penis.

Click the pic for full size stupidity, suitable for framing.

We are from France

I saw this advert up on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg. I imagine since they posted it publicly, and since no one actually reads this blog anyway, I don't have to blur out the numbers. There are many funny things about this posting that made me want to capture it. The spelling errors are obviously the first you will notice. Then there is the country of origin. Who would list their nationality on a posting? Also, what Italian have you ever met who was named "Solomun?"

Who are they really? I'm guessing, terrorists, zombies or coneheads.

Your New Home

New song can be downloaded in high quality mp3 here.

To be fair this is actually something that I worked on and had up on the Myspace in a different form a few months ago.

The song has gotten a remix and a 100% brand new vocal track. This time I replaced the dopey vocal effects with proper enunciation so you can hear the whole story.

What hasn't changed is the song is still a silly stream of consciousness homage to late 80s Touch and Go records bands.

Enjoy. The picture is unrelated. It is from a goat farm I was on last week before seeing Alice Cooper and Heaven & Hell. I threw the goats at the goat and it just kept staring back at me, trying to suck my soul out through my mouth as I breathed. Goats are freaking Metal. I see why people associate them with the devil. Weird freaky gorgeous lovable creatures. Click on the picture for the full size version where you can really see the F'ed up eyes. There was also a newfie on the farm which is the most ginormous puppy I have ever crossed paths with. Although still technically a puppy the dog weighed over 130 pounds. And was wet and stinky. My friend Vince in order to try to not get dog slobber all over him raised his hand up when the dog came running. Apparently this is the command for "hug" so he got a lot more than he bargained for with a face full of newfie. Pretty rad dog anyway, even with the stinkiness and all.

Yes, this was the third time I saw H&H in the last six months. What can I say? I never thought I would ever get the chance to see Sabbath with Dio so I took every opportunity that presented itself. No, there were no surprises, in fact they cut four songs from the set. But who cares? Alice and Dio in the same night? Freaking awesome.

Also unrelated- went to the LI Roller Derby championships yesterday. It was a fun night because of the company but the game wasn't particularly notable except they kept the music going the whole time, not just in between periods. Watching girls beat the crap out of each other to "The Trooper" was freakin' sick. Even though the announcer tried to ruin it by singing along to the guitar harmonies. Actually no, that just made it all the more Metal. We were also coincidentally super close to where my parents live. We passed their house a couple of times and I took everyone in the car to the old diner hang out Shyer and I used to go in high school, On Parade Diner. It is all fancy now. WTF? It was also empty on a Saturday at Midnight. Where do the kids hang out now? Are they all at Syosset House?

Save the Gorillas

I can't live in a world where Gorillas go extinct.

Well, we'll still have Chimpanzees.......

Transmissions from Uncle Ted

It speaks! It speaks! Listen you must.

New Song- "Under the Wires"

Also up on the Myspace.

High quality mp3 HERE

Right click to download or left click to stream. If you are on a Mac, God willing you know what to do with a link.

While wrestling with a very ambitious song "Exposed" that is far from ready for public consumption, I kinda crapped this out very quickly. That is not to say that there wasn't any sweat or tears over the arrangement or the mix, but the basic structure and lyrics came in a flash. As people who have worked with me know, I love simple arrangements with dense sound layers. This song started as just acoustic guitar and vocals, and I added all the orchestral parts one by one. There are high strings, brass, stringed bass, and some synth pads. The "tropical" guitar is electric, although in context it sounds almost like a very bright acoustic guitar.

Should I add percussion? I am inclined to say no, but I was experimenting with a few hits that I thought sounded pretty good, but also made the song sound a bit Flaming Lips-y. Anyways, give it a spin. New Scream Bloody Virgin on a lazy Sunday.

In case you didn't know tonight is the season premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm!!! I am so psyched. Hopefully divorce has given him some great material.

Also if you live in the UK you are probably already watching the IT crowd. If you live in America you probably don't know what it is. Find a way to watch it. Season two is already three episodes in and they are the funniest things I have seen all year. Find them as torrents, or if you know how to spoof your IP, they stream on the BBC website for UK IPs.

I hung out with some goats yesterday, and the most ginormous puppy I have ever personally had the pleasure of petting. Stories forthcoming..........

Live Human Target

On Friday, I went to Graham's apartment to record the guitar solo for "Spray it On," a musical piece in the middle of his film. This completed all my obligations towards the movie, and just in the knick of time too, as the mix is next week. So before we got started Graham was showing me some absolutely amazing animation from a DVD box set of Soviet propaganda videos. He specifically wanted me to see a short film called "Shooting Range." The first thing that you notice is the absolutely amazing artistry and production quality. The animation, set to an amazing free jazz/freak out soundtrack, is very reminiscent of that great creepy 70's psychedelic animation. Think some of the famous Sesame Street shorts like the pinball song or Fantastic Planet.

The video centers around a young middle-class worker who is down on his luck walking around Times Square with a cardboard sign around his neck saying "job wanted." A capitalist fat-cat, who I thought didn't look nearly semitic enough, lures him into his shooting range. First he is working happily as the guy who resets the targets, but those capitalists. They will find any way they can to exploit the good workers. So he starts shooting at our middle-class hero, and the capitalist gets the idea to promote a LIVE HUMAN TARGET for double admission. I won't go any further, I have embedded the video below. Graham and I were joking about the setting and tone of the cartoon as it seemed more Russian than American in its spirit, and the themes eventually feel pro capitalist. Also, I said, if only we really had shooting ranges where you can hit a LIVE HUMAN TARGET. Well, little did I know I was less than 48 hours from fulfilling my new life's goal.

Was I the only person unaware of Shoot the Freak? I didn't understand Kristin's message that she may show up to Coney Island early to "shoot freak," but didn't think to press the issue. After shredfest (it was fine, as unpopulated as we expected during labor day with no promotion and no headliner, but a bummer that more of our friends who were in town didn't come out) a whole crew of us went out to the boardwalk to enjoy the last weekend of an un-gentrified Coney Island. Sure enough, right there on the boardwalk was Shoot the Freak, where you can shoot a live human target, albeit with paintballs and not bullets. The ten bucks I spent on 35 paintballs (and a two dollar tip so the "freak can eat") was the best I spent all day. The sight on my paintball gun worked, and I unloaded my clip into him. I probably peaked a bit too quickly, but the adrenaline was flowing as every shot landed right on the freak. Unfortunately this meant I was just standing there as he taunted everyone with pelvic thrusts and I couldn't shoot the freak in the balls. But very awesome. Capitalism rules!

Real Album Title

Has been selected. I'll reveal it soon along with the new SBV logo.

I need to finish up two songs and record 3 or 4 more. I wrote two of them today after house cleaning.

Scream Bloody Virgin in 2007, yo!