The End All Around US
I have a chapter in a new edited collection The End All Around US: Apocalyptic Texts and Popular Culture The chapter is called 'End of the World Music: Is Extreme Metal the Sound of the Apocalypse?'.
I have a chapter in a new edited collection The End All Around US: Apocalyptic Texts and Popular Culture The chapter is called 'End of the World Music: Is Extreme Metal the Sound of the Apocalypse?'.
Today is the International Day of Slayer. Here's what you're supposed to do:
DO NOT use headphones! The objective of this day is for everyone within earshot to understand that it is the National Day of Slayer. National holidays in America aren't just about celebrating; they're about forcing it upon non-participants.
Taking that participation to a problematic level
Have a huge block party that clogs up a street in your neighborhood. Blast Slayer albums all evening. Get police cruisers and helicopters on the scene. Finish with a full-scale riot.
Spray paint Slayer logos on churches, synagogues, or cemeteries.[erm...maybe not]
Play Slayer covers with your own band (since 99% of your riffs are stolen from Slayer anyway).
Kill the neighbor's dog and blame it on Slayer.
It's Shabbat of course (I myself blogged this on Friday) but what better way of celebrating Motzei Shabbat than with a blast of 'Reign in Blood'?
This is a strange project in that it's hard to tell how tongue in cheek it all is. I'm interviewed on the site as part of a panel of experts. They asked some pretty serious and challenging questions. Have a look and decide for yourself.
Although neither of these publications have much to do with my metal side, I am quite proud of them:
Jews talking about talking about Israel - article in Haaretz
Although neither of these publications have much to do with my metal side, I am quite proud of them:
Jews talking about talking about Israel - article in Haaretz
I'm a huge fan of the US TV show The Shield, which sadly came to an end recently. When I accidentally discovered that Five USA, the channel that shows The Shield in the UK, had mucked about with the season episode, it was an opportunity to dip my toe into the world of journalism. It's hardly Woodward and Bernstein stuff but it made for a fun story - read it here.
I blogged recently about the extraordinary History of Metal project. Now here's another strangely beautiful attempt to map the metal world - the Metal Cartogram
...but I didn't. The call for papers for the follow up to last November's excellent metal conference in Salzburg is now up.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it's great that there's another metal conference. On the other, the metal and gender conference in Cologne (which i will be going to) is only a month before. There are only so many metal scholars so it's probably that one or the other conference may suffer attendance-wise. Still, metal people are a committed lot, so a fair few will probably go to both (probably not me alas).
I blogged a while back here and here about the book 'All Known Metal Bands'. Now thanks to Brian Hickam (who doesn't have a blog so I can't link to him), I've found out about another, even more ambitious metal art project - the boringly titled The History of Metal:
The History of Metal (T.H.O.M.) is a large scale visual art project detailing the origins, growth, and breadth of heavy metal music. I will attempt to identify every heavy metal band that ever existed, identify different subgenres within metal and their relationships to one another, and create a collection of artworks that represents metal’s place in history, the world, and in popular culture.
I've been a fan of heavy metal music since I was a teenager, but until now I haven't taken the time to delve into the history and genealogy of this unique music genre. I took on this project largely to educate myself and others about heavy metal, as well as to bring attention to what I consider to be one of the most complex and enduring facets of musical culture.
When I originally came up with the idea for T.H.O.M., it was to be a single drawing - a giant timeline that contained every heavy metal band from the 1970's to present day, organized by subgenre. It has since evolved and expanded to include several "peripheral" pieces that investigate heavy metal's cultural presence. The project as a whole currently consists of four pieces - three drawings and a interactive Flash presentation:
It's well worth checking out. I love the idea of trying to identify and nail down the entirity of a genre in a piece of visual art. On the one hand it's as futile as trying to nail jelly to a wall. On the other, it's a suitably mythic monument to a scene that is obsessed with making its own mythology. It'll be interesting to see how the project develops.
On 14 April 2009 I presented a guest lecture at Texas A & M University entitled 'The Color of Metal: 'Whiteness', 'Blackness' and the Roots of Heavy Metal in 1960s Rock'. I hope to turn it into an article at some point, in the meantime, you can my powerpoint presentation: Download Texas a and m lecture April 2009.
I'm giving Twitter a go - my feed is here (@KeithKahnHarris)
Not sure whether I will keep it up for long. It seems like a real treadmill. In any case, my disgracefully short posts on this blog are almost Tweet-like in their brevity...
All hail Gaylord (their music is pretty good too)
Yeah yeah I know I haven't posted much the last couple of weeks - I've been away. Normal service will resume at some point. In the meantime, check out Ulytau , a not bad Kazakh folk metal band.
A few years ago, I wrote the first page of what was intended to be a lucrative blockbuster thriller and never got any further. I've decided to share it here for no particular reason.
I’m aware that this first page is not evidence of a remarkable lost literary talent - quite the reverse. It's probably representative of the thousands of attempts to write a thriller that are scuppered by the lack of a plot. When I wrote the piece (in 1996) I had a great idea for a scene and an opening but no idea how to turn them into a novel. I thought the process of writing the first page would help – it didn’t. Enjoy:
On
19th March 1996 a man calling himself Nigel Lawrence asked for a room in the
Green Guest House, Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong.
After a brief series of questions and answers, the bored owner, Rajind
Shah took a weeks money in advance and gestured towards a room at the end of
the corridor. To Mr Shah, Nigel
Lawrence appeared little different to the stream of travellers that constantly
entered and left his small set of rooms.
A week’s money in advance was perhaps unusual but even this caused no
more than a few seconds of flickering interest.
Rajind Shah did not see himself as an observer of people and had no
interest in any of his guests. But then,
the Green Guest House bore little resemblance to the grander international
crossroads clustered on Kowloon and across the water on Hong Kong Island. It was situated in Chunking Mansions, a
hellish warren of small guesthouses hostels on the upper floors and restaurants
and electronic shops on the lower. The
Green Guest House consisted of one corridor with five window-less boxes on
either side. Each contained a bed, chair
and had a tiny shower room attached.
Decked almost entirely in white tiles, the rooms were clean but lit with
a harsh fluorescent strip that made them feel like interrogation cells.
This
mattered little to the steady stream of western travellers like Nigel
Lawrence. In fact even having a room to
oneself would be seen as a luxury by many backpackers and the steamy maze of
Chunking Mansions offered a certain flavour of romance, intrigue and excitement
to some. But there was no romance in the
place for Rajind Shah who wondered whether the steady living he made for him
and his family justified a life without sun or space. And there was no romance for Nigel Lawrence
who was certainly not short of intrigue or excitement.
There
comes a point when an actor lives a part so comprehensively that he almost ceases
to be acting and on that day in March Nigel had long ago reached that
point. He had spent two months in
Thailand before he flew to Hong Kong that day.
He had done the usual traveller things in the usual traveller
places. He had trekked in Chaing Mai and
Mae Sot, smoked acres on grass in Ko Tau and Krabi and met other
twenty-somethings, students and assorted drop outs from all over the
world. On reaching the Green Guest House
he was part of the subculture with a thousand checkable stories and sightings
to prove it. Yet that day in Chunking
Mansions was also the day the acting stopped and the game begun.
My review of Jamie Saft's Black Shabbis is now up on Zeek.
This sounds fascinating (hat tip: Nicola), hope fully it will come to the UK at some point:
Egyptian artist Nader Sadek will be displaying a new performance piece entitled B’doun Wag’h (”Faceless”), this piece will incorporate a mixture of Middle Eastern culture and death metal music. The following musicians will be performing said piece.
Steve Tucker (formerly of Morbid Angel)
Flo Mounier (Cryptopsy)
Nick McMaster (Krallice)
Mike Lerner (Behold… The Arctopus)
Admission price to witness B’doun Wag’h will be a suggested donation of $5 and proceeds will go toward victims of the Darfur crisis. B’doun Wag’h will take place during an afternoon event called “It’s All Yours Now” on March 15 at:
SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves Street
Long Island City
New York, 11101
718.361.1750
For more detailed information on “It’s All Yours Now“, check out the official press release:
http://www.sculpture-center.org/pressSpecific.htm?id=12577
I know I haven't posted in ages but I am snowed under at present.
In the meantime, here's the link to an article on Anglo-Jewry that I just had published on the Prospect Magazine website.
This evening I acted as DJ while my kids (6 and 2 years) danced like maniacs around the bedroom. It was one of those times when I remembered why I wanted to breed in the first place. Here's their favourite tunes:
Toy Dolls - 'Nellie the Elephant'
Electric Six - 'Gay Bar'
Ruslana - 'Wild Dances'
Plastic Bertrand - 'Ca Plane Pour Moi'
Pre-Emptive False Rapture
Chrome Hoof: Pre-Emptive False Rapture
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