They sat and played their game in a bright and busy park; the old men could always be found there when the weather was good.

The game changed from time to time, sometimes rummy or crib or euchre, but they liked poker most of all and it was around this game that the most severe bets took place. The hand was dealt, their faces serious and composed. I leaned nearby on my cane, quietly observing.

?Ante up!? cried the dealer. There was a pause. Slowly, the man to his left spoke up.

?Our fifty-seventh anniversary,? he said, ?that was the last time Jeannie and I ever danced.? He sighed and paused, while the others let him take his time. ?My brother was there too. Glenn Campbell was on the record player, and we danced all night . . .?

After a moment, the next man spoke.

?Hey, Barney, remember when you and me was kids and we found that watering hole? We nearly drowned your sister goofin? off in that hole, swimmin? for hours on end and building forts. I’m gonna toss that summer; That’s the best one I got left and if that won’t win this hand for me, I’m better off without it.?

Barney cackled toothlessly across the table before gumming out a reply that suggested?mostly through vigorous nodding?that he was putting that memory on the table alongside his friend.

?All right,? said the dealer, sounding more like a circus ringleader than an old man. ?Twelve years old,? he said, ?beating the snot out of Jimmy Nicholls.?

?Who’s Jimmy Nicholls again??

?He’s the first kid that ever tried to steal my bike. I laid him straight out, boy.?

Barney shook his head vehemently, baring his gums like moist and shapeless fangs.

?Tom,? Barney’s friend said to the dealer, ?as usual I’m with him. That’s not nearly as valuable as what we’ve wagered here. George’s last dance with Jeannie and our childhood memories are worth more than a lousy fist fight over a bike.?

At this, Tom got rather flushed and I’m sure I must have too, for it was at that moment I finally understood; these poor, sad old men were betting with their own dreams and memories. This game was literally worth the very thing that raises us above instinct, that makes a person more than the sum of the parts: the ability to remember who you are.

?You guys have cleaned me out and you know it,? argued Tom. ?You’re lucky I haven’t anted my memory of how to deal these stupid cards. Take it or leave it.?

I suppose It’s best to cut the majority of the game from this account. The technical details are uninteresting at best?the game consisted mostly of similar bickering?but in short, Tom’s wager of a teenage brawl was accepted, and they played it through.

Nobody really won.

In a time when 85 per cent of the Afghani police force is illiterate, and most of your children think that ?ha ha? is spelled ?lol,? I personally couldn’t agree with the sentiment more. Pow! Take that, video games.

Miss Lonelyhearts

by Nathanael West

One of the least recognized and most formative writers of the post-war era, Nathanael West became famous for his writing posthumously. Sales of The Day of the Locust, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, and A Cool Million were disappointing at best while he was alive, though most of his stories are now films and still strike a remarkably resonant chord today.

This tale of an agony columnist from New York with problems of his own echoes Bukowski, Burgess, and Burroughs in a way That’s both surprising and yet not at all, and is (in my opinion) one of the best short stories ever written.

I Am Legend

by Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson is a hugely influential writer, responsible for inspiring such over-lauded word machines as Ann Rice and Stephen King, and this, his most famous novel, has been made into three separate films, starring Vincent Price (The Last Man on Earth), Charlton Heston (The Omega Man), and Will Smith (I Am Legend), but the original book tells the story with such detail and style as to make it a completely distinct tale.

Brilliantly haunting and nauseatingly realistic, this is the horror story of vampirism as a bacterial infection, the narrator being the only human left alive who is immune to the plague.

Insane from night-time cabin fever and wholesale daylight slaughter of the sleeping undead, he paces in an ever-tightening spiral of fear and misery beyond respite, while desperately seeking a cure for the infection.

It’s no wonder that this apocalyptic tale of inward frustration and outward terror has been so influential for so many years.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

by Laurie R. King

This is an adorable and easy to read retelling of a later period of Sherlock Holmes’s life, through the eyes of a pubescent, petulant, and brilliant young lady that the master detective takes on as an apprentice.

While It’s not exactly great literature, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is still a very fun, well-written novel that doesn’t take itself too seriously: it opens with a disclaimer that the text was found on a doorstep amongst other oddities like some rope and chunks of foreign rocks, immediately placing the reader on guard for both mysteries and clues.

Worth reading, but not necessarily keeping for a second go-round, this is a good summer choice to grab at your local library or garage sale to occupy some time sun tanning or sitting in a park.

The Resurrection

by John Gardner

An aging university professor is diagnosed with leukemia in the midst of struggling with the greatest paper of his career, the one that will put his name in the history books, and so he and his family move to his childhood home where he goes through a touching and sympathy-laden, if wordy, reawakening and comes to grips with his disease.

This is a page-turner without any real development until the last few chapters, and you’ll find yourself looking up from it saying ?Why am I reading this?? However, once the climax hits, you’ll thank yourself for sticking it out, because the ending not only explains all of the superfluous, seeming nonsense from the rest of the book, but also blows you away with the simple elegance of its message: the true beauty of life is in how it is lived.

Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is the sort of author that separates the world into two distinct categories: those who read his books, and the brain-dead masses fighting for survival in an intellectual winter, huddled around the warm glow of their cell phones and personal digital assistants.

The idea behind Timequake is a simple one: the universe is constantly expanding, and with it, time. But what would happen if time were to hiccough for an instant, to the tune of approximately 10 years?

Those 10 years would repeat themselves exactly as before, and those creatures sentient enough to be aware of it would be stuck on autopilot until the repeat finished and everything started up again where it had left off?and the impact of suddenly being in control of your own body, thoughts, and movements again would be devastatingly jarring.

This is Vonnegut at his wackily serious, philo-sci-fi best.

I was paid ridiculously huge amounts of money to ride tin cans?commissioned by the government to be built by the lowest bidder?into space so that I could come back and tell everybody how cool it was out there in the depths of airless emptiness.

It was while I floated in the vast vacuum beyond all that we know, that I began thinking about how messed up everything was everywhere except where there wasn’t anything, and eventually came to the conclusion that humankind needed to move to outer space in order to reinvent itself and be thoroughly rid of earthbound issues like pollution, paranoia, and Maury Povich.

Of course, I’m sure most of you are familiar with my failed campaign for prime minister of North America, and the tremendously inappropriate slogan my staff and I chose for the project: ?You suck and so does the vacuum of space, so why not move there?? which was entirely based on some mildly delusional rantings I managed to scribble on NASA toilet paper while space traveling.

I understand now that it was necessary to make an example of me and my anti-social space fever by forcing me to give up space travel and politics in favour of media reviews, but that still doesn’t make me wrong. Trust me, It’s easier to breathe in an airless environment than in a place so overcrowded with redundancy that bands name themselves after movies.

To quote Art Buchwald, ?You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All You’re doing is recording it.?

Flatliners

I have to start with this one because the juxtaposition is just so enormous here; for one thing, Flatliners was an extremely trippy, dream sequence-centred movie from the early ?90s starring Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, and one of the Baldwins that was about med students who killed each other and then brought each other back to life to find out what was beyond life and death.

For one thing, not only is this the only Kevin Bacon movie without any penis in it (not counting Tremors, which was all about prehistoric, penis-shaped monsters), It’s also the only movie I can think of where you actually get the satisfaction of seeing Julia Roberts die.

On the other hand, The Flatliners are also a bunch of kids from urban North York who are?and this is unbelievable in this day and age?still playing ska. I mean, I thought we worked all this out in the ?70s and ?80s with The Police and UB40: ska is over, guys. Not just passé, like bell bottoms or techno, but actually dead and gone and not worth being a part of, like the Spanish Inquisition or Three’s Company.

Yet somehow, major radio stations keep giving these perpetual 13-year-olds airtime to wank their lame stoner solos and silly lyrics about being held down by the man in their mom’s basements. If You’re going to name yourself after a movie That’s all about the horrors of returning from the dead, at least sing about zombies or something, you checkerboard-wearing ever-teens.

Holy Mountain

Holy Mountain was an inspired, shocking, and visually astounding (the sets look like Michel Gondry making fun of Salvador Dali) film from Spanish genius Alejandro Jodorowsky that got his films banned from a lot of close-minded countries that didn’t want to let their citizens see the crucifixion of Christ re-enacted by toads. Pretty much the best movie you could ever watch if you were ever an interior designer or a secret hippie.

Alternatively, Holy Mountain is an album by formative doom band Sleep that delves as far as possible into your ability to tolerate drony, annoying noises and stories about flying into the sun. While there are some elements that definitely remind one of repetitive punk and early death metal, the album stays fairly fixed on its course for self-destruction via boredom and rarely veers off course. Pretty much the best album you could ever listen to if you were ever an interior designer or a secret hippie.

Them

Them is a standout classic of 1950’s sci-fi about oversized carnivorous ants that attack humans from underground, which sadly few people have seen but which ranks with Batman and The Thing as one of the most original, creative, and interesting ideas to be hatched on this continent in about a million years and then turned into a sci-fi/horror flick.

James Whitmore does a fantastic job of being terrified of ants in this film and if you haven’t seen James Whitmore run away from ants, then you haven’t lived.

However, Them is also the most essential album of King Diamond’s expansive career, about a haunted house where his family gets murdered by ghosts and his grandma drinks blood tea. Incest, spying through keyholes, and operatic arias and solos that border on manic make this an incomparably necessary item in the King catalogue.

Sting

The Sting is a classic film starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman hustling a rich guy on a horse race. It’s a bit too long but there?re plenty of gangsters reciting pithy witticisms with absurdly over-the-top accents.

Unfortunately, Sting is also the guy that thought that forming The Police was a good idea. Look, Q107, I don’t care what friggin? dress Roxanne wears, just stop playing the song already.

Franz Ferdinand

Franz Ferdinand is some archduke guy who got shot and probably liked rolling around in money.

Franz Ferdinand is some pop band with swoopy hair and tight clothes that probably like rolling around in money.

During the process of programming a machine to select the sequences of letters to be used, somebody surely saw fit to include a statute that, should any colourful language arise from a random set of characters, it should be passed over.

Of course, as large a list as possible of foul foursomes would be desirable, to prevent the largest amount of people from being offended, so a lot of people would need to weigh in with their favourites.

Then, someone would need to enter all of the sequences to be skipped into a computer that would, of necessity, be on federal or provincial property, which means that somewhere, the Canadian government has a machine containing all the best four-letter words ever, which was paid for and stocked by us, and we’re not allowed to see these words on a license plate.

And That’s why I like music like this.

Drudkh ? Blood in Our Wells

Drudkh is the soundtrack to a wintry forest glen that occasionally hosts glorious duels. Pretty and distant piano and fiddle interludes replace the standard ?Grr grr grrr!? of black metal, and a lot of the heavy bits are modest and melodic in their own right, though it does get pretty brutal. For fans of Opeth and Dimmu Borgir bored with solos and plastic spikes.

NoMeansNo ? 0 + 2 = 1

0 + 2 = 1 is one of the best albums by one of the best Vancouver bands of all time and deserves to be listened to for a number of reasons: the music seems impossible at first, layered beyond belief with out-of-sync bass lines, wailing guitar squelches, and technical yet maddeningly simple drum beats, but somehow ends up so catchy and driving that it won’t leave your head for days; the Dylanish use of obvious metaphor is coupled with a fantastic enthusiasm and swift styling that Dylan certainly never possessed, and has a lot of weight behind the words; It’s way punker than D.O.A. ever was, and these guys never ran for office; and the list goes on.

Just trust me, this album is worth your time.

Ufomammut ? Idolum

Sometimes when I’m in a quiet place, I’ll notice a noise (perhaps dripping water) repeating rhythmically in the distance, and realize that It’s been doing so all along, only my focus changed to appreciate it.

Then my awareness of the sound amplifies it and adds to it and builds on it until I’ve got a full-fledged orchestra pounding in my head around this sound, and That’s usually when I realize it was just Ufomammut all along.

The Kittens ? Bazooka and The Hustler

This is what Nirvana would have sounded like if they were from Winnipeg and Kurt wasn’t high all the time. Pretty much the best band ever.

Morbid Angel ? Domination

I’m told that Florida has an awful lot of swamps, so It’s no surprise that the forefathers of sludge metal are natives there. This is one of the heaviest and dirtiest sounding recordings of all time, designed specifically with causing aggression in mind.

When Dr. Phil and his army of mutant counsellor-psychiatrist-self-help-gurus take over the world with book clubs and guest appearances, music like this will come with warnings like ?May cause you to destroy public property,? and ?Not recommended for anyone who wears paisley.?

Toner Low ? Toner Low

This is pure rock and roll, stripped of wanky solos and turned up to 11. Simple, unadulterated, heavy rock riffs plod along a deep trench of sludgy but compelling beats and speaker-blowing bass, marching in a cadence like horned, fire-breathing rock ants. Anything this album doesn’t break wasn’t there in the first place.

Macabre ? Morbid Campfire Songs

That’s right. An album of campfire singalongs based on the grisly true details of famous mass-murder careers. Fun for the whole family.

Entombed ? Sons of Satan Praise the Lord

When Entombed released Clandestine, the face of black metal was forever changed by the raw, heavy, and stylistically intense way the album sounded. That’s probably why nobody really expected this record to come from the same band, stocked front to back with covers of KISS, Alice Cooper, Roky Erickson, Bob Dylan, Bad Brains, and MC5.

It just goes to show that there will always be bands out there willing to undo the knots of definitions so mercilessly used to tie them down by playing punk versions of ?Amazing Grace.?

The unabashed open-mindedness of the music scene in Japan breeds jealousy in the minds of small-town dwellers and city folk alike on this side of the ocean, and once there it becomes evident why: the apparently undiscerning ears of the Japanese are actually so finely tuned that the entire country literally cannot help being cool.

I feel it necessary to dispel the rumours I’ve heard since my return from this magical land of billions of Arthur Fonzarellis: I’m not in the army, I haven’t turned to Scientology, and I didn’t start listening to country music. I was just in Japan, desperately sucking the cool from the air like the last crumbs of sugar from a bygone Pixy Stix.

This bizarre coolsmosis left me listening to so much music that I went out and bought the newest generation iPod, the model that inserts directly into your brain and never turns off, making it pretty difficult to form cohesive thoughts, let alone write entire sentences at a time.

Since any minute now I’m very likely to start screaming Three Six Mafia songs until somebody locks me away, let’s make the best of it and take a look at some of the great bands marching forward into the future of music in the brainpods of the hub of radical and the home of awesome: Japan.

Boris ? Smile

Boris has the ability to create music that, at first impression, seems to define uninteresting unoriginality in a fell swoop, but which is actually so layered, diverse, and complex that anyone inclined to label it anything less than sheer genius probably doesn’t have ears at all.

The newest album, Smile, bursts at the seams with sentimental pop, drony grunge, and face-kicking rock ?n? roll meshed together with both brilliant interludes and shockingly abrupt stops and starts. This is music for musicians.

Job For A Cowboy ? Doom

Pure effin? evil. Think Cephalic Carnage getting into a bar fight with The Locust and Burnt By The Sun.

Mono – You Are There

Mono’s simple approach to amplifier worship makes itself evident in the first few seconds of this album, and only builds as the tracks wax endlessly on in a fury of ebbing and flowing feedback loops, glorious and interlocking orchestral arrangements, and piercing piano pieces. If bands like Mogwai and Thee Silver Mt. Zion are ambient, then this is just plain comatose.

Battles ? Mirrored

Mirrored is an epic triumph from the Don Caballero offshoot Battles that rounds up all of their previous work into a living portfolio of genre-blurring, feet-moving, technically astounding grooves.

Caribou and Euphone wish they could be this awesome. Every song on this album could easily fit into any background, playlist, radio station, or record collection without skipping a beat, and It’s that incredible malleability of sound that makes this group such a success.

Disfear ? Live the Storm

Disfear is one of the few bands in this world that can actually still be called punk rock. Not many groups can get away with the fast and simple style of angry, hungover skateboarders without seeming either painfully juvenile, phony, or both, but these guys just plain rip it up and then light it on fire.

Everyone on Epitaph and Fat Wreck needs to hear this album and bring some tissues with them, because it won’t be long before they realize that they’ve wasted their lives.

Why? ? Alopecia

Though the frustrating, nasal voice and unlikely samples and time changes can be a bit difficult to adjust to at first, the unabridged talent and originality of Why? is ineffable and worth adapting for.

Touchingly humble and realist lyrics (?My copper crown’s gone green, poor me . . .?; ?Are you what church folk mean by ?the good news? . . . or are you giving me a dirty look in the rearview, clicking the button on your UHaul pen??; and ?Today after lunch, I got sick and blew chunks all over my new shoes, in the lot behind Whole Foods?this is a new kind of blues?) line up succinctly with simple piano runs and funky tambourine beats and even the occasional, well-placed na-na-na-na to make for a dazzling, if strange, record you’ll find yourself listening holes into.

Cursed ? III: Architects of Troubled Sleep

Cursed has a history of deftly blending hardcore and metal in such a way that you can never know what’s going to happen next. Their first two albums, aptly titled One and Two, helped set them apart from other hard bands by being just a little too heavy or fast or long where it didn’t fit, and this album proudly carries on that tradition, shredding the preconceptions of metal like so many blasting riffs. Killer.

In fact plenty of wretchedly unwatchable movies are awesome if you give them a chance, but because certain subjects are still considered too dark for mainline moviegoers, lots of incredible films remain buried in obscurity.

B horror has a reputation for gratuity and a lack of intelligence, and in my experience the genre offers up some of the best thoughtless indulgences to be had.

The truth is that, like rotten children, bad movies are just misunderstood and with a little bit of time and attention both can be enjoyed thoroughly until they put peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches into your VCR.

The Bat

This 1926 black and white masterpiece was the inspiration for Bob Kane’s original Batman comics. It tells the story of a masked criminal haunting an old house and its guests, and though it tries hard to be terrifying, falls just short of insanely funny.

You know those fake plastic teeth people wear to look like hillbillies? Yeah, the bad guy has teeth like that. This film ranks alongside all those Abbot and Costello horror mock-ups, and was in a sense the predecessor to the whole horror-comedy genre.

Zombie Apocalypse

No zombies, just brain-transplanted cannibals and a mad scientist. Oh yeah, It’s Italian so there are a thousand and one needless scenes of busty women getting changed into nightgowns and everyone is visibly speaking in English but for some reason still have their voices dubbed over.

Maniac

Reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, this cult classic is about an escaped murderer who apprentices with a mad scientist, kills him, and adopts his identity to avoid suspicion and further his schemes, which are left relatively unexplored through the movie.

There are some great fights with unfortunate animals visibly tied together and pretty much no cohesive story, and the main character is played by the movie’s makeup artist. This is supposedly based on an Edgar Allen Poe tale, but I still can’t figure out which one.

Dahmer

Not many people honestly want to know what was going in Jeffrey Dahmer’s head when he raped and murdered numerous young men, but this stark telling dramatically illustrates just how an insecure maladjust becomes a household synonym for evil. It seems so simple in hindsight to point out that a little gratuitous release of tension and a sense of community very likely would have ceased the whole affair before it began, and this very human portrayal of a truly monstrous person leaves you with an odd mixture of empathy and fear for the everyman.

Ravenous

Ravenous is the mostly true account of colonial cannibals in the United States. With bang-up performances from Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting, 28 Weeks Later), David Arquette (Scream, Eight-Legged Freaks) and Jeffrey Jones (The Hunt for Red October, Beetlejuice, Howard the Duck) Ravenous is, to my knowledge, only the second movie to tackle this subject, the other being the remarkably hilarious Cannibal: The Musical by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Sleepaway Camp 2

Schlock horror like the original Sleepaway Camp is only made worthwhile by the central elements of a movie like that; nobody knows who the killer is, there’s a shock ending, and lots of National Lampoon-esque moments that make you feel like You’re changing channels between movies. Part two has none of these, but makes up for it with overwhelmingly stupid death scenes: a girl gets forced into a latrine and drowned, another sits complacently while getting a hand-held drill to the face, and a third camper gets his throat cut by a toy Freddy Krueger glove. Hey, if dumb wasn’t funny, they never would have made a second Harold and Kumar flick.

Brutes and Savages

As though making a film about Africans and South Americans performing Americanized and scripted traditions and then calling it something so horribly demeaning as Brutes and Savages weren’t awful enough, this movie actually has a scene where a tribesman battles an alligator but the alligator is really?I’m not kidding here?an inflatable pool toy and the tribesman couldn’t even be bothered to be in the scene. This is a case of laughing at, not with.

Demons 2

Dario Argento (Suspiria, Opera, Inferno) has basically just stopped trying. There’s no reason given for the wild ?demons? (read: angry Italians) running around eating and maiming people, nor for the various scenes where people attack inanimate objects with potted plants. Chock full of hilarious one-liners and lowbrow special effects, this was pretty much on par with Demons.

The game changed from time to time, sometimes rummy or crib or euchre, but they liked poker most of all and it was around this game that the most severe bets took place. The hand was dealt, their faces serious and composed. I leaned nearby on my cane, quietly observing.

?Ante up!? cried the dealer. There was a pause. Slowly, the man to his left spoke up.

?Our fifty-seventh anniversary,? he said, ?that was the last time Jeannie and I ever danced.? He sighed and paused, while the others let him take his time. ?My brother was there too. Glenn Campbell was on the record player, and we danced all night . . .?

After a moment, the next man spoke.

?Hey, Barney, remember when you and me was kids and we found that watering hole? We nearly drowned your sister goofin? off in that hole, swimmin? for hours on end and building forts. I’m gonna toss that summer; That’s the best one I got left and if that won’t win this hand for me, I’m better off without it.?

Barney cackled toothlessly across the table before gumming out a reply that suggested?mostly through vigorous nodding?that he was putting that memory on the table alongside his friend.

?All right,? said the dealer, sounding more like a circus ringleader than an old man. ?Twelve years old,? he said, ?beating the snot out of Jimmy Nicholls.?

?Who’s Jimmy Nicholls again??

?He’s the first kid that ever tried to steal my bike. I laid him straight out, boy.?

Barney shook his head vehemently, baring his gums like moist and shapeless fangs.

?Tom,? Barney’s friend said to the dealer, ?as usual I’m with him. That’s not nearly as valuable as what we’ve wagered here. George’s last dance with Jeannie and our childhood memories are worth more than a lousy fist fight over a bike.?

At this, Tom got rather flushed and I’m sure I must have too, for it was at that moment I finally understood; these poor, sad old men were betting with their own dreams and memories. This game was literally worth the very thing that raises us above instinct, that makes a person more than the sum of the parts: the ability to remember who you are.

?You guys have cleaned me out and you know it,? argued Tom. ?You’re lucky I haven’t anted my memory of how to deal these stupid cards. Take it or leave it.?

I suppose It’s best to cut the majority of the game from this account. The technical details are uninteresting at best?the game consisted mostly of similar bickering?but in short, Tom’s wager of a teenage brawl was accepted, and they played it through.

Nobody really won.

There is a similar stigma today in independent music, with bands being placed not in categories of style or taste but circulation, and a certain amount of credibility is lent to those who strive to make their music as inaccessible as possible, either through low budgeting, creatively unappealing album covers, or other means. Also, food is delicious.

Gravy Train!!!! ? Ghost Boobs

Gravy Train!!!! is an extremely successful parody of itself, pumping out gaudily overhyped dance tracks about sex and hamburgers, grinding down the stage in their underpants, and basically just being all around perverts. If you like laughing and/or dancing, You’re about to be really glad you read this.

DJ Food ? Recipe for Disaster

Though this album occasionally gets a little bland at points and could use a little pepper, It’s still a tasty treat for the turntable-inclined.

Vanilla Fudge ? Self-titled

I was sure that by now the Fudge must have realized how hilarious these old recordings are, but sadly they remain a band and continue to play the same tripped-out (mostly covers) hippy poop they always did, including a recent Led Zeppelin cover album. If only it could be 1967 forever, huh guys?

FATO ? Devoured/Lapidate/FATO/Vomigod Split CD

Peterborough, Ontario’s Forever Annihilating the Obese is a grindcore band dedicated to eating a lot. With songs like ?Fast Food Diet? and ?Liposuction Fetish,? I think they probably qualify as the heaviest band ever, literally and figuratively.

Frank Zappa ? Burnt Weeny Sandwich

There is something really unsettling about Zappa’s music; it has an eerily familiar distortion to it that makes it seem like you could play it at a wedding or a punk show. Always/never appropriate.

Mudhoney ? Piece of Cake

Dear Steve Malkmus,

Listen up, poseur.

Love, Erik

Eggs ? Bruiser LP

In the 1990s there was an awful lot of really crappy music being touted as the ?alternative? to the lame stuff major labels were barely churning out, and pretty much any jerk with a distortion pedal (e.g., Everclear, Pearl Jam, Hole, Garbage, Dishwalla, Weezer) became the super-heavy new alt thing to like.

Eggs flew in under the radar with some really rockin?, genuinely awesome alternative-to-the-alternative music that absolutely nobody has ever heard of. Eggs: the other white meat.

Guns N? Roses ? The Spaghetti Incident?

I don’t think anyone, including Axl Rose, likes Axl Rose, but at least they covered songs by The Damned, The Dead Boys, Fear, Soundgarden, and Charles Manson.

Supertramp ? Breakfast in America

I will never tire of two things: this album and laughing at skydiving injuries.

Cannibal Corpse ? Eaten Back to Life

Unless you like it when your ears bleed, you probably shouldn’t listen to this. You know how kids are always trying to find the most vile and repulsive thing to be into so they can use it to horrify their parents? Well, kids that listen to this horrify other kids. I don’t think zombies even like music, but That’s just a guess.

Mike Patton ? Pranzo Oltranzista

This is an experimental vocal and orchestral album themed after an Italian menu. After that I’m pretty lost, because not one single part of any of this make a lick of sense.

The only frame of reference I have for this game craze is the mid-90s, when I was loyally obsessed with DOS-based first-person shooters. I must have spent half of 1995 playing Doom I and II, so I vaguely appreciate the borderline schizophrenia enveloping MMORPG nerds in pixelated characters. Today I wanted to travel back a little bit to those glorious demon-blasting episodes that enriched my life so much, with a look at some of the best games I ever played.

Wolfenstein 3D

Wolfenstein is one of the first and remains one of the best. You are an American soldier captured by Nazis and taken prisoner to Wolfenstein Castle, where your goal is to kill everybody you can get your sights on. This game pioneered the style that would be adopted by every single FPS to come after it; simple taskbar display, strategic game play, and fast, near-sentient enemies, and It’s still fun after nearly two decades.

Doom

Doom has many instalments, including three DOS games, several console adaptations, and a Vin Diesel movie, and it is probably the most widely recognized and copied FPS series ever. Even though most of the elements, like the main character, weapons, level textures, and game play are lifted directly from Wolfenstein, this is forgivable since they were both made by the same company.

The major difference here is that the levels in the game have become puzzle based, forcing the player not just to be a skilled demon hunter but a fast-thinking problem solver as well. The all-MIDI soundtrack has tributes to Slayer, Anthrax, Sepultura and lots of other metal gods, making it the toughest MIDI ever, including Anton Maiden, the guy who killed himself over an online argument about how tuff his MIDI was.

Duke Nukem 3D

DN3D is essentially a combination of the original two side-scrolling Nukems with the play style of Doom. Again, this is a very puzzle-based game with smart, quick enemies, but Duke introduces a lot of elements that were non-existent with previous shooters. For one thing, it has a sense of humour, stealing pithy one-liners from Ash (Bruce Campbell in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead) and other B-culture heroes, and incorporating plenty of gratuitous bitmap babes. There are also numerous bonuses like inventory (the ability to store items for later use), jetpacks (the introduction of totally three-dimensional game play), and triggerable weapons like pipe bombs and laser-activated mines. Groovy.

Hexen

Hexen is a witchcraft-themed version of Doom, where you play a hooded initiate of some kind of clandestine group out to slay monsters by magic and might. Though early console games like Final Fantasy and Gauntlet introduced medieval-themed puzzle solvers and mana?a magical energy used to cast spells?Hexen and its sequel Heretic were the only games at the time using these concepts in an FPS. Like Doom, this game is limited to moon-boot gravity (i.e., no jetpacks or jumping around; You’re stuck permanently to the floor until you fall off something) and takes itself pretty seriously, but has excellent levels easy to waste a sunny afternoon on.

Descent

Now this one really shook the foundations of first-person shooting: You’re piloting a tiny spaceship through loads of underground mines on distant planets, which means that It’s not just your standard labyrinth full of monsters?It’s played in three dimensions at all times. Adapting to the controls makes you a bit queasy at first, but this game has all the best parts of those other games and more, making it well worth playing.

Quake

There are three instalments in the Quake series, which was a revolutionary release to the FPS world; sharper graphics, simplified game play, awesome weapons like the nail gun, and a non-MIDI soundtrack written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Once these games got online they spawned death-match games like Medal of Honor, Soldier of Fortune, and many, many more. This is a lot of fun to play.

Redneck Rampage

What? A game about killing coverall-wearing, rebel-flag-flying, chicken-molesting, Democrat-voting, true-blooded Americans? Well, before we get all incensed and write congress a letter, let’s see what actual gamers think about the subject of racism in their video games. Yup, thought so: still considered fun.

Most people would arguably be able to survive a zombie apocalypse based on knowledge they garnered from a movie or show, but what they don’t know is the biggest secret being kept by the international DJ community: techno is a zombified corpse’s biggest weakness, and they can’t resist alternately dancing and falling asleep. This makes them extremely docile and therefore vulnerable.

It’s bound to happen sooner or later, so here are some of the best ways to capture a zombie’s attention and render it harmless.

M.I.A. ? Arular

M.I.A.’s repetitive dance beats are about as infectious as an undead plague; great stuff for waking the neighbours and pretending not to be white or high.

Autechre ? Untitled (Warp180)

Autechre’s complex brand of IDM (intelligent dance music, heh) is engineered to astound and confuse, leaving the listener in an attention deficit coma for hours at a time. The Humane Society is currently considering this record as a more acceptable means of putting down small animals.

The Knife ? Silent Shout

When it comes to slaughtering the soldiers of a zombie army, It’s pretty much this album or a lot of big guns and trucks. Just look at this brain-melting crap.

Mortiis ? The Smell of Rain

I’m not sure if Mortiis is supposed to be some kind of cool ogre or elf or something, but his early 90’s industrial rip-offs are so bland that oatmeal would improve them. Ten out of 10 for style, but a big fat zero for effort.

Venetian Snares ? Meathole

This is the exact opposite of Excedrin.

Scooter ? Excess All Areas Live DVD

Halfway through the first song, I went out and bought a bunch of neon clothing, got my hair frosted and my everything pierced, and got arrested for dancing in front of Winners with my boom box. I’m now enroled in a 12-step program for recovering Scooter fans, and I’ve gained a lot of weight. Hide this from your children.

Single Cell Orchestra ? The Vertical Iris

How many more rave anthems does the world really need? Stop doing meth, put down your glow sticks, and go have a shower for crying out loud. I take it back; this is too irritating to be used on zombies.

I Am Robot and Proud ? The Catch

The only way The Catch could be any more soothing is if it was a scented candle made out of Yanni.

Tribes of Neurot ? Adaptation and Survival: The Insect Project

This is a dedication to the multitude of skills and talents evolved by insects over the millennia through the sonic exploration of an insect’s world; in other words, an album of what bugs probably hear. I fell asleep just reading the liner notes.

Portishead ? Third

Apparently, Portishead can’t spell ?turd.?

The Focus Group ? Hey Let Loose Your Love

There are pretty much an infinite number of ways to make and pattern noises into songs, and the absolute worst one of these myriad methods is to take brief, somewhat soothing electronic samples and arrange them haphazardly, giving the impression of Star Trek?s sentient Computer softly weeping disconsolately to itself.

Seriously, how do these people even sleep at night knowing that they charge $20 for such utterly unlistenable pap? It must be easier to calm your conscience when You’re rolling around in big piles of undeserved money and laughing at the plebian suckers you’ve swindled with your ?art.?