Author Archives: heavymetalheartbreaker

Feb 08 2013
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PUSHUPS

Backstage at BB Kings, November 2012. Photo courtesy of Chris Klettermayer.

On my birthday, I went to the library in my neighborhood for the first time. It was boiling hot inside, and there were a bunch of people sitting around looking stressed out. Who goes to the library anymore? On my birthday, it was the elderly, local students, and me. It felt like how I imagine 1974. It felt like the world of CBS FM. Computers were a negligible presence, and the books themselves were yellow and middle-aged.

I sat down in the periodicals room and opened my composition notebook. I was trying to finish new lyrics; that was why I came to the library on my birthday. I was hoping that the purgatorial vibe of the library would give me something. It felt like an Edward Hopper painting in the daytime. I was looking to find rhymes in that. One guy near me was wearing a sea captain’s hat and slept sitting up in his chair. The man next to me was reading two giant reference books about cancer. That’s not you, I said to myself. You are here today to turn 26 and write lyrics.

Later that day, after I had put together 2 verses at the library and come back to my apartment, I decided to do 70 pushups in a row without stopping. 70 pushups would not be my lifetime record, but it would be close—I once did 75 in a hotel room in August, 2011. Sometime after setting that record, I started walking around as a guy who could do 75 pushups in a row, and then I stopped doing them, and then I lost the ability. I started trying again this past summer, when I went to Morocco with my girlfriend. On our first day, with no phone and no friends in a foreign country, I realized that it was just the 2 of us and our wits. And part of my wits, I decided, should be pushups. So I started doing pushups again.

3 months later, on my birthday, I was ready to try for 70 straight-through, no junk ones. Down and up, every time, with my back straight. That was the plan. Around 5:30 PM, I got down on the carpet and said to my girlfriend, “I think I’m gonna try my thing now.” I’d had reasonable success at the library earlier, and I’d had a full day to brood about the meaning of turning 26. The meaning of 26, as far as I understood it, was horrifying to me. I read somewhere that by the time George Harrison was 26, the Beatles had already accomplished everything and broken up. So I spent most of my birthday furious at that, and on my way back from the library I dared to ask whether George Harrison, at any point in his life, could do 70 pushups in a row. The answer must be no, I said.

I started my pushups by using the terror of old age to power through. The first 50 were a mostly-painless blitz of pride and self-actualization. Starting around 54, I had to slow down a little and concentrate. The next 11 took on a personality of their own. They had the feeling of a blood offering. The feeling of a painful thing I was only doing to scare away the thought of, “What if it never happens?” But I made it to 70, and the last 5 were not too difficult for me to catch a glimpse of 80. I saw the nearness of 80, and I saw the possibility of beyond. It’s not too late to dream of 100, I decided. Happy birthday.

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Oct 21 2012
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THE WILL TO LIVE

Roommate in kitchen.

I think about the will to live every morning when I check the mouse traps in the kitchen. My kitchen has 9 different traps in it, and many more units of poison. I don’t know how to measure the quantity of green poison pellets that have been dispersed throughout my kitchen, but there are a lot. Every day I wake up and check the traps, and they are always untouched. Sometimes I find mouse poops near them.

We’ve plugged all the holes, so the mouse is trapped inside with us, and it’s only a matter of time before he stumbles onto a trap. Whenever I think about this, I say to myself, “Please may it not be a glue trap.” As you may know, the glue itself doesn’t kill. You must finish the job. And I’m told that at times like this, the will to live often complicates things. The mouse may scream and have mouse-conniptions. It may drag itself through a narrow space to pry the trap off. If that doesn’t work, some mice are so overcome with the will to live that they will chew their legs off in order to escape.

This is why I pray for it not to be a glue trap. Such a grisly, soul-killing ending with those. And besides, the glue traps make me think about the horrifying powers that are afforded to mice when the will to live is invoked. The will to live can make a mouse do Jason Bourne things, or it can make a mouse do extreme auto-cannibalistic things. The will to live can be kind or unkind, Christian or un-Christian; it can be savage and appalling or it can cite scripture to suit its purpose. It is for this reason perhaps a satanic force.

My roommate runs a catering business, and one time he saw that a waterbug had gotten stuck in one of the glue traps in the basement. When he first discovered it, the waterbug was thrashing around in total madness, trying to escape the glue. The next morning it was still trapped, and it was still writhing around in the grip of absolute mania. The bug was firing every twitch and synapse that it could to get out of the glue, but it was no use. There was nothing it could do. It was just going to starve to death, and probably soon, because of how exhausting it is to be in constant motion. But the waterbug was still alive on the third and fourth days, still flailing in vain, slowly drowning in glue. And then, on the fifth day, when my roommate went down to the basement, the glue trap was still there, but the waterbug was gone.

Oct 03 2012
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BEST-LOVED SEARCH TERMS

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What follows is a list of some of the most memorable search terms that people have used to find this blog:

axl rose erection

androgynous satanist

mike tyson muscles

fleetwood mac tits

mosh pit tits

mike tyson’s brutal punch power

heavy metal boys

were there rumors of ronnie james dio of being gay

miguel cotto’s wife

happy people in mosh pits

miguel cotto wife tities

eating underwear

prince songs anal sex

mariah carey heavy metal

slayer concert tits

phil anselmo gay rumors false?

curtis sliwa relationships

leonia middle school students

Sep 03 2012
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A LIST OF SIDE EFFECTS FROM WATCHING EVERY EPISODE OF THE SOPRANOS AGAIN FOR THE THIRD TIME

(This is an incomplete list.)

1. It’s like drugs. It’s too good. Knowing that I can eat dinner and watch another episode of The Sopranos, it’s almost as though I don’t need anything else to live for. One episode can un-waste an entire day, no matter how long it took me to put on my pants in the morning. That’s how much I love The Sopranos. It is a dangerous love.

2. I’m noticing a bunch of small errors for the first time. Mostly they’re first-season stuff: the actresses who play Silvio and Big Pussy’s wives are different the very first time you see them, and some of the vocal punch-ins are a little off. Also the very first season uses more non-diegetic music than the seasons that follow. I’d never noticed that before.

3. When I play the game of “Which Sopranos Character Am I?” I’ve come to see that I’m probably Johnny Sack, the perpetual guy-behind-the-guy from New York who dies of lung cancer. He’s monogamous, he’s uptight about his things, and he’s basically in charge, but he has to play chess games with everybody to get his way. I relate to those qualities. Also he loses face for crying at his daughter’s wedding. The other gangsters talk shit about that.

Now that I’m older I can admit that I would not be Tony or Chris. I calculate too much. I have too many questions, and I have also, in my time, cried. So I’ve come to terms with the fact that I would not be one of the stars of The Sopranos, if my life were The Sopranos. I would be the slinky cigarette-smoker with bags under his eyes. I would be Johnny Sack.

4. Certain things on the show are too much for me. Certain things make me squirm with pleasure-pain. For instance: the scene in the fancy restaurant when Tony Soprano tells some guy to take off his baseball hat. This scene haunts me. The guy doesn’t want to take his hat off. But then Tony looks at him, and he takes the hat off. Afterward a waiter comes over and thanks Tony.

Sometimes I think this one scene has fucked me up more than all heavy metal music and rated-R movies combined. When I’m on the subway and I see and hear things that are the Ivan Anderson–equivalent of a person wearing a baseball hat in a fancy restaurant, I think of this scene and I am tormented.

How does a person do that thing? How does a Johnny Sack become a Tony Soprano? And why does it mean as much to me as it does?

When I talk about The Sopranos as drugs, this is what I’m talking about. It nudges my fantasies to their furthest, most infinite places. And as much as I love the show, sometimes it’s just too much. Like the flavored syrup the dentist uses to clean your teeth and gums. Sometimes that’s the taste of the thing you love.

Halloween, 2009.

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Aug 29 2012
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Rock & Roll, Secret guitar solos

GUITAR STORE CONFESSIONS

Photo courtesy of Caitlin Becker

I can count all the times I’ve been complimented in a music store. When I first started learning guitar as a kid, being complimented in a music store was an attainable dream on the list of dreams. It was among the things I wanted in a “Oh that would be nice too” sort of a way. I fantasized about it as recess from the other more extreme fantasies.

This is because a big part of electric guitar is the culture of big tits. For guitar players, big tits = shred, and shred = fancy in-your-face guitar playing that immediately shows off. If you have the big tits of shred, everyone wants to see it. But you’re not allowed to touch someone else’s big tits of shred, you just have to stare and admire it, or envy it. To put it another way, shred is obvious and powerful the way big tits are, and the feelings of attraction and confusion that shred inspires among guitarists are not, I submit to you, entirely different from the feelings many of us have about big tits.

I was 12 when I started taking guitar lessons, and my teacher back then was 13. I remember once, during a lesson in his living room, he told me that he went to a guitar store and bunch of other kids crowded around him and watched him play. “Yes,” I thought to myself as a hapless beginner, “I must have that too someday.” And it was at that moment that I first entered the gladiator’s arena and took my shoes off.

All these years later, do you want to know how many times I have received praise in a music store? The answer is 4. You may be wondering, “Is 4 a lot or a little?” You must decide for yourself. Judge my 4 how you will, with all that you know about shred and big tits.

Know too that many people who work in guitar stores are basically Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. This may explain why 2 of my 4 praises are not from playing guitar but from playing piano. I can imagine that the culture of piano is different, that there’s less silent hatred among players, less overall anxiety in the rat race for shred. Maybe because there’s never quite been a Jimi Hendrix on keyboard.

In any case, I’m not a good piano player, but it has brought me 50% of my music-store props. The first time anyone ever said to me, “Hey, you sound good,” I was diddling around on a keyboard in Teaneck, NJ. I had been playing guitar for about 8 years at that point, and I felt totally ready for someone in a music store to say that I was a shredder. But it didn’t happen until I sat down to play a keyboard, maybe because I wasn’t trying so hard, or maybe because I can only play pleasant, Paul McCartney–type stuff. It happened again at the Guitar Center near Union Square: I was sitting at a piano and people stopped and watched for a while, which counts the same as praise in my scoring system.

If I could, I would trade those for 2 more guitar praises, guitar being my main phallus and my main big tits, but that’s not allowed. Of my 2 guitar praises, one is from a guy in a store in Roslyn, Long Island, who seemed like he might have been looking for a guitar-bro. He was in his 40s, he had an 18-year-old son, but he gave off the vibe of the kid on the playground who wants to be friends more than you want to be friends. It was a small guitar store, and I didn’t want to get sucked into a conversation with this guy about his rig and his band and his dreams, so I bailed.

My 4th guitar praise, which is probably the only one that really counts, is from the owner of 30th St. Guitars, Matt Brewster, who once looked up when I played “Le Freak” by Chic. I was playing a BC Rich through a Marshall stack, which is totally un-Chic. But I made it sound like “Freak Out,” because I’ve had a thing with Nile Rodgers since 10th grade, and I even saw him on the street once. And while I was playing, Matt looked up at me from the back of the store and did the frowning nod thing.

So, to be perfectly honest with you, my 4 is really a 1. But it’s a good 1. And earlier, when I said that you yourself must decide whether my 4 counts for a lot or a little, it was really another way of saying that my 4 counts for a little. But I say too that my 4 contains 1 really great 1. So let that be known.

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Aug 29 2012
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Elsewhere On The Internet

I HAVE THIS TO SAY ABOUT NJ

Ronde Del Dia! published something I wrote about my hometown and my favorite diner, Royal Cliffs, which recently went out of business. The piece is called “RIP Royal Cliffs Diner,” and it’s also about the time I poured bleach on my leg to get rid of poison ivy, and the summer when I had to drive my friend to a bunch of psych wards. You can read it here. It’s what I have to say about NJ.

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Aug 29 2012
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OVER ON BISCUETTE: ONE SERIOUS THING ABOUT THE ARMENIANS

I got a series over on Biscuette devoted to boxing and rock & roll, including a series of boxing matches between songs with the same name (most recent bout: “Friends” by Led Zeppelin vs. “Friends” by Shalamar). But every once in a while I use the platform to say something else, and earlier this year I wrote about the Armenian Genocide, which is something I have strong feelings about. The piece is called “My Armenian Mind,” and I’m putting a link to it here.

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Apr 02 2012
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Rock & Roll

ON THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF PRINCE

I read recently that Wendy and Lisa get the vibe from Prince that he disapproves of their lesbian relationship, even though they were all in the Revolution together. That struck me as odd. In addition to being an extraordinary talent, Prince made a name for himself by being androgynous and sexually unrepentent and queer—as my grandparents would use that word. Is he really in a position to cast aspersions on the sexual proclivities of others? Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe he is afforded that position by being a Jehovah’s Witness. Or maybe by being a genius. He is, after all, my favorite living musician, and I have some reservations about speculating about his personal beliefs, even more reservations about judging those beliefs. Nevertheless, I find myself drawn to a paradox: the possible convervatism in the sexual politics of our most sexually liberated performer.

One explanation is that, actually, the conservatism was always there. To be clear, we’re talking about the man who wrote a song called “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” which he sang under the guise of Camille, a hermaphrodite whose voice was a sped-up version of Prince’s. He also wrote a song about getting sexed and pimped by his own sister, and a song that inspired Tipper Gore to start the PMRC. One of my favorite Prince lyrics is this one: “I’m not saying this just to be nasty, but I sincerely want to fuck the taste out of your mouth. Can you relate?” Yes. I could always relate. It was my understanding that these Satanic verses were, in fact, the opposite of Satanic: they were testimony that we know God by the ecstasy of orgasm.

There is one type of orgasm, however, that I have never known Prince to write about: the kind you get from anal sex. It is an omission that leads me to wonder if a certain kind of passion, the kind that dare not speak its name, has always been distatseful to Prince. Maybe, to him, it represents blasphemy: when you have anal sex, you’re doing God’s work in the wrong sort of way. A sacreligious way. Maybe even hetero couples are sinners when they try it. Of course, this would mean that when Prince sang “Sexuality is all I ever need,” he was talking about sexuality in terms more narrow than you or I might have guessed.

The handful of references to being gay in Prince’s lyrics (that I have found) do not entirely refute this theory. “Bambi,” an early song in which Prince tries to seduce a young lesbian, contains the line “Maybe it’s ’cause you’re so young.” In “Uptown,” Prince describes being asked by a woman if he’s gay, and then remarks “She’s just a crazy crazy crazy little mixed up dame,” which makes you wonder how much he was offended by the question. Neither of these is shockingly homophobic, but I do detect traces of a certain kind of straight-boy attitude, the kind that says “I just don’t get it with those people.”

But I think I’ve gone too far. Parsing his lyrics like this, trying to read his mind, is exactly the sort of thing I try to avoid; it’s one thing to judge the lyrics, another to extrapolate the man behind them (especially a chameleon like Prince). One reason I like Prince is that he has always been provocative and sly, and I would hate to misunderstand him by citing songs of his that were written in the poetic voice. After all, my single favorite Prince song ever is “Controversy,” which I have always considered, rightly or wrongly, to be the Prince-iest of them all. The first line is: “I just can’t believe all the things people say/ Am I black or white, am I straight or gay?” It is in many ways a perfect first line: daring, ambiguous, personal. And also accusatory. The subtext is “Fuck you for asking.” Could it be that the truest perverts among us are those that get hung up on the difference between black and white and straight and gay? Maybe trying to guess Prince’s innermost feelings on the subject is itself more prurient than anything Prince himself ever wrote, or didn’t write.

Which is why, for everything I’ve just written, “Controversy” is the song that makes me think I’m wrong. Even if Prince does, in whatever way, disapprove of Wendy and Lisa in bed together, the truth is probably more complicated. We may know God by the ecstasy of orgasm, but that doesn’t mean we know Prince.

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Mar 22 2012
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Boxing, Elsewhere On The Internet, Rock & Roll

DREAMS vs. DREAMS

I started a series on Biscuette in which 2 songs with the same name fight each other. In the first entry, “DREAMS” by Fleetwood Mac takes on “DREAMS” by Van Halen. FIND OUT WHO WINS HERE.

I’ve set up a poll below, because I’m curious to see where everyone comes down on this. Depending on the results, I might arrange a rematch:

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Mar 16 2012
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Elsewhere On The Internet, Secret guitar solos

NIGHTTIME MAGIC: ANOTHER VIDEO GAME GUITAR SOLO

The author.

I recorded another guitar solo over the music from Sonic the Hedgehog. I call this one “Nighttime Magic”:

Here’s the cool part: this time the solo, as well as an essay I wrote about why I record these things in the first place, has been published on Bon Mots and Blood—a blog that runs literary criticism for books and video games side by side. You can read my essay, which is titled “Sonic the Hedgehog, Masato Nakamura, and the Secrets of Cool Guitar Playing,” here.

And if you want, you can listen to my very first video game guitar solo, “Pact With Satan,” here.

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