“We’ll choke their rivers with our dead” – Bart Simpson

“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.” – Jean Baudrillard

“Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.” – Jean Genet

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl

“When you`re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.” – Daniel Dennett

“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet.” – Banksy

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so obvious as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it” – Bertrand Russell

“It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.” -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Epping Forest was still untouched across the other side of the street, rabbits, squirrels and deer were always around. In the morning my mother would walk me to school. It took me about ten minutes through the forest along a trail worn by footsteps and deer. There were pools, frog ponds, deep shadows. It was a magickal place, and a favourite haunt, I learned later, for rapes, flashing, and the dumping of corpses.” – Genesis P-Orridge

“Drr…drr…dr…” – Junji Ito

Listening to this is like drinking from a fire hose.

Most bands take time off, then release a batch of new songs (ie, albums). Luca Turilli works this formula on a meta level: he takes a LOT of time off, then releases a flurry of albums. He has truly pathological release patterns. Counting both Rhapsody albums and solo releases, from 2000-2002 he released three albums and one EP. Then, a few years off. Then, in 2006, three new albums. Another break. Then, from 2010 to 2012, three new albums and one EP. Now, we’re coming off another 3 year break. Have the floodgates opened again?

Prometheus is a monstrous effort, and ranks among Turilli’s greatest work. The power metal is still there, fused against an even expanded backdrop of symphonic scoring, as well as an electronic element we haven’t heard from him since Prophet of the Last Eclipse. There’s so much of…everything that it becomes overwhelming. This is musical Where’s Waldo – a short exercise in what it’s like to have ADD.

“Il Cigno Nero” is fast and breezy, a power metal song with a lead guitar tone so crisp and sharp that each note seems rimed in frost. “Rosenkreuz” and “Anahata” are slower but attack from about the same angle. Choruses are large and powerful, but layered with that distinctive Rhapsody intrigue that makes you look forward to your tenth and twelve listen, just so you can appreciate the final small details.

“Yggdrasil” sports the album’s most diverting chorus, and would have made a good lead single. “One Ring to Rule Them All” has a massive build-and-release in the prechorus leading into the chorus, as well as an appealing folk metal bridge. Final track “Codex Nemesis” is 18 minutes of the densest and most intricate music Luca’s composed to date. I think I had to listen to all the other songs twice before I felt equipped to understand this one.

There’s a lot of things this album is, and a few things it isn’t. It’s not a power metal assault like the final two Rhapsody of Fire albums. The guitars exist only as one instrument among many. It’s not really as much of a “band” effort as some seem to be looking for – I’ll take Luca’s word that there’s a guy playing bass along with this, because I sure can’t hear him in the mix. But that’s not what this project was meant to be. It was designed to push the Rhapsody sound as far in one direction as it would go.

Does it work? Listen to “Solomon and the 72 Names of God”, for example, and tell me. It’s not a question of whether the album has things to give. It’s a case of whether you’re equipped to capture it all. The nozzle of the Luca Turilli fire hose now stands before you, and someone just unkinked the pipe.

Eating good food comes with a price: you can’t enjoy McDonalds ever again. Likewise, reading good writers means you will no longer enjoy their imitators and ripoffs (and I hold that it’s possible for a writer to be a second rate clone of someone without even knowing they exist).

I used to read a blogger called Fred Clark/Slacktivist. He is a shitlib (look it up), but I originally assessed him as an entertaining one. He’s most famous for his Left Behind cycle, where he reviews the popular Left Behind novels page by page. (It became a bit of a mess after he changed from Typepad to something else that blows. Maybe WordPress didn’t have enough writers of color or something).

…Then I discovered John Dolan, and was struck by a sense of “wow, this is what Fred Clark was trying to be, all along.” Clark’s a Shirley Temple, Dolan’s 60-proof moonshine pulled straight out of the radiator. Here’s his article about being homeless in Canada. Here’s his article about working for the American University of Iraq. He writes extremely well, and he writes about interesting topics. The shitlibbery is pretty strong at points, but he always lays out a case that’s hard to argue against.

For more Dolan, read the War Nerd (his column under the pen name Gary Brecher), or his all-time most entertaining piece of writing, a review of that James Frey thing: A Million Pieces of Shit.

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat otter”: “There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”

Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

Any kindergartner would know that, and anyone with a flicker of life would be delighted to see a beaver and its home. But for Frey, a very stupid and very vain man, the “fat otter” is nothing but another mirror in which to adore his Terrible Fate. He engages the beaver in the most dismal of adolescent rhetorical interrogations:

“Hey, Fat Otter. He stares at me. You want what I got? He stares at me. I’ll give you everything. Stares at me….”

And so on, for another half-page. You want to slap the sulking spoiled brat. The Fat Otter should’ve slapped him with its “flat, armored tail” and then chewed his leg off and used it to fortify its “Pile with monstrous protrusions.”

After injecting copious amounts of hi-test Dolan into my brain, I re-read Clark and he comes across as a shrill button-pushy retard. Here’s his latest, trying to score some rhetorical points re: shooting sprees. “Hahaha, I’m taking the logic people use on Muslims and applying it to men!”  But that’s actually un-ironically interesting. I am curious to know why males are much more likely to be spree killers. So are lots of people. Go ahead, let’s investigate it. You’re not making a joke here.

Great how he tries to jam every fucking thing from the news into the story (Go Set a Watchman, Sandra Bland). It was a sad day when he slithered from the abortion bucket.