Death to False Metal
The summer is almost over, and what do you have to show for this season's excuse for laziness? A golden tan to hide the etched lines around your drooping eyes? Several more corrosive spots on your turgid liver? Fourteen forgotten novels and the wisdom that came with them? A belly to be proud of?

No, no, I merely jest. No darkness in the time of bright skies. No baseball either. Just small boys headbanging between double-horned finger signs while Slayer blasts our dinner's soundtrack. The realization on the other side of middle age that Philip Roth is the great American writer of our time, chronicling the second half of the 20th century by illuminating the broad political landscapes and the nuanced personal quirks of those particular citizens that must act as representatives for ourselves. Who melds the personal with the political better than Roth? Who sustains relentless psychological insight together with the contradictory nature of perspectival social truths better than he does? Who is funnier? Who raises your hackles of recognition on the page more acutely painfully than this man? Who makes it OK to feel that way more compassionately? I've heard cries about American authors' failures to address OUR TIME and that they insist on looking only in the mirror and at their own toes. Read I Married a Communist, American Pastoral and The Human Stain to be disavowed of that observation forever.

The best record I've heard in years is Slayer's Reign in Blood. Why I had to insist on an anti-metal bias all those years is just further testament to the wrongheaded and myopic taste quotient of the aging hipster still clinging to the superiority of his own taste. I usually laugh out loud at least three times during the duration of its playing, and none with irony. If I had been 14 when I was first heard it before I was contaminated with the compartmentalization of music into acceptable and noacceptable categories, I might have been a proper satan worshiper and would have been able to slaughter that evil bastard that attacked me at the Motorhead show when I was defending that young maiden's honor. Better yet, that bitch's maidenhood would have been mine.

Fucked Up's Epic in Minutes is generous hardcore, in that you can listen to it with more than just the need to salve your festering rage. You can sing along without scrinching up your face into that bathroom scowl, and you can vacuum to it.

Morrissey cannot be denied. Don't try. Get the greatest hits and let the inner gay you out for a dance around your living room carpet. At least twirl as if you're polymorphously perverse.

Steve Earle is too earnest by 4 but the man is a consistently great songwriter. "John Walker Blues" is a haunting, gorgeous classic that could only have been misconstrued by the same condemners of art who didn't understand The Last Temptation of Christ. Or anybody who doesn't fathom irony. Or most of our dads.

I like to listen to Deicide while I'm on the stairmaster at the gym looking at the inevitable decay of moms' bodies. I find it comforting.

Philip K. Dick is terribly overrated, as far too much of his work is pedestrian sci fi with a dash of psychological horror. He does, however, hit on occasion, and it is with those hits that I'll be trading some of his stories for Gibson's in the Visions class this year. Wish me luck.

When Bass beer tastes closer to Bud than Racer 5, you know you're in the hands of IPA mania. Thank god Red Tail is considered a delicacy in Tahoe, or those late-night card games could have gotten ugly.