Why I Won't Be Playing Fallout 4 until 2017 (And Even Then, I'll Probably Pirate It)

I don't often write about gaming because... well, Im not really sure why I don't write about gaming more. I'm extraordinarily passionate about gaming because I feel like it's a wildly under-appreicated artistic medium. A perfect example of my video game obsession; I was personally offended (something something "triggered!" rabble rabble) by Roger Ebert's campaign to denounce video games as a valid medium for consideration of their merit as (capital "A") Art, especially when games like Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, and The Last of Us so clearly answer the question "can video games be Art?" with a resounding "Duh."

The thing about video games, even more-so than music and film, is that industry is directly tied into their production. Very few studios exist that are capable of pumping out AAA (in industry terms; top tier, professional content) titles without budgets easily rivaling some of the most expensive movies ever made. Despite genres and game types, the largest of these games generally always compete to sell as many units as possible, meaning that the bottom line is often more important than the many aspects of the game itself.

More like "wallet exsanguination" and "malnutrition after 2 days of testing mod fixes and shit that should have been in the game in the first place."

In this respect, Bethesda, current owner and developer of the Fallout franchise treads a fine line. Their games are legendary among players for their open world gameplay and the ability to enable the user to craft the kind of roleplaying experience the user would like to have. In their pursuit of massive, open ended, open world gameplay, graphical fidelty has been something of an afterthought for most modern Bethesda titles. In the past, the rhetoric from Bethesda has been that, technologically, it has previously been impossible to offer the kind of open world games they create while maintaining "bleeding edge" graphical fidelity. Okay. That's not too big of a load to swallow, I mean, not even 15 years ago, 3D video games pretty much looked like marginally more articulated Lego minifigs, stiffly bumbling around grainy textured polygons that sort of looked like the things they were supposed to represent. Even the launch titles for the last generation of consoles look seriously dated compared to what developers were able to squeeze out of them at the end of their life cycle. Compare Call of Duty 3, to The Last of Us or even 2010's Red Dead Redemption, a game that came out only 4 years after the system launched. Graphical fidelity has made leaps and bounds in terms of improvement in just the last five years alone.

And here we get into the turd on the fine china... Consoles. It is unarguable fact that they are holding gaming back in terms of what is capable, graphically, in video games. They use outdated and cheap hardware in an effort to provide customers with a “cheap” and “plug and play” video game experience. Honestly, Im not talking shit on console gamers. I own several consoles. I love all video game platforms, BUT, it is undeniable that consoles help corporate bottom lines, not gaming as a community. The games that look beautiful on consoles do so in spite of the technological limitations of consoles, not because of them.

Now, when we talk about graphical fidelity, fewer games are as graphically advanced as The Witcher 3. Gorgeous, even on consoles, one only has to play this game on any platform to come to the conclusion that we are, undoubtedly, in the age where graphical fidelity is no longer tied to game size or complexity. So why, then, does Fallout 4 look worse than current generation, and modern PC titles, yet still cost the same amount as them? The answer is the bottom line.

Suddenly, we come to a grim realisation... In a lot of cases, Ebert was actually right. Why? Because we keep defending the bottom line. Every single time a game is released unplayable without a day one patch (-cough, hack- nearly every modern title), we defend the bottom line. Every single time a PC port is locked at 30 FPS (-cough cough- Watchdogs... -cough, sputter- Arkham Knight), we defend the bottom line. Every single time a game has major, gamebreaking bugs (-cough- every open world Bethesda title ever released for the PS3, -cough, hack- these last few Assassins Creed games), we defend the bottom line, and we tell developers and publishers that we're willing to swallow their rancid, three day tequila and taco bell bender jizz. Their lowest possible effort. Their budget spent more on stupid fucking marketing gimmicks, rather than innovative gameplay and graphic fidelity.

How much money did Bethseda make off Skyrim? 1.3 BILLION fucking dollars. So tell me, why in the actual sweet mother of pigfuck does Fallout 4 look worse than titles nearly ten years its senior? Shave the .3 off that number, make that .3 the theorertical budge that Fallout 4 could have had, and shitpunting blammo, I can almost guarantee you've got a budget that can support a new engine AND YOU'VE STILL GOT NEARLY A BILLION DOLLARS PROFIT FROM YOUR PREVIOUS GAME, a game which "only" cost 90 million dollars to make, by the way. Something, my basement dwelling friends, is very rotten in Sovengaard.

I'll be the first to admit, I'm not an industry guy. I don't head a wildly successful development company. I've never produced a AAA title in my life. Obviously, every single penny of profit doesn't go back into game development, but something... something, and I just can't quite put my finger on what, tells me, instinctively, that 1.2 billion in profit is a sum of money that more than adequately covers the total cost of development of the average Bethesda game, including programmer salaries, and extraneous costs. Fuck, for that kind of money, Bethesda could probably manufacture the game disks themselves, but here we are in 2015, and Bethesda's mouth animations are literally the equivalent of badly dubbed Godzilla movies. In fact, they're worse, because even in Godzilla movies, the actors were saying real words and using real facial movements. Bethesda just had a guy program mouth animations for the song "eep, op, ork, ah, ah" and called it a day.

When Bethesda slimily teamed up with Steam to fracture the outstanding mod community that finishes their games for them by trying to monetise traditionally free content provided by people who, by and large prefer the modding community remain unmonetised, the gaming community was in an uproar. Within a weeks time, Bethesda retracted the "experiment" (unfortunately hinting that this was not the end of their bullshittery, and that they'd be back to fuck up their mod community again some day), and gamers rejoiced in the fact that they'd come together to stick up for themselves. Now, here we are at Fallout 4 launch, and every single person who speaks up and says "Hey, uh... does anyone else notice that this game looks demonstrably worse than every other quality title on the market right now? That's a concern for many of us, and we're not getting a great value here" is fucking bulldozed by a hypetrain of unbelievable fanboyism who practically deifies a developer who has religiously fucked over its customer base in the name of profit.

This shit is like punching people in the face for pointing out oil spills because you have an unreasonable love of that stupid Exxon tiger tail novelty toy. It needs to stop. If we want better quality from developers, we need to start demanding it. We've shown that we're capable of unifying and demanding better treatment from developers. We're capable of changing the tide of the industry from moneygreedy corporatism back to developers who are as passionate about developing video games as we are about playing them. We're capable of this and more, but apparently “OOH SHINY” trumps “Hey, uh... this bag of pixels and code you just sold me is bunk as shit. Im taking my money back whether you like it or not.”

Death Warmed Over: Reposts From Beyond the Forbidden Zone pt. 1 "Fuck This: Faith No More - Tribute of the Year"

I’m not quite sure how or why, but almost every single band that cites Mr. Bungle or Faith No More as an influence so entirely misses the subtlety and nuance of both bands that, often times, when said bands mention them, I’m not even sure they’re talking about the groups I know that have those names. I’ve briefly considered that, perhaps, there exists an alternate universe where Faith No More is actually just Disturbed with better singing, but then something like Tribute of the Year comes along and destroys that theory with 2 discs worth of songs I’m exceptionally familiar with, but rendered with such surprisingly little taste or tact or knowledge of the inner workings of the source material that I almost suspect they hired M. Night Shyamalan to oversee the project and he decided that the twist ending to the whole affair was going to be “Every song sounds like shit.”


Years ago I inherited a spindle of CD-R’s from a still, to this day, unknown source. At the very top of that spindle was a disk upon whose label it looked like a stroke victim had hastily scrawled the “words” “VHGHVSLEX CRAB NICKA”. Confused, intrigued, and a little bit scared, I inserted the disk into my computer and what rotting hell was unleashed that day has yet to be banished to the nether regions of my memory.


Once, a friend and I were walking down a suburban street, yammering about this and that, whilst a mother and her small child were perambulating the opposite side of the thoroughfare. The child tripped on some errant chunk of pavement and fell face first onto the cold concrete. Silence bestilled the neighborhood for roughly 3 seconds before the child screamed “OH MY GOD! WHY DID THAT HAPPEN TO ME?” At the time, myself, my friend, and even the child’s mother laughed heartily at the shattering of the boys naive assumption that the world was a fair place, where the innocent remained so, and no harm would come to those who were themselves doing no harm. The method by which I discovered Tribute of the Year elicited a similar response from even my long jaded brain. In short, my review for this entire collection of… songs… could very easily be “OH MY GOD! WHY DID THAT HAPPEN TO ME?”, but you and I both know there are more delicious black licorice mix-ins in this shit sundae than just an anecdote about a child injuring his brain.


Years ago, Invisible Records splintered an offshoot imprint called Underground Inc. Much of the history of the label is lost to the annals and the more obscure tomes of the industrial rock history books, but as I understand it, Underground Inc. was essentially a place for industrial rock artists who didn’t necessarily want to sign with Invisible Records, but wanted wider distribution than their own niche labels could manage. In addition to this, Martin Atkins offered unsigned bands an opportunity to appear on a label compilation, with the vague insinuation that this could lead to a record deal with Invisible. The catch was that the bands themselves had to pre-order copies of the compilation at a bulk price, and then sell the product at shows to recoup their investment. Basically “pay to play”, and not exactly a guarantee of anything more than the ability to say “Yeah, my band was once on an Invisible Records related compilation,” little attention was paid to quality control, and the bands with the most money, more often than not, were the ones who ended up on the compilation, leaving everyone to hawk a product full of unlistenable junk, just so you, if you made it on to the comp, could sell your friends an album full of crap with one of your tracks on it.

Mind numbing mediocrity and, and ear destroying, unlistenable garbage since, 

oh... 2001. Probably. 

Why is this relevant, you ask? Because I can think of no other reason why 83.33% of the bands on this trainwreck even made the cut for the tribute. VooDoU, Bile, Tub Ring, Hate Dept. and Grim Faeries were either previously signed with, or featured members of established Invisible or Underground Inc. bands, but the rest of the bands were culled from the Real Notes From Thee Underground compilations (-sigh-, unnecessary use of TOPY neologisms and errythang), and quite honestly, the varying “quality” of “prodcution” and “talent” alone (and I use those terms even more loosely than my quotation marks might suggest for some of these acts) warrants a purchase point of negative money. You COULD pay me to own an actual copy of this album, but you’d be so deep into Warren Buffets pocket that you would legally be considered a strand of his ball hair after you calculate interest on the loan. But enough of my yakkin’. Here comes the pain.

VooDoU – “Stripsearch”


When I first fired this disc up, I actually thought that it was a mix CD and the first track was the original Faith No More version of “Stripsearch”, which is, by all accounts, a standout, later era FNM song. Part trip-hop, part metal, all balls, “Stripsearch” finds FNM experimenting beyond even their regularly scheduled weirdness, and the result is something like Moloko meets Crowbar without the yelling. I’m not sure if VooDoU sampled the opening keyboard flourish from the original track, or managed to recreate it so faithfully that I briefly thought I was listening to the original, but all comparison stops at that tiny detail.

I don’t know what the fuck VooDoU were going for, but “discount night at the county fair haunted house” was never a vibe I got from the original. The original is dangerous and slinky. This is like a Vincent Price advertisement for a “15 Spooky Sounds For Halloween” cassette tape. The listener is immediately assaulted by shitty production and mixing, the female singer can definitely not hit the lower notes of Pattons register in the refrain, and VooDou added a really obnoxious, completely superfluous keyboard element that sticks out like a candy raver at a lower Alabama truck stop. Spoiler alert folks, this is actually one of the better tracks on the album, so strap yourself in. This homemade rocket sled is only going downhill and into the creek from here.

Bile – “Midlife Crisis”


I’ll get this out of the way right now, I’ve never liked Bile. Nothing they’ve ever done has ever struck me as interesting, or even novel. Their production is weak and the musicianship is shockingly subpar, even for an industrial rock band (Sorry Levi, I love your bass playing something fierce, but your continued involvement in Bile mystifies me). Many industrial rock bands are capable of maximising simple structures and repetitive elements. Bile are not one of those bands.

A single in heavy rotation from the Angel Dust album, “Midlife Crisis” is heavily rhytmic, featuring Patton syncopating percussive elements of his vocals, and alternating with gigantic, operatic belts of often very strange (for pop music, at least) harmonies. Krztoff, on the other hand, literally sounds like he phoned his vocals in. Like he was lying in bed with a tub of Chunky Munky and he called the studio and they pointed the phone in the general direction of a dynamic mic. Who, exactly, thought it would be a good idea to completely re-write and eviscerate the bridge/breakdow into the most turgidly standard hunk of worthless garbage known to man? What the fuck happened to the drum track? Puffy’s ingeniously minimal syncopation, and Matt Wallace’s careful production are reduced to some cut and paste assfuckery from the preset library of whatever sampler Bile rented from Guitar Center that weekend. Okay, 2 down… 28 more to go. –twitch-

Parallax 1 – “We Care A Lot”


Oh. Ohhhhhh… Oh no. First of all, I don’t… Oh man. I don’t even know where the fuck to begin. For starters, the jungle drum loop from “Erotica”? Not necessary. Not throughout the entire song. I wouldn’t like it here or there, I wouldn’t like it anywhere. I don’t know whose idea it was to hire Marv Albert to handle vocal duties, but he and guitarist Joseph Merrick need to go back the drawing board in the day room at the home for the monstrously deformed, because “New Jack fuzz metal” isn’t a genre anyone, anywhere, ever wants to listen to. Also, this is the start of a disturbingly consistent trend on this album of singers who simply can NOT parse the phrasing, inflection and timing of the source material, for reasons I can hardly fathom, aside from the fact that so few of them got any other parts of the song right that I can only assume the only versions of these songs these people are familiar with are either general MIDI renditions or cell phone ringtones. Christ, that was bad. Like, bad bad. I would be very shocked if this album had anything worse to offer.


Tub Ring – “Mouth To Mouth”


Tub Ring actually have the distinction of having worked with Trey Spruance who produced, mixed and even performed on their 2001 album, Drake Equation the year prior to the release of Tribute of the Year. Whether or not Trey had a hand in the production of this track is difficult to say, but given some of the poor production and mixing choices on display here, I’m going to go with “no.”


Definitely one of the less shitty tracks on this tribute, it is, however, unforgivably marred by the completely unnecessary addition of slap and pop basslines where there were none before, and some wonky bullshit with the kick drum on the inexplicable jungle sample that makes its way into the chorus. Crappy drum production and pointless jungle samples are something of a theme with this tribute.

I get the feeling no one in Tub Ring actually wants to be in Tub Ring. 

Imbue – “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”


Holy fuck, no. Just… no. STOP. STAHHHHHP. More sampled jungle drums and… how, HOW do you fuck up the phrasing of the lyrics this badly? Maybe if these guys were from eastern Europe or something I could forgive phrasing this terrible, but they’re from Baltimore… which may actually explain a lot more than I’d anticipated. Terrible. Terrible is really the only way to describe this. Not to mention, the singer has neither the breath control nor the vocal range to approach the intensity of the original track. Here’s a hint; when you have to REMOVE words from the lyrics of a song because of your phrasing, you’re phrasing them wrong. Did anyone listen to this album before it was shipped?


The Donkey Punch – “The World is Yours”


I really had to resist the urge to credit this band as “Shitty Type O Negative” in the byline up there, because that’s exactly what they sound like, but I figure any band who names themselves “The Donkey Punch” got exactly what they deserved.


Honestly, I’d rather be donkey punched than ever listen to this song again, but while I’m still pissed; why, WHY would you choose to cover a song you KNOW you have no hope of replicating vocally? Patton pulls off an extremely high pitched whistle register scream that not many professional, trained vocalists could even dream of producing. “Peter Tinfoil” over here gives it a shot and the results are embarrassing, to put it mildly. At the very, very least, if you’re hell bent on covering a song, and you don’t even have the slightest chance of pulling off the most difficult part of said song, leave it out of the arrangement. I can’t believe I’m not even halfway done with the first disc of this album yet. I feel like I’ve listened to at least 15 shitty Faith No More tribute albums already. Who decided this crap should be 2 discs long? Im going to kick Martin Atkins in the nuts if I ever see him.


Daiquiri – “Everythings Ruined”


What IS this bullshit? There aren’t enough daiquiris in the universe to make this song good. This is especially egregious, because this is one of the most beautiful songs on Angel Dust, and they turned into some art school, Mr. Bungle-wannabe pablum, when the original is perfect in its simplicity. “Hey guys, you know how, like, this song is really just kind of awesome and not very complicated? Let’s ignore every single thing about it in the hopes that people think we’re smart and edgy.” Also, Singer Guy; take a knee. This is a tribute album, not a contest to see who can “out-Patton” Mike Patton, yeah? You’re at about a Peeping Tom and I need you to be about uh… I dunno… “Everything’s Ruined”, ya feel me? Are we done yet? Can I go home, or… No? 23 more tracks, you say? Sometimes I wonder why I work here.


Drowning Season – “Kindergarten”


Well, the music for this isn’t exactly terrible, aside from the obnoxious, obvious drum machine, but the singing is painfully bad, and some of the guitar effects are overly reminiscent of Limp Bizkit’s needless production ornamentation. With some more work and a different singer, this could have been a really chill little downtempo tune, but that absolutely didn’t happen, and since I’m not going to sit here and mentally filter out the awful parts of the song just so I can enjoy the bass and about 40% of the guitar playing, I’m going to just damn this track to the lake of fire with the others.


The Rib – “Malpractice”


At first, I thought this was going to be a cover of “Torgo’s Theme” from the movie Manos, The Hands of Fate. I’m still not entirely certain that it isn’t. Also, you know what this track didn’t need? Melodica. Or concertina. Or to be recorded or released or conceptualised as a project. Mostly those last few things, though.


Ichabod – “Absolute Zero”


Left off of King For A Day… for good reason, “Absolute Zero” is a boring song of interest only to Faith No More completionists. Something of a poorly executed throwback to the early days of FNM, Ichabod actually do the track a favor by giving it a grimy kind of “hardcore” treatment here, making it sound something like a rejected Acid Bath song. By the standards of any band, it’s still a bland offering and a mediocre oasis in the desert of suffering that is Tribute of the Year. If this album were a road trip from Detroit to Yakima, this song would be Wall Drug.


The Sump Pumps – “Be Aggressive”


From the first note of this song I knew I was going to hate it, but, not even kidding, this song makes the “We Care A Lot” cover sound like a fucking lost Beethoven symphony by comparison. I could be mistaken here, but this may very well be the song that Blood On The Dance Floor heard and decided to base their entire musical output upon. Every single aspect of this song is horrifically bad by any standard of measurement you care to mention.

I humbly submit that if the Sump Pumps did, in fact, inspire Blood on the Dance Floor,

that we try them for crimes against humanity. 

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to lump these last four tracks together because they’re all so spectacularly hideous that exegeting them for any reason whatsoever is of so little benefit to mankind, on both an objective and critical level, that doing so would literally waste time in a geological sense. For reference, modern humans have existed for about 250,000 years. Dinosaurs existed for about 180 million years. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. In my opinion, spending any more than five minutes writing about the remaining songs on this album would be an insult to both modern and ancient history, and a slap in the face to all that is sacred and good about life as we know it, as a species capable of abstract thought, not even taking to account that no less than TWO of the songs contained herein were already covered by other bands on THE SAME FUCKING DISC.


I know, I know… you have a burning question right now, searing your insides like a red hot poker of curiosity. “But Mort, were they better than the other covers?” Fuck you. Disc 2 next week [editor: or whenever he gets the courage to try it]. I thought I could do this whole thing in one go, but I’ve literally depleted my ability to tolerate this nonsense for at least 7 days.



(First published on Feburary 25th, 2014 on Deaf Sparrow)

When Megaton Leviathan went on tour some months ago, I got to see a lot of the country that I hadn't seen in a number of years. I'm hardly a patriot, but I love America. Not in the football, bipartisan, "tookerjerbs" kind of way, but in the way that it's a vast land of absurd cultural variety.

For about 5 years or so I spent a great deal of time travelling the states by a variety of methods. That was nearly a decade ago. Perhaps it's refracted through the lens of youthful idealism, but what I remembered was vibrant; troubled like any nation, but despite my inherent misanthropy and pessimism, there was a sense of endless wonder. Like I could travel forever and just stop somewhere for a little while and explore whenever the mood struck me.

What I saw of the country this time around was practically frightening. Large swathes of the land, even cities or suburban areas I've seen numerous times were either ghost towns, pitted with or comprised entirely of abandoned, decaying buildings and overgrown plots of land, or cities that mostly seemed either split down the middle with clearly defined areas of wealth and poverty, or cities that looked straight up on the brink of financial collapse.

Nowhere was I so shocked at this stark change of climes as I was in NYC. Bushwick was... full of fucking hipsters, and I could literally smell the American Apparel hounds circling, just waiting for all the monied people to move in so they could then price out the hipsters and what was left of the people of color and build a bunch of luxury condos. I saw this in other cities, but The City is MY city. I was born there. I may have spent most of my youth in it's mountainous backyard (aka, the Poconos), but New York runs through my veins as sure as the dwindling street hustlers, Rockaway Beach, downtown before The Great Cleansing, that shitty roller coaster at Coney Island, pizza, Times Square at Christmas, pizza...

Seriously, fuck this thing.

I moved when I was six, and I only sporadically made it back for family gatherings and the occasional uh... "recreational substances" purchase later on in my young adult life. That never stopped NYC from being my home in my heart, and I never stopped admiring the fierce, independent, artistic, working class social melting pot that city stood for. Birthplace of No-Wave, Hip Hop, co-author of Punk and Death Metal and a million stops in between... I don't know maybe I'm waxing romantic. For better or worse, New York is a very, very big part of who I am as a person. 

So it saddens me greatly when I read something like this:

https://np.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/2ryxv2/reshaping_new_york_from_buildings_to_bike_lanes/cnkpcec

(For those unfamiliar with reddit, the link at the very top of the page with the thumbnail next to it is a link submitted by a reddit user, shared for the consideration of the rest of the userbase. All the posts below it are comments and discussion regarding the original link. In this case, the link to the NY Times article at the top of the reddit page should be visited for maximum comprehension of the comment displayed beneath it.)

Not just because it literally pains me to watch my city being dismantled by corporate hagfish, but because a comment mentioned later in the reddit comment section about "national economic trends of de-industrialisation and financialisation" is unequivocally true, and the country that I also love is being further divided into a kind of modern feudalism by which it will be ever increasingly harder to escape the crushing trappings of poverty and crime unless you're either born into, or magically ascend to the domain of the wealthy elite.

As far as I can see, there is no cure for this. Money and special interest rule the land, and maybe not tomorrow, but in some foreseeable next week, we'll be a nation of homogenised, rich white people, littered with the detritus of our criminal poor, while the handful of the middle class that manages to hold on desperately tries to climb the economic ladder in an effort to escape the bought and paid for media scaremongering of the growing "poverty menace."

It's not a future I look forward to. Much as I love touring, it's also a very heavy sense of foreboding that tempered much of the enjoyment of the gloriously bohemian fix for my insatiable wanderlust that playing live music in a different city every night provides.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope digital fabrication matures quickly and becomes commonplace, and steals the thunder of laissez faire capitalism before it sucks us all into a black hole of binary social economic order. We'll probably bomb ourselves into new and unimagined realms of primitivity before that happens though, so I guess that's something to look forward to. 

And here I thought it'd be at least a month before I broke my New Year's resolution to be more positive. 

Last Night My City Let Me down

On the night of March 30th, 2014, I went to a concert to see one of my all time favorite bands nearly flawlessly perform a downright amazing set of their best material from a long and storied career. Unfortunately, something happened that drew my focus from their performance, and to a greater issue on the whole. I wish this review could have been about a great band performing a killer set. Instead, what follows is a lot of disappointment and some soul baring. Not necessarily the domain of The Cheeto Factory, but we'l return to your semi-annually scheduled buffoonery sometime in the near-ish millennium. This essay/editorial (what? I'm the editor here...) was originally posted on facebook, and is here being reposted, slightly revised, for greater visibility and posterity. [Mort]

Last night, a portion of a Portland metal audience unironically cheered when a staunchly anti-fascist, pioneering extreme-metal act made a barbed comment about Portland being the seat of caucasian racial prejudice the last time they came through town some 20 odd years ago, and it solidified everything that’s wrong with this town for me. You should be ashamed of yourself, Portland. I honestly don’t know what else to say.

Usually, when one says that their city has let them down, they mean that their sports team lost an important tournament, or one functionally identical binary political party member is elected to some ineffectual position of imaginary power in favor of the other. It’s not often that one can say they’re morally disappointed in the entire city in which they live, especially when one is something of a moral blank oneself.

Last night, a legendary British band came through town for the first time in over two decades. Over the years, Carcass have pioneered a variety of extreme metal styles, and endured hardships that would break feebler bands. Throughout all this, a major lyrical theme of the group has been the rejection of authority and systems of oppression and torture, amongst a wide variety of other topics. Rejection of authority and rebellion may very well be overblown teenage constructs that lose their potency in the stolid march toward adult responsibility, but there is a kernel of truth in youthful anarchy, and I believe it remains relevant regardless of what age you are. Nevertheless, themes of antifascism are timeless and Carcass have penned a number of very powerful songs refuting oppression and torture.

In fact, here’s an excerpt from a former Carcass website F.A.Q. regarding the matter of fascism:
“Carcass are a vehemently anti-fascist band, if you are a right-wing nazi racist - please don't bother showing up to our shows or buying our records, you are sadly missing the whole point.” [1]

And another excerpt from an interview with Bill Steer:
“[…]All of us detest sexism, racism and bigotry in general[…]” [2]

So when bassist/lead singer Jeff Walker cracked a joke last night that “The last time we came through Portland, you guys were the white power capital of the world…” and a not insignificant portion of the crowd (roughly 20-25% by my entirely non-scientific estimate) cheered, I was not only heartbroken, but confused and angered.

The metal and punk I grew up listening to, for lack of a better explanation, came from a place of moral high ground. You could listen to metal and punk and it addressed important social issues like corporatist greed, and governmental corruption. It was a call to arms to challenge the human race to deny its sad history of nationalism and persecution, and to educate people in an effort to bring about a general sense of egalitarianism. I don’t know, though… maybe I’m just some kind of idealistic prick who read that all wrong and it was only meant in a “rights for whites” kind of way. I always had friends who were people of colour who listened to metal, and it never seemed any other way to me, so the very idea that forms of extreme music are exclusionary is absurd to me.

The extreme metal music climate I grew up in had a very strong antifascist core. 90s era east coast hardcore had its share of skins, but everyone I knew was firmly on the side of antifascism, and skins were persona-non-grata at most shows. In the event they did show up, there was conflict and it was made known they weren’t welcome. Bands like Sepultura, Candira, God Forbid, Body Count, Orange 9mm, Biohazard, Rage Against The Machine (yeah, yeah, they get a lot of shit for being corporate sponsored, hyper-popular metal hypocrites, but for all the metal hipster “too popular!” chatter, I personally think they were a solid band the entire way through, and they were a great mainstream source of antifascism… also, I was 17), Corrosion of Conformity, Rollins Band, etc. all featured either strong members who were people of colour and/or an avowed message of antifascism and equality.

It was never even a question of “should I be a racist dimwit?” when I was a growing up in extreme music, I always had amazing role models who crafted strong music that fostered a spirit of equality and justice to guide me, and friends of a variety of nationalities with whom to share the experience. That, and racism is idiotic, and if you can’t see why it’s inherently, logically wrong, you have the mental comprehension of can of soda. A very stupid can of soda.

Which is why, when I discovered that a book entitled “What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman's Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal” [3] exists, it brought about a very profound sense of dismay in me. People of colour were always welcome in metal and punk events in the area in which I grew up (NYC, NE Pennsylvania, and northern New Jersey). Again, it wasn’t all copies of By Any Means Necessary and flowers and shit. We had a racist contingent and we dealt with them. Their pride was a shameful thing. They were unwelcome. That they continued to show up to events was morally problematic for us. It never occurred to me that elsewhere, hell, even in other metal scenes, racism and the pervasive creep of real (as opposed to projected, knee-jerk, “I toss this term around to sound socially proactive”) privilege cast the shadow of exclusion on people of colour in the context of styles of music I love dearly.

Since then, my unfortunately, circumstantially naïve brain has come to conclude that metal has a problem with racism (and homophobia and sexism as well, but that’s another subject entirely). In a bizarre twist of irony, given that its birthroots are blues and rock and roll, metal and its subgenres are almost overwhelmingly populated by white, male musicians, most of whom are perfectly nice guys with no fascist agenda whatsoever, who will happily tell the racist skins to fuck right off should they turn out to shows. Indeed, there are disturbing pockets of propaganda machines in bands like Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack, and Skullhead, but many of those bands are shunned outright by the majority of most metal fans. Still, statistically, when you look at the numbers, white musicians and fans comprise the vast majority of the experience. Which isn’t inherently a bad thing; it’s largely a cultural construct, especially here in the states. The problem is that white people simply don’t understand racism from the receiving end because they’ve never experienced it. That, in all honesty, is the true definition of “privilege”. It’s not a term meant to shame white people, it’s simply a very real concept. A concept that illustrates that a certain group of people will never experience the lifelong consequences of casual or outright exclusion, derision, belittlement and violence that comes from being a visible minority; plain as that.

So when I stand, in my city, amongst a group 300 strong (at least), enthusiastically enjoying the music of a band who is avowedly antifascist, and that group cracks a joke about our city's shameful past and NO ONE fucking boos or jeers, and, in fact, a largely audible portion of the audience applauds and cheers… I have no fucking words for you Portland. None at all. I’m horrified, in fact. You should just… know better.

Not long ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine who is black, and we got to the topic of his experiences of racial prejudice in general and eventually that of his experience in Portland. He told me a story about how his mom came to visit him from out of state, so he took her to a nice restaurant so they could have dinner together. Along the way, someone shouted “NIGGERS!” at them from across the street. My heart fucking sank. Imagine the experience of taking a loved one out, simply to enjoy a freedom that everyone in the country has a right to. Now imagine that experience being overshadowed by a group of ignorant shitheads shouting the most demeaning, irrelevant insult at you that you can think of. Now imagine that it’s not an isolated incident. In fact, this, and several shades of more and less subtle disparagement pervade your entire life. It changes the way you experience the world.

Could the above incident happen in just about any town in the US, pretty much at any point in history? Sadly, unfortunately, the answer is yes. The fact that it happens at all in what is, today, considered one of the most progressive towns in America is despicable. It is not an isolated story.

I hear anecdotes of subtle and not so subtle racism in my chosen hometown frequently enough that I can’t simply ignore it. I, myself, frequently experience other white people whom are very obviously racist, but since it’s at least somewhat of a social faux pas to be a visible racist these days, they couch their bullshit in socially digestible nice-isms, acting like they’re being responsible community people, helping to keep a healthy buffer from a “bad element”. And truthfully? I don’t know how much more of it I’m willing to tolerate. The fact that I tolerate it at all is a source of great internal struggle for me. Often, I’m presented with these issues in the workplace, and I’m forced to put my financial stability before my sense of equality and fairness.

It is not my lot in life to be an activist in the traditional sense. I’m a DJ, a musician and a music engineer. That’s my passion, and it’s very clearly my path in life. It’s a very time consuming career and goal and it leaves little in the way (currently, at least) for me to both make a living and support my dream and my burgeoning career. I support antifascist charities and events when I can, but being on the front-lines isn’t really something I have the ability to provide a consistent, sustained focus for. Creating awareness is my small attempt to overcome that, to help educate people when I can. It’s a personal struggle for me, as I hate armchair activism, but in essence, I'm little more than an armchair activist myself. I suppose we all have our issues.

Honestly, I hope that perhaps my reading of the entire situation is simply mistaken, and the crowd were just cheering blindly at the words coming out of the mouth of someone they respect. That, in and of itself, presents its own very vexing problems and parallels, however.

Portland most certainly DOES have the capacity for great things. I’ve seen and am participant to a number of amazingly artistic and beautiful cultural events here in this city. There is also, undeniably, a very real problem with a very ugly demon that rears its head far too often to be a topic that is swept under the table as much as it is. What is to be done about that problem is a question I am unable to answer. Education is the best form of combat against intolerance, but how do you educate people who refuse to see they even have a problem? I don’t know, and it very seriously calls into question my continued, long term residence in this town.

Get your shit together, Portland. Seriously. Not for me, and not because I’m some kind of moral force in the world, or even this town, but because it’s the right thing to do.

1. http://www.goddamnbastard.org/carcass/faq.html
2. http://www.goddamnbastard.org/carcass/interviews/nucleargore.html
3. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1935950053

Musings and Wisdom From Night Ranger Guitarist Brad Gillis (circa 1984)

The year is 1984 and the timeless monolith of a power ballad "Sister Christian" is bigger than 80 of Shane Diesels cocks combined into one massive black schlong. Brad Gillis is pretty much supreme ruler of the universe right now. His rippin' solos keep the framework of the cosmos from unraveling. The amount of tail Brad Gillis gets can't even be tabulated with human numbers. If God were Brad Gillis, I wouldn't even be able to finish this sentence because I'd be too busy listening to Night Ranger non-stop.

These are the thoughts of 1984 Brad Gillis.

"I hope LA Gear never goes out of business."

The Room. Live.

For those not in the know, The Room is an independently produced, low budget American romantic drama film that has gained a participative midnight movie screening cult audience, not unlike The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Vanilla Sky. Except the whole “cult phenomena” thing never happened to that piece of shit second film and rightfully never will. Why it happened to The Room is beyond the comprehension of anyone, living or dead, ever, in the history of this or any other universe and is possibly the result of Satan worship, international bribery and/or telepathic brain manipulation. The frightening billboard Wiseau maintained off an LA highway might have something to do with it as well.

ALRIGHT. FUCK! I’LL GO!

Listed among wikipedia’s "List of films considered the worst" (not a long list, by the way), nearly anything that can be said about The Room has already been written, so I’ll briefly address some of its main points. At face value, The Room is the age old story of a man betrayed by his best girl and his best friend. He also kills himself at the end, so there’s that too (lolSPOILERALERT).  How anyone manages to kill themselves with an Airsoft gun, though, is incomprehensible. Admittedly, sense is not the domain of The Room. Pretty much everything about The Room raises the bar for the term “suspension of disbelief”. Subplots and characters are introduced and dumped quicker than Jennifer Anniston at a lame horse auction. The music sounds like everyone who was ever rejected from an O-Town audition smoked a bunch of shitty weed and covered an unreleased Nsync album. Dialogue is… uh… you can’t call it that. It’s not dialogue. It’s basically moonspeak. And when the not-dialogue isn’t moonspeak, it’s like someone who had only a rudimentary understanding of a non-existing gibberish language made up of mangled aphorisms and folk wisdom phrases plugged several of those phrases into Google Translate and then farted at a piece of paper to fill in the blanks. What characters The Room does decide to chronicle, it does so in such an unbelievably amateur way as to render them zero-dimensional. I know that’s hard to grasp, zero dimensions, but it’s imperative that you don’t give it much thought, lest The Room win and your mind be assimilated into whatever unearthly force is making Tommy Wiseau’s left eye lazy to the point of being indicted for unemployment fraud. What I’m saying is that The Room is a difficult film, though it isn’t challenging in any cinematic sense like, say, Begotten or Possession. The Room is more like an endurance test, like trying to play QWOP with one’s fingers stuffed up one’s own ass. I’ll take a juice break while you attempt the aforementioned feat, just make sure to wash your hands before you return to the keyboard.

Directed by Tommy Wiseau.

The creators of both QWOP and The Room clearly intended to produce something of creative value, but failed miserably, somehow inspiring car wreck decapitation levels of rubbernecking at their colossal missing of the mark. That missing of the mark is what delivers us to the midnight screening cult phenomena of The Room. Reportedly the result of a word of mouth, “OH GOD I CAN’T STOP WATCHING THIS” campaign, independent of the director’s actual advertisement campaign, the film spilled out of its LA “Friday Night Is All Anal Hardcore Night” theater confines and people were soon ridiculing the film internationally. However, Canada will watch anything and post-modern irony is still a good twenty years away from their collective conceptual understanding, so they actually think it’s a good film. I’m just playin’ witchoo Canada, we cool.

I can no longer remember how I was introduced to The Room. Wiseau has clearly taken over the part of my brain that controls why anyone would think it’s a good idea to actually watch The Room, but I think it was the aborted child of my love of shitty cinema and drunken, late night internet trolling. I acquired a copy of the film, watched it… and then watched it like three more times. All totaled, I’ve probably seen The Room about fifteen times, possibly more. When I heard The Room was playing at Cinema 21 in NW Portland, I was oddly compelled to go. The thing about The Room is that it’s much better to watch with other people. I should know. I’ve watched the film alone at least three times and I’ve wanted to commit suicide by pellet gun myself each time. When there are others present with which to commiserate your shared agony, it seems there may be hope and light in the world. But then, for some idiotic reason, you watch it by yourself again, drunk at 3 AM and it’s the filmic equivalent of consuming an entire bottle of aspirin and chasing it with a bottle of extra strength own brand Draino.

I didn’t really expect there to be as many people as there were, but there were a fuckton of people there. The line was around the block. Wiseau was late, but when he showed up he gave everyone in line a high-five, stopped to cavort and play “football” (a Room in-joke) in the middle of the street with a few attendees and got scolded by the cops for doing so. Indoors, Wiseau had set up a merch-table pretty much directly in the entrance of the theater and a small crowd gathered to collect autographs and interact. Interacting with Tommy is fucking bizarre. I get the impression that no one has any idea what that man is talking about, ever. Asked for advice about success or some such topic, Wiseau said “Always give twenty percent. Never one hundred. It goes twenty percent, forty percent, sixty percent.” I did the math in my head later and realized that’s 120 percent. What the fuck? In the Audience Q&A before the screening Tommy claimed to be from Mars, insulted the theater for lack of preparedness even though he was fifteen minutes late, and improvisationally mock-directed a skit loosely based on his film with a group of people who had come dressed up as characters from the film. He made absolutely zero sense until dropping the line “The Room is about expressing yourself.” At that moment, I realized Tommy Wiseau was actually insane.

Solely on the merit of his film being mocked and publicly ridiculed has Tommy Wiseau achieved success. He refuses to tell us about his past. Funding for the film’s six million dollar budget may or may not have come from child labour. His film is considered one of the worst of all time. And I asked for his autograph.

And I posed for a picture with him.

He refused to have buttsex with me though.

The Plot Of Voltron Is Hard To Follow

Since I’m still a little hesitant to revisit the mind-numbing horror that has become the “Tribute Of The Year” review, I’m typing this review of the first two episodes of Voltron with a hangover and only four hours of sleep because it seems like a really good idea and maybe it’ll make me want to pass out again before I go get my ass thoroughly kicked by Swans tonight at the Roseland.

Here’s my thesis:

Voltron makes no goddamned sense.

I know, I know… you’re like, “But Mort, it’s a show about magical robot lions! It's not like it needs to make perfect sense.” True. However, not only is your grammar questionable, but even a show about magical robot lions needs at least a semblance of coherency. Shit just makes no fucking sense AT ALL. My guess is that the source material was too culturally specific, violent and lengthy, so the people tasked with re-writing the thing were just like “Pbbbth… fuck it. This is a mess. Let’s get shit-hammered.” And oh, how they got shit-hammered.

We’ve got problems right out of the gate.

“From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of the universe, comes a legend. The legend of Voltron: Defender of the Universe! A mighty robot. Loved by good, feared by evil. As Voltron's legend grew, peace settled across the galaxy. On planet Earth, a galaxy alliance was formed. Together with the good planets of the solar system, they maintained peace throughout the universe, until a new horrible menace threatened the galaxy. Voltron was needed once more. This is the story of the super force of space explorers. Specially trained and sent by the Alliance to bring back Voltron: Defender of the Universe.”

That’s the opening voice-over. While your kid-mind is watching awesome robots fly around in space and make swords out of pure light and shit, your big-person mind doesn’t notice that Peter Cullen is spewing raw word sewage straight out of his lower face hole.

OooOOooh, shiny! Huh, plot?

“From days long ago...”

Uh huh, gotcha. I’m on this shit.

 “From uncharted regions of the universe, comes a legend…”

Stop. He’s just a legend? Has anyone even seen this motherfucker? Because that’s seeeeeeeriously imperative to the next two sentences making any kind of sense what-so-ever.

 "A mighty robot. Loved by good, feared by evil. As Voltron's legend grew, peace settled across the galaxy”

No really, has anyone SEEN this fucking thing? What kind of robot is so bad ass his mere legend brings peace to the ENTIRE UNIVERSE? Depending on character designation, everything in known existence either shits its pants in washing machine destroying terror, or immediately ejaculates rainbow-powered dolphins and fluffy singing kittens at the mere MENTION of this guy. He’s gotta have mad robot bitches on his robot jock! (Robot Jox jokes, aka "verbal pantie remover")

 “On planet Earth, a galaxy alliance was formed. Together with the good planets of the solar system, they maintained peace throughout the universe.”

Oh. Okay, so wait… what? Who brought the peace? Was it the legend of the robot, or… you know, the people of Earth and the other good planets who actually did shit? I don’t…

 “Until a new horrible menace threatened the galaxy.”

Oh shit, I take it this motherfucker never heard of Voltron. Someone want to email this assjacket and tell him ‘bout a whole fucking bucketful of VOLTRON?

“Voltron was needed once more.”

Where the hell did he go? I mean bringing peace to the universe is no small feat, so I guess it’s cool he took a holiday or whatever, but how long did he expect universal peace to last? You can’t put five people in a room stocked with Totino’s Pizza Rolls, a high def TV and the known library of PS3 games without some motherfucker gettin’ socked in his jaw over what Call of Duty game you’re going to play. The universe is a big place. Eventually someone’s gonna try to run game.

“This is the story of the super force of space explorers. Specially trained and sent by the Alliance to bring back Voltron: Defender of the Universe.” 

Well, he doesn’t appear to be defending shit at the moment does he? Where the fuck did he go?! How the hell do you maintain the title “Defender of the Universe” when five mongoloid non-robot lions have to go drag your ass out of bed TO DO YOUR JOB? 

Alright, Lucy got some ‘splainin’ to do and the show hasn’t even started yet, so maybe this will start to not be pure brain rot when we get the ball rolling.

Annnnnd, no. We’re barely a minute into the show and we already have Space Explorers (technical name, mind you) who are completely incapable of discerning terrestrial phenomena from non-terrestrial phenomena. The Space Explorers are on their way to the planet “Arus”, presumably because that’s where the Alliance thinks Voltron is. Approaching the planet it becomes apparent that “something’s wrong” which is an actual Space Explorer assessment of the situation. Two highly trained astronauts debate whether or not Arus is being “hit by an asteroid shower” or volcanically erupting before they come to the conclusion the planet is actually under attack.

"I honestly can't tell if it's some kind of planet wide 'casual Friday', or if it's the second coming of 

Star Jesus. We just didn't get this kind of training in space camp!"

Let’s just stop right here for a minute. Despite the fact that these people would seriously need to know their shit about pretty much every branch of science known to man, TWO, fucking TWO of them can’t discern whether the planet is being destroyed by rocks from outer space, or if a catastrophic volcanic event is taking place? I guess it doesn’t matter anyway, because it turns out some iron-balled dickbasket named Zarkon is laying waste to everything above ground. We’re talking about an attack that literally decimates every civilization on this planet in a MATTER OF ONE MINUTE. Seriously, I can’t even piece together the timeline here but I’ll try, because I know it sounds like I’m leaving something out or just not understanding a vital piece of the plot. However this entire scene is maybe- maaaaaybe- 2 minutes long. Here’s a breakdown of what just happened:

1. Astronauts mistake a planet-wide military strike for possible natural phenomena.

2. Astronauts deliver explanatory dialogue regarding a hostile planetary invasion instead of oh, I don’t know… immediately radioing for fucking backup.

3. We’re treated to some footage of several “weird attack ships” (actual Space Explorer jargon) and troops entering the cities of Arus, as well as a number of snakes and dragons who are apparently either part of Zarkon’s attack plan or simply being mind controlled by the dude. I’d also like to point out that Arus’ entire military defense force seems to consist of four terrified mice who were presumably obliterated in the enemy invasion’s warp speed destruction of everything in sight.

When you reach down into a pile of mouse droppings that used to be your best friends face, 

you'll know what to do!

4. Astronauts finally DO radio the Alliance and tell them THEY’RE GOING IN BY THEMSELVES. I imagine the half of the conversation we missed went something like “I think we got this. Y’all just chill out and get some mojito’s or something.”

5. The whole planet of Arus is nuked by Zarkon. WHY DID HE SEND TROOPS?

6. Astronauts finally arrive on planet Arus.

7. Astronauts are immediately captured by the dude who just bombed the planet back to the corn age.

Here’s what I don’t get. Twice in this opening scene it’s mentioned that the Space Explorers have what are called “telescanners”. It’s later shown that these “telephonic scanners” (yeah, I don’t get it either, but apparently they do some kind of reconnaissance “scanning”) have the ability to detect other ships. If they’re that sophisticated how the fuck did they not know the planet was being completely destroyed by enemy forces at the onset of this whole ordeal? They couldn’t just “telescan” the giant fucking fleet attacking the planet? Not to mention the Alliance had no military presence in that part of the galaxy or even any kind of intelligence what-so-ever with regards to an army LARGE ENOUGH TO DESTROY A PLANET moving through what would almost certainly have to be Alliance regulated space? How the hell you fuckwits managed to keep any kind of peace without that giant magical lion robot for any period of time at all is beyond me.

So our heroes have been captured by a guy who is either an evil reptilian king or a space pirate (both back stories are proffered in the same expositional sentence), a peaceful planet has been destroyed in an act of unprovoked terrorist aggression, and our brick shithouse magic robot is nowhere to be found.  Let’s check in with the military geniuses back on Earth. I’m sure they’ve got some kind of plan.

Nope.

Not even shitting you. I have no idea who these people are in terms of what their rank or role in the Alliance is, but basically these military guys spend about ten seconds making the decision to say “fuck it, let the Space Explorers fend for themselves”. Then the head military guy comes up with the most brilliant plan ever: Fucking Voltron! Voltron could totally save their asses! That’s seriously his plan. And here’s where I need about fifty bajillion Excedrin. Weren’t the Space Explorers on a mission to find Voltron? Furthermore Voltron is supposed to be on Arus, the surface of which is now nuclear toast and the Space Explorers are being carted to Zarkon’s prison planet which is “2,000 light years away”. Maybe, just maybe you numbnuts should send another goddamned team to Arus to get Voltron instead of relying on the team that just got captured to somehow escape a prison planet and fly an alien spaceship back to the planet where Voltron lives?! AGHKJAHAKJHGWG!!!!

How did I watch this shit when I was a kid? Oh yeah… bitchin’ robot toys.

Calm… Calm… nice cuppa tea. Got another seventeen minutes or so to go… CALM… CALMMMMMMTTTGHHH…

So, apparently the reason Zarkon sent troops to the surface of Arus was to grab some slaves before he destroyed the planet, which actually explains why the troops were shown marching into Arus’ major cities before Zarkon went all Fatboy and Little Man on their asses. That the troops were there to capture slaves could have been visually represented as it was happening, but whatever. It’s the only thing that makes any sense at all so far, so I’ll take it and cherish it and pray it blossoms into a big strong tree called “Oh, Now The Rest Of This Shit Is Intelligible.”

At any rate we’re treated to some footage of the slave ship returning to Planet Doom (which is seriously the most badass name for a planet EVER) and some dialogue about preparing the slave quarters and then we cut to Zarkon’s throne room. Here, Zarkon delivers some lines that make me question exactly how this universe works:

Zarkon – “Planet Arus is defeated and I, Zarkon, rule the entire universe!”

Hold up. You nuked a planet that had ZERO, and I mean fucking ZERO military force and that was the crux of your plan to RULE THE FUCKING UNIVERSE? How the hell does that work? That was the ONLY THING ZARKON DID. He blew up a peaceful planet and now he rules the universe. No one in the universe has ANY kind of weapons or bombs or military ships? Anything? For serious, a couple of spitballs and one of those paper clip launchers made out of rubber bands would give the Alliance at least some kind of a fighting chance. Here, check out this next bit of dialogue in case you thought that perhaps Zarkon just overlooked the Alliance’s militaristic capabilities.

Zarkon – “And with the capture of the Space Explorers, I need no longer fear the Alliance!”

That was it. The mental giants who decided to FLY INTO A PLANET WIDE NUCLEAR ENEMY ASSAULT with NO BACKUP were the ONLY thing resembling an armed force in the entire UNIVERSE, and they were captured IMMEDIATELY.

Oh, by the way, since they’re just sitting around in a dungeon like jackasses, let’s take some time to get to know our service-men, shall we? That way we know exactly how much asparagus to eat before we piss on their memorial:

Commander Keith Cogane – Mullet. Appears to be the leader.

Lance – Appears to be CroMagnon. Also mullet.

Pidge – Gay midget. How do I know this? Ascot and hairband. Vocal predecessor to Meatwad.

Sven -  Incredibly racist Norwegian stereotype. I wish him to die.

Hunk – Fat loudmouth. When not stating the blatantly obvious, his abysmal attempts at humor are likely to earn him a blanket party.

I should probably mention another character that was introduced here named Haggar. She’s a witch and she has a cat that is unsettlingly interested in the arrival of the Space Explorers at the castle dungeon. Zarkon quipping “Kitty is excited!” is literally the grossest thing I’ve ever heard in a children’s cartoon.

"VAGINA IS LUBRICATED"

So now we learn that Zarkon has captured these slaves ENTIRELY for entertainment purposes. He’s built a giant arena and the creepy people of whatever the hell this nation is called all gather to watch the comically under-armed, potato-headed combatant/slaves get mercilessly slaughtered by the “Robeasts”. What are Robeasts, you ask? I don’t know either, so fuck you. The more pressing question is why Zarkon kidnapped slaves just to murder them for entertainment. That reallllly seems like a giant waste of resources. We’re talking about manned, intergalactic space missions to capture the slaves, housing and feeding the slaves, cleaning up slave guts, maintenance on Robeasts should they get damaged, etc. I’m not quite sure what Planet Doom’s chief export is, but shouldn’t the slaves be put to more constructive work than just getting liquified by the blue Robeast (who is actually more of a dark purple hue, by the way)? Shit, have the slaves BUILD Robeasts. At least that way you get some kind of compensation for their expensive, yet ignoble deaths.

Back in the dungeon, the Space Explorers have temporarily decided to take some time off from being the universe’s worst and only line of defense, and brute force their way out of their prison. Using a rope made of bed sheets that only exist because the writer discovered he needed them to, the Space Explorers begin to descend down the castle wall. Twenty seconds later they’re set upon by the GIANT VULTURES that were clearly visible from the prison window. As noted by Keith, this actually turns out to be something of a boon as the vultures deliver them from the castle to a… festering pit of blood and bones. Sven remarks “I’ll always think they’re beautiful” in his horrendous mockery of what someone who has never heard one thinks a Scandinavian accent sounds like and our intrepid spacemen sit around praying for some reason before wobbling off to do something else extremely stupid.

Not realizing the guards who frequently patrol their cellblock might notice they’ve gone missing, our bumbling crew of ass-tronauts (had to do it, I swear I did) IMMEDIATELY head BACK INTO Castle Doom instead of using the survival skills that the Alliance bigwigs have told us they’re so proficiently trained in to camp out for a night and assess the situation.  The crew comically jump-flips into an air duct and, since they’re all masters of stealth, instantaneously set off a booby trap consisting of spiked iron doors and FLYING SWORDS that also attracts the attention of the guards. A quick fight through a few paper thin sentries and the Space Explorers actually manage to pilot one of the alien slave ships out of the landing bay. In a fit of brilliance that I’m sure he must’ve later justified with “Dude, I was just really in the moment, you know?” Commander Keith Cogane SMASHES THE SHIP INTO ZARKON’S TOWER, for a quick, “Hey, fuck you dude!”  This alerts Zarkon to the escape and further endangers an already extreeeeemely dodgy plan.

Cut to Castle Doom.  Zarkon is mega-pissed at a guy I didn’t even know had a name until now. Zarkon’s all, “YOU BUNGLED AGAIN, URAK!” and Urak is like “Yeah, my bad. They’re not terribly hard to catch though, so I’ll just nip right out there and grab ‘em right quick.” Turns out, Urak is actually pretty good at that shit and he hits the fleeing vessel with “ALL LAZERS!” which has to be the coolest weapon ever. ALL LAZERS is like a bajillion times more powerful that SOME LAZERS. You might as well bring a fart sandwich to a fight if you’re gonna try to battle ALL LAZERS with SOME LAZERS, cause that shit is weak.

Now, you’d think that maybe since this shit started making a little bit of sense that perhaps we’d be treated to a trend of shit making sense. Not so. Shit stops making sense quicker than you can push a giant business suit-wearing David Byrne to the ground and yell “THE FOREST SUCKED!”. A tractor beam takes hold of the damaged ship and… I don’t know. I’m real fuzzy on this part. Arus is like a completely different planet, right? So somehow, the Space Explorers are tractor beamed from inside the gravitational field of Planet Doom ALLLLLLLLLLLLL the way to Planet Arus, where they’re brought to the fabled Castle of Lions.

How do I know it’s the fabled castle of Lions? Let’s let the dialogue do the talking:

Sven - “Look, our power (I presume he means the tractor beam) is coming from that statue of a lion!” Immediately after uttering this phrase he’s beaten to death with a length of Norwegian horse sausage. Well, not really, but I imagined he was and I was immensely pleased.

Pidge – “Huh… A castle! I’ll bet that’s the legendary CASTLE OF PIGFUCK! No wait… I mean lions! I bet that’s the legendary Castle OF PIG-FUCKING LIONS.”

From there it just devolves into Hunk fisting Pidge for like an hour and a half.  

Then Hunk shoves about a billion sliders into his mouth and says something like, “MMMPHABLAPABLAB MOLTRON?!”

And YET AGAIN we’re told about how MOTHERFUCKING BADASS VOLTRON IS. I GET IT OKAY, HE’S LIKE A ROBOT SHAFT ON TECHNOCRACK. GOT IT. NO MORE PLEASE.

Then we find out that the witch with the sexually deviant cat broke apart Voltron into a bunch of magic lions. Why she didn’t just destroy him is beyond me, but legend has it, according to Keith, that if they can find all the hidden lions dens the lions will “all come together and attach somehow”. Somehow? What? You don’t know how they fucking attach? What the hell are you assholes doing?!!!!!! GFJGHAEJHJGKGLJWBB!!!!!

Ed. Note: I found Balzac in a puddle of bloody urine and this was about as far as he got. I’m pretty sure it’s the end of the episode, so here you go. I put him on some meds and I’ve ordered a dialysis machine. Once he’s better I’ll try to get him to crank out the review of the second half of this two parter.