#ben greenberg

[nofatclips]

The Cycle​/​The Spiral: Time To Go Down Slowly by Algiers from the album The Underside of Power

[ourladyofomega]

Uniform (and huge bonus points to Michael Berdan for wearing a Skinny Puppy tee).

📸 source: FB

[sinceileftyoublog]

Chat Pile Album Review: Cool World

(The Flenser)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Chat Pile's debut album God's Country saw them asking, "Why?" As much as they delved into drug-addled, grotesque absurdity, at the heart of the album was Raygun Busch and company's questioning of why we, as a society, can't do better, especially for the most marginalized among us. On their sophomore album Cool World, Chat Pile seems to have discovered that violence is inescapably embedded into American life. "I gave them my flesh to write the final chapter," he sings on "Funny Man", a song about the inextricably linked cycle of poverty and war. "But the blood of my sons is just a new beginning." The ruling class lives, and the working class is thrown to the wolves.

Chat Pile turned to Ben Greenberg of Uniform to mix Cool World. While Luther Manhole's creeping guitars, Stin's bass grooves, and Cap'n Ron's thwacking snares sound just as dangerous as before, this time around, Busch's vocals, and the clarity of his singing style from song to song, clue you into his state of mind. On opener "I Am Dog Now", Busch screams like he's being restrained against his will, a prophet wanting to tell anyone who will listen that death is the great equalizer: "Remember, everyone bleeds." Consider it a warning. On "Shame", one of many anti-war songs on the album, Busch speaks deadpanned over marching drums and atonal guitars, the band sounding less like their doom contemporaries and more like Slint. "God remained silent," he laments. On "Frownland", he's exasperated that nobody's listening. The song starts with propulsive drums reminiscent of Nirvana's "Scentless Apprentice" (a song Chat Pile has covered), Manhole's guitars wincing like a saw through a bone. Busch repeats, "They don't wanna hear what I have to say," dumbfounded that nobody--governments, God, his fellow human--seems to be moved by the world's horrors.

What makes Cool World bleak but a rewarding repeat listen, though, is precisely that the band treats its subject matter with passion. At times, Busch may be straightforward when singing, talking, or screaming about genocide, colonialism, and the ills of capitalism, but he's never apathetic. The one-two punch of "Camcorder" and "Tape" uses horror imagery to divide humankind into those who choose to see evil and those who don't. "They made tapes!" he exclaims on the later, giving us no excuse to look away. Of course, he knows that some folks fetishize atrocity and fail to engage with it from a humanistic perspective. "The New World" explores the limitations of our analysis of cave drawings to fully understand history; "the skull speaks and its words are truthful," Busch chants. "Milk of Human Kindness", portrays those previously blissfully ignorant. "I'd heard nothing about the way they burn," Busch sings, the song's slowcore making you sit in the cruelty for as long as possible.

Album closer "No Way Out" is Cool World's most instrumentally dynamic and urgent song. It sports an interplay between bouncy drum and bass, as Manhole shreds a syncopated tornado of guitars. "Used to be so much time," Busch cries, taking every opportunity to let us know we're part of a world that would rather bomb kids than fight climate change. But as much as the end of life, the end of the world is unavoidable, he still finds room to hold people accountable. "Time to pay," he repeats in the pre-chorus. On Cool World, Chat Pile may accept the inevitability of destruction, but they never lose their sense of desperation.

[senorboombastic]

‘Cool World’ – Listen to episode twenty one of ’60 Minutes or less’, the new podcast from Birthday Cake For Breakfast – featuring Raygun Busch of Chat Pile!

Words: Andy Hughes ’60 Minutes or less’ – the podcast from Birthday Cake For Breakfast – returns for episode twenty one and we’re delighted to welcome the brilliantly named Raygun Busch, vocalist in noisy Oklahoma outfit Chat Pile! With nightmarish music videos to compliment their harsh brand of noise rock, Chat Pile have picked up quite a lot of steam in their home country and throughout…

[nofatclips]

Director: Tony Wolski [Live version here]

Track of the day // METZ - A Boat To Drown In

From the album Atlas Vending, out October 9th via Sub Pop.

[hosgeldinhuzun]

Sanki hiç var olmamış

ve artık hiç var olmayacakmış gibi belleğinden çıkarmıştı.

[samasmith23]

When I look at these pages from J.M. DeMatteis’ & John Romita Jr.’s criminally underrated Spider-Man: The Lost Years miniseries, I’m reminded of a quote that former Spider-Man: Clone Saga editor Glenn Greenberg made in he 36-part “Life of Reilly” online essay. Specifically in relation to both the character-writing and panel composition of these pages:

“Duality comes up a lot in Marc DeMatteis's writing, as it's a favorite subject of his. He has a real penchant for exploring the darkness and light in the souls of his characters, and stripping away the layers surrounding them to reveal their deepest selves. It's particularly enlightening when he does it long-established characters such as Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman, about whom you might think everything has already been said.”

From Spider-Man: The Lost Years #2-3 by J.M. DeMatteis & John Romita Jr.

[cinemajunkie70]

I watched this again after watching Beau Is Afraid. This quote is the essence of the movie. But I also still feel it. I AM TRULY SORRY IF I HURT ANYONE, ESPECIALLY LATELY!

[somehowwow]

Life is wasted on people..

Noah Baumbach's Greenberg

[haveyouseenthisromcom]

[nofatclips]

Chaka by Algiers from the album There is No Year

[ourladyofomega]

Ben Greenberg (Uniform, Coca Leaf, Sacred Bones).

📸: Chad Kelco

[queerasfact]

Father in heaven, who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water, You changed the fire of Chaldees so it would not burn hot, You changed Dina in the womb of her mother to a girl, You changed the staff to a snake before a million eyes, You changed [Moses’] hand to [leprous] white and the sea to dry land. In the desert you turned rock to water, hard flint to a fountain. Who would then turn me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this, being so graced by your goodness.

-Qalonymos ben Qalonymos, Even Bochan, c.1322, translation from Wrestling With God & Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition by Rabbi Steven Greenberg, p.118-120

In late 1322 or early 1323, French Jewish poet Qalonymos ben Qalonymos completed their book Even Bochan, which features this passage, describing the author's discontent with living as a man, and desire to live as a woman.

You can read a longer version of the passage here, and listen to our podcast on Qalonymos and their place in trans Jewish history here

[matan4il]

Update post:

Yesterday, the identification of two bodies brought back to Israel from Gaza by IDF soldiers to Israel was completed.

The victims were identified as 36 years old Ziv Dado, who was murdered on Oct 7, and his body was kidnapped to Gaza by Hamas, and 27 years old Eden Zecharia, who according to one Israeli journalist, was kidnapped alive. If this is true, it means Eden was murdered in captivity.

After the identification of the bodies was completed, the IDF was able to confirm that Israeli soldiers Gal Meir Eizenkott and Eyal Meir Berkovich were killed by a detonated IED while clearing the perimeter for this operation.

IDF soldiers are reporting that the number of terror tunnels and shafts is much bigger than expected, as well as that there is almost no house they enter in Gaza, which doesn't have some weapons stashed. In some houses, they also found orders and plans for the Oct 7 massacre. Kept in residential homes. In one house, the soldiers found, side by side, weapons like an RPG, and documentation of the chemotherapy treatment that an 8 years old boy was receiving in Israel, mere weeks prior to the Hamas massacre.

The desecration of Jewish religious sites under Palestinian rule is not a new phenomenon, despite the fact that the Palestinian Authority is supposed to be legally committed to the preservation of the Jewish holy sites Israel agreed in the Oslo accords that the PA would control. Today, we got another example.

The prevalence of antisemitic and anti-Israel content and messages on social media is not new, either. After Jewish celebrities and content creators had confronted Tiktok on its antisemitin and anti-Israeli bias, there are now Jewish employees of Tiktok, who are speaking out about the fact that this is happening by the design of the many antisemitic, anti-Israel moderates of the company, and not by blind chance. They also talk about how they are discriminated against, in comparison with anti-Israel employees.

Several residential homes in the north of Israel were directly hit by Hezbollah, one in the town of Metulah was completely destroyed. The only reasons there are no casualties, is because Israel evacuated the northern towns, just as it did the southern ones.

On the day when the UN is celebrating 75 years anniversary of the human rights declaration, the families of Israeli hostages are demonstrating outside the ceremony, to remind everyone that those who had been kidnapped on Oct 7, have been robbed of all of their human rights for over two months now, and that international organizations such as the UN and Red Cross have barely even commented on this.

The IDF's spokesman in Arabic has tweeted this morning, that aid trucks have been waiting for an hour and a half to enter Gaza, because they had to wait for someone on the Gazan side of the border (meaning, Hamas) to open the checkpoint.

The BBC is reporting that Human Rights Watch has denounced the Iran-funded Houthis' attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea, and declared these attacks to be war crimes. It's nice to see that when the ships targeted are no longer supposedly Israeli ones, HRW is capable of doing its work.

The other day, soldiers who were a part of an operation to clear the neighborhood of Shujayiah, entered a terrorist ambush. During the fight, there was suspicion that one of the soldiers was kidnapped by Hamas through a terror tunnel. The highest ranking officers on the ground personally joined the battle, to help the fighting, and also to coordinate the different forces, in order to minimize the possibility of a friendly fire incident. 10 soldiers were killed in this battle, among them two of those high ranking officers, Colonel Yitzhak Ben Basat and Lieutenant Colonel Tomer Greenberg (meanwhile, the highest ranking commanders of Hamas are sending their terrorists to die, while they themselves hide in terror tunnels, behind the human shields of Gazan civilians and Israeli hostages). These are the fallen soldiers from this battle (Greenberg top right, Ben Basat top left):

This is 38 years old Lilia Gurevich-Vasilkovsky.

She was murdered at the Nova music festival on Oct 7. She was a molecular biologist, who was hailed for her ability to think outside the box. She was working on developing a sweet protein, that would replace sugar. If she had been successful, this could have improved the health and lives of countless people around the world suffering from diabetes. I'm one of them. Reading about her made me stop and think about the fact that, especially when considering the many young victims, we will never fully understand how much the world has lost on Oct 7.

This is 36 years old Itay Perry.

In the photo, he's holding up the note that his 6 years old son sent him. The note says, "I love you, I miss you, Dad. I hope you won't get injured." Itay carried the folded note on him since he got it, including when he was killed in Gaza. Itay's dad mourned his son, saying that no parent could have a kinder child, and that Itay was also an amazing father and husband.

May the memories of all of the fallen be a blessing.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The General Post Office (now the new Penn Station), 1932-36.

Photo: Ben Shahn via the Howard Greenberg Gallery

[samasmith23]

One of my favorite Spider-Man: Clone Saga stories has always been the 4-part "The Exile Returns" arc, which not only features Ben Reilly's debut as the Scarlet Spider, but also Benjy's first major victory as a superhero since returning to New York after 5-years when he singlehandedly defeats Venom in mortal combat. What made the fight between Ben and Venom so epic was that the story was actually a response to a previous story in Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #375, which had Peter Parker make a deal with Venom to stay out of each other's way. The reason that was done was because Marvel wanted to turn Venom into an anti-hero during the 90s, but a lot of fans and creators were really pissed off about that story, since they felt that Peter making a pact with Venom betrayed the character's sense of responsibility. And this frustration was openly expressed in The Exile Returns, with Ben Reilly being incredibly shocked that Peter would have done such a thing, basically declaring to himself, "If Peter's not going to accept responsibility and bring Venom to justice, I'll have to step in and do it myself!"

Spider-Man group editor Glenn Greenberg even commented on the writers of The Exile Returns deliberately referencing ASM #375 in the 36-part online essay, "The Life of Reilly," which extensively covers all the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding The Clone Saga:

And the way Ben defeats Venom is so clever and inventive! Instead of relying upon the symbiote's usual weaknesses of loud noises and extreme heat, Ben utilizes his own original inventions as the Scarlet Spider. Ben shooting multiple "impact-webbing" pellets down Venom's mouth which immediately expand into hundreds of little webs that get caught directly in-between Eddie Brock and the symbiote, weakening their bond as Ben then shoots his "stinger" web darts to further weaken Venom as he beats him into submission.

Seeing Ben Reilly singlehandedly take down the one supervillain that Peter Parker was never able to truly defeat up until that point was honestly one of the most badass and entertaining fight scenes that I've ever read in a superhero comic!

And its honestly shocking that neither impact-webbing nor stingers stuck around in the comics after The Clone Saga ended (only appearing in the video game adaptations), since those things are so FREAKING awesome!

From adjectiveless Spider-Man (1990) #53 by Howard Mackie & the late Tom Lyle (May he Rest In Peace...).