The Baltimore Banner does a quick article on independent restaurants in Baltimore County worth checking out. Some of these are close, some not so much, but there are a couple I’m interested in.
Could Mastodon be any cooler? Not after being invited to portray Wildlings on Game of Thrones.
Damn. Brent Hinds, founding lead guitarist of Mastodon, left the band this March for unknown reasons, and all parties were initially quiet about the reasons. More recently he started posting angry tweets about being kicked out of the band, and things got uglier. Yesterday he was killed in a motorcycle accident, when a woman turned left without signaling in front of him.
It sounds like he had a lot of stuff to work out, and like any band breakup, I always have hope they can sort their differences and work together again; I do hope the band can continue making excellent music. Several of their albums have been inspired by personal tragedy, but this just seems cruel.
I’ve had this fucking song stuck in my head for the past five days now, and it’s probably one of my least favorite songs this band ever produced. I had a cassette of Louder than Love in high school and played it until it wore out, but found that my appreciation for Soundgarden’s last two albums fell off sharply, minus a few songs. I didn’t pay much attention to Audioslave even though it was a mixture of two of my favorite 90’s bands; the styles and genre didn’t mesh as well as I had hoped it would even though they gave it everything they had.
RIP, Chris Cornell.
Update: The same day I posted this, I learned that a group of excellent musicians—William DuVall, (Alice In Chains), Bill Kelliher (Mastodon), Charlie Benante (Anthrax, S.O.D.), and Mark Menghi (Metal Allegiance) among others, formed King Ultramega to do covers of Soundgarden tracks during COVID, and just started releasing them, beginning with one of my favorites, Rusty Cage. All proceeds go to support the MusiCares Foundation.
This is a bit of a saga to unwind, but so worth it: Some SpaceX junk fell to earth on a Saskatchewan farm, and the landowner contacted a local authority to ask who should clean it up: an astronomy professor at the local college. She talked to local media about the situation, using the opportunity to talk about unregulated space junk. SpaceX heard about this, and sent two employees in a rental truck to come and pick up their crap (portions of which took two people to lift into the truck) in front of a gaggle of local reporters and camera crews. I’m glad to see journalism still functioning, and I do hope that governments begin regulating private spaceflight before 200-lb chunks of Elon’s pet project come crashing through my roof. (via metafilter)
I read the other day that Bluesky, the Twitter competitor started by the founders of Twitter, came out of invite-only beta this week, so I signed up to park my name. I’ll probably never post there, and will never install the app on my phone. I never signed up for Mastodon, mostly because I never saw the point of belonging to a federated version of a service I never paid attention to anyway. Why have I done this, when I avoided ever being on Twitter? Hard to say.
I never watched Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and was not aware they made it into a movie, but when they did, a pre-movie “don’t talk during the movie” reel was produced. It was scored by Mastodon, and is predictably hilarious.
Skip ahead to 1:00 for the best part.
Backstory: there’s an online talk show by two comedians who dress up in corpsepaint called Two Minutes To Late Night, and they interview various metal bands. They have a house band and usually have the guests play a couple of songs, usually covers, as part of the show. It’s funny and interesting and the guests are always unique. Because of COVID they can’t tape the show live, so they’ve gotten an amazing assortment of artists to remotely tape covers, usually deeper cuts from an artists’ catalog. This is a cover of Rush’s Anthem, featuring members of Tool, Primus, Mastodon, and Coheed & Cambria; it’s like a Venn diagram of amazing covering one of Rush’s best songs.
In heavy rotation: a (Hardcore? Post-rock? Post-punk? Math rock?) band from Belgium called Brutus. Heavy as shit but with absolutely beautiful melody throughout; the drummer doubles as singer, and I don’t know how she can physically do both at the same time (see also: Mastodon) but she absolutely crushes them both. Standout tracks: Django, Carry, and Space. (via Stereogum)
I love Mastodon, because they are an incredibly melodic hard metal band, they have an excellent sense of humor about themselves, and they write great songs. I’ve been jamming to The Motherload all day:
I would embed the official music video here, but it’s ABSOLUTELY BATSHIT CRAZY.
Sunday morning we hopped back on the Metro and took Finn to the Museum of Natural History. She was excited to see the dinosaurs and animals based on our descriptions of the place, so when we finally got in the door it overwhelmed the three of us. I haven’t been inside in 30 years or more, so what I remember has changed dramatically. The sea life exhibit is an attention disorder nightmare; there are fantastic standalone displays placed randomly along the floor for viewers to ping-pong between. The design is beautiful but it’s hard to connect displays above or below eye-level with their information.
The dinosaur exhibit is breathtaking but a lot smaller than I remember. They’ve updated some of the larger displays but the dioramas are as I remember them, with an added layer of dust. The lighting is more dramatic now. I remember everything under bright white . Finn stood in awe of the T. Rex and stegosaurus displays, but it was hard to talk to her with the movement and noise around us.
I don’t remember much about the ice age exhibit from my history, but Finn seemed to like it a lot. The mammoth and mastodon skeletons were impressive. Jen and I laughed later at the early man display, with three hairy mannequins covered in dust. (There were lots of questions about early man and our ancestors later in the day).
We continued through the museum after a break for some lunch, and Finn did really well up until the gemstone exhibit, when she (and Jen and I) succumbed to overload. There’s so much to see, and so many people there. We bailed at about 4:30 after a snack and she promptly fell asleep on the train ride home.
