Dancing Mania Vol. 1

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The first one I remember seeing in person was the Macarena, which showed up out of nowhere and conquered my elementary-school dances swiftly and without mercy. My classmates and I were powerless against it. Even if you hated it, you had no choice but to join in. Today, things are basically the same: If you have kids, odds are one of them has done the Dab or the Floss since you started reading this.

But none of our modern moves are anything compared to the original dance mania — a literal compulsion that swept Europe, off and on, throughout the Middle Ages. For reasons nobody has ever been able to fully explain, large groups of people were suddenly taken with the desire to start dancing, and nothing could compel them to stop. People danced for so long their feet bled. Their ribs broke. Many died from their injuries. All the while screaming in pain and begging for someone, anyone, to figure out what was going on.

The earliest recorded instance of what became known as “the dancing plague” dates back to eleventh-century Germany, when a priest grew angry at a group of people partying outside his church during mass and cursed them to dance without stopping for an entire year as punishment. (They did.) A couple of centuries later, a group of some 200 revelers in the Dutch city of Maastricht started compulsively dancing across a bridge, until said bridge collapsed and drowned them all. Similar spontaneous episodes were recorded in France, Switzerland, and across the Holy Roman Empire.

The most well-known — and best-documented — case of dancing mania, however, took place in the city of Strasbourg (today part of France) in 1518. On a summer’s day, one Frau Troffea stepped out into the middle of the street and, apropos of nothing, started cutting a rug. She kept going and going like that for several days in a row, and it wasn’t long before others joined in. Within a week, there were nearly three dozen people added to the fray, and within a month, roughly 400 people were out dancing in the streets. Local authorities were understandably confused and decided that the only cure was to let the dancing work itself out naturally. They shuffled the dancers into empty guild halls and even hired bands of pipers and drummers to give the event some semblance of normalcy. It didn’t work. Over time, the dancers wore themselves out, and dozens died as a result of strokes, heart attacks, and all-around exhaustion.

It bears repeating that this isn’t an urban legend. Dancing mania has been documented by many reputable sources, and the Strasbourg epidemic, in particular, is supported by local sermons, doctors’ notes, and even contemporaneous writing from its city council. “These outbreaks,” agreed historian John Waller, “represent a real and fascinating enigma.” There were common threads, too. Nearly all of the outbreaks, for instance, took place near one of two rivers: the Rhine and the Moselle. And the dancing plague had all but disappeared by the seventeenth century. So what the hell was going on?

People danced for so long their feet bled. Their ribs broke. Many died. All the while screaming in pain and begging for someone, anyone, to figure out what was going on.

Different theories have circulated over the years. One held that the victims had eaten a particular kind of mold known to grow on rye stalks, which can induce spasms and hallucinations in whoever eats it. Another suspected that the dancers were members of a cult. Another still came out of Italy, where those afflicted were thought to have been bitten by the same species of poisonous wolf spider, causing them to dance in an effort to prevent the venom from fatally mixing with their blood.

These days, historians like Waller believe the dancing plague was actually the result of a trance state, which is known to occur in people exposed to extreme stress, as was certainly the case for the poor, starving, and chronically ill citizens of Strasbourg. At the same time, these populations believed in supernatural forces that could possess their bodies and, say, force them to dance uncontrollably. Put those two factors together and you’ve got a recipe for trouble. It wasn’t until the Reformation came along and challenged Catholicism that the dancing plague suddenly died out, “because the supernaturalist beliefs that fed it gradually disappeared.”

The Macarena doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?

Building Character

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Fallout 76 (Bethesda Softworks, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

If there’s any series that can put a silver lining on the mushroom cloud of a nuclear apocalypse, it’s the Fallout role-playing games, which mix zany anything-goes gameplay with 1950s atom-bomb hysteria in an open world crawling with mutant nightmares. This sequel is the largest and zaniest yet, offering a new option for postapocalyptic survival: multiplayer cooperative gameplay.

You are a survivor of Vault 76, a subterranean prepper community, tasked with scouring the surface realm for supplies 25 years after the mushroom clouds have cleared. Although lone-wolf types can still trek solo, you’ll find the game easier with a little help from your non-mutated friends. Squad up online with three fellow vault dwellers to undertake missions for the survival of your colony.

While previous entries let you explore irradiated versions of New England and Las Vegas, Fallout 76 unleashes players in a region that’s wild even by today’s pre-nuked standards: West Virginia. The state’s mountains, towns, and landmarks have been faithfully reproduced in post-nuked form and split into six regions. Each landscape crawls with nuclear horrors: cannibalistic humans, radioactive bears, dragon-size bats, and beasts inspired by backwoods folklore. A new combat system lets you confront foes in real-time as in a typical first-person shooter while using the tactical elements of the slower-paced past installments. In other words, you can play tactically or just shoot shit.

The game packs a broad payload of guns and ammo, from muzzle-loading pistols to flesh-broiling laser cannons. Hard-core role-playing fans can tweak hundreds of character-development perks. You’ll build a unique survivor and assemble settlements that you can manage with an iron fist. Eventually, you and your squad will find nuclear codes that unleash atomic hellfire on enemy settlements, perpetuating the cycle of mutually assured destruction and spawning more powerful mutants in the contaminated hellscape of West Virginia.

Hitman 2 (Warner Bros., PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Peer through the heightened senses of Agent 47, the genetically-bred assassin, in this sequel that accurately portrays the trials and triumphs of the world’s second-oldest profession. You’ll need to sniff out betrayals, pack the right tools, and choose the path of least resistance as you track down six high-profile targets around the world while trying to avoid early retirement yourself.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War Definitive Edition (Warner Bros., PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Set between events depicted in those Hobbit movies and Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On,” Shadow of War gives you free rein to stymie the evil Sauron’s APB for the One Ring. Spared foes hold grudges and use your own tactics against you, so don’t be afraid to use scorched-Middle Earth tactics. This deluxe edition includes four massive expansions and a trove of bonus loot.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey transplants its scowling antihero from the recent past to ancient history. You’re once again tasked with taking out historical figures as efficiently as possible, except now the character-building aspects of the series are ramped up to match the Hellenistic hyperbole of Greek mythology. Forge relationships and build a myriad of abilities both real and mythical.

Underworld Ascendant (505 Games, PC)

The spiritual sequel to Ultima Underworld, one of the most celebrated role-playing games of all time, Ascendant takes the tropes of ye olde dungeon-crawling adventures and adds the play-it-your-way style of modern sandbox games. Your mission is simple: sojourn to the darkest depths of a dungeon and slay a great evil with any combination of swords, sorcery, and/or sneakiness.

The Gospel According to Social Distortion

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The first was when I heard rumors of lead singer Mike Ness sending signed photos of himself sucking his own dick to girls he’d slept with, and I, like a worshipper of a golden calf, spread those rumors farther, regardless of their validity, blinded by their garish allure.

The second time I denied Social Distortion was when I went all in on being a Murder City Devils fan, reveling in the small differences as I pretended that a tattoo of the number 13 surrounded by flames was less corny than flaming dice, and that pomade as a tool for dishevelment was superior to using God’s cream to shape a beautiful pompadour — as though chaos was somehow better than carpentry. Looking back, I hate myself.

The third denial was, on the surface, the most benign. But if we subscribe to the ecclesiastical notion that indifference to God, not rebellion, is the worst sin, denial No. 3 was arguably the most insidious: I simply forgot about Social Distortion. Life got in the way, and I actually went a stretch without once thinking about America’s premier purveyors of hard-luck hairdo rock. For that, like Peter upon hearing the rooster crow after the Last Supper, I repent like a motherfucker.

Social Distortion — formed in 1978 in Orange County as a better-than-average punk band made distinctive by Ness’s strung-out, bummed-out vocal fry — is an easy band to hate and love in equal measure. An earnest cliché factory that made a personality out of cigarettes, without ever getting that sweet Tom Waits cachet, Social D makes tough-guy music for car nerds (except actual tough guys tend to prefer hardcore or, like, freestyle).

The band mainly appealed to the sort of guys who wanted to date girls who looked like Bettie Page but settled for girls with Bettie Page tattoos, and girls who wanted to date Ness but would leave with the drummer, any drummer. Most of the Social Distortion fans I grew up with just settled on racism and, eventually, death. I’m not better than any of these people; Social Distortion just made me want to be a badass, and I’m lucky enough to have moved to a town that rewarded posers.

Besides writing songs as catchy as anything by the Ramones, Social Distortion’s glory lies in the way it exists entirely outside of time. With their deep attachment to a historical period that never existed, they can’t help but be an eternal anachronism. Despite all the gestures to James Dean and Sun Studios, no prior band ever sounded like Social Distortion. They’re like time-traveling aliens trying to blend into 1950s society, but in 1994. Their closest counterpart in this devotion to an America that never was is Lana Del Rey. Or the Republican party.

Like the face of God and grilled cheese, Social Distortion never changed once they found their true voice on Prison Bound, a 1988 album of sexy junkie regret. If there was any evolution, it was just to become a more perfect, truer, and streamlined version of what they were before. They wear cowboy shirts over wifebeaters and play three-chord blues and countrified punk rock. That’s all they do, and if EDM or rap ever happened, they certainly weren’t made aware.

It’s a purity of vision that might lead some people, including some of their fans, to believe that Social Distortion is conservative. They are not. While their choice of Rolling Stones covers (“Back Street Girl,” “Under My Thumb”) probably won’t get Ness invited to any campus women’s studies groups, the man does love to punch Nazis.

When Ness was recently in the news for roughing up a MAGA-type show attendee (not necessarily a proponent of National Socialism but, for the purposes of this discussion, close enough) who took issue with the insufficiently racist stage patter, I was delighted. But those whose love of Social Distortion has never wavered poo-pooed the whole kerfuffle by saying, “Mike Ness has always punched Nazis.”

When your fans can be blasé about your penchant for knocking out cretins, you’re doing something right.

Not one to ignore portents, especially when delivered by rockabilly cherubs, I have turned my heart back unto the light of Social Distortion. I started talking about them to my friends (Mike Berdan from pig-fuck noise-rockers Uniform is a longtime fan, which… surprised me). I played all seven of their albums, in chronological order, in the bar I work at. The place filled up nicely for a Sunday night and even the Europeans tipped, a rare miracle I lay directly at the feet of our grease-stained troubadours. I even played Ness’s solo albums, which should suck, but instead rule.

I felt wild and free, a bad enough man with a heart of gold, whose hair was slicked if not growing back. I didn’t feel like I did the first time I heard Social Distortion — thank God — as I now know what I didn’t then: that I will, eventually, have sex. But there was a shadow of that electricity of desire and possibility just offscreen, like I was some sort of hero in some sort of movie while that music was playing.

And if the truth is that, like Saint Peter, I’m more a character actor in someone else’s noir, well, shit, at least some bad trouble and hard loving was going down for someone’s rockin’ daddy. I don’t know if the cock crowing three times at the end of JC’s final rave-up is analogous to last call at a dive bar on MacDougal Street, but it felt like a real cool time to be redeemed all the same.

Has Consent Culture Become A War on Sexuality?

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But as we watch innocent, clumsy, unwanted sexual advances get lumped into the same category as rape, where women weaponize a movement — an important and much-needed movement — to garner sympathy and claim victimhood, I think about the real victims of sexual assault, not those claiming they were traumatized by a coworker trying to kiss them. Their stories are getting lost in the mayhem as the angry mob storms on, looking for the next high-profile target they’ll mark for eternal punishment.

Third-wave feminism has gained immense power, and where there is power, there is corruption. Women now have the power to ruin any man’s life with one accusation. It doesn’t have to be substantiated or proven. Due process no longer exists because we have trial by Twitter. Lately, it doesn’t matter what the “crime” is, there’s a demand for lifelong consequences. No questions are asked, and if you do dare to question, you are deemed an apologist and misogynist.

People, companies, brands are all operating on fear rather than reason. Women are believed automatically. I don’t think anyone should have that type of power based on their gender; just because we’re women does not mean we won’t abuse it. We have already seen examples of women using this movement for personal gain and revenge. Those despicable women are hurting all of us by doing this. They are damaging a much-needed awareness concerning a very real threat that women face every day.

Along with the excesses and overreaching — and the co-opting for selfish reasons — we’ve seen as the #MeToo movement expands and morphs, there’s also a viewpoint on human sexuality at work that I find naive and unrealistic. It’s a perspective that oversimplifies sexuality, rationalizing it, demanding it be neat and tidy.

Last month, the New York Times published an essay written by 30-year-old Courtney Sender for their Modern Love section. In the piece, Sender tells a story of a 24-year-old man she met on Tinder, a guy she invited over in the middle of a snowstorm and they ended up having sex. Her Tinder date complied with all the rules of modern politically correct culture, asking for consent before every touch or kiss, a self-policing that began to frustrate Sender and suggested to her that her date, though just six years younger, had learned some different rules when it came to hooking up. But she liked him. And thought things were going well, especially when, during their second hookup, he told her he’d cook her dinner the next time he saw her. That never happened. He stopped contacting her.

Though initially almost irked by her Tinder date’s consent questions, by the way it seemed to imply she wasn’t able to simply say no herself if she didn’t want to do something, she came around to his solicitous style, and viewed it as thoughtful. However — and this is the thrust of her essay — she had a big problem with being ghosted after two hookups.

“I was left thinking that our culture’s current approach to consent is too narrow,” Sender writes. “A culture of consent should be a culture of care for the other person, of seeing and honoring another’s humanity and finding ways to engage in sex while keeping our humanity intact. It should be a culture of making each other feel good, not bad.”

According to Sender (who should really be refraining from any sexual relationships due to her lack of maturity), she now thinks she is entitled to be cared about by whomever she chooses to have sex with. It’s like Gilead, except men are prisoners held captive by needy women. But wait a second. Haven’t women desired the freedom to hook up like men with no emotional strings attached? Haven’t we been partaking in Slut Walks and fighting for sexual liberation? Isn’t this what we wanted?

As Camille Paglia once wrote, “With freedom comes risk and responsibility.” This overbearing consent culture, with its excessive intervention into sexual relations between men and women (powered by a feminism calling not just for equity, for societal and legal fairness for women, but for women to be viewed as fragile victims-in-waiting, incapable of agency), begs the following question: Can casual hookup culture coexist with #MeToo and the new gospel of consent?

Toward the end of her piece, Sender writes: “I wish we could view consent as something that’s less about caution and more about care for the other person, the entire person, both during an encounter and after, when we’re often at our most vulnerable.”

Consent culture is not preventing rape, it’s not promoting healthy sexual relationships, and it’s not stopping sexual harassment in the workplace. In many ways, it’s ruining sex and confusing people. Rape is real, as is sexual abuse. Those things need to be addressed. But this oppressive, politically correct regime is like a religion, monitoring the way we express ourselves in all walks of life, but especially in the bedroom. The irony is that these so-called rules are coming from individuals who claim to be “progressives.”

An outlook on sexuality this stifling, rigid, and regressive is the furthest thing from enlightened and liberated. It is totally authoritarian. It’s a complete regression from the sexual freedom I enjoyed as a teenager and young adult in the late nineties and early aughts — the freedom that was fought for by second-wave feminists who were attempting to free themselves of the parental supervision and restrictive fifties culture that treated women as perpetual victims. How have feminists come full circle?

Sexuality is a part of every human’s life, and it’s vast, complex, and layered. Sometimes it’s gross, and sometimes it’s painful — emotionally and/or physically. Sometimes it’s like wading into a mosquito-infested swamp in the pitch-black darkness, and sometimes it’s like being catapulted into the fourth dimension with your soul connecting to your lover. We use sexuality to connect with people, to control people, to escape. Even to hurt. Some sex is illegal and completely immoral. Sexuality is an animal instinct. And it’s not always easy to navigate.

In our current puritanical climate, there’s an obsession with the articulation of boundaries during sexual interaction. There’s a call for defining every sexual nuance, but that’s impossible. Sexuality cannot be put into a perfectly wrapped box with a bow on top. It’s far too complicated for that.

Musical Jocks

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One afternoon in July 1995, pitcher Jack McDowell gave the finger to his own fans at Yankee Stadium. McDowell was a great hurler — the 1993 American League Cy Young Award winner and a three-time All-Star — but he just didn’t have it on this day and got rocked for nine runs and 13 hits in four and 2/3 innings. As he left the mound after getting pulled, Black Jack — nicknamed for his gunslinger stare, the black look he gave hitters — got lustily booed. Feisty as ever, the tall, goateed McDowell raised his pitching arm and gave the crowd a one-finger salute. Then he twirled his hand around for good measure.

JACK ASS shouted the Daily News. THE YANKEE FLIPPER blared the New York Post. Later we learned music had something to do with McDowell’s poor performance. He’d been drinking into the wee hours with two music buddies, Mike Mills and Scott McCaughey of R.E.M.

A musician himself, Black Jack was friends with a number of rockers, including guys in the Smithereens and Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder. In fact, two years earlier he’d been partying with Vedder in New Orleans and got knocked out by a bouncer during an altercation. Vedder was arrested for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. Black Jack walked away with a black eye.

I’ll always associate those 1995 Yankees with music. I had just moved to New York City and it seemed like every other day there was a print, radio, or TV story about the chops of both McDowell and center fielder Bernie Williams, a classically trained guitarist.

By this point, Black Jack had toured with the Smithereens and had a new band, stickfigure, whose first album, Just A Thought, compiled memorable songs in a jangly, alternative-rock vein, written and sung by Black Jack. The band would go on to release three more solid albums, with bass from Mike Mesaros of the Smithereens and drums from Frank Funaro and later Josh Freese. (Funaro left to drum for Cracker; Freese had earlier drummed for Paul Westerberg of the Replacements.) As for Williams, who led the Yanks in hits, runs, and total bases that year, and batted .429 in the playoffs, he wasn’t trying to put out records at the time, but it was clear he kept up his skills. I watched him strum a couple Latin-inflected tunes during a local-news segment and thought, Damn, Bernie can play.

One of the greatest Yankees to ever don pinstripes, owner of four World Series rings, his No. 51 officially retired, Williams went at music hard as the new century began. Playing and composing songs in different styles (jazz, Latin, classical, pop), he released a pair of major-label albums, both of them cracking the U.S. jazz charts top-five. These records included collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, Rubén Blades, banjo wizard Béla Fleck, and other greats. After leaving professional baseball in 2006, Williams studied guitar and composition at a state university, and just a couple of years ago received a bachelor’s degree from the prestigious Manhattan School of Music.

Black Jack and Bernie — two of the most legit music-making sports stars we’ve ever seen. But who’s their competition? Who else has excelled as a professional athlete while also achieving musical excellence, as opposed to mere novelty-act notoriety?

I did some digging. I did some downloading. I listened to champion boxers Manny Pacquiao and Grammy nominee Oscar De La Hoya sing. I listened to tennis legend John McEnroe shred. I listened to Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza play drums and contribute “death growls,” as the liner notes put it, to a metal album by Black Label Society. I watched clips from Woodjock, a charity event organized by pitcher Jake Peavy where ballplayers get on a stage during spring training in Arizona and play music before Cactus League fans.

I watched Peavy do a fine cover of the Amos Lee song “Learned A Lot.” I discovered that former All-Pro offensive lineman Kyle Turley moved to Nashville and put out an album of “power country” songs. He shows off his pipes on a tune called “Another Whiskey.” I was impressed with the singing of retired All-Star shortstops Omar Vizquel and Ozzie Smith. Vizquel covers a Goo Goo Dolls song and Smith pulls off a goosebump-inducing (seriously) rendition of a Sam Cooke R&B classic, “Cupid,” on a record featuring warbling ballplayers titled Oh Say Can You Sing?

And then there’s retired pitcher Barry Zito. Last year he became the first former Cy Young Award winner to hit the Billboard charts when his self-released EP No Secrets briefly appeared on the Country and Americana/Folk top-40 lists. Zito’s been singing and playing guitar since 1999 and hopes to do more charting in the future.

But he doesn’t chart on my own totally subjective, no doubt faulty top-5 list!

Along with Bernie and Black Jack, these former ballers bring it, musically.

Mike Reid, a Pro Bowl defensive lineman for the Cincinnati Bengals in the 1970s, went on to forge a big-time music career, writing more than 30 top-ten country and pop hits, including two Grammy-winning songs for Ronnie Milsap, and Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” “Walk On Faith,” a single from his own 1990 debut album, climbed to No.1 on the Billboard Hot Country chart. Reid’s the only human in history to be inducted into both the College Football Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Wayman Tisdale, the late, great power forward from Oklahoma, a 1984 Olympian, retired in 1997 after a sterling NBA career to focus on music, his first love. A gifted soft-jazz bassist, Tisdale would put out eight albums before his death in 2009, with his 2001 album Face to Face climbing to the top of the Billboard contemporary jazz chart.

Tim Flannery, a San Diego Padres infielder for a decade (his best season at the plate was 1985, when he hit .281), spent seven years as third-base coach for the San Francisco Giants, and has World Series rings from 2010, 2012, and 2014. Okay, so he wasn’t an MLB superstar, but he’s a great singer-songwriter, and a fine guitarist. A bluegrass ace, he’s put out a dozen albums and played with Jackson Browne.

Alexi Lalas, the flame-haired Olympic and pro-soccer player turned commentator also points to music as his first love. In the late nineties, he sang and played guitar in a band, Gypsies, that toured Europe with Hootie and the Blowfish. Since then, the always-vocal Lalas has released three solo albums of tuneful rock ’n’ roll, the last in 2014.

Shaquille O’Neal and his rapping might seem to fit the description of a novelty act, but I vote legit. The Big Aristotle — league MVP in 2000, four-time world champion, 15x All-Star — has a way with words, as we know. And as an MC his low-voiced, mid-tempo flow makes for enjoyable listening. Check out his work with Phife Dawg on “Where Ya At?” Wait, you’re not buying it? Okay, how about this? He’s a better rapper than point guard Tony Parker.

Moreover, you can’t take this away from Shaq: His 1993 debut album, Shaq Diesel, went platinum. Boom.

Heather Benjamin

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Early on, the New Jersey native used old copies of Penthouse and Playboy, as well as vintage nude photos culled from flea markets and thrift shops, as raw material for her illustrations. The erotica helped power the many art zines she released. In “Sad Sex,” put out in 2008 when she was a student at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, nearly all the images were informed by her mighty collection of print porn. But while many of the women depicted posed with the alluring swagger of pinup models, their facial expressions or actions were anything but centerfold-friendly.

One work featured a woman spreading her pussy lips with one hand, the other reaching toward the viewer in agony. Her eyes are scratched-out, her mouth is agape in horror, but she sits beside the words “YOU MAKE ME FEEL SPECIAL,” the capital letters dripping blood.

From the start, Benjamin’s work has included images of women mutilating their nipples, threatening their labia with scissors, or flexing in ecstasy as insects swarm their limbs. Imagine the deviant, DGAF attitude of an R. Crumb comic, fused with Leonor Fini’s surrealist explorations of femininity, and you’re getting somewhere close to a Benjamin artwork.

Yet despite the carnal carnage she regularly depicts, a sensuality and agency emanates from her characters, especially because they usually appear alone. This tension is not unlike the ambivalence most of us feel about our own bodies — that vacillation between love and loathing of our flesh. It’s a duality that fuels Benjamin’s practice, and she’s able to translate this abstract, almost ineffable experience into something both visceral and vivid.

“Looking back, I feel like ‘Sad Sex’ was a metaphor for my extreme confusion and self-hate and depression at that time, which was manifesting in a very teenage way because I was a teenager. In order to express it, I was resorting to extremes [in my work] because I felt so extreme,” Benjamin says. She’s quick to point out that she still has a “dichotomous relationship with my body and other people’s bodies — this really extreme fluctuation between perceiving beauty and experiencing lust, and then alternatively experiencing disgust and repulsion.”

Since “Sad Sex,” Benjamin has self-released numerous other zines (most of which sold out), participated in dozens of art exhibitions, and become something of a cult figure within the East Coast punk scene, with her illustrations adorning countless DIY gig posters.

In 2011, the Vancouver band White Lung (fronted by Penthouse editor Mish Barber-Way) posted flyers featuring Benjamin’s ink drawing of a woman pulling out her hair, veins bulging on her hands. Scrawled in the corner of the illustration are the woman’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts, including the line, “My God… I cause my own suffering through my desire to think of myself as a being of value and permanence.”

In other words, Benjamin’s work continues to explore many of her early themes. “I’ll probably be wrestling with them for the rest of my life,” the artist says.

But since her student work, Benjamin has honed her voice and technical skills, and expanded her visual language to the degree. This development is captured in the new book Cavegirl Monologue, which she describes as an anthology of work from the past five-plus years. “I really tried to organize it in a way so it wasn’t perceived as a retrospective, but rather a collection of my work from a specific period,” she says.

Released by the Brooklyn record label and art-book publisher Sacred Bones (they’ve issued music by David Lynch, Pharmakon, and Zola Jesus, and books by illustrator Alexander Heir), Cavegirl Monologue compiles 150 pages of Benjamin’s drawings and paintings in full color. The hardcover showcase — and the cachet of the publisher — means Benjamin’s art, by turns arousing and grotesque, titillating and disturbing, will find even more fans.

Yet even as this book is being published, its creator speaks of transitioning into a new season of her practice and life. With a breakup in her recent past, and having made a decision to return to New York City after several years in Providence, Rhode Island, she’s feeling reinvigorated, and says this energy is apparent in the text’s newest images. As Benjamin puts it, this work expresses “growth and exploration and sensuality, because that has so much to do with my experience of reconnecting with myself.”

Since sending Monologue to the printer, Benjamin has been attending artist residencies, curating group exhibitions, and focusing more on larger-scale paintings. She describes her latest work as “looser,” less “cerebral.” That said, she’s not done drawing clitorises and bodily fluid in her signature, Janus-faced style — erotic, disquieting, and incendiary, all at once.

Asked how she hopes her work will be received, Benjamin says she’d like it to resonate with anyone who can “identify with aspects of my own experience of womanhood and sexuality, especially the darker stuff.” The boundary-pushing artist continues: “I’m trying to create something beautiful and stimulating out of pain and trauma — that’s my ultimate catharsis. When it works, and people can relate to it, that’s the biggest high for me.”

Photo of Heather Benjamin by Justin Cole Smith 

High Voltage: Matt Pike

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The musician Matt Pike shouldn’t require an introduction. The world is a little fucked up, though — as he’ll be the first to tell you — and the virtuosos who walk among us usually don’t get their due until it’s too late and they’re already six feet under. Pike deserves better, and anyone who knows the difference between a blast-beat and break-beat would agree that the metal maestro should be a household name by now.

But for those who have never carved an anarchy symbol into a desk, Pike is essentially your favorite headbanger’s favorite headbanger, a guitar guru if there ever was one. As a founding member of both Sleep and High on Fire, the 46-year-old has spent the last quarter-century eviscerating eardrums and unleashing riffs that have shaped the contours of contemporary metal. Without him, “stoner metal” wouldn’t have a Wikipedia page, and thrash might never have had a twenty-first century renaissance.

Both Bay-area bands, despite their stark differences, have cultish followings, and the legacy surrounding their music has been passed from dorm room to dorm room, record shop to record shop, over the years, making Pike something like the Alejandro Jodorowsky of the fretboard. After all, taking a cue from the title of Jodorowsky’s trippiest film, Sleep named its second album Holy Mountain (1992), and the creation story of Dopesmoker — the trio’s infamous hour-long song/album about a cosmic caravan of “Weedians” sludging through a “riff-filled land” on the way to Nazareth — has developed the type of feverish mythology usually reserved for midnight movies or conversations about Elvis’s current whereabouts.

Pike’s most recent trip around the sun might elevate his status outside the metal underground, though. 2018 has seen Sleep awaken from a mighty hibernation with the release of The Sciences, the group’s critically acclaimed fourth full-length and its first since Dopesmoker. (Naturally, the album dropped on 4/20, courtesy of Jack White’s Third Man Records.) And this month, High on Fire will release Electric Messiah, the band’s eighth LP and its best in years. Packed with the types of speed anthems that should soundtrack a bank robbery or coup, Pike believes the record has the potential to swell the group’s audience to its rightful size. “This album’s definitely got the material to do it,” he told Penthouse over two long and epic interviews as he was wrapping a set of High on Fire shows in Las Vegas this past summer.

Sleep might be compared to Black Sabbath (if drowned in cough syrup), and, as frontman of High on Fire, Pike is regularly described as the American Lemmy Kilmister. But, in reality, the metal lord has carved his own path and sounds like nothing other than Matt Pike. If the guy doesn’t receive some sort of monument during his lifetime, then maybe he’s right that humanity is truly on a “spiritual downward spiral.”

At the very least, we promise to make our children listen to Dopesmoker. This generation might not recognize him as a living guitar god, but the next will.

Hey Matt, how’s Las Vegas treating ya?

I’m the mayor of fucking crazytown, so I’m busy as fuck.

Keeping up with your mayoral responsibilities. Are you partying?

Maybe just a little. It’s more that I’m trying to schedule and manage everything… but I like to gamble, play games, and stuff like that. Plus, I’m with my girlfriend Alyssa Maucere, who I haven’t seen in quite a while. We’ve been together for two and a half years, and live together [in Oregon]. She’s kind of my life partner. She’s amazing. She’s not only a tattoo artist, a poster artist, and a musician, but her band Eight Bells is playing here on Sunday, so I’m staying in Vegas until the end of the weekend.

You must be touring at least ten months a year, right? And if Alyssa is also in a band, how often are you able to get together with her?

I’ve been making sure that I make time. We’ve been scheduling our relationship like we schedule our bands. If something great comes up for one of my bands, and I’m into it, yeah I’ll take it. But I’m usually the first one to go, “No, I don’t want to do that.” These days, I try to allot time for my personal life because probably for the past ten years, I haven’t allowed any of that time, and quite frankly that destroys my brain and it makes me hate everybody I’m around. It makes me hate music, it makes me hate everything. So I’ve got to take some time for myself. You have to learn how to say no. That’s hard. I’m a pretty sweet person, so I have a hard time saying no to anyone. There needs to be boundaries, though, and don’t forget I’m in two different, full-time fucking bands.

You just finished touring with Sleep, and now you’re on the road with High on Fire. What’s that kind of transitioning like?

It’s like juggling. It’s hard to explain. I put ’ludes in Stove Top stuffing, and then I can play Dopesmoker after touring with High on Fire. Or you go from Sleep to High on Fire, and you pretty much put meth on spaghetti and meatballs [laughs]. I wish it were that easy! No, it takes a lot of like meditation and it takes a lot of focus, as well as knowing the material very thoroughly. I have rituals for both.

Tell me about them.

I have to breathe, I have to think about all the lyrics, or I have to think about all my parts and my solos. I just have to review everything. This is where I really do keep a sober mind, and I take it very seriously — my playing and how I perform with my brothers. I don’t like to let people down, so I don’t let people down!

Some rituals, though: I do pranas and I electrocute myself with these little electrodes, and I squeeze a hand thing. Pranas are the breathing and stretching exercises you do before yoga, but no one really practices those ’cause Westerners are too impatient to take any time. I also do some stretching, some push-ups, sit-ups, and like I said, I meditate and I think about the task at hand. For this part of my life, for the things when I have to perform and when I have to be at my best, I just try to be present — mentally aware of my consciousness and how I’m feeling about the amount of serotonin and dopamine in my brain. I practice a couple different types of meditation. I do a walking meditation, where I count my breaths. I have a breath meditation, too. Sometimes I’ll listen to some frequencies, and then other times I’ll just listen to Dogman Encounters and I get off on the terror that other people have, which sounds draconian, and perhaps it is, but at least I understand the dark side of what I want to call my “spirituality.” Why not explore what might be considered dark?

You’ve had a busy year, with lots of touring. I’m curious what tour life is like for you today, compared to when you first started out.

Well, the rider has gotten better. Some of the travel’s gotten better. And some of it’s not better. I wish the guarantees were better, and I wish we could do more with the stage show. I wish we could do a lot. But we worked hard on this upcoming album, so High on Fire will be working on getting some traction and moving in a forward direction.

Sleep is doing way better than anybody ever thought it would [laughs]. For me, Al [Cisneros], and Jason [Roeder], we just go and jam, and then we think of even more fucked things to do as that band. It’s been pretty good. It’s been a good ride. We did all the blueprinting early on, and no one listened to Sleep. We were on tour with bands like Cannibal Corpse, Cathedral, and Hawkwind, and some weird bands [in the beginning]. It’s like we were planting seeds, and now that seed has spread and it’s become gigantic. That’s a great thing. We’re trying to strike while the iron is hot and the three of us continue getting together to write. It’s a real band.

What are your writing sessions like today, compared to the 90s when the band was known to practice 12 hours a day while passing the smoking “chalice” nonstop?

I think me and Al just smoke some weed and work on ideas. And when it’s me and Al and Jay, we work on drumbeats. I mean the whole concept of Sleep — what the music actually is — it’s all about the drummer. It’s just me and Al sprinkling things here and there when the drummer’s playing and hitting notes at certain times. The whole playing technique to Sleep is to be listening to the drummer and hit on the right spot. Like, one note, then he plays 30 beats, then you hit another note. It’s not always like that, but musically, the concept behind the band is rhythmic.

Sometimes, I throw shit at Al. But my job in High on Fire is definitely that I’m in charge of the themes and the lyrics. In Sleep, that’s kind of Al’s job. His singing and what we sing about are definitely mostly his concepts. I will throw ideas at his head now and then, but that’s not my role in the band. My role is to make a rhythm section sound like it has a guitar player — and that he doesn’t suck [laughs].

When you’re coming up with the crazy conceptual ideas that inform High on Fire’s music, what’s that process like? Are you sitting down with a pad and paper at a bar? Are you hanging out at home and smoking a joint?

Well, it all depends. While I’m traveling, I might be in my bunk, just like trying to ignore the rest of the world. Sometimes I still do hallucinogens. I’ll take mushrooms or acid, and really just think about things. I do a lot of research on conspiracies and esoteric stuff — things that interest me, often historical things. I believe that history is fucking bullshit. Everything I’ve been taught since kindergarten is a lie and I believe that thoroughly.

I really don’t share my mind all the way with everybody until I know that you’re a person who might be open-minded enough. If I put all my ideas and interests out in public, they’d just put a tinfoil hat on me. CNN or FOX, or whatever news channel, or whoever puts the fucking tinfoil hat on whoever’s head, doesn’t realize they’ve been separated and that we are weaker when we’re separated.

That’s what the media is there to do, and I’m not that dumb. I don’t share my thoughts or opinions anymore because I don’t want to be mocked when I’m right. I don’t give a fuck what anybody says, I am who I am, but I’ll keep that shit to myself unless you’re smart enough to read my lyrics and understand the metaphoric things I present within them. If you’re smart enough to do that, you’re probably of like mind. And if not, like I hope you enjoy the music anyway because it’s just a metal record, dude.

Sleep

That’s one of the things I like most about your music. I can appreciate it on an aesthetic, head-banging level, or I can dig into it, learn about the esoteric shit, and appreciate the ideas you explore that a lot of people might call “fringe.”

Most of them don’t talk about this stuff because most of them don’t believe it. They are all watching TV on their cell phones, and that’s all they do. They don’t fucking read anymore, unless it’s on their fucking cell phone. They don’t pay attention to anything unless it’s Hillary Clinton or Trump. They don’t fucking think. And if they do think, they’re thinking about the next lollipop they can get with the next buck that they make. Mankind is on a spiritual downward spiral that has been going on for the last 40 or so years. I think about the 1970s to now, and it’s gotten just dramatically intensified. Is humanity going to exist and coexist in this universe, or are we just gonna let ourselves keep burning on fire like we’re doing?

I don’t mean to be like that… because we have a choice.

People are taught to be complacent or think the woes of society don’t matter because they don’t directly affect them. We’re sort of conditioned to live in a delusion and accept it.

Yeah, that’s what they taught you in school. Or the American Dream, whichever one you want to buy, whatever bullshit thing you’re buying. There are a few things in the world that I fucking do love though, dude. I love fucking guitar. I’m sorry, but this is Penthouse — I really like butts [laughs]. I like yoga pants and bikinis. I like weed! I love my car, which is swampy because I haven’t been home in months. It’s a beautiful car, but it needs to be fucking cleaned. It’s a ’78 El Camino, but it’s got a 383 Stroker and is 500-plus horsepower. It’s fucking badass. It’s not the year I would have chosen, but it had the motor in it, which is worth more than that fucking car. The car is beautiful, too. It has a perfect interior, great paint job. It took me a long time to earn. I bought myself something nice, after enduring all the times I’ve eaten shit for this job. But I love what I do.

“Mankind is on a spiritual downward spiral that has been going on for the last 40 or so years. I think about the 1970s to now, and it’s gotten just dramatically intensified. Is humanity going to exist and coexist in this universe, or are we just gonna let ourselves keep burning on fire like we’re doing?”

I also like freedom of speech. What do Penthouse and Slayer have in common? The First Amendment. You can’t fucking call hate speech on someone because they have an opinion! Fuck you if I don’t like you and I want to say “fuck you.” If I don’t hurt you physically and I’m not a threat, you don’t have the fucking right to tell me what to fucking say. That’s what this whole new fucking fight is about. We have freedom of speech so people can talk their fucking bullshit. But it’s like the vegan wearing leather. Don’t talk your shit if you’re not going to walk your walk. And I know why that generation is pissed off: It’s because your parents were fucking yuppies and they suck. They’re the reason that it’s too expensive to afford a house. I’m not on the side of Trump, either. He’s a distraction — that’s what I believe.

So you’re frustrated with both the left and the right. What about some modern political groups, like the Democratic Socialists of America?

I don’t support socialism, but I agree with socialism sometimes. I mean, I love Scandinavia. Socialism is great there because if you’re in a band, you get paid or even funded. I’d love to have something like that, or universal health care that doesn’t fuck you. American health care fucked me.

I’m fucking pissed about that because I worked really hard to be who I am and do what I did.

On top of digging ditches or driving a fucking tow truck, I went to band practice after work, and I slept like one day a week — for years! I’m not against a left person or a right person, I am against the fact that no one will take responsibility for themselves and they blame it on their personal fucking pocket Jesus… which is your cell phone or computer. Social media is the worst thing that ever happened to man, aside from the fact that once in a while someone tells the truth on it. But even then, it leads to them getting attacked and shut down.

To me, the best part of social media is that new audiences can get introduced to culture they might otherwise be unable to find. Like, there’s a new generation of Sleep fans who probably found out about the band through the internet and social media. But yes, the vast amount of American culture’s relationship with social media is fucking sinister.

I agree with that. I would like this interview to strike something in the hearts of all the left and all the right, and all the people who don’t even want anything to do with all this shit. I’m telling you this is the point: They are separating us and it’s the fucking TV, and this social media bullshit. Turn your fucking TV off and throw it in the hall. Turn your cell phone off and fucking make a friend without knowing if they support the left or right. Then there is no narrative. You’re on neutral fucking ground. There’s no fucking anarchy flags, no American flag, there’s no flag they’re flying anywhere. And when you get a grip on all that, then we’re going to get somewhere. Then, shit, maybe Matt Pike for president?

Hell yeah. President Pike.

Yeah, well, I don’t know if I’d ever want that job. The minute you get it, whether you did anything or not, they shut you down in one way or another. They point a finger at you out of a narrative… if one side likes you or the other, CNN or FOX will inevitably attack you. If I were president, I would just make everybody fucking meditate. I’m not a narcissist or egotist, this is just a hypothetical [laughs]. I do think if everyone shut off their electronics, they might know what north and south are. It’s like fuck, dude…

What’s your connection to Albert Pike? I know he was an infamous Freemason, but you told me to look him up.

It’s horrifying, but yeah, as far as I’ve done research, I’m very much related to that guy.

Are you a Freemason?

Nope. I actually have been approached, and it’s nothing against the Freemasons or anybody else. I’m a one-man gang, or my gang consists of my crew and my bands. So I really don’t need any sort of narrative. I don’t need any sort of higher-up.

I’m an anarchist that enjoys his gun rights, and that’s who I am.

When you’re digging through arcane history and looking up esoteric stuff, how do you find it? Are you looking online? Are you taking out books?

Sometimes it’s from books. There are certain lectures I like, including ones from people like Michael Tsarion, even though I don’t agree with everything he says. He’s really well-read. David Icke turned me on to the Reptilians and all that kind of stuff. I think he turned a lot of people on to that. There’s David Wilcock and Ancient Aliens. I’ve been to Peru, so I fucking know for a fact that mankind — some guy with a fucking knife made out of stone — didn’t make the shit that’s there. There were giants walking around, and I know that for a fact. And the same thing with the Sphinx. How come you can measure around the pyramid [in meters], and up and down it, and it is exactly the speed of light, 186,000 miles-per-second? Why is that? What is that sacred mathematics there?

If mankind is egotistical enough to think that we are the only ones who’ve ever been here, you’re fucking fooling yourself. At the end of the day, really, we all should just be hunter-gatherers and go back to the fucking Dark Ages because we’re being separated [laughs].

I’m not trying to get all conspiracy theorist, I just know that the world is full of fucking shit. I’m not saying this place is all bad. After all, I’m in Penthouse, and it’s full of a lot of fun, a lot of good music, a lot of hot girls, a lot of cool people. You know, I love my fast car, I love my guns, I love my dog, I love my girlfriend. I love a lot of things about the world. If we try hard, it might not fucking fall apart. But it’s not looking good because people just get dumber instead of smarter — and that’s by design. That’s what I’m saying. Fucking shoot your TV. I know cell phones are necessary, but… They gave cell phones to everybody knowing humanity would become that much more stupid. It’s by design, dude. If they turn off the electricity, now they have all the power. If they turn off the fucking electricity, I want to see how many fucking DIY people that want to be politically correct know which direction to walk to find fucking water. What will you do to start a fire, dude? I want to know what you’re going to do when they take that all away from you.

Society feels bleak right now. At the same time, you and I haven’t jumped off a bridge yet. What could we do to change things? Are there any solutions to this bullshit?

Unfortunately, the only thing that teaches people who have fucking ego problems a lesson is consequences… and it’s going to be too late. Finding things in spirituality like forgiveness, kindness, goodness can help. Instead of having an attack on someone’s self-esteem, you build them up, and you try to make them see your point of view by being intelligent and by making choices that help humanity. Or you can be a selfish little prick and just go with a bunch of other selfish little pricks that really don’t care if anybody’s hurt or anybody feels any bit different about anything.

We’ve been taught to be a complacent, sad species. We are fucking sad. We are not the apex predator we were. Dude, I could take a hundred kids out of school and not one of them would know how to hunt or kill their own food. They will eat at fucking Burger King or McDonald’s all day, but not one of them would know how to survive ten minutes. Me, personally, I’ll be eating all your fucking legs and asses. I’m telling you, cannibalism is the way to the future [laughs]. That was a hypothetical, but the people who are going to survive are going to be cannibals. The people who are going to survive are going to be gangsters with all the guns that have pirate rules. But the New World Order is not the way to do this.

High On Fire

I know you’re a gun enthusiast and always have been. I remember reading an old interview where you detailed your mighty collection at the time. Has it grown since?

Oh yeah. I just got a CZ Scorpion with the new laser sight. It’s a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, but kind of like an Uzi or submachine gun. I can make smiley faces on targets from like 60 yards. CZ is a great company. I have another Sub-2000 which is a Kel-Tec. I’m going to keep kind of quiet about the rest of my gun collection because if they come for ’em they’re not going to know what to look for. I’ll have a stash, somewhere.

So I have a Sleep question. From the beginning, the band had a big relationship with weed. Do you still smoke pot?

Actually, now that I live in Oregon and recreational marijuana is available, I’ll smoke weed once in a while. Like, I did bong hits with Al while we were writing during the last little session working on The Sciences. I hadn’t done a bong hit in like five years. We were in Albuquerque, and it’s not like there’s traffic, but I had a hard time getting from his house to my hotel right up the street. I was so high. Oh God, dude.

Now, I buy gummies. I guess I consume edibles more than I actually smoke. Every once in a while, we’ll be in Europe or something, and my guitar tech and sound man, Chad Hartgrave, will get me to smoke so I go to bed and don’t go out and fuck up and party and do all that stuff. He’ll make me smoke a joint with him, even if it’s just hash and tobacco. It knocks me out and makes me go to bed.

What are Sleep fans like today?

Multiplied [laughs]. I see a lot of younger people at our shows, and I think their parents were probably into us. I’m kind of an old dude. I’m 46 — not even close to a millennial.

I’m obsessed with all the mythology around Sleep and the recording of Dopesmoker. I know you’ve said the rumor about the band spending its entire advance from London Records on weed is exaggerated. At the same time, the album was recorded in Mendocino, California, and you must have had access to great pot.

Dude, it’s so different today. There used to be weed that had seeds in it. They don’t do that anymore. Anyway, yes, we were in Northern California, which was definitely a great place to find some good fucking weed. That’s where most of it was coming from. Hippies with guns were scary back then, though.

How much weed you were smoking during those recording sessions?

I don’t know exactly, but we each had at least a pillowcase’s worth at all times. We even made a fucking chalice out of the sink. We turned it into the biggest bong ever, using duct tape, some surgical tubes, and a kludgy mouthpiece we fired. We’d fill the sink with water and tape it off, so it was kind of like a gravity bong, but way fucking bigger. I think Al was the only one that actually got the thing to hit. I don’t think anyone else had the lung power, but Al’s got special DNA for shit like that.

Over the entire recording of Dopesmoker, how much pot do you think you consumed?

It was something like three to six ounces a day for two months. Yeah, it got to the point where I got so sick of just smoking it that instead I would just grind it up in a coffeemaker and throw it in spaghetti and make everybody eat that. Then we’d be, like, drooling, and you’d forget your name and address. It was a lot of weed [laughs].

Sleep released its long-awaited fourth album this year. Now that The Sciences is finally out, are you and Al still digging through the riff vault? What’s the current status of the band?

Well, we’re just treating Sleep how we treat Sleep. We’re just trying to get together and write and have some fun with it and do some shows. We don’t like to be too agenda-filled. We’re pretty casual about it until we’re done with something or have an album’s worth of music ready.

I’ve always appreciated that you’re in two very different bands, but both are so fucking good.

I appreciate it, too. It’s apples and oranges. I’m glad I have both apples and oranges because I have two kinds of juice. And now High on Fire has a new album called Electric Messiah. We just released the eponymous single. The record is like an anarchy-Sumerian rock opera. I had a dream about Lemmy Kilmister after he died. People have told me I’m the American Lemmy, even before he passed, and it always bugged me. I can’t touch that man. I used to tell people, “Dude, I am not fucking nowhere near Lemmy. I might have a raspy voice, and I might play similar music, and Motörhead is an influence on us, but I’m not fucking Lemmy Kilmister — no one is.”

“I love my fast car, I love my guns, I love my dog, I love my girlfriend. I love a lot of things about the world. If we try hard, it might not fucking fall apart. But it’s not looking good because people just get dumber instead of smarter… They gave cell phones to everybody knowing humanity would become that much more stupid. it’s by design, dude.”

And I guess that’s what the dream was essentially about: Lemmy got hella mad at me. Dude was pissed. In the dream, I felt guilty or that he would scold me or something. I had been writing a tune with Des [Kensel, drummer], and I started singing about the weird fucking dream. I ended up writing a bunch of lyrics that I thought Lemmy would sing, while approaching it like an homage to Lemmy. I got to go on tour with him, I got to interview him. I knew him a little. He was one of the biggest deals to rock and one of the last of his kind. So the single “Electric Messiah” is our ode because Jeff [Matz, bassist] and Des love him just as much as I did. I wasn’t trying to jump all over a poser bandwagon or something. It’s just a tribute to Lemmy, but it’s a great album title as well, so we stuck with it.

At one point, I wanted to call it Insect Workout With Lemmy [laughs], but Des convinced me to go with Electric Messiah, and we think it’s badass.

Can you tell me about the album art for Electric Messiah?

Oh yes, Skinner did it! I’ve been friends with Skinner for a long time. We all have. He’s an amazing dude. I met him quite a few years ago, at one of his art shows, and I was just blown away. For the album art, I talked to Skinner on the phone for a while, and told him what I was thinking about — the legend of the Nephilim and the Anunnaki giants waking up after they’ve been cryogenically frozen under earth. The Nephilim are half-Anunnaki, and were supposedly the people who first created our civilizations.

Are they the ones who built Machu Picchu?

I believe so. They were spread out all over the Earth. So were the Pleiadians. If I go into that fucking thing, I’ll be on the phone with you for another six hours. Anyway, the cover relates to the Nephilim giants, who used to be the kings of Earth, waking up from their underground tombs and usurping their thrones and slaying mankind. A lot of people have this hypothesis that that’s going to happen.

Basically, I took all Sumerian cuneiform tablet stories and put themes from them into the first block of the new album, as if it were my own weird little book report. I’m very versed in this stuff. I study and research a lot of crazy shit like that.

So you’re saying the album’s lyrics reflect ideas related to this mythology, too?

Yeah, most of it. There are other [songs] about cryptids, and witches, and “God of the Godless” is about artificial intelligence. “Freebooters” is about Sir John Dee and England’s colonization conspiracy with the pirates. The album is full of all the weird tales that I know.

But I’m not fucking telling you this is or this isn’t. It’s just shit I think about. What’s more metal than half-fantasy, half-mythology? It all came from somewhere true. I sing about the Reptilians on occasion. I listen to a lot of people who they call “conspiracists,” but dude, they have the best metal lyrics [inspiration-wise]. My personal beliefs, you can take or leave. I believe a lot of crazy shit. You know what’s cool about this album? It’s a fun album. It’s not as doom-y [laughs].

Any other thoughts you want to add for Penthouse readers?

Yeah. Stop listening to the media and go to more fucking shows. Fucking seriously. Doomsday’s coming too fast to not enjoy what you’ve got.

Must-Read Booze Books

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Along with all the philosophizing that goes on in Plato’s Symposium, there’s a shitload of drinking, since getting blasted on wine and debating the meaning of life was the whole point of a “symposium.” Exhibit B? The Bacchae, by Euripides, considered one of the greatest plays ever written. Not messing around, it makes Dionysus, the god of wine, its protagonist.

Shakespeare got in on the action with Falstaff, the corpulent knight who shows up in three different plays hanging out at the Boar’s Head Tavern getting wasted on sherry. Drinking buddy of Prince Hal, future king, Falstaff got his own Orson Welles movie, Chimes at Midnight, and inspired Falstaff Beer out of St. Louis, merrily quaffed for 102 years.

Books and beer, lit and liquor — they go together. Reading while buzzed is a risk-free activity (unlike, say, swinging a kettlebell through your legs drunk at the gym). Not for nothing do you have bookstores offering adult beverages these days. Next time you’re in Hudson, New York, check out Spotty Dog Books & Ale. Or grab a cocktail at Denver’s BookBar. And it’s not like you have to reach back to ancient Athens or Renaissance England for a work of hooch lit. Here’s our line-up of ten modern and contemporary keepers. They bottle their topic in different ways, but all give a leading role to the sauce.

Everyday Drinking 
Twentieth-century British writer Kingsley Amis, father of novelist Martin, drank like a fish, excelled at zingers, and wrote superbly. His hangover riffs, here and in Lucky Jim, are the gold standard. “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night,” Amis writes in Jim, his first novel. This compendium, fizzily introduced by Christopher Hitchens, gathers the hilarious drink columns Amis wrote in the seventies and eighties. (Wine drinkers, be warned: He takes the piss out of your kind.)

The Joy of Mixology
A legendary barkeep and widely published writer, Gary Regan — mentor to hundreds of bartenders, cocktail competition judge, and longtime drinks columnist — is an ideal booze Yoda. Though written as a professional guide, this book works for anyone hoping to up their mixology game. The way it pulls back the curtain on Regan’s world will enrich your convivial nights out.Plus, the author shares recipes, including for his esteemed margarita.

Drinking with Men
Rosie Schaap, daughter of the late sportswriter Dick Schaap, sister to ESPN’s Jeremy, is a Brooklyn bartender, terrific writer, and lover of a good pub. Here she serves up an engaging, artfully written memoir focused on the intersection of her life with bar culture from the time she could drink. She shares stories, sketches portraits of regulars, and celebrates some of her favorite watering holes from Dublin to L.A. to New York.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
“My name is Tucker Max and I am an asshole.” So began this 2006 best-seller by a womanizing, bar-hopping dude smart enough to attend the U of Chicago and Duke Law. Max turned tales of guzzling, fucking, mocking posers and twits, and all-around drunken jackassery into a publishing gravy train that’s sold two million copies. Beer him!

The Lost Weekend
Made into an Oscar-winning movie by Billy Wilder of Some Like It Hot fame, this 1944 novel, written by booze-addicted Charles Jackson, scandalized readers with its tale of an epic bender by an alcoholic New York writer. In one famous scene, our hero Don trudges 60 blocks to pawn his typewriter, only to find the shop closed. Think Leaving Las Vegas without the call girl, and with a fall down stairs instead of into a poolside glass table.

Blackout
For years, Texas writer Sarah Hepola got loaded and slept with men she’d just met, barely or not at all remembering how she got in their beds. Blonde, pretty, smart, and witty, she was a party girl — until she realized it was destroying her life. This critically acclaimed 2015 memoir, like Drinking With Men, explores life in bars, but from a very different perspective.

Proof
Named a 2014 best science book by multiple publications, Proof, by Wired editor Adam Rogers, pops a top on the “science of booze.” Get your liquor geek on as the entertaining author hits laboratories, distilleries, wineries, and more, decanting insights from chemistry, metallurgy, neurobiology, psychology, and other relevant fields. In the hangover chapter, we learn Rogers’s technical term for the 23 percent of us who don’t get hung: “Jerks.”

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway’s breakthrough 1926 novel of Paris, Spain, bullfighting, lust, journalism, friendship, and Americans abroad also features a mind-blowing amount of drinking. Characters raise a glass (or squirt wine from a goatskin bag) more than 800 times. They down beer, punch, champagne, absinthe, cognac, liqueurs, and a couple barrels of wine. Everyone’s lit, all the time. Do not attempt a drinking game with Papa’s masterpiece!

The Drunken Botanist
This best-selling 2013 book illuminates alcohol and mixology in the freshest of ways. It explores the herbs, flowers, fruits, trees, and fungi that for thousands of years have been our sources for beer, wine, spirits, and other drinks. Author, gardener, and horticultural blogger Amy Stewart tells of the eureka moments, the trial and error, the craft behind the creation of our beloved gin, sake, and bourbon. Lively and funny, nothing if not enthusiastic, Stewart says a trip to a liquor store just fills her head with origin stories.

Drink
Perhaps you’ve heard of beer towers: colossal plastic cylinders filled with well over a hundred fluid ounces of lager, ale, what have you. This brilliant book — all 560 pages of it — is the hooch-lit equivalent of a beer tower. Iain Gately surveys the whole history of booze, from its start 8,000 years ago, through the Mayans and their pulque, all the way to Budweiser’s Spuds McKenzie. Subtitled “A Cultural History,” the account even covers the world’s most famous drinkers and drinks.

So belly up and start reading. Salud!

Tuned In

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, PS4, Xbox One)

Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok — gunfighters were the rock stars of the Wild West, notorious for their oversized personas, unhealthy habits, and penchant for shooting a man for snoring too loudly. Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 delivers on the outlaw lifestyle like no other game. It’s a mash-up of historical fact and spaghetti western set in 1899 frontier country. Players strap on the six-shooters of fictional rabble-rouser Arthur Morgan. He’s the leader of one of the last remaining gangs in a Wild West about to be tamed. After a robbery goes awry, Morgan must lead his motley crew across the American heartland with bounty hunters and federal marshals in pursuit. Morgan’s base of operations is a mobile bandit camp from which you can stage misdeeds in nearby one-horse towns.

Like the previous game (which you don’t need to play to follow the story here), Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t dodge comparisons to Rockstar’s other classic crime series, Grand Theft Auto. You can giddy-up and go wherever you want in an open world and take on a dozen dirty side activities, from hunting wolves to robbing stagecoaches, while progressing through the type of cinematic story that Rockstar is famous for. The scenery is no less epic, shifting from desert mesas to alpine forests to gator-infested bayous as you push across the country. Each town has its own lively characters — card players, Civil War vets, saloon keepers, brothel professionals — who go about their daily duties and react to your presence and notoriety. Pistol play is more Django Unchained than Unforgiven, letting you quick-draw and deal devastating bodily injuries. But just because you’re an outlaw doesn’t mean you have to be the bad guy. An honor system tracks how you treat bystanders. If you sling lead indiscriminately, they’ll run you out of town. Gun down the town’s local thugs at high noon and you’ll become a folk hero — at least until the law catches up with you.

Brütal Legend (Electronic Arts, PS3, Xbox 360, PC)

A pantheon of rock gods from Rob Halford to Ozzy Osbourne joins Jack Black in this hilarious 2009 homage to arena rock. Black plays a roadie whose enchanted belt buckle transports him to a world ripped from heavy-metal album covers. Wield an ax — and an ax guitar — to rock the faces of demonic adversaries while banging your head to a soundtrack of more than a hundred metal standards.

PaRappa the Rapper (Sony Computer Entertainment, PS One)

A game about a rapping spaniel looking for interspecies romance might not sound like the greatest thing to groove on, but PaRappa the Rapper popularized a genre that until 1997 had been a mere Japanese novelty. Any fan of the game can still quote the motivational lyrics of its catchy rap-alongs (“Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind!”).

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Rockstar Games, PS2, Xbox, PC)

Gaming’s most notorious interactive crime spree might seem out of place in a list of revolutionary music games, but 2002’s sun-soaked Vice City pioneered the use of a soundtrack as a tool to pull players into the world. The game featured more than 100 acid-washed 1980s hits that players cranked on their stolen car’s radio as they cruised a stylized Miami’s neon streets.

Rocksmith 2014 (PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC)

Unlike the Guitar Hero games that shipped with a plastic instrument, Rocksmith requires a real electric guitar to play — and it actually teaches you to play it using the same scrolling-note interface used in similar titles. The software adjusts its difficulty based on your fretwork. The better you get, the more notes it’ll throw at you, until eventually you’re handling your ax like a rock deity.

The Long and Whining Road

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Some people believe art is more than a job, but some people believe in a very specific white-skin Jesus, and I don’t see why one sort of self-regard should be less dopey than the other. I mean, believe in angels or believe you’re special; it does no harm as far as that goes.

That being said, like people who brag about their IQs, the harm only comes when shit gets said out loud. While the fine-art world has seemingly resigned itself to largely being an endless circle jerk of commenting on its own existence, therefore keeping its audience limited to, well, fine artists and those who make money off it, music is still happily only, like, 20 percent living within its own asshole.

The 20 percent I’m talking about is the worst rock genre there is (worse even than crabcore, though maybe not as bad as crunkcore): Songs About Being in a Band. Those songs that operate from the premise that there’s something inherently more interesting about playing three chords than being a carpenter or locksmith. Songs like The Byrds’ “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” and Paramore’s “Looking Up.”

Now, I’m not claiming that being in a band isn’t more fun or easier than those occupations. I’m not insane. But the only thing less cool than bragging is making that brag a whine.

The purview of the singer, to me, is sex and/or death. That covers a lot of ground, from political ranting to score-settling with contemptuous parents/teachers/gym coaches. But the ground it shouldn’t cover is the gig itself. That’s not interesting and it’s not fair to the fan to force them to pretend it is, to ask all the teens to sing along to verses about bad A&R brunches as if it were their own deep-rooted pain.

To make the point finer: If pornography was about pornography, half the fun would disappear (though — cough — I imagine the remaining half would still get the job done). In the same way we want, say, Riley Reid to be a neighbor or an astronaut or whatever, we want a band to be something else, something either relatable (like a Bon Jovian working stiff) or aspirational (a Bowie spaceman, a Cobain Hamlet, a Freddie Mercury… Freddie Mercury).

Rock songs about performing rock songs (not be confused with rock songs about rock songs, like “Land of 1,000 Dances” or even Bob Seger’s “Drift Away” — to me the worst rock song ever recorded) are just too self-aware, and then not self-aware enough. They’re what happens when a band decides that the fan owes them their empathy, that they no longer need to use metaphor to get the listener engaged because the listener is so dense as to want to sing along to “We’re an American Band,” doing all the heavy lifting, while the band just describes what was included in their rider.

Why do rock bands do this? With hip-hop, well, hip-hop throws the whole thing off. It’s a form with discussion of process baked in at its inception. Rappers have always talked about The Show and, having learned either something or nothing from the history of blues and soul exploitation, they’ve always bitched about the industry. Rock bands share the same sense of grievance, though, unlike rappers, they’re far more likely to extend their complaints to feeling misunderstood by their fans.

Fall Out Boy have forged an entire career talking about how they perceive their fans, and somehow convincing said fans to pigeonhole themselves. Pete Wentz might be the first man in history to beat the monkey’s paw at its own game. He wishes for success, and gets richer complaining about it. Arguably, he’s just following the template set by grunge mopers and their immediate corporate pop-punk descendants; we were misunderstood as teens and now we’re misunderstood as 30-year-olds who dress like teens.

If you spend most of your time in a tour van/bus, playing shows, it’s understandable that you want to write about your life as it’s happening. And there have been some great songs that prove the exception to my petulant broad-sweep irritation. To my mind, the good songs about being in a band are the ones about being unloved and/or hopeful. Songs like “Formed a Band” by Art Brut, and “One Chord Wonders” by English punk band the Adverts, operate as calls to arm, letting the eternal kids know that anything and everything is possible.

But eventually, even the punks end up like Rancid, ignoring the whole “no gods no heroes” thing and indulging in the most egregious kind of self-mythology. The singer can cloak his/her nostalgia in fatalism, but if they’re complaining about the open road being long (it’s paved, baby, you should write a thank-you note to city hall, or at least the Romans) or their amps in any capacity, then I’m checking out.

Of course, my crying may be moot, like complaining about dinosaurs or moderate Republicans. History has largely wiped out the guitar band and, to be honest, most of the new breed are ladies who write songs about bastards and the state — two topics I get down with. But the flip side is that, while the rich get richer, the niche has grown nicher.

I worry that so many of my peers love Pup’s “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You I Will” because, besides it being an undeniable jam, rock is in the same popularity rut that fine art is: its fans are mainly its practitioners.

Maybe, in a time when selling a few thousand records will put you on the charts, fans aren’t fake-relating — they’re listening from their own vans, writing their own songs about listening to Pup in said vans, passing other bands in vans on their own way to play for whatever musicians or publicists or label owners live in the next town, everybody pissing in the same bottles and calling it art or, worse, interesting.

Score Bard

Posted on by Team Penthouse

For those of us with more, ahem, discerning ears, film scoring — the instrumental music written to enhance a story’s drama — can make or break a production. Ideally, it’s a thing of beauty that transports us, conveying emotions the images cannot. In reality, it can be an unrelenting assault on the senses, or overly dramatic schmaltz that offends our intelligence.

But not when it’s the work of L.A.-based film composer Craig Wedren.

“I always look at the music as the final character — this ghost that floats through,” says Wedren. “You’re not aware of it, you don’t know why you’re thinking or feeling the way you are, and this is frequently because of this all-important, nonverbal final character.”

Wedren’s composing style is versatile by nature — after all, pros have to adapt to each project and whatever music is required. But what catches our ear every time are his more languid, atmospheric scores, which is unexpected for someone who started out in D.C.’s legendary Dischord Records scene, fronting the post-punk band Shudder to Think (think Fugazi-type hardcore, but with Wedren’s dreamy, operatic pipes). But as the band achieved major-label status in the 1990s, touring with groups like Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement, Wedren’s interests began to drift toward film scoring, and in 1997, he and his bandmates hit the mother lode: writing and performing songs for Todd Haynes’ glam-rock opus, Velvet Goldmine, and composing scores for Jesse Peretz’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, and Lisa Cholodenko’s debut feature, High Art.

Shudder to Think eventually disbanded, but Wedren’s newfound career took off. Twenty years later, this professional film composer has a résumé full of winners, including David Wain’s Wet Hot American Summer and Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, along with an impressive list of TV credits, like Hung, Reno 911!, and The United States of Tara. In 2017, Wedren and Pink Ape — the name of his studio as well as his soundtrack “collective” of musician and composer friends — created the score for the hit Netflix series GLOW, and he also released an electro-acoustic solo record, his first since 2011, titled Adult Desire.

We had the pleasure of chatting with the very busy Wedren, who just turned 49, while he was on vacation with his extended family — wife, children, parents, in-laws — in coastal Maine. In honor of our interview, he jokes, “Everyone is walking around topless with cocktails.” Huzzah!

Let’s start with the movies you watched growing up.

Up until my junior year in high school, I lived in Cleveland, which was this cultural catchall, so anything my friends and I could get we absorbed. We were late-70s/early-80s boys, so it was Corvette Summer, Star Wars, and Caddyshack, and as we got older our tastes got weirder and artier, like Cat People and Liquid Sky.

Did you pay any attention to the music?

I don’t know if I was aware of movie music as a separate thing, but I was obsessed with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. My big introduction to punk and new wave was the soundtrack to Times Square, which had songs by the Cure, Patti Smith, XTC, and all the bands that would feed into Shudder to Think, my own output, and eventually my film stuff — the more atmospheric background music. I don’t know that my friends and I were conscious of it, but what was embedded most deeply into our aesthetic DNA was music and movies.

You’re still involved with your Cleveland friends, right?

I grew up with David Wain, who directed Wet Hot American Summer, and Stuart Blumberg, who directed Thanks for Sharing and has written a lot of different movies [including Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right]. We were the Three Musketeers. We had bands together and we made videos and there were skits in David’s basement and a little recording studio, so we were always generating this material. Then David and I went to NYU and he joined this sketch-comedy group that became The State.

This was the late 80s and I was already in Shudder to Think, and all of The State guys were in film school. I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno, Arvo Pärt, and different composers that fell somewhere between the kind of post-punk/new wave/ambient/4AD stuff [Cocteau Twins, Pixies] that was going on then and, like, cinematic classical background music. So when I wasn’t doing Shudder, I was doing sound design for theater, making music for student films, or just recording experimental stuff, high with friends, on my little 4-track. It was a very natural, unconscious foray into what would become, essentially, film-score music.

The first movie I saw that Shudder to Think scored was Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art, in 1998. How did that project come about?

Lisa was editing the film at Post 391 in New York — the same facility as Todd Haynes, who directed Velvet Goldmine [for which Shudder to Think wrote two songs] — and somebody mentioned us to her. She was like, Who are these poser/wannabe queer/straight boys trying to make film music? At first she was skeptical, but I watched a rough cut of the film and I had a vision. I knew exactly what the score needed to be. So I created a demo using wine glasses as the instrument. I gave her a DAT tape and it worked really well with the material.

Do you get a cut of the film you’re working on and then figure out the music, or are you involved earlier in the process?

It depends. Frequently, producers and filmmakers are so overwhelmed keeping track of a thousand different elements of production that they don’t think about the music until the very last second. Then you get a cut of a movie or TV show dropped into your lap with a hodgepodge of music they’ve grabbed from different scores and sources, and you go from there.

The flip side of that is, for instance, this movie I just did with Ken Marino, Dog Days, where there’s a band in the story, so we had to figure out what this band sounded like. I recorded a bunch of music way beforehand that they could play along to on set. We also knew that there had to be a centerpiece — it’s a romantic comedy, so there needed to be that kind of classic love song for the montage in the middle. That was one of the first things that got written so [Ken] was able to play it for the actors and get everyone on the same page — melodically, atmospherically, and thematically.

In the case of High Art, I think Lisa cut the entire movie together without any temp music. Most editors will “temp” the film — which is to say grab music from wherever — while they’re editing. Which makes sense, because technologically you have access to everything. But there are some old-school filmmakers who believe that you should cut the film so it plays well dry, before adding any music.

Do you have a preference?

I used to like to have things completely dry so I could come to it with fresh ears, but now I like knowing a director’s tastes and what they’re thinking. I don’t mind having temp music to put me in the ballpark, but if they’re too attached to it then it can become a drag — this is called “temp love,” and it can take the wind out of one’s creative sails.

Temp music is also good because sometimes I like to take apart another composer’s work. Like, Let’s see, how did John Williams make this piece of music? For Reno 911! Miami, there were a lot of big, classic scores temped in — Jurassic Park and God knows what else. I had only done smaller indie films at this point, so I was like, Okay, I’m gonna get my crash course in big Hollywood film scoring. I didn’t go to school for this, I just kind of bushwhacked my way through. So that was really cool.

You scored the Netflix series GLOW, which has gotten great reviews. It’s definitely a weird concept — women’s wrestling in the 1980s. Did you think it would be this good?

I knew from the people involved that it was going to be a highly creative, intelligent, and fun project. Jesse Peretz, one of the executive producers, actually directed the very first movie that Shudder to Think scored, First Love, Last Rites. He was a friend of mine in the 90s, so we have a long history together. Then, Jenji Kohan, who created Orange is the New Black, was another executive producer. I know her through friends in L.A., and she’s amazing and smart and she doesn’t make bullshit.

I love your use of cheesy synth music — it really feels like the 1980s, not some greatest-hits rehash of that decade.

I remember GLOW when it was on [1986-89], and I was like, What the fuck is this? Before reading the Netflix script, I watched the documentary [Brett Whitcomb’s GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling], and it had this amazing sub-hair metal music in it. Then when I read the script, it reminded me of Wang Chung’s score for To Live and Die in L.A. — off the beaten path, and maybe a little lower budget than some of the more “designer” brand synth scores of the era, like [Giorgio] Moroder, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis.

So we came up with what I would call “off-brand” music [laughs].

What you describe makes me think of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York, where the director scored and played half the instruments himself.

I love that movie. Now that’s low-rent. It’s almost like the band Suicide, which was this rickety-ass synth-punk duo from the 70s — two chords, really creaky and trashy. But it turns out they were the foundation for half the indie music that’s been made in the twenty-first century. And I feel like John Carpenter’s scores are like that. At the time, we were like, Did he make this on a tin can? It was just so primitive. But now, if you watch something like Stranger Things, anyone who’s making a weird synth score owes a debt to John Carpenter.

Speaking of Stranger Things, how do you feel about all the punk/alternative music we listened to growing up now being used in all these mainstream movies, TV shows, and commercials?

I’m of two minds about it. On one hand, if the musicians are still alive to enjoy the spoils, I certainly understand, because it’s really hard to make a living making the music that you want to make. For better or worse, that’s one of the only games left in town — licensing for a movie or a commercial or a TV show. On the other hand, sometimes it’s utterly ridiculous.

I remember hearing a Buzzcocks song in some commercial, and I was like, What the fuck? The world doesn’t make any sense! There’s this duality to it. There was this precious, secret music that was our little coven, but we also felt like: This should be the big music! You can’t have it both ways. And of course it was the weirdos who ended up in creative jobs, like music supervisors, writers, directors, so inevitably you have these former freaks behind the controls of commercial output. So it makes sense that our peers making these commercials are like, I love the Buzzcocks, let’s put them in.

Then there’s the other phenomenon of the internet, which turns over every rock from the twentieth century, making all this stuff equally available to anyone. So this whole notion of our secret, sacred music is erased from the familiar categories we grew up with. With Shudder to Think, ours was beautiful music, but it was aggressively challenging at times. We wanted to be as big as Van Halen — that was our utopia. I don’t know that we wouldn’t have been disappointed had that happened, because there’s a whole lot of weirdness that comes from popularity and commercialization, but that was what we hoped for.

To learn more about Craig Wedren or to stream Adult Desire, go to craigwedren.com

The Ongoing Fight for Civil Liberties

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During my own lifetime, liberal president Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the detention of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in camps far away from their homes. This compromise of civil liberties was approved by the most liberal justices in modern Supreme Court history.

Then came the threat of Communism during the 1950s. The response was another compromise in civil liberties demanded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers. Free speech was restricted, the Communist party was outlawed, and the courts upheld many of these compromises on civil liberties.

Then came the civil rights movement, with violence on both sides and the accompanying call for compromises in our civil liberties. The Supreme Court was asked to limit trial by jury so that segregationist governors could be compelled to obey court orders without the risk of jury nullification.

This was followed by the Vietnam War, during which the government drafted dissenters in order to silence them, and war protestors were charged with a variety of crimes to stifle dissent.

At the beginning of this century, we witnessed the disaster of September 11. This was followed by a call to compromise the civil liberties of suspected terrorists by detaining them without trial, torturing them, and silencing imams who advocated jihad.

And now, the presidency of Donald Trump has given rise to demands that we stretch the criminal law and the criteria for impeaching and removing the president. The justification offered for this compromise is that Trump himself has denied the civil liberties of people seeking asylum and immigration into our country.

In every age, we hear the same claim: “This time it’s different. Previous threats have never been as great. This time we really need to compromise civil liberties.”

But as Benjamin Franklin warned us more than 250 years ago: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Whenever civil liberties have been compromised, I have been on the forefront of demanding strict compliance with our Constitution. It is precisely during times of crisis that civil liberties are most endangered, because decent people believe that the short-term needs for safety outweigh the long-term needs for liberty. I have been vilified, not only by the hard left, but by some centrist liberals as well, for insisting that the criminal law not be stretched to target Donald Trump’s political sins, and that the criteria for impeaching and removing a president not be expanded in order to target this particular president.

Had Hillary Clinton been elected president and had the Republicans tried to prosecute and impeach her, I would be making precisely the same arguments I am now making with regard to President Trump. The book I recently wrote, entitled The Case Against Impeaching Trump, would have been The Case Against Impeaching Hillary Clinton. The title would have been different, but the content would have been the same. To emphasize this point, I had my publisher produce a mock cover featuring Clinton’s name instead of Trump’s. Had I been making these exact arguments in regard to Hillary Clinton, people on the left would be building a statue of me instead of trying to tear me down.

Throughout my life, I have applied what I call the “shoe on the other foot” test. Whenever I make an argument, I ask myself: “Would I be making the same argument if the shoe were on the other foot, if the person whose rights I was defending was of the opposite party or political persuasion?” I pass this test with flying colors. Most of my critics fail it.

I will continue to demand civil liberties and constitutional rights for all Americans, regardless of party affiliation, ideology, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. The equal protection of the law does not stop at the Oval Office. No one is above the law. No one is below the law. If the law can be stretched to target a president, it can be stretched to target anyone.

Our Date with Anarchism

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Illegal logging operations had been razing the oak forests surrounding the town for years, with the backing of one of the sprawling cartels that now effectively controls large swaths of Michoacán, the Mexican state in which the town of 20,000 resides.

And since neither the local police nor the Mexican government seemed interested in following up on the community’s complaints, Cherán’s residents — most of them indigenous Purépecha people — suspected these entities were cut in on the deal. After loggers began kidnapping, raping, and murdering locals, and the clear-cutting began to threaten a nearby spring, the town’s women made up their minds to fight back.

Early in the morning of April 15, a few dozen of them, armed with rocks and fireworks, surrounded a bus full of loggers. They took two loggers hostage and kicked the rest out of town. Then they ejected the mayor, the cops, and any representatives of Mexico’s main political parties they could get their hands on.

Seven years later, the cartels haven’t come back to Cherán, and neither has the government. A citizen militia tightly controls the border around the town, searching visitors for party propaganda along with more common types of contraband. On voting day for the recent presidential election that put leftist reform candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in power, Cherán residents who wanted to cast a ballot had to travel to neighboring towns to find a polling place.

Cherán now has a council of citizens instead of a mayor and a citizen watch patrol instead of police, and it effectively exists outside the rule of the Mexican government, thanks to a supreme court decision in their favor. Sending the feds packing seems to be working out for Cherán. Crime is down, happiness is up, and the forest is starting to grow back.

In 10,000 years of human civilization, we have yet to come up with a single form of government that’s functional, stable, and capable of scaling up to fit our forever-expanding societies. From god-kings to colonial empires, every idea we’ve had for organizing large populations under one power structure has collapsed when it was stretched too far. It seems like the only ways to unite people behind a government are to threaten them (like North Korea) or bribe them (like Denmark, which is so swamped with oil money that its secondhand-vinyl sellers can afford to winter in South America).

There was a minute there, between the fall of the Soviet Union and the launch of Russia’s internet war on Western politics, where it seemed like liberal democracy might win out as history’s final form of government, capable of uniting the whole world under one global order. But that was before hackers uncovered its possibly fatal vulnerability to the new information paradigm, and brought the entire postwar political order to the brink of collapse with what appears to be a modest Facebook advertising budget. The schisming of the United States, the European Union’s teetering on the edge of a breakdown, and liberal democracy’s seemingly insurmountable difficulty in finding a foothold in the Middle East all strongly suggest that this system isn’t any better suited for the future than Soviet communism was.

For the past few years, the news has felt like play-by-play commentary for a society spinning out of control. Our young millennium has seen technological change, societal change, and environmental change accelerate to dizzying, unprecedented speeds. We’re bound for a kind of a social singularity, one where our increasingly interconnected, digitized, globalized society reaches a tipping point and… something changes on a deep, fundamental level.

We’re about to cross the threshold into a new epoch, one as distinct as the Iron or Industrial ages, and we don’t really know what’s on the other side. Moreover, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we don’t have a working plan for how we’re going to govern it.

So here’s the question: If we can’t figure out a kind of government that’ll work for us the way we want it to, why should we bother having governments at all?

Cherán isn’t the only community on Earth functioning effectively without a government. Other indigenous communities in Mexico have followed the example of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and established their own autonomous cooperatives. Christiana, the leaderless city within Copenhagen, has existed almost entirely outside of direct rule by the city or national governments since 1971, and has even survived a few organized attempts by those governments to shut it down. Closer to home, Burning Man has been collectively building, operating, and dismantling a more or less hierarchy-free city in the Nevada desert every year for over three decades. Maybe, the animating idea goes, we’d all be better off if we gave everyone in power the boot.

The technical term for organizing people without a government — or at least the kind of top-down hierarchical structure that we usually mean when we say “government” — is anarchism. And for a growing number of people, it’s looking like the future of power.

In American politics, anarchism is a dirty word. We typically think it means bomb-throwing terrorists sowing chaos for chaos’s sake, which is why conservatives have for so long used it to try and discredit everyone from labor organizers to civil rights leaders. But America is, in a lot of ways, a deeply anarchist nation, born out of rage against restrictive systems of power, and has remained intensely skeptical of power, even during periods like the one right now where we vote for leaders who openly revel in accumulating it.

We’re taught early on that the United States is a democracy, but the ideal America that we’re raised to believe in — a place of infinite personal liberty, where everyone gets a say in how things are run and anyone who doesn’t like it can head out west and try their own way — is quintessentially anarchist.

The friction between the Thoreau-style anarchist utopia we’re raised on and the constraints of an imperfectly designed representative democracy has done more to shape the American political identity than anything else.

Although anarchism in the United States has operated mostly on the fringes, some of its most potent ideas have managed to embed themselves deep in the mainstream. Anarchism’s success as a political concept is difficult to measure by standard means. For obvious reasons, there isn’t an Anarchist Party fielding candidates whose votes we can tally. But its influence on mainstream American politics is undeniable, even if it doesn’t get much credit.

For instance, the model used by nearly every successful social protest movement of the past decade — horizontally distributed, leaderless, local — was designed for antinuke protests in the seventies and eighties by anarchists, along anarchist principles. On the left, social and political ambitions that even just a few years ago were considered untouchably radical by most politicians have become part of the mainstream discourse. “Abolish the prison system” used to be an intentionally provocative anarchist slogan, so far outside polite political discourse that it could shock an audience into action or reaction. Now? It’s something that people put in their Twitter bio.

Since the Reagan era, republicans have been infatuated with libertarianism — the idea that the government should be shrunk down to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub.

Liberals have for decades dismissed their anarchist cousins as either ineffective political daydreamers lost in theory and to the infighting that can arise over tiny points of abstract disagreement, or, alternately, as hotheaded hooligans who use revolutionary politics as a cover to excuse their enthusiasm for property damage. But as anti-Trump resistance pushes liberals farther left, many of them are rediscovering their anarchist roots and raising the black flag of anarchy over social media.

Anarchism hasn’t made the same kind of inroads on the right, which makes sense considering how much emphasis conservatism puts on structure, order, and obedience. But it’s there. Since the Reagan era, Republicans have been infatuated with libertarianism — the idea that the government should be shrunk down to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub. Over the years, libertarianism’s antigovernment ideals have flourished so extravagantly on the right that it’s stopped being shocking to hear GOP politicians making passionate speeches against the validity of the governments they’ve been elected to serve.

All that libertarianism has left conservatives open to accepting ideas like the somewhat contradictory-sounding anarcho-capitalism, which pushes faith in the supremacy of the free market to its furthest logical conclusion, calling for the transformation of a government’s services and duties into saleable products. This philosophy’s been most closely associated with Silicon Valley, where everything new is by nature better than anything that’s been done before, and where the combination of billions of dollars and intense competition have produced egos of a seemingly ungovernable size. But it’s also found open arms in the business-friendly conservative mainstream, where legislators and regulators are already working closely with corporations to reduce the government’s ability to govern them.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is one of the world’s most outspoken anarcho-capitalist true believers, and was one of Donald Trump’s biggest tech supporters during the election. His attention-grabbing speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention shows, ironically, just how much influence anarchism currently has in the upper echelons of power.

In real life, the current flourishing of anarchist enthusiasm doesn’t look much like the Hollywood action-movie conception we’re familiar with: balaclava-clad rioters, guerilla bombing campaigns, rogue hackers releasing viruses that shut down the world’s financial systems while broadcasting video of a shadowy anarchist leader, probably wearing a balaclava, reading a manifesto. Despite their badass reputation, most anarchists are bookish poli-sci wonks who spend more time arguing over theory than anything else.

All that arguing and theory have led to a vibrant spectrum of ideas about what anarchism means, and what the end results might look like. There is, of course, the kind of anarchism familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on a college campus since the eighties: left-leaning, heavy on collectivism, and intersectional with a whole range of social justice causes. There are anarchist schools of thought focused on ecology, ones centered on feminism, and ones for people who don’t want to do anything to help anyone else.

Queer and trans people have expanded the range of possibility for anarchist revolution by adding sex and gender to the list of systems it could disrupt. There are anarcho-communists counterbalancing the current fad for anarcho-capitalism. There are militant anarchists and pacifists. There’s veganarchism, which is exactly what the name suggests.

One of the advantages of anarchism is that it’s easily shaped into nearly anything that someone wants it to be. In an age where our politics and our identity are becoming nearly the same thing, this is a key strength. In our representative democracy, reform is electing someone who sees things more like you than the last person who had their job. Anarchism gives you a plan to tear everything down and rebuild it to fit your specific worldview.

From an outside perspective, the different models might seem impossible to implement in real life, but in truth organizing things along generally anarchist lines makes practical sense.

Systems that are regimented to within an inch of their lives can give the illusion of being secure and stable while hiding massive vulnerabilities. The U.S. spent two decades trying to figure out ways to protect its voting system from hackers and saw a presidential election disrupted by a swarm of cheap Twitter bots. Conversely, an anarchistic system designed for maximum flexibility and adaptability — maybe some kind of data-generated direct democracy — would be able to absorb the effects of unforeseen change. You don’t have to worry about whether or not your president is being blackmailed by foreign agents if you don’t have a president.

The internet gives us a real-life illustration of a nonhierarchical system in action. Organized to avoid hierarchy, the internet stands as the greatest experiment in mass anarchism in human history. It was deliberately designed with a bare minimum of rules by a community of scientists and programmers mixing radical anarcho-leftists and libertarians, and it’s largely resisted efforts by the strongest political powers in history to control it.

Anarchism’s influence on mainstream American politics is undeniable, even if it doesn’t get much credit.

The internet transcends geographic and social borders, allows theoretically anyone on Earth to speak to a global audience, and is set up in a way that even repressive, technologically capable governments like China’s can’t entirely dictate how people use it. In many ways, it’s the culmination of a century’s worth of anarchist dreaming.

The culture that’s emerged online is similarly anarchic. From the very start, the internet’s denizens have revolted at any top-down attempt to infringe on their ideal of unimpeded digital liberty, even as governments and multinational corporations have gotten involved.

Reddit and Twitter became two of the biggest communications hubs on the planet largely because they refused to tell people no in any but the most extreme cases of abuse. As internet culture rewarded platforms that allowed users to set the rules themselves, en masse, and starved ones that tried to import IRL hierarchies, it created a virtual world where the distribution of power is far more favorable to the average person.

In a very real sense, we are never more free than we are when we’re online. And the more time we spend in this virtual anarchist utopia, the more we want the real world to feel the same — and the more frustrated we get when it doesn’t. It’s no coincidence that some of the most effective political and social movements in recent memory have not only been born online, but reflect the internet’s inherently anarchist nature.

There’s no president of Black Lives Matter or #MeToo. There also isn’t a single mastermind behind the alt-right movement or the burgeoning incel intifada that began as an internet joke before crossing over into the real world with tragically real consequences.

Nor does it seem to be a coincidence that the most recent victorious presidential campaign was the one that promised more than anything to get rid of as many rules as possible.

Dapper white nationalists and sexually frustrated spree killers are strong arguments against making the real world more like the internet — and for keeping the societal structures that sometimes feel constraining and outdated but still do a decent job of holding the world together. Some people really do just want to watch the world burn. Giving them ways to share ever more sophisticated means for destruction has made the world more chaotic — a place where prank phone calls have evolved into swattings, where mass shooters are held up as heroes, and where national security specialists (and other concerned people) lose sleep over the possibility that a misanthropic 4channer will somehow set off a nuclear conflagration for the lolz.

Anarchism is a philosophy based on the idea that we can take away the rules and people will still more or less behave themselves. Certain quarters of the internet represent exhibit A in a very strong case that we don’t deserve that trust.

The idea of corralling the internet’s anarchist tendencies went out the window a long time ago. Still, if the world of the internet was organized in a nonhierarchical way, its creators weren’t actively seeking to dismantle dominant real-world structures and global power centers. Blockchain technology, on the other hand, is specifically designed for this job.

You don’t have to worry about whether or not your president is being blackmailed by foreign agents if you don’t have a president.

Like the internet itself, it can be confusing to explain in detail how the blockchain works, but in simple terms, it’s a way of distributing a bunch of information to a bunch of people in a way that preserves the secrecy of the data and prevents corruption by outside parties.

Its best-known application is Bitcoin and the many cryptocurrencies that are causing a virtual gold rush of as yet to be determined proportions. The identity of Bitcoin’s creator, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, isn’t known, and so ascribing any specific political philosophy would be just a guess. But since the technology’s unveiling nearly a decade ago, Bitcoin has attracted anarchists of all stripes — in particular crypto-anarchists — who are united less by a specific political goal as by a desire to make it as hard as possible for governments to snoop in on private communication. They want to create conditions for a revolution (or revolutions) without getting hung up on what specific form it will take.

While crypto-secured communication is undoubtedly helping to power some burgeoning people’s revolutions — and is most definitely empowering whistleblowers — it’s the more audacious goal of replacing government-issued money that seems to have the most potential to upend the status quo.

We deal with money every day. Money permeates every corner of our lives, and as long as the government controls money, it gets to share that constant intimate presence. It’s the ultimate form of control. If the U.S. government disappeared overnight, there wouldn’t be rioting because we felt like the grownups had left the room, but because we wouldn’t know how to buy and sell things anymore.

Being able to create and exchange money without the government’s involvement could potentially be even more powerful than communicating without the government being able to overhear. Cryptocurrency poses an existential threat to the establishment, not just because a lone wolf terrorist might use it to buy a nuke on the black market, but because a lot of people might use it to buy a lot of things.

Cutting the government out of our financial transactions would significantly shrink its footprint in our lives. And that’s only the beginning.

Thinking up ways to replace everyday government functions has become something of an obsession in the blockchain world. People are already designing smart contracts that would eliminate the need for courts to verify or enforce them. The blockchain could conceivably replace even deeper government functions, like voting.

If the technology’s evangelists have their way, it’ll chip away one by one at all the myriad roles the government plays in our daily lives until there’s nothing left to hold it up, and it collapses, unmourned and unmissed — anarchy through obsolescence. The fact that most of the financial daredevils flooding the blockchain market are in it for fortune and fast cars, and not explicitly to destabilize Western democracy, is beside the point.

The blockchain is a promising tool for bringing down the established order of things, without a clear picture of what will replace it (besides more things built on the blockchain). There’s a lot of hope that the tech world will be able to deliver us a solution to the situation, even though there’s not yet one in sight.

The model for how things might work after the social singularity we’re heading for could come from treating the distributing of power like selling apps. Software engineer Patri Friedman wants to apply the tech world’s iterative design philosophy — build it, break it, and build a better version — to our quest for a new way of running the world.

The co-founder of the Seasteading Institute, Friedman wants to turn the ocean into a laboratory for applied politics by creating autonomous mini-countries on floating platforms where we can see how even the most experimental governmental theories work out in practice. It’s a radical, sci-fi-level idea — not to mention the source of a lot of jokes about Silicon Valley “visionaries” — but it very well could make it off the drawing board. Friedman and the Seasteading Institute are tantalizingly close to putting a test platform in the water off French Polynesia.

The son of economist David D. Friedman, who coined the term “anarcho-capitalism,” and grandson of the Nobel-winning libertarian theorist Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman is personally rooting for a system based on a radically untethered free market. But the benefit of trying out every conceivable approach is that we might find the solution where we least expect it. Maybe someday soon the residents of a pontoon city in the Pacific will discover that veganarchy is actually the way of the future.

There are others who believe that technology is sufficient on its own to deliver us to the next stage in the evolution of human civilization. We’re on our way to becoming entwined with our technology on a deeper level than we can even wrap our heads around yet. AI, cybernetics, and most likely some new kind of technology yet to be invented are going to blur — and then maybe even erase — the line between us and our computers, between the real world and the virtual.

Anarcho-transhumanists fear that the world-shaking technological breakthrough we’re careening toward could turn into an opportunity for established powers to control us on a much deeper level than before — imagine being offered a powerful new computer brain, but you’d have to agree to let Google use it to sell you customized ads.

On the other hand, if we do things the right way, spreading this new power out evenly, and using it to maximize our use of the planet to benefit every person equally, we could be looking at a world of limitless abundance, where scarcity will disappear, along with the war and oppression and strife that scarcity breeds.

Anarchists are some of the only people besides sci-fi writers who’ve thought seriously about what that kind of world might look like. (The anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin was already thinking about it when he published Post-Scarcity Anarchism all the way back in 1971.) And anarchy is really the only system that would make sense in such a world. If we don’t have poverty we won’t have crime, which means we won’t have cops.

Cryptocurrencies’ audacious goal of replacing government-issued money seems to have the most potential to upend the status quo.

In these kinds of futures, anarchy is both an inevitable outcome of our maturing as a civilization and a reward for growing up. If we can get to a point where everyone signs on for global peace and equality, we’ll show that we’re not only ready to live without so many rules, but that we deserve to. We’ll have earned our return to the idyllic hierarchy-free existence our species may have once had before we settled down and built farms and towns and cities and nation-states. After 10,000 years, we’ll finally have what we think we’re naturally entitled to: civilization without the constraints of civilization.

But do we really deserve to be let back into paradise? A hundred centuries of nonstop murder, war, slavery, genocide, and wanton environmental damage suggests otherwise, according to anarcho-primitivism, a fairly recent development in anarchist thought that’s surprisingly popular, considering its end goal is the dismantling of every aspect of human civilization separating us from our hunter-gatherer beginnings, all the way down to our use of language.

We get so caught up in politics and money and the busy work of keeping civilization running that we rarely ever stop and wonder if the costs — measured in lives shortened and ecosystems ruined — are worth it. The idea that the world would be significantly better off without us — that ultimately, the only path to peace is suicide on a civilizational scale — is almost incomprehensibly pessimistic.

And yet there it is, lurking in the back of your mind. It flashes into the open for a moment when you see photos from the latest mass shooting. Or when you reach for a bottle of water, realizing that the plastic will end up leaching toxins for decades, and grab it anyway. Or when you think too long about the fact that after 10,000 years, we still haven’t evolved a way for different kinds of people to live together without killing each other.

Asking humankind to throw away its computers and antibiotics and words for things, along with every other redeemable idea we’ve had, to go with our ten millennia worth of bad ones, is easily one of the most absurd demands ever made in the history of politics.

But it’s hard to deny that, if nothing else, it would at least be satisfying from a narrative perspective. Anarcho-primitivism’s idea of a utopia is one that most people wouldn’t enjoy living in — if they even managed to survive the cataclysmic transition it would take to get there. If we don’t figure out a way to handle all the power that we’ve created for ourselves as a species, we might end up there not on purpose, but by accident.