Geez, I've just been watching Paul Thomas Anderson interviews on YouTube all night... It started because I heard Slayer was good on the Henry Rollins Show, so I went looking for that, but I ended up watching a PTA interview from 2006 on there first, for the presumed There Will Be Blood content (I thought it was a really good movie), and things just snowballed. I had actually never seen the guy talk before so it's been interesting. There's been stories about how high he his in interviews, but in this Rollins one I found him pretty cool and down-to-earth (probably because he's a dad now) and I liked what he had to say about TWBB, which he was just about to start shooting.



After that I backtracked to an early interview, with Mike Figgis, mostly about Boogie Nights. This time he's maybe a little too cool, a little too nervy, though waving a piece of half-eaten pizza around is a nice touch.



Someone in the comments section for that one was like "He's not high here, you want to see him all coked-up go to the three-part interview on Punch-Drunk Love," and I think they might have been talking about this next one. It's not insane or anything but it is a little tweaky and kinda unpleasant, mostly because of his affected 'I might be unpredictable!' mannerisms and how little of substance he's actually able to dredge up as he dodges the questions. Big difference from the Rollins interview.



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Geez, I've just been watching 2000s noise-punk videos all night. Started out with a Russian Tsarcasm performance, which was cool, which immediately got me into some Dynasty, not clips from the TV show about Blake Carrington and the gang but the Providence noise/punk/art/damage trio featuring the guy from Kites and a couple other guys.



This clip is my introduction to this band. At first I was impressed by the craziness of this clip but it had dwindled by the end. I think it's because for the last few days I've been listening to the new career retrospective-type CD How Little Will It Take by Landed, a longer-running Providence noise/punk/art/damage band, and after absorbing their music, Dynasty kinda seems like a tribute band, less interested in actual music than they are the 'craziness' that it can generate. I feel like their drummer is the only one actually required to play riffs - the two guitarists can both stop playing their instruments due to whatever isolated melee happens to be erupting and the sound of the song doesn't even change. Compared to this, Landed play music as sleek and sharp and detailed as techno. Dynasty do threaten to hit this mark with one song, in the video below, from roughly 3:00-5:00 - the drummer is still the main riff instrument, but the guitarists do get a serious chug going and some real hands-on transubstantiation occurs instead of just gestures and postures.



After Dynasty, I started watching some clips by The Coughs. Damn, memories... this is a Chicago band and I'll never forget when they exploded into my consciousness, at the 2002 University of Chicago Festival of Marginalized Subgenres, massively and awesomely coordinated by Tim Aher (RIP). Plenty of notable acts put on great sets: Burning Star Core, Vertonen, Cock ESP, Panicsville, the debut performance by Gays in the Military, Behold the Living Corpse, RETSILRATS (they just sat at a table and ate food), a couple hardcore bands, and then this large band I'd never heard of started setting up. They had a lot of people and appeared to have at least two drummers playing 'industrial percussion' and maybe even TV screens playing 'subversive video collage', so naturally I assumed they'd be lame, but then they started and almost immediately reached down the collective throat of everyone watching and ripped our guts out with completely focused steamrolling industrial hate-punk. The singer looked like Mary Poppins's evil twin and spent most of the show stalking the audience like a sharply dressed screaming death angel. About a year or so after that they put out a good full-length on Load, but it didn't come close to that show, and I haven't found a clip that really does either... these are enough to get an idea, at least. As one commenter succinctly states, "They have dark powers."





Shit man, speaking of dark powers, this isn't too bad, The Hospitals live in 2005.



And of course there's always the Magik Markers in their pissing-people-off trio heyday... check out the end, I always like Ms. Ambrogio's 'talking to the crowd nowhere near a microphone' bit.



And somehow all this got me to, holy shit, an 8-minute Venusian blues guitar jam by Moncho Conlazo himself! Not noise rock:



If you don't know, Conlazo was an absolutely crucial member of the Argentinian legends Reynols... they definitely had some dark powers going on too, scan this documentary for the ghost-trance performance sections:



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Geez, I've just been watching gravity blast YouTubes all night... "There's nothin' to it, dude! Here, watch it in real life!"