
“Arcing ropes of jism.” How could I not open my song of praise to Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and not feature that description? I had to work it in somehow.
Sure, flying jism is a visual you’d associate with a porn site — but not a Joe Cocker song. And yet that’s the way Homme — the sexy and smart frontdude for the Queens — describes his reaction to a certain snare drum sound that he’s been “chasing” (to mimic and record) ever since he heard it on the Cocker tune.
The jism quote was featured in a recent Pitchfork interview that celebrates the release of the Queen’s exhilarating new album Era Vulgaris.
The title is Latin for “common era.” But don’t take that as an arty snub against our culture’s Last Days cluster fuck. Homme enjoys the times we’re all wallowing in, and considers the current zeitgeist a character building challenge — or as he puts it: (more…)


“Whenever I see twins,” Marcel Proust wrote, ” I feel thrown off balance, like nature is trying to sell me a pattern.”
They’re written for teenage girls, right? (Over 18, of course.)
“Who was the last person who saw you naked?” the intrepid reporter from The Face asked Morrissey sometime back in the ’80s when he was still the lead singer of
It was no accident that he inspired a rock cult that faithfully turned up for his every performance: Steven Patrick Morrissey happens to be one of the modern masters of that tricky literary form —
Ejaculating like a fountain all over the audience, fucking your keyboardist up the ass on stage, bursting into flames and than putting it out by pissing over everyone —
from which the other band members occasionally drink and then — a trademark of the act — mounting his keyboardist, who 
He plays the lead in a new opera, An American Tragedy (right), based on the the Dreiser novel about a poor but ambitious stud who murders his





