On this site, we need to come down harder on bunglers. Bunglers either tend to be anarchistic-narcissistic or obedient-conformist, which means that you can be one in either major political party, even if the biggest bunglers come from the Utopians who, among other things, ruined Cuban cigars.
Yes, like the vision of Jesus or Buddha, the idea of peace and happiness on Earth always seduces the human being. You can either be a dualistic egomaniac or a daoist life-denier, but the bug gets everyone at some time. In politics, it becomes the idea of equal distribution.
People love that notion because like pluralism itself, it is pacifism: eliminate the differences between us, we all get along, angels play trumpets and pianos play “Imagine,” and everything is good. Like all simplistic fractional truths, this leads to horror, which is what happened in Cuba.
Some bunglers rose to power by realizing that there were lots of bunglers out there, so if they formed a movement based on the idea of equal acceptance of bungling, they could drive out the non-bunglers and therefore, rule forever on the backs of the incompetent.
This is not much different than regular democracy, but redistributing wealth sticks a nasty burden to the competent and productive. It tells them to do a good job so everyone else can laugh at them for being nerds who take life seriously. After awhile, they quit doing that.
Since this process happens pretty quickly, socialist states quickly go from “everyone have the free food” to “work or we shoot you” in the same way democracy goes from tolerating everyone to punishing those who are not tolerant enough. Cuba followed this path, and it killed their cigar industry.
You can still buy Cuban cigars, but these come from bungler-regulated fields instead of farms managed with pride by those who take great joy in their product. You will pay a lot of money; you will receive a cigar that, price comparatively, is worse than options from Nicaragua, Honduras, and even crackhead retiree meth ghetto Florida.
Since the glorious people’s revolution, basically the French Revolution without any of the pretense toward pragmatism, in Cuba, the Cuban cigar industry has done what everyone else with an IQ higher than 96 did in Cuba: hop into an inner tube and head overseas, figuring the sharks are less destructive than loser bunglers with AK-47s and a mandate from Heaven to make Utopia on Earth.
I mean, really, what is Communism but a misinterpreted Christianity? The Republicans read Jesus as a middle class businessman, which is more accurate, but the Communists see him as a hippie. In reality, he was just a half-Jew who hated the Roman occupation because empire sucks to its core.
When death metal gave the finger to the notion of “good,” it was telling us that nature is good and humanity is lies, therefore whatever humans think is “good” is unrealistic Utopian nonsense. Turn that cross upside down, burn human bones on the altars, rape Baby Jesus, and read the Bible backwards.
Escaping the Communist cigar bungle, the Cuban growers set up shop in nearby areas and began cultivating their broadleaf varietals for the classic Cuban flavor: a light, vanilla-esque sweetness with an inner richness but a surface, agave-style thin flavor, so that the smoke surges into depth over time.
If you make a cigar too strong, bold, and quirky like the hipster brands of today, you end up with a great experience on the surface that over time becomes tedious and one-dimensional. If you start with a simple note, then expand its inner texture, over time it becomes more interesting and pleasurable.
This was the genius of the Cuban cigar and it built them a reputation in the 1920s-1950s that lives on today, undeservedly since the product of Cuban agriculture is about on par with the products of Soviet agriculture. Utopia, like dualistic heaven, is human projection not reality.
Perhaps the most prominent blend to carry on the Cuban tradition is the Altadis Montecristo line, especially the White, which has that Nilla-wafer-with-white-pepper flavor that made Cubans so popular. Altadis, being savvy, have made a budget knock off.
Joining other low-cost everyday smokes for non-pretentious people like the Cusano M1 and CC lines, Casa de Garcia Connecticut is a straightforward cigar in the Cuban style: light, vanilla-tasting (but not flavored) Connecticut wrapper and a mild binder.
Strength is medium, at best, but when you are smoking an ounce of tobacco, it can be mild and you will still get that peaceful, logical, intense, but non-Utopian state of mind. The flavor is mild, and the rolling is not as sparse as a Macanudo but still makes for an easy draw.
You can burn one of these down over the course of about three hours by just breath-smoking it, which in fact is the only way you should smoke mild leaf like Connecticut and Virginia. It is slightly aged, just enough to remove acidity and ammonia, but without the caramel-like fermentation and its spicier pepper taste.
Sure, you will impress absolutely no one by hauling out these budget sticks. If you need to impress hipsters, get some Junko in My Trunko maduro nub and rave on about the overtones of leather, apple brandy, J7, AstroGlide, and the smell of the limited edition first pressing Nirvana live album. Whatever.
However, for a good daily smoke that you can enjoy for its subtlety as well as its solid dependable inoffensive but pleasurable flavor, the Casa de Garcia Connecticut churchill is worth seizing and enjoying. You can always paste on a label from one of your hipster brands.
Tags: churchill, cigars, connecticut, cuba, tobacco
So called Cuban seed cigars play into the mythology of Cuban cigars, but is it just marketing. Playing into hype to push a product is nothing new. The cosmopolitan western humanist materialist eat this up like manna from Heaven. Now we find ourselves with variety anxiety in a McDonald’s of cigars, hardly the utopia we were promised. It’s a disturbing trend but nothing new, an art form perfected by Horace Greeley and the mainstream government media complex. It’s upsetting, but what’s more upsetting is Phil Kusabs from Blasphemy and Diocletian internet search history. By now everyone know Pedo-Phil has been arrested for filming himself in some of the most horrific videos of child sexual abuse involving babies and toddlers and distributing it on the internet. Phil Kusabs has a very young daughter with his wife Cherish Sue Gafford, one has to wonder how much she knows or the extent of her involvement. Domestically produced cigars for some now rival Cuban seed cigars. It’s true that Miami is not Havana, but American producers are closing that gap.
Iconic movements attract all sorts who want to have “their part” in the drama. My feeling on friends and family of paraphiliac criminals is that they notice a pattern of deception, and note that something is “off,” but rarely realize exactly what is going on, in part because they decide not to look too deeply.
As far as markets go, the great evil of them is that they depend on consumers who are oriented by culture and social hierarchy toward the good, in theory. Governments destroy culture and social hierarchy. This creates a trend-driven environment where novelty and ironism matter more than quality. The internet culture of rewarding the weird, oddball, and underdog only intensifies this.
As far as Cuban seed goes, I have to disagree, with a caveat. There are lots of great broadleaf varietals out there, and only some of them are from Cuba, but the Cuban cigars became popular for good reasons. They were pretty tasty. They are not bad now, but I do not think are worth the money relative to similar offerings from other countries.
empires are awesome
Too big, they tend toward centralization and standardization to an unhealthy degree, in my view.
Brett, what are your thoughts Psychotic Waltz’s second, third, and fourth albums?
I like a lot of what they do, but find it hard to want to go for repeat listens. It is easy to write metal, as an academic exercise, and even write good riffs, but maintaining atmospher and convincing development is an art.
That’s what early Thought Industry is for.
Can you reccomend more good cigars, so far all I enjoy are My Father LA Opunlencia which I dunno if they’re false cigars or not but they’re fucking good to me.
Looking over the description of those, I bet they are pretty good. I am more interested in daily smokers, since the hipsters have covered the expensive cigar market. For a buck more or so, I’d get a Montecristo White, but that fits my taste profile more exactly. It probably depends on how much you smoke. The hardcores seem to have humidors with a few dozen varieties so that they can experience different taste profiles. In my view, the cigar that you enjoy is the best one available, and since there are lots of good options, it really depends on what types of leaf you like.
Nothing beats excellent tobacco. Unfortunately enjoying it responsibly somehow became a sin in the U.S. I’ll never forget entering a smokers lounge 10+ years ago at the Denver airport and instantly realizing that the luxury of doing so was probably coming to an end soon. And then sure enough…
On a totally unrelated note Demilich recently had a really great show in a really terrible city. It’s too bad they didn’t produce a professional tape of it, but at least there’s this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhAhEuV9KQQ
What a great video. It is inspiring to see this band still on point after so many years. I might point out some things that made me twitch:
1. At this time, the video has 395 views. The audience dwindles year-after-year, and most of this has to do with real life getting in the way. Play with your kids, or listen to death metal? Do you want to expose your spouse and spawn to this music? Maybe they should have happy lives without bringing in the past.
2. I fear dominance by the past. Yes, we love the 1990s classics, but the real question is how to move forward with the same spirit in both an eternal and mostly currently relevant way.
It’s sort of where classical music is. Almost anyone can appreciate the Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven classics, and music nerds like myself will dig out the slightly lesser-known like Saint-Saëns and Respighi, as well as off-the-beaten path overlooked classics like Berwald and Franck, but the tradition needs to live on, and not just through performance.
Writing about Satan and disease sort of fits with the 1990s, but is a bit too reactive in the end, and writing about spaceflight and fields of wheat has convinced almost no one. Rediscovering the Greco-Roman and Indo-European classic stories has appeal, sort of like the horror epics from Slayer and the Misfits will be eternal in their own way, but mostly this genre needs a renewed and endless sense of purpose instead of reaction to the time in which we find ourselves. We need to react to what we desire.
I think that bands like Demilich are conceptually vast and perhaps musicians like them play the role that a bard would have several generations ago, but I can’t say for sure. I think that this music is fit for places that would bar “women, children and uniforms” from entering. Rather than fame and recognition the artists and musicians that have touched on such timeless topics are not wielders of those vast concepts attached to them but rather an instrument for them to speak.
The music may be intricately composed, technically demanding to play and understood by few but honestly I do not understand enough about music or art as to say this is rigorous enough to merit academic analysis. While certainly not “high culture” I think that this music is more reluctant to accept the declining standard that formal art criticism seems to have been going through for decades now.
I think there’s too many people trying to write music today who need a lesson in humility. The artistic vocation involves tapping into a natural source of beauty, opening your body and mind to things that can inspire you, but it is not easy to do so because people like being sheltered.
I agree with the last paragraph, and it is why the non-commercial approach is essential.
The point of my comment was not to criticize 90s bands, only to say that something new is needed too.
90% of the review queue is people rehashing the 1990s and mixing in a bit of emo, blues, and jazz to substitute for the lack of motivic ideas.
Look at all the dissonance bands going around. None of them credit the album that in my opinion started it all: Unholy Cult. The problem is that people are going to take from what someone did and replicate it via technique which I commend but the conceptual result will be different. If an aesthetic principle for an artwork is changed the result will be syntactically different from the original; No matter how many surface level ornaments they want to rip off, the work will be unoriginal.
Now, the majority if not ALL people who come to this world will suffer and yet most of us do not live to produce masterpieces. In my opinion there is indeed an obscene attack on beauty by people who are more interested in being perceived as artists than they are in producing artworks. Because of this, media gets bloated since they have slowly but surely capitalized on outrage which makes certain ideas that may be taboo and trivializes them by making them into emotive decoration pieces. Perhaps we have reached the feared singularity of ideas. What do you think, Brett?
I trust this universe to be infinite. The singularity of ideas is being enforced by aesthetics which are wholly derivative and therefore self-limiting. When every band needs to sound like the five biggest sellers from the previous two decades, then all goes into the toilet.
Unholy Cult struck me as simply a formalization of the Voivod influence.
In the meantime, it seems like everyone is ripping off Fugazi, Pantera, Tool, Slipknot, and Rage Against the Machine. We are being ruled by warmed-over 1990s tropes mixed with hip-hop.
The industry, by insisting on conformity to this, has drained us of ideas, but they are trying to adapt to a changing audience which no longer has anything in common, so their data is all bad and they default to “what sells.” Bands imitate this.
In the same way, the formula of 1990s underground metal + post-metal (emo/indie) has worked to sell music to the same people who bought hardcore back in the day.
When the audience cannot tell the difference between good and bad, you get lots of bad with a fancy surface.
I would argue that the dissonance in “Unholy Cult” is more than just the Voivod influence — I’ve always looked at that album as something of a culmination of all of metal’s technique (anyone familiar with metal guitar technique from heavy metal, speed metal, death metal, and black metal can find the entire range of techniques that are normally unique to those subgenres find their way to that album), and a lot of the unusual chord voicings are inherited from the black metal tributary, with Thorns acting as the father of Mayhem, Emperor, and Burzum’s riffing style.
Maybe, but the problem with Immolation after Here in After is that they essentially wrote the same song over and over again. I see the basis of their approach as distinct from technique being rooted in what Voivod were doing, which was to use their dissonance as an anchor to otherwise straightahead phrases that emphasized complex rhythms. Black metal abstracted rhythm and used dissonance as a kind of harmonic widening mid-phrase.
Thank you, Brett. Keep up the good work. What do you think of Sulphur Aeon by the way?
Brett, how do you think Powermad compare to DBC?
DBC strikes me as a bit more adventurous, but Powermad do better heavy metal riffs on the edge of speed metal. I can enjoy both, which have a subtlety and depth completely lacking in contemporary metal, but would probably stick with DBC for the atmosphere.
Thanks Brett, I share your opinion but wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing something.
DBC are far superior to Powermad.
Powermad were just a ‘fake technical’ speed metal band, whereas DBC have legitimate (musically speaking) compositions based around ‘logical’ note-sequence/riff development and genuine alt-time signature surprises.
Meaning that Powermad just tack on or take off a number here and there, while DBC are actually constructing a rhythmic disorientation in service of keeping musical surprise in the mix.
Seeing as how DBC (first record specifically) comes across on initial listen as just a ‘metalcore’ band, this really works to support their musical and lyrical intelligence.
They are without question the most politically astute of all of the 80’s ‘crossover’ groups, as almost all of the others were just throwing slogans around, like a low budget U2 at 220 bpm.
No doubt this is directly related to the real-world political environment of Quebec in the 60/70/80s.
Anyway, they were as tight as Slayer, with great playing (the drummer!)
DBC’s first record is an absolute classic (randy burns production), and very very underrated.
I wish I can experience a sense of wonder and mystery with Metal again, I’m getting old, and even some of the classics are starting to lose their luster. I remember hearing “Exile of the Sons of Uisliu” sometime in 93/94 and being absolutely blown away at how epic and wonderous it sounded, it was uplifting! Does Metal have anything left to say? Can there be new techniques or arrangements? Maybe there isn’t a path forward besides just emulating the old masters.
I’m currently listening to Camel’s “Moon Madness”, a truly wonderful album.
I think we are in an uncanny valley between when music is still relevant as it originally was and when it becomes a classic.
Listening to Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, or The Beatles these days feels like archaeology.
Listening to Slayer, Demilich, Amorphis, or Deicide still feels like part of our time, but you can feel it slipping away.
Eventually those will become classics, and people will appreciate them as themselves. They will have been integrated into history and ritual.
And with that integrated into sportsball and monster truck events.