Swans never alienated its brethren with such embellishments as highfalutin lyrical metaphors or notemakery. Give Public Castration a spin and hear the heights of surrealist comedy for the masses. Norman Westberg processes Grade D hamburger on his guitar. Roli Mosimann struggles to manufacture rhythm paste on his drum apparatus. However, his hands are covered in sticky molasses, and overuse of methamphetamine has reduced him to a catatonic state. Hilariously mired product results.

The centerpiece of the performance concerns the prolonged attempt of an industrial saboteur to murder Gira. Mr. Gira, tireless operator of the throat machine, struggles to manufacture mellifluous bellowing with hilarious consequences. Initially, he delivers pained punchlines from studio efforts Greed and Holy Money. Who wouldn’t recognize the classic “OPEN YOUR MOUTH / HERE’S YOUR MONEY” routine? However, sarin gas slowly eats away at Gira’s lungs throughout the album. “HOLY” becomes “HOLLLLLLY” becomes “HOYYYYYY” in his deteriorating throat machine.

their masters and churned out the unforgivably melodic, The Burning World. Gira strained his misanthropy in an attempt to poison the album, but the youth of America merely joined him in a rousing chorus of “Goddamn the Sun.”

of the audience. Mr. Westberg boils his guitar alive whilst his comrades drop comically large pieces of metal and electrocute themselves repeatedly.

At 73 minutes, Public Castration may overwhelm newcomers to the realm of industrial humour. I recommend lying on your parlor floor and swallowing the whole LP in one go. As Gira knew that many a worker did not own a record player, he designed the LP itself for consumption. The shards of laughter lodged in your esophagus parallel the album’s aural delights.

The instruments grew weary of their power and soon succumbed to Swans’ influence. In later efforts, the instruments stare blankly at one another and produce their effort for sound with little enthusiasm. A cave-like brooding falls over The Great Annihilator and fellow final efforts of Swans.

Curiously, Gira has become a loving factory boss with age. He only raises his voice slightly at his subordinates and enchants the weary workforce with an acoustic guitar and a smile. Notably, Gira contributes to the Kumbaya canon with “Reeling the Liars In,” a fireside singalong about the time- honored tradition of “burning the liar pile.” He even halts the migraine build-up of “Inside Madeline” to strum pleasantly, all while that damned violin moans at the screen door. Before Gira can pummel the violin, Norm Westberg’s guitar stumbles in screaming for “Eden Prison,” Norm churns out a nauseous repetition before expelling monumental stomach spasms all over the bridge of the song. Indeed, only truly incomprehensible figurative language can capture the unique sound of Swans.

After the release of Public Castration, Swans shocked the world with a sudden turn to music. The group purchased a violin, an acoustic guitar, and other instruments that write good songs to produce the epic Children of God. Unfortunately, the music machines soon conquered the minds of

However, the collapse of the world economy inspired Michael Gira to drag Swans from the grave in 2010. My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky features Swans’s aberrant instruments fully reeducated for the industrial environ. Off-kilter punchcard rhythms, queasy feedback repetitions, and violin alarm drones sum in a nice thick clangscape. Norm Westberg and cohorts produce a variety of industr

Hamako also talked about the way in

Actually, “Monsters, Messiahs, or Some- thing Else? Mixed Messages about Mixed- Race in Science Fiction Movies” turned out to be a compelling lecture presented by the Mul- ticultural Resource Center and Multi-Sympo- sium Student Committee’s Mixed Dreams: A Symposium on Multiracial Identities in the United States. As one of several speakers and panelists, Eric Hamako helped create discus- sion about understandings of multiracial- ity—understandings that need to be probed, especially since the inauguration of a biracial president has created a fallacy that American racism is on the outs.

A doctoral student in Social Justice Edu- cation, Hamako has traveled to Stanford, Yale, and other humble institutions of higher edu- cation to speak about mixed-race stereotypes portrayed in popular culture and entertain- ment. He pointed out that movies, particularly sci-fi flicks, have always offered an outlet for fears in the societal subconscious: The 1953 horror film Cat Women of the Moon, for ex- ample, revealed terror of lesbians via alien she-cats who brainwash fine earthling ladies. (Or there’s The Day After Tomorrow.) Science fiction can enable a covert or sensationalized discussion of issues that mainstream society and government don’t like to deal with plainly, like the racial struggles tackled in Blacula and other blaxploitation films.

various media.

Throughout the lecture, Hamako alluded to various instances in which sci-fi films have portrayed the “monster” stereotype of multi- racial people: Sickly abominations, confused hybrid degenerates, and wannabes infiltrating or diluting both white and nonwhite groups. He cited “oreo,” “banana,” “coconut,” “ap- ple,” and various other food-based nicknames

which interracial sexuality is presented as a kind of queer sexuality, substituting sex for interactions like biting. In movies such as Un- derworld, seriously sexual gnawing or blood- swapping is acceptable between a male and a female and spares a life but leads to death when occurring between male figures. Also, Blade takes a drug to inhibit his deep-seated bite urges, because it’s better to be an addict than to indulge his heinous interspecies lust— to let out the beast inside him, the “bad” half.