03.04.11
Cult of EMP Crazy: Wrong venue
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has no shortage of comical characters. While they are always well-treated on the pages of America’s newspapers, there’s are — occasionally — wrong venues.
William Forstchen, the Cult’s semi-famous author, made an appearance at the Homefront game’s balloon debacle in San Fran this week. He had the misfortune to be the opener for the Dillinger Escape Plan, a metalcore band with which I have some familiarity.
As an opener, if you’re not up to snuff, Dillinger fans will heckle you.
The event kicked off at noon, with the publisher first inviting foreign relations expert Tae Kim to speak on Homefront’s fictional future timeline, which finds the Greater Korean Republic occupying the United States in the year 2027. As the clean cut Kim spoke from behind a podium, a restless crowd shouted “Dillinger!” in his face as he did his best to keep calm.
Kim was followed by Electromagnetic Pulse blast expert and published author, Dr. William Forstchen. As Forstchen tried to explain the real (and quite terrifying) dangers of an EMP attack on the United States, the crowd continued to get rowdy, and shouted “Dillinger!” in his general direction. (One person even noted that he had an “awesome comb over.”)
The crowd was obviously ignorant of the toil Forstchen has put into peddling his book, One Second After, for the last century. And they were doubtless oblivious to the fact that he is Newt Gingrich’s co-author, too.
Shameful.
To set the scene more accurately, of the Dillinger Escape Plan, I once wrote:
It has been claimed that the Dillinger Escape Plan are kingpins of M.I.T.-inspired science rock. The band is the ultimate combination of skills in arithmetic calculation, progressive composition, and fantastically technical heavy metal. If you don’t get it, goes the argument, your brain is not of the cloth of Ph.D. material the band’s listeners are required to be cut from. A fine and entertaining story it is but the horse doesn’t trot well when the brags are dismounted.
On video, of which there is plenty, the Dillinger Escape Plan resemble nothing if not a squad of men doing calisthenics during basic training. The singer flexes and shakes his muscle at the audience like he’s captain of the wrestling team at the Danzig-Rollins Magnet School for Physical Fitness. This means, naturally, that he loses something on record. And it’s obvious on the new Miss Machine that Dillinger don’t even need a singer, really, for whatever it is they’re performing. The last 10 or so minutes of the CD veer between bursts of riff noise more smoothly recorded than expected and washes of music to watch soft porn by, indicating the charm of being proudly abrasive and busy is wearing off.
“Highlights include the shocked faces of those passing by as [Dillinger] wrecked the stage,” reported the game journal.