​Credit Maura for lasting long enough in the New York Times's dreaded Modern Love column yesterday to turn up this revelation regarding the love memoirist Rachel Sontag found while she was down and out. "I simply needed to make enough to pay next month's rent so we could maintain our state of suspended existence together," Sontag writes. "I took a job as a hostess at a restaurant in Harlem. I walked neighbors' dogs. I bathed and fed friends' children. I pursued work as a foot fetish model. I posed nude for a 75-year-old artist doing a series of oil-painted vulvas. I sold beer at death-metal shows called 'Brutal Truth,' 'Pig Destroyer' and 'Repulsion.'" So there you have it: attending a Pig Destroyer show ranks somewhere between having your vulva painted in oil by an old man and walking strange dogs for money. We're positive they'd be flattered. [NYT]

All photos by yr brave correspondent, who writes: "I got punched in the face but I gave it back worse."

​Eyehategod, Pig Destroyer, Goatwhore
Rocks Off Concert Cruise, Hudson River
Saturday, October 24

The kid in the Suicidal Tendencies t-shirt went down hard, his spindly dark form an inverse chalk outline on the floor. Crowding around him, and jostling violently for view on the balcony above, his metalhead kin roared at the security guard (as if this sweaty, wayward ship could claim any order) who'd knocked him flat with a beefy fist. Were their cries a timely exhibition of the smash-the-Man ethos just roared for half an hour by furious punks Pig Destroyer? No, it was a bunch of boat quips - "Throw him overboard!" "Send him to the brig!" As they said on The Love Boat, "It's not a cruise until someone gets fucking punched."

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The now departed rock club CBGB has come in for some abuse around these quarters, it being mostly a repository for evermore decrepit punk nostalgia and incredible family/scene infighting of a remarkably bitter nature--plus the fact that half the club's bookings after like 1988 were battle-of-the-bands shows and interminable high school coffeehouse-type fare--but jeez, how about this video of Virginia grindcore killers Pig Destroyer playing the club in its waning days? It's hard to overstate the volume vocalist J. R. Hayes achieves after the CBGB mic cuts out (ahem), and he continues to sing (ahem) at a volume that well surpasses that of the fully-amplified metal band behind him. So you weren't all bad, CBGB. Also: 50 Reasons to Love Pig Destroyer. (#26: The fact that the band apparently still practices in a band member's parent's basement.) [Video courtesy of Metal Sucks, via The Daily Swarm]