There was not, however, other stuff out there that involved custom-made rubber body armor and blast beat drumming.
Note the utter appropriateness of this combination. There is no group of people who are so intent on protecting their bodies from the influences of a herd-mentality society as vegans — except black metal fans. There is no group of people who are as indignantly self-righteous, as comically misunderstood or as regularly mocked as black metal fans — unless it is vegans.
Manowitz grew up in Tampa, studied behavioral neuroscience in college in Gainesville and planned on going to medical school. Instead he started playing guitar and moved to Orlando after graduation. He says it has a really great metal scene, which, considering the seething animosity that some residents must feel toward Mickey Mouse, is not entirely surprising.
Now he makes a living doing freelance sound engineering and playing in two black metal bands. On a sunny afternoon before he begins the taping for Episode 2 — which he films on his own, with a tripod — he congenially explains the subtle differences between black metal, its cousin death metal and its uncle thrash.
“Here’s a shortcut,” he offers helpfully, after outlining the differences between one’s more chest-based growl and the other’s raspier tone. “Death metal sounds like Cookie Monster; black metal is like Donald Duck.”
Something is happening to online cooking. Which is to say, online everybody is cooking like the Vegan Black Metal Chef. Cooking with testosterone (the women, too). Cooking with insanity. Cooking with unnerving intensity, and sometimes cooking with power tools.
Vegan Black Metal Chef is the latest example, but earlier ones include “Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time” — which can best be described as “Ultimate Fighter” meets lutefisk — and “Epic Meal Time,” a Dude-Where’s-My-Spatula take on cooking, which blends wisecracks and bacon. Their videos average four to five million views apiece.
“We’re in some real next-level [stuff] here,” yells “Epic Meal Time” host Harley Morenstein in one episode, as he prepares a Cheesy Grilled Cheese Tower. A calorie counter running at the top of the screen soars into quadruple digits.
“I like to say it’s a celebration-of-food show,” says the Canadian Morenstein in a phone interview. “Let’s do it how you really want it. Not how society pretends it wants to eat, but how that little fatty inside of you wants to eat.”
YouTube’s extreme cooking genre has exploded in the past year — though surely it owes something to the Japanese and their classically weird import, “Iron Chef.”
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