All of which is wasted on me. Forget sunning by the pool -- give me a frozen tundra and a copy of Cowboy Henk and I'm a happy guy. I find myself picking and choosing my activities based on what destinations have the finest air conditioners. (As an interesting side-note, if you find yourself shopping at Amoeba Music Hollywood and you’re in need of a rush of cold air, go to the classical section, then find where we keep Beethoven. That exact spot is where our powerful A.C. first blasts the room, and it’s heavenly.)

1) Iron Maiden Flight 666 DVD

2) Metallica Death Magnetic CD/LP

3) Mastodon Crack The Skye CD/LP

4) Metal: A Headbangers Journey DVD

5) Nyktalgia Peisithanatos CD/LP

If, like me, you suspected that heavy metal music had been going through a bit of a renaissance in recent years and that the decades old genre born out of hard rock in the late 60's/early 70's seems more popular than ever these days, you would be correct, according to longtime metal fan and Amoeba employee Stevil. "The state of metal is healthier than ever. Plus it is more diversified than it has ever been," confirmed Stevil, who works at the San Francisco Amoeba Music, and who has been a dedicated metal fan since the early 80's -- a time when the genre, while popular with certain crossover bands, was generally not nearly as widely accepted as today. "It's cool and acceptable to like metal these days. That's good," said Stevil. He recalled the bygone era when he first got into the genre, when it had a certain "excitement and camaraderie" due to being a relatively smaller and more insular scene. "It was like a huge worldwide gang," reminisced Stevil, noting that, "Nowadays there's a lot of bands, a lot more bands, but with more and more fractured sub-genres" beyond the once standard classic, thrash, and black metal musical divisions which remain his personal favorite types of metal. "A lot of bands have come over from the hardcore punk scene, so there is a whole new fanbase to it, a wider fanbase than ever."

1) Iron Maiden Flight 666 (2009)

2) Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (2006)

3) Heavy Metal In Baghdad (2007)

4) Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2005)

5) Monsters of Metal Vol. 6 (2008)

The new Iron Maiden film Flight 666 is an excellent concert documentary directed by Sam Dunn & Scot McFadyen. The film was screened at several festivals, including SXSW in Austin a few months ago, had a brief run in theaters, and has been recently shown on VH1 Classics. Finally, it's now available on DVD with lots of bonus footage. Since it was released last week (Jun 9th) it has been selling extremely well at Amoeba Music's three stores. "We sold nearly every copy, way more than we expected. We've had to reorder it, it's so popular," reported Chris at the Hollywood Amoeba store, whose areas of specialty include music DVDs. So who's buying Flight 666? Iron Maiden fans of old or  music fans that have been newly converted to the legendary British metal monsters? "Metal head dudes of all ages are buying it up," said Chris, adding that others are too, including many curious to learn more about this legendary hard rock group, who have been putting it down for 34 years and yet still manage to blow away many metal bands half their age.

The movie was made in the classic concert documentary style, and it follows the band on last year's Somewhere Back In Time World Tour, during which the veteran metal musicians clocked 50,000 miles round the globe, playing 23 concerts on five continents over a 45 day period with stops in such cities as Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Mumbai, Sydney, Tokyo, Costa Rica, Bogota, and Buenos Aires. The deluxe edition is a two disc set that includes the entire set from the 2008 segment of this tour on the bonus disc. Nice! The sound is crispy clean and passes the cranked up loud on a big sound system test, and while nothing equates the experience of being in the flesh at a concert, the live show footage on Flight 666 comes pretty close.

Traditionally thought of as soothing and relaxing, or at least pleasurable in some way to the subjective listener, music can also be the cause of pain and suffering.

You have probably heard that classical and other music is sometimes used to disperse loitering adolescents at malls, as in the case in New Zealand a couple of months ago when Barry Manilow songs were blasted to alienate and drive away unwanted teens. But that is nothing compared to the US armed forces' use of music as a form of torture against detainees in US operated detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. It has been reported by journalists and human rights advocates that the music of such artists as Eminem, Nine Inch Nails, Queen, Rage Against the Machine, Britney Spears, and even Barney and Sesame Street tunes have been blasted at deafeningly high decibels as a means of physical torture in interrogation at these centers.

Not surprisingly, word of these tactics has shocked many, including the artists whose music was unknowingly appropriated, and has resulted in the formation of an organization, UK non-profit group Reprieve, to protest the use of music as torture and to make sure it never happens again. Reprieve is supportive of the anti-torture initiative called Zero dB that is hoping to bring an end to the technique by gathering the support of musicians whose songs are used in controversial interrogation techniques by US forces. So far they have gotten overwhelming support from outraged artists including Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine and Lars Ulrich of Metallica who was interviewed recently on the topic by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Sesame Street composer Christopher Cerf's reaction is captured in the video news report below, courtesy of AP, that also includes an interview with former detainee Donald Vance.