There's a lot going on in this room. I am sitting here reading Marilyn Manson's autobiography while singing along to Hanson and doodling in a notebook a phrase that has been on the minds of everyone who watched the Grammy Awards last week -- SOY BOMB. And Marilyn Manson's going on about pissing off fundamentalists (like that's hard) and I've now drawn a skinny little torso around SOY BOMB to resemble the guy on TV, and when Hanson sings, "Isn't it strange that we all feel a little bit weird sometimes," it comes off real perceptive and deep. And I know that imagining a band called Marilyn Hanson is an old joke by now and that SOY BOMB probably doesn't mean anything. But I wonder: What if the strange thing isn't that we all feel a little bit weird sometimes? What if the strange thing is that we don't agree on what weird is? Is it Marilyn Manson or Hanson? Is it the SOY BOMB guy or Bob Dylan? Because the more I think about that Grammy moment when the topless dude disrupted Dylan's set by writhing around with SOY BOMB painted on his chest, the more I realize that he wasn't half as odd as the eyeliner-wearing Dylan himself, who accepted his award for best album by mumbling something about the time when he saw a Buddy Holly show as a teenager in Duluth and said that Buddy Holly looked right at him as if that was supposed to mean something very obvious to the rest of us, as if it was supposed to be the anecdotal equivalent of that Clinton-shakes-Kennedy's-hand photo that gets trotted out to underscore presidential destiny. Maybe it's just that Marilyn Manson and the SOY BOMB guy try to be weird whereas Hanson and Bob Dylan just are weird.

People get all worked up about Marilyn Manson as some kind of culture clasher, but if you really pay attention, he's more of a Tom Petty figure. His music, like Petty's, is a highly competent version of a genre. What Petty does for mid-tempo rock -- display quiet confidence, utter lyrics that are neither hackneyed nor astonishing, arrange the instruments in a suitable fashion, wisely hire a good drummer -- Manson does for heavy metal. The arrangements of Marilyn Manson songs, for instance, are well-planned, mildly ambitious and efficiently executed. His voice is neither great nor horrible. He can be a power balladeer, like when he covers the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," or he can punk out on the delightful little ditty "Cake and Sodomy." Clearly, he knows what he's doing. And his life story reflects this.

"The Long Hard Road Out of Hell," co-authored by Manson with Neil Strauss of the New York Times, is beautifully designed, nicely paced, loaded with interesting epigraphs and not as pretentious as you'd think. For a man who considers himself the antichrist, it's one of the least evil memoirs I've read in a while; it can't even come close to last year's Spaulding Gray ickfest, "It's A Slippery Slope," for example, in which the author nonchalantly recounts ruining the life of his longtime girlfriend while learning to ski.

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N E X T+P A G E +| By-the-book evil