NADER, I’M MAD AT’ YA!
Okay, so now I’m good and pissed off. You, me, even David Letterman, we’ve all spend months hammering away at George (smirking) Bush, and finally, in the last few weeks, we’ve seen some cracks appear. But just as we were started really to wonder if the light at the end of the tunnel was actually hope, and not the on-rushing train of neo-Con dictatorship, Ralph Nader lurches in this weekend, demanding everyone's attention like an ignorant drunken whore at an otherwise perfectly pleasant party. Fuck you, Ralph, you opportunistic, egomaniacal, shithead. Your vote syphoning got is into this mess. You’ve already had quite enough of our attention this year when millions of us sent you emails telling you, quite politely, to stay the fuck out of the race. But you didn’t, and now we hear you will announce whether you’re going to run for president on Meet the Press tomorrow, and I have to get up at fucking 8AM on a Sunday to see what you think you’re doing. I swear, if you run, I’m coming after you with pliers and a length of old Harley Davidson timing chain, because, pal, if you fuck up the 2004 election and put Bush back in the White House, you deserved the hurt being put on you -- with extreme prejudice. If for no other reason than, in the current political climate, no one in their right mind is going to hand you the cash to run EXCEPT THE FUCKING BUSH CAMPAIGN ITSELF!
Which makes nothing more than a treacherous bought-and-paid-for creature of the Bush White House, with less ethics than a 10th street crackhead rentboy. Go away Ralph, before we do something you’ll regret. This isn’t finished by a long shot, but I’ll wait until you announce before getting any more serious. You are enough, right now, to drive me to drink, and you wouldn’t like me after I’ve been drinking.
AND TALKING OF DRINK
In last year's LA CityBeat Xmas gift guide I wrote.
For the bohemian who has tried everything, what better than genuine Czechoslovakian absinthe? The forbidden green goddess of demimonde decadence is a legendary aphrodisiac, a subtle and colorful hallucinogen, and only quasi-legal. Plus the romantic imbibing ritual – involving sugar, ice, and a naked flame – is super-seasonal. Better hurry, though. Online absinthe suppliers, La Boheme, promise a ten-business day delivery to the US, but the stuff does have to be ordered in the UK and the shipped from the Czech Republic. (We tested an order, though, and all worked as advertized.) Compared to other exotic liquor, absinthe isn’t cheap, but measured by hallucinogen prices, it’s a steal. A sample starter of 140 ml., in a highly keepable stainless steel flask, is $34.99, while the 70 cl. Absinthe King Gold could fuel an orgy at $199.99. But before you dim the lights and break out the satin and lace, also order one of the decorative absinthe preparation spoons that start at $12.99, and find some elegant, goth-green, tumbler-sized glasses for real belle epoch class. (All orders come with history and full instructions.)
Go to www.laboheme.uk.com
Well, Fidicen took my advice and here’s his report...
A large cylindrical package arrived at the office yesterday and despite an angel on my shoulder loudly advising I wait until nigh on the weekend, by 9:15 p.m. I was dimming the lights, chilling filtered water, and pulling out the sugar cubes. At approximately 9:25 I toasted my cat as well as the visage of Arthur Rimbaud gazing down at us from a lovely French import edition of original manuscript facsimiles perched above the poetry section of my library. I'd read about the first taste being difficult and had to laugh knowingly as the beclouded green fluid met my palate like a sweet and dear friend. Admittedly, subsequent tastes were occasionally odd, but my mostly empty stomache can assume the blame there. I took to it like a doctor to medicine. I felt light effects quickly, knew something was afoot, and noted a desire for only upbeat and happy music and thoughts. A couple more rounds in and a rising exuberance began to take hold, I upped the volume on the stereo and gleefully took a call from a journalist friend and found my thoughts lucid and animated and being received as such.
After quaffing another, the confines of my apartment would not suffice. With but little concern for my obligations on the morrow, I put on my coat and dashed up to Sunset in search of after midnight adventure. Definitely a social drink; I don't expect to drink alone on this one again. Of course there was a special breed gulping down alcohol on a Tuesday night nearing closing time following a three day weekend in quaint old Hollywood. I made fast friends and promptly got myself in a heck of a condition, overflowing with lust and verging on drunken madness. Easy to understand why those old poet and painter bastards got themselves in a knot. Jesus Z Christ, what's cutting off an ear when you're on a jag with this lady?? Of course I saw no indication that it would provide creativity, or even augment it--assumed that was mostly the mythmaking of spastic hack writers with a hard on for fin de siecle Europa. Then again, perhaps more mysteries await me. Mostly I noted a cocainesque thing of nasty confidence building, quickening of thoughts, and bodily unabashedness. Quite the devilish dash to add to an 140 proof concoction.
Bartender, another.
More carousing, they generously offered me a free Newcastle Brown, and finally forced me out around 2:20 upon which I happily bounced homeward and jumped into the building's jacuzzi. For good or for ill, not a soul seemed to be around. God knows when I went to sleep but I do know about waking. Talk about a world class hangover. That's got to be the true danger with this stuff. Interestingly, the effects were clearly still upon me, a lucidity and positivity, gentler under the duress of my newer condition. Somehow I got to work, even though my brain really is preferring not to function. I found myself not wanting to hassle with bothers like other cars and rules of the road. Outdoor oxygen seemed very necessary, and continues to beckon as I report to you from the confines of a dreadful, stuffy location near LAX. Not sure what else will help but the lunch truck is due any minute and I will be customizing a burrito with a hefty compliment of the hottest chilis they have. Purge we must. Usually the world's intrigues find me, but the Green Goddess has been fickle despite my heavy acquaintance since the age of 15 with the likes of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Hemingway, and those wacky impressionists and cubists. Naturally I've never even seen Moulin Rouge, but perhaps I might now.
Obviously more research is necessary.
CRYPTIQUE – It’s not easy being green.
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COMMERCIAL
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Saturday, February 21, 2004
Friday, February 20, 2004
IT’S THE DOC40 HISTORY CLASS (for Dysfunctional History Month)
DEPT. OF MONKEY AND MONOLITH
Fifty years ago today -- on Feb. 20th, 1954 -- President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to nearby Edwards Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens. And that, according to some theories, is when it all went really wrong. For just the facts (ma’am)...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4306380/
DEPT. OF ROCK AND HARD PLACE
I wrote this cautionary tale from the elder days of rock & roll, on how psychedelic music was corrupted into progressive rock, for Mojo. It ran in December ‘03 issue, but I figured, now the mag’s well off the stands, I’d post it for those among you who like this kind of esoteric musicological trainspotting...
PSYCH TO PROG
The Who were at the Marquee. The place was packed with rabid mods blocked on fine SKF Dexedrine. I think the tune was Smokestack Lightning, their early auto-destruct finale. Townshend had pulled round his two stacks of sixteen 4x12s so they faced each other leaving a nine inch gap. Holding his shell-shocked Rickenbaker by the neck, like a garroted vulture, he thrust the guitar into the space to create an electric alien banshee. Moon killed his kit in primitive anger management, Entwhistle made a noise like a nuclear submarine stripping it’s gears. We’d obviously come a long way from Be-Bop-A-Lula or Apache. It this wasn’t the future it was quantum progress.
More progress a couple of years later at the UFO Club, Pink Floyd played Interstellar Overdrive; similar psychosis, but far less rage. The piece commenced with a repeating four chord theme, little more than Green Onions in reverse and descending. The crowd was now stoned on Moroccan or Manfred’s acid. The paisley tide swayed and waved, submarine and languid. The theme cleared the gravity well, and meandered with whirling Binson echo boxes, out past John Cage and Albert Ayler to somewhere near moons of Saturn, straight from a Dan Dare hallucination, courtesy of Syd Barrett. Here again was rock & roll shaping its future, and making clear it was boldly going where none but Sun Ra had ever gone. Sadly, Barrett would soon be mistaking the dawn for a supernova, and being advised to take a rest from piping at the gates, but no matter, Sgt, Pepper was upon us and all manner of weird floodgates were bursting.
In the beginning, psychedelic meant novelty records; My Friend Jack Eats Sugar Lumps by the Smoke, Granny Takes A Trip by the Purple Gang, but, very quickly, the Rolling Stones went Marakesh/Owsley/Satan, while Steve Marriot and Pete Townshend were hard at work on a psychedelic pop idiom for Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Pete’s underappreciated pop masterpiece, I Can See For Miles. Strawberry Fields were taking us down. Nights grew so neuron-hammered that we listened to Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground over and over, and very loud, and breakfast with Boss Goodman meant Paki black, bacon sandwiches, and all four sides of Live Dead. The MC5 were actually playing Sun Ra songs along with the more predicable rama-lama, while Jimi Hendrix blazed a trail all of his own to places where few humans could completely follow. The air was day-glo electric for those who Jim Morrison called the “stoned immaculate.” The only fly in the ointment was an insistent voice from the other side of the dressing room demanding we hold on a minute.
“Hold on a minute? Why?”
To engage in what seemed to be a very pointless argument turned out to be the answer. Was psychedelic music nothing but a drug groove? The slogan was bandied about; “what can be achieved by drugs can be achieved by other means.” To we Star Fleet dopefiends, the concept was plainly nonsense, but a number of bands, led by a Syd-less Pink Floyd, were backing off from public association with the drug culture. On one level this was an understandably pragmatic. In 1967/8/9, the official heat was on, from the high profile busts of Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones, down to the constant stop-and-search street harassment of the velvet and hairy. To blatantly promote oneself as “psychedelic”, or as a “drug band” was a red flag to the drug squad. In our neck of the woods, the Deviants, Sam Gopal, later Hawkwind, and all the stoner combos to follow, acted nonchalant, bollocks to pragmatism, and went our merry way flattering ourselves that we lived outside the law, and at least tried to be honest. Others, though, with their eyes on the prize, the contract, and dreams of shipping platinum, became circumspect. At the same time that CBS was developing their fatuous marketing campaign “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music”, house hippies working for major labels brainstormed for a generic term not so overtly druggie as “psyche”. The term Progressive Music floated from some hellspawned corporate meeting. A decade later, punk would be sanitized to suits and narrow ties by the sobriquet New Wave, and so it went when Psyche became Prog.
The house hippies had correctly noticed the all-night idiot dancers in what Zappa dubbed psychedelic dungeons went even more bananas than they were already were over America by the Nice, and this was absorbed as a template for Progressive. The greatest template of all, of course, was Whiter Shade of Pale – one of the most beautiful and deliberately witless pieces of pop music of all time. The major-label house hippies failed to grok, however, how, by embracing this approach, they were opening a Pandora’s box of pretensions and ugly trousers. Bad lyricist wrote screeds of illiterate Pre-Raphaelite poetry, but worse than that, keyboard players were encouraged. Led, as far as I could tell, by John Lord, Rick Wakeman, and Keith Emerson, these were a breed who had gone to Guildhall or some lesser college, and needed to get fancy with G-sharp diminished ninths, while making portentous judgements about Good Music. Unfortunately, rather than pillaging Bartok or even Richard Straus, and totally leaving Carl Orf for metal to discover years later, they leaned to the pop classics, Ravel, even Elgar. Sometimes it worked, as in Roy Wood’s early shoe-horning of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 into the bad-trip, proto-punk classic, Night Of Fear, or, on a more grandiose scale, Townshend’s orthodox operatic design for Tommy. Too often, though, grandiose became the dumb bombast of (say) Robert Plant’s Band of Joy. Progressive Music had to be de-capitalized, and some u/g press wag, maybe Charlie Murray, shortened it to “prog”, making it sound like a Saxon mining implement.
My real problem with prog was that I sensed totally different and more valid progress being made well away from its beaten tracks. Capt Beefheart represented progress in spades. With Trout Mask Replica, he had established rock’s own Mars Colony. The Stooges braved the metaphor of napalm in the morning and prepared for Search and Destroy. David Bowie sang Lou Reed like Anthony Newley dressed as Veronica Lake, while Bob Dylan was taking us down home for another look at country music. In such circumstances, it became very hard take the pomp and circumstance of King Crimson (even with the wit of Bob Fripp) as significant musical progress. Strange fusions were coming, but, for me, the strangest would be tragically denied us. Two great Kubrick monoliths, Jimi, post-Experience, and Miles, in Bitches’ Brew mood, appeared to be drifting into each other’s orbit. But then Jimi was a sunbeam, and that was the end of that. But damn, if nothing else, that would that have been progressive.
Of course, the psyche/prod conflict is now only in the minds of collectors. Those of us from back in the day have pissed over a lot of bridges in the intervening years. For the most part, we have kissed, made up, and even worked together, learning the lesson that method and madness are by no means antithetical, but are in fact two symbiotic halves of the same creative process. But remember, all of the above is highly subjective and shamelessly biased.
CRYPTIQUE – Smoke if you got some.
DEPT. OF MONKEY AND MONOLITH
Fifty years ago today -- on Feb. 20th, 1954 -- President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to nearby Edwards Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens. And that, according to some theories, is when it all went really wrong. For just the facts (ma’am)...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4306380/
DEPT. OF ROCK AND HARD PLACE
I wrote this cautionary tale from the elder days of rock & roll, on how psychedelic music was corrupted into progressive rock, for Mojo. It ran in December ‘03 issue, but I figured, now the mag’s well off the stands, I’d post it for those among you who like this kind of esoteric musicological trainspotting...
PSYCH TO PROG
The Who were at the Marquee. The place was packed with rabid mods blocked on fine SKF Dexedrine. I think the tune was Smokestack Lightning, their early auto-destruct finale. Townshend had pulled round his two stacks of sixteen 4x12s so they faced each other leaving a nine inch gap. Holding his shell-shocked Rickenbaker by the neck, like a garroted vulture, he thrust the guitar into the space to create an electric alien banshee. Moon killed his kit in primitive anger management, Entwhistle made a noise like a nuclear submarine stripping it’s gears. We’d obviously come a long way from Be-Bop-A-Lula or Apache. It this wasn’t the future it was quantum progress.
More progress a couple of years later at the UFO Club, Pink Floyd played Interstellar Overdrive; similar psychosis, but far less rage. The piece commenced with a repeating four chord theme, little more than Green Onions in reverse and descending. The crowd was now stoned on Moroccan or Manfred’s acid. The paisley tide swayed and waved, submarine and languid. The theme cleared the gravity well, and meandered with whirling Binson echo boxes, out past John Cage and Albert Ayler to somewhere near moons of Saturn, straight from a Dan Dare hallucination, courtesy of Syd Barrett. Here again was rock & roll shaping its future, and making clear it was boldly going where none but Sun Ra had ever gone. Sadly, Barrett would soon be mistaking the dawn for a supernova, and being advised to take a rest from piping at the gates, but no matter, Sgt, Pepper was upon us and all manner of weird floodgates were bursting.
In the beginning, psychedelic meant novelty records; My Friend Jack Eats Sugar Lumps by the Smoke, Granny Takes A Trip by the Purple Gang, but, very quickly, the Rolling Stones went Marakesh/Owsley/Satan, while Steve Marriot and Pete Townshend were hard at work on a psychedelic pop idiom for Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Pete’s underappreciated pop masterpiece, I Can See For Miles. Strawberry Fields were taking us down. Nights grew so neuron-hammered that we listened to Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground over and over, and very loud, and breakfast with Boss Goodman meant Paki black, bacon sandwiches, and all four sides of Live Dead. The MC5 were actually playing Sun Ra songs along with the more predicable rama-lama, while Jimi Hendrix blazed a trail all of his own to places where few humans could completely follow. The air was day-glo electric for those who Jim Morrison called the “stoned immaculate.” The only fly in the ointment was an insistent voice from the other side of the dressing room demanding we hold on a minute.
“Hold on a minute? Why?”
To engage in what seemed to be a very pointless argument turned out to be the answer. Was psychedelic music nothing but a drug groove? The slogan was bandied about; “what can be achieved by drugs can be achieved by other means.” To we Star Fleet dopefiends, the concept was plainly nonsense, but a number of bands, led by a Syd-less Pink Floyd, were backing off from public association with the drug culture. On one level this was an understandably pragmatic. In 1967/8/9, the official heat was on, from the high profile busts of Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones, down to the constant stop-and-search street harassment of the velvet and hairy. To blatantly promote oneself as “psychedelic”, or as a “drug band” was a red flag to the drug squad. In our neck of the woods, the Deviants, Sam Gopal, later Hawkwind, and all the stoner combos to follow, acted nonchalant, bollocks to pragmatism, and went our merry way flattering ourselves that we lived outside the law, and at least tried to be honest. Others, though, with their eyes on the prize, the contract, and dreams of shipping platinum, became circumspect. At the same time that CBS was developing their fatuous marketing campaign “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music”, house hippies working for major labels brainstormed for a generic term not so overtly druggie as “psyche”. The term Progressive Music floated from some hellspawned corporate meeting. A decade later, punk would be sanitized to suits and narrow ties by the sobriquet New Wave, and so it went when Psyche became Prog.
The house hippies had correctly noticed the all-night idiot dancers in what Zappa dubbed psychedelic dungeons went even more bananas than they were already were over America by the Nice, and this was absorbed as a template for Progressive. The greatest template of all, of course, was Whiter Shade of Pale – one of the most beautiful and deliberately witless pieces of pop music of all time. The major-label house hippies failed to grok, however, how, by embracing this approach, they were opening a Pandora’s box of pretensions and ugly trousers. Bad lyricist wrote screeds of illiterate Pre-Raphaelite poetry, but worse than that, keyboard players were encouraged. Led, as far as I could tell, by John Lord, Rick Wakeman, and Keith Emerson, these were a breed who had gone to Guildhall or some lesser college, and needed to get fancy with G-sharp diminished ninths, while making portentous judgements about Good Music. Unfortunately, rather than pillaging Bartok or even Richard Straus, and totally leaving Carl Orf for metal to discover years later, they leaned to the pop classics, Ravel, even Elgar. Sometimes it worked, as in Roy Wood’s early shoe-horning of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 into the bad-trip, proto-punk classic, Night Of Fear, or, on a more grandiose scale, Townshend’s orthodox operatic design for Tommy. Too often, though, grandiose became the dumb bombast of (say) Robert Plant’s Band of Joy. Progressive Music had to be de-capitalized, and some u/g press wag, maybe Charlie Murray, shortened it to “prog”, making it sound like a Saxon mining implement.
My real problem with prog was that I sensed totally different and more valid progress being made well away from its beaten tracks. Capt Beefheart represented progress in spades. With Trout Mask Replica, he had established rock’s own Mars Colony. The Stooges braved the metaphor of napalm in the morning and prepared for Search and Destroy. David Bowie sang Lou Reed like Anthony Newley dressed as Veronica Lake, while Bob Dylan was taking us down home for another look at country music. In such circumstances, it became very hard take the pomp and circumstance of King Crimson (even with the wit of Bob Fripp) as significant musical progress. Strange fusions were coming, but, for me, the strangest would be tragically denied us. Two great Kubrick monoliths, Jimi, post-Experience, and Miles, in Bitches’ Brew mood, appeared to be drifting into each other’s orbit. But then Jimi was a sunbeam, and that was the end of that. But damn, if nothing else, that would that have been progressive.
Of course, the psyche/prod conflict is now only in the minds of collectors. Those of us from back in the day have pissed over a lot of bridges in the intervening years. For the most part, we have kissed, made up, and even worked together, learning the lesson that method and madness are by no means antithetical, but are in fact two symbiotic halves of the same creative process. But remember, all of the above is highly subjective and shamelessly biased.
CRYPTIQUE – Smoke if you got some.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
UTOPIA – SCHMUTOPIA
Yeah, well, it was nice to consider thinking outside the box for a moment, but sinboy was right. If you’re sick and ain’t got medical care, metaphysics can get a trifle luxurious, and thinking outside the box becomes academic in the face of the truly absurd shit the other side keep throwing at us as they strive for dictatorship. The following comes from Arianna Huffington, in her email newsletter. I have my reservations about Arianna. Never been too trusting of the pitstops, honky tonks, and the Highway Patrol parked behind the Exxon sign out on the Damascus Road, but in this case, she’s close to the money...
Remember that divisive pre-9/11 campaign staple? Well, it’s flared up again — with a vengeance and a rash of new administration actions clearly aimed at shoring up the president’s Christian conservative base. In the last month, the president has traded in his too-tight flight suit for a revival tent, backing a new anti-obscenity crusade, anti-condom sex-ed programs, a renewed commitment to fighting the drug war, and his attorney general’s efforts to poke around the private medical records of women who’ve had abortions. He even hinted in his State of the Union that he’d be willing to endorse a constitutional ban on gay marriage. But that’s not even the worst of it. The Justice Department has recently assigned a team of FBI agents to focus exclusively on adult obscenity cases. That’s right, with the war on terror in full swing, our war president is going to have a group of G-men doing nothing but working the porn beat when they could be tracking down — oh, I don’t know — terrorist sleeper cells. Talk about your misguided allocation of manpower. I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel safer knowing the feds are going to be keeping close tabs on Jenna Jameson.
Except Arianna doesn’t take it far enough. The old Duke of Wellington taught me that it’s half the battle to chose the battlefield and be the first to arrive. (Of course, it didn’t work for Robert E. Lee, but that’s another story.) The bloody fundamentalists are making the running, comrades. We are under heavy bombardment by the cultural trivia of oppression and it is wasting a great deal of our time. And it will get more intense and viciously witless as this election year progresses. Witness the following nonsense relayed by Jay Babcock
Can American cultural life get any more absurd? I'm laughing to keep from crying...
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., Sunday, Feb. 15, 2004 – Bobby Labonte overcame early problems in the Daytona 500 and fought back to finish 11th in the 46th Daytona 500 Feb... The hood of Labonte's car is both a shameless movie plug -- The Passion of the Christ, coming soon to a theater near you -- and some new-style proselytizing for the Gospel. Yes, witnessing has moved from the revival tent to the fast lane. "It's a chance to get the word out," Labonte, who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, said about the ad on his car. "Someone who is curious about Jesus and has never been saved sees the race and says, 'Hmmm, I'd like to see what that's about.' ... Maybe we can change their minds." NASCAR racing and the Christian faith have often worked hand-in-hand, from infield services for drivers, crewmen and officials to the pre-race invocation to the annual break in the schedule for the Easter holiday. Now comes a car promoting The Passion of the Christ, a soon-to-be-released movie that already has drawn lavish praise from conservative clergy -- including the Rev. Billy Graham -- but angry denouncements from Jewish groups fearing it will stir up anti-Semitism. For Labonte, it was a no-brainer to plug Mel Gibson's film on the No. 18 car, especially since the movie focuses on the seminal event in the Christian faith -- the crucifixion of Jesus."I know how much it has impacted my life and my family's life," said Labonte, a former NASCAR Nextel Cup champion.
http://www.bobbylabonte.com/news/04_news/040215_race.shtml
AND IN RESPONSE TO SINBOY OF YESTERDAY
some girl writes...
sinboy is cute, but...????
Quoting him: "I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them." Oh, that media. always trolling for freaks. or maybe they were kind of hard to miss, what with the slaughtering of the pigs and all. i mean, i see what he sorta means, but...i dunno. i would a more cynical point about it being natural for leaders to abuse their power, human nature, blah blah ... but then i'd feel bad for raining on his hard-work utopian parade. hee. anyway, i love reading about his little commune or whatever, but does he really think it's never been done before? adorable. hmmm....a true libertine? and a boy, no less. kewl.
AND FINALLY MORE FARREN
For a more reasoned and erudite analysis of the current Democratic primaries try the cover story I seem to have written for this week's LA Citybeat.
http://lacitybeat.com
CRYPTIQUE – Rome wasn’t burned in a day.
Yeah, well, it was nice to consider thinking outside the box for a moment, but sinboy was right. If you’re sick and ain’t got medical care, metaphysics can get a trifle luxurious, and thinking outside the box becomes academic in the face of the truly absurd shit the other side keep throwing at us as they strive for dictatorship. The following comes from Arianna Huffington, in her email newsletter. I have my reservations about Arianna. Never been too trusting of the pitstops, honky tonks, and the Highway Patrol parked behind the Exxon sign out on the Damascus Road, but in this case, she’s close to the money...
Remember that divisive pre-9/11 campaign staple? Well, it’s flared up again — with a vengeance and a rash of new administration actions clearly aimed at shoring up the president’s Christian conservative base. In the last month, the president has traded in his too-tight flight suit for a revival tent, backing a new anti-obscenity crusade, anti-condom sex-ed programs, a renewed commitment to fighting the drug war, and his attorney general’s efforts to poke around the private medical records of women who’ve had abortions. He even hinted in his State of the Union that he’d be willing to endorse a constitutional ban on gay marriage. But that’s not even the worst of it. The Justice Department has recently assigned a team of FBI agents to focus exclusively on adult obscenity cases. That’s right, with the war on terror in full swing, our war president is going to have a group of G-men doing nothing but working the porn beat when they could be tracking down — oh, I don’t know — terrorist sleeper cells. Talk about your misguided allocation of manpower. I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel safer knowing the feds are going to be keeping close tabs on Jenna Jameson.
Except Arianna doesn’t take it far enough. The old Duke of Wellington taught me that it’s half the battle to chose the battlefield and be the first to arrive. (Of course, it didn’t work for Robert E. Lee, but that’s another story.) The bloody fundamentalists are making the running, comrades. We are under heavy bombardment by the cultural trivia of oppression and it is wasting a great deal of our time. And it will get more intense and viciously witless as this election year progresses. Witness the following nonsense relayed by Jay Babcock
Can American cultural life get any more absurd? I'm laughing to keep from crying...
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., Sunday, Feb. 15, 2004 – Bobby Labonte overcame early problems in the Daytona 500 and fought back to finish 11th in the 46th Daytona 500 Feb... The hood of Labonte's car is both a shameless movie plug -- The Passion of the Christ, coming soon to a theater near you -- and some new-style proselytizing for the Gospel. Yes, witnessing has moved from the revival tent to the fast lane. "It's a chance to get the word out," Labonte, who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, said about the ad on his car. "Someone who is curious about Jesus and has never been saved sees the race and says, 'Hmmm, I'd like to see what that's about.' ... Maybe we can change their minds." NASCAR racing and the Christian faith have often worked hand-in-hand, from infield services for drivers, crewmen and officials to the pre-race invocation to the annual break in the schedule for the Easter holiday. Now comes a car promoting The Passion of the Christ, a soon-to-be-released movie that already has drawn lavish praise from conservative clergy -- including the Rev. Billy Graham -- but angry denouncements from Jewish groups fearing it will stir up anti-Semitism. For Labonte, it was a no-brainer to plug Mel Gibson's film on the No. 18 car, especially since the movie focuses on the seminal event in the Christian faith -- the crucifixion of Jesus."I know how much it has impacted my life and my family's life," said Labonte, a former NASCAR Nextel Cup champion.
http://www.bobbylabonte.com/news/04_news/040215_race.shtml
AND IN RESPONSE TO SINBOY OF YESTERDAY
some girl writes...
sinboy is cute, but...????
Quoting him: "I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them." Oh, that media. always trolling for freaks. or maybe they were kind of hard to miss, what with the slaughtering of the pigs and all. i mean, i see what he sorta means, but...i dunno. i would a more cynical point about it being natural for leaders to abuse their power, human nature, blah blah ... but then i'd feel bad for raining on his hard-work utopian parade. hee. anyway, i love reading about his little commune or whatever, but does he really think it's never been done before? adorable. hmmm....a true libertine? and a boy, no less. kewl.
AND FINALLY MORE FARREN
For a more reasoned and erudite analysis of the current Democratic primaries try the cover story I seem to have written for this week's LA Citybeat.
http://lacitybeat.com
CRYPTIQUE – Rome wasn’t burned in a day.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
UTOPIA REDUX – First Response To Yesterday’s Post
Sinboy writes...
Polymorphous yes. Utopianism? Are you effing kidding? This shit takes work. One of my tribe (*) just broke her leg on the way to thecourthouse to help with the same sex marriages in San Francisco. She's a massage therapist, has no health insurance, and is going to need near
24 hr care for a while. The really shitty thing is that she's a marathon runner, and was just recovering from some pain from her last try at training for an AIDS marathon. That Heinlein guy never mentioned this in Stranger In A Strange Land. But somehow I don't feel cheated. If you're still worried about the whole "Manson cult" thing, you should see the scar one of my other family members just got. A lamp fell on him. He's this intense biker tech guy with a superman fixation. I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them.
(*)there's no word for what we do as a family. It's not common enough to get a definition. Some call it polyamory, others call it open marriages, and some would call it communalism. The words aren't what's important.
While some girl corrects a couple of Star Trek details I screwed up.
Star Trek: TNG is set in the 24th century. That would make it THREE hundred years in the future. Not two hundred. And you didn't key in a code to get what you wanted from the replicator on the Enterprise-D. You just told it what you wanted. You know, like, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." And there you had it.
GAY WEDDINGS
Again I stand corrected. There were 2500 gay weddings in the Bay Area over the long weekend, to which I can only paraphrase Col. Kilgore in one of my favorite movies. -- "I love the news of gay weddings in the morning. It's news of...chaos."
WHAT US WORRY?
But this clip from the New York Times may indicate that all this discussion of a better world may be totally academic...
Recent astronomical measurements, scientists say, cannot rule out the possibility that in a few billion years a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation. “In some ways it sounds more like science fiction than fact," said Dr. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist who described this apocalyptic possibility in a paper with Dr. Marc Kamionkowski and Dr. Nevin Weinberg, from the California Institute of Technology, last year. The Big Rip is only one of a constellation of doomsday possibilities resulting from the discovery by two teams of astronomers six years ago that a mysterious force called dark energy seems to be wrenching the universe apart. Instead of slowing down from cosmic gravity, as cosmologists had presumed for a century, the galaxies started speeding up about five billion years ago, like a driver hitting the gas pedal after passing a tollbooth. Dark energy sounded crazy at the time, but in the intervening years a cascade of observations have strengthened the case that something truly weird is going on in the sky. It has a name, but that belies the fact that nobody really knows what dark energy is. In six years it has become one of the central and apparently unavoidable features of the cosmos, the surprise question mark at the top of everybody's list, undermining what physicists presumed they understood about space, time, gravity and the future of the universe.
CRYPTIQUE – Surf or fight!
Sinboy writes...
Polymorphous yes. Utopianism? Are you effing kidding? This shit takes work. One of my tribe (*) just broke her leg on the way to thecourthouse to help with the same sex marriages in San Francisco. She's a massage therapist, has no health insurance, and is going to need near
24 hr care for a while. The really shitty thing is that she's a marathon runner, and was just recovering from some pain from her last try at training for an AIDS marathon. That Heinlein guy never mentioned this in Stranger In A Strange Land. But somehow I don't feel cheated. If you're still worried about the whole "Manson cult" thing, you should see the scar one of my other family members just got. A lamp fell on him. He's this intense biker tech guy with a superman fixation. I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them.
(*)there's no word for what we do as a family. It's not common enough to get a definition. Some call it polyamory, others call it open marriages, and some would call it communalism. The words aren't what's important.
While some girl corrects a couple of Star Trek details I screwed up.
Star Trek: TNG is set in the 24th century. That would make it THREE hundred years in the future. Not two hundred. And you didn't key in a code to get what you wanted from the replicator on the Enterprise-D. You just told it what you wanted. You know, like, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." And there you had it.
GAY WEDDINGS
Again I stand corrected. There were 2500 gay weddings in the Bay Area over the long weekend, to which I can only paraphrase Col. Kilgore in one of my favorite movies. -- "I love the news of gay weddings in the morning. It's news of...chaos."
WHAT US WORRY?
But this clip from the New York Times may indicate that all this discussion of a better world may be totally academic...
Recent astronomical measurements, scientists say, cannot rule out the possibility that in a few billion years a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation. “In some ways it sounds more like science fiction than fact," said Dr. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist who described this apocalyptic possibility in a paper with Dr. Marc Kamionkowski and Dr. Nevin Weinberg, from the California Institute of Technology, last year. The Big Rip is only one of a constellation of doomsday possibilities resulting from the discovery by two teams of astronomers six years ago that a mysterious force called dark energy seems to be wrenching the universe apart. Instead of slowing down from cosmic gravity, as cosmologists had presumed for a century, the galaxies started speeding up about five billion years ago, like a driver hitting the gas pedal after passing a tollbooth. Dark energy sounded crazy at the time, but in the intervening years a cascade of observations have strengthened the case that something truly weird is going on in the sky. It has a name, but that belies the fact that nobody really knows what dark energy is. In six years it has become one of the central and apparently unavoidable features of the cosmos, the surprise question mark at the top of everybody's list, undermining what physicists presumed they understood about space, time, gravity and the future of the universe.
CRYPTIQUE – Surf or fight!
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
ANYONE FOR UTOPIA?
How many of you remember Star Trek: The Next Generation? That was the second version of the show that boldly went where no TV show had gone before, the one with the Patrick Stewart and his shaved head as captain of the slick, new-model Starship Enterprise, with the bar and the “holodeck” where all fantasies were made virtual reality. The Mk 2 Enterprise also came with a neat device that looked like a microwave and could supply anything from a dry martini to clean underwear just by keying in the appropriate code. In a small backstory aside, viewers were informed that, when this marvelous stuff simulator was invented, money was abolished on Earth, and a whole new social order introduced.
This was supposedly two hundred years in the future, but it would seem that from MP3s to weblogs, the situation is already with us in the contemporary arts, and the obsolescence of money becomes technically possible. Okay so the record companies sue downloaders, and techies work on encryption devices so we still have to pay to watch movies, but these are only holding patterns. Writers wonder where it will all end. Some turn tricks, others pose as Nazis. Agents cop attitudes, and don’t return calls. Drummers move to Montana where bars still pay the band to play blues for drunks. Web and print scuffle for the same advertising dollars. Chaos is virtually upon us. And yet we can hardly have a culture that is entirely driven by elves, amateurs, and the unemployable.
You may have noticed that I’ve taken a day off from Bush bashing. This doesn’t mean that I have given up on evicting the weasel from the White House, but today I started reflecting on the shape of things just a few miles further down this road. The battle is not merely to get John Kerry into the White House for nothing more than a Dem course correction. Fear of the future is rapidly becoming the 21st century malady, and when the ignorant get scared they run to daddy. Daddy, of course, in political terms, is, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff, (I don’t have a link to hand, look him up!) points out, the totalitarianism of dictatorship. That is why I am so bent on bashing Bush. I recognize, with, I hope, some accuracy that the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld quartet and the voice of PNAC are the thin end of an Imperial American dictatorship.
Maybe with Bush currently polling five points behind Kerry, he is not so invincible as he looked at the end of last year, but what’s ahead? Can the kind of democracy formulated by 18th century gentleman farmers cope with a techno-driven social upheaval that promises to be as radical and disruptive as the Industrial Revolution and the Italian Renaissance combined? Right now half my cable channels are down, but Comcast, while trying to buy Disney, have instituted a policy of charging me $1.99 to complain to a human being. They have a monopoly on my TV service, unless I re-tech to satellite, or go back to eight channels and rabbit ears with bits of tinfoil on them. I’m not only screwed but left prostrate for further uninvited penetration. That is how corporate capitalism copes with change.
So, brothers and sisters, what are your thoughts on all this? I am not preaching doom and gloom, and ain't that a change? A golden road could be paved for our tried feet, but it will require a massive creativity. But the very survival of creativity is being choked off. I’d really like to hear from all who read this. Short comments on the absurd comments board, but longer reflections to byron4D@aol.com. They will be posted.
NOTE
How many gay weddings were there today in San Francisco? A hundred?
RESPONSE TO YESTERDAYS BECK/FARREN
from mfc
Henri LeBeque...how dare you mention mendacity and not Burl...and I think there's room for The Rifleman in there somewhere
CRYPTIQUE – Somebody say amen.
How many of you remember Star Trek: The Next Generation? That was the second version of the show that boldly went where no TV show had gone before, the one with the Patrick Stewart and his shaved head as captain of the slick, new-model Starship Enterprise, with the bar and the “holodeck” where all fantasies were made virtual reality. The Mk 2 Enterprise also came with a neat device that looked like a microwave and could supply anything from a dry martini to clean underwear just by keying in the appropriate code. In a small backstory aside, viewers were informed that, when this marvelous stuff simulator was invented, money was abolished on Earth, and a whole new social order introduced.
This was supposedly two hundred years in the future, but it would seem that from MP3s to weblogs, the situation is already with us in the contemporary arts, and the obsolescence of money becomes technically possible. Okay so the record companies sue downloaders, and techies work on encryption devices so we still have to pay to watch movies, but these are only holding patterns. Writers wonder where it will all end. Some turn tricks, others pose as Nazis. Agents cop attitudes, and don’t return calls. Drummers move to Montana where bars still pay the band to play blues for drunks. Web and print scuffle for the same advertising dollars. Chaos is virtually upon us. And yet we can hardly have a culture that is entirely driven by elves, amateurs, and the unemployable.
You may have noticed that I’ve taken a day off from Bush bashing. This doesn’t mean that I have given up on evicting the weasel from the White House, but today I started reflecting on the shape of things just a few miles further down this road. The battle is not merely to get John Kerry into the White House for nothing more than a Dem course correction. Fear of the future is rapidly becoming the 21st century malady, and when the ignorant get scared they run to daddy. Daddy, of course, in political terms, is, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff, (I don’t have a link to hand, look him up!) points out, the totalitarianism of dictatorship. That is why I am so bent on bashing Bush. I recognize, with, I hope, some accuracy that the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld quartet and the voice of PNAC are the thin end of an Imperial American dictatorship.
Maybe with Bush currently polling five points behind Kerry, he is not so invincible as he looked at the end of last year, but what’s ahead? Can the kind of democracy formulated by 18th century gentleman farmers cope with a techno-driven social upheaval that promises to be as radical and disruptive as the Industrial Revolution and the Italian Renaissance combined? Right now half my cable channels are down, but Comcast, while trying to buy Disney, have instituted a policy of charging me $1.99 to complain to a human being. They have a monopoly on my TV service, unless I re-tech to satellite, or go back to eight channels and rabbit ears with bits of tinfoil on them. I’m not only screwed but left prostrate for further uninvited penetration. That is how corporate capitalism copes with change.
So, brothers and sisters, what are your thoughts on all this? I am not preaching doom and gloom, and ain't that a change? A golden road could be paved for our tried feet, but it will require a massive creativity. But the very survival of creativity is being choked off. I’d really like to hear from all who read this. Short comments on the absurd comments board, but longer reflections to byron4D@aol.com. They will be posted.
NOTE
How many gay weddings were there today in San Francisco? A hundred?
RESPONSE TO YESTERDAYS BECK/FARREN
from mfc
Henri LeBeque...how dare you mention mendacity and not Burl...and I think there's room for The Rifleman in there somewhere
CRYPTIQUE – Somebody say amen.
Monday, February 16, 2004
DID YOU MISS ME?
Yeah well, it was a weekend not so much lost as spent running behind the metaphoric bus, and not managing quite to get on it, mainly because of Mixmaster Eric and his using me and the CityBeat crew as guinea pigs for his glow in the dark cocktails, although the golden-orange ones were very nice – Carmen Miranda’s Tropical Pussy or something. I really have to compose the names of Eric’s drinks for him. I did create a moment of drama, though, when the TV in the bar was running by default, tuned to some History Channel-type show about famous executions, it being the anniversary of the hanging of alleged Lindburg baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, and everyone was suddenly watching with such rapt and grisly attention that I felt I had to remonstrate with full Shakespearian projection that this was not appropriate bar-viewing on a Friday night – even the 13th – and then storm out for a smoke. When I came back, Jimi Hendrix was on the jukebox and the lights had been dimmed and all was much more as I felt it should be. So I guess I prevailed, but maybe I am turning into an irascible old geezer. Who knows?
DIALOGUE
The following exchange occurred on Sunday afternoon with Henry Cabot Beck, although you do need an extensive knowledge of old movies and Tennessee Williams to follow it.
Re “Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard.”
Beck – We're going to find that like Orson Welles' Mr Arkadin AKA Confidential Report, guys who could actually come forward and talk about bending elbows, snorting blow, chasing West Texas hookers, tipping cattle, and evading the war with GWB will have disappeared, one at a time, in the vast indifference of the Texas outback. Other movie references: Cliff Robertson in Picnic, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) in Written On The Wind, Anthony Franciosa as Jody Varner sucking up to Will Varner (Orson Welles again) in The Long Hot Summer. All stories about bad sons with too much money, mean and miserable, trying to make daddy happy or stand in his shoes. If this were the film Giant, GWB would be seen as a child playing in the dirt with an toy oil derrick, a tin soldier and an empty whisky bottle. Chill Wills would play Dick Cheney.
Farren – But where is Jett Rink?
Beck – He's Phil Spector.
Farren – Oh, I though he might be Ted Turner. More important though, in the Giant analogue, where is Liz?
Beck – To my mind, the tragedy of GWB is that he never had a great, big-titted fag hag Liz Taylor dominatrix drama queen to pick him up by the scruff of the neck like Roy Horn and drag him away from Big Daddy like Maggie The Cat did for Brick. Of course GB had Barbara, but Laura Bush is neither Big Mama nor Maggie nor even Hillary. Come to think of it, Bill would have made a good Brick. And worst of all, Big Daddy Bush (Bradford Dillman?) never gave GW the much needed speech about mendacity. Of course the crux of the play is that nearly everybody in it is a lying liar. The world may be ready for Cat On A Hot Tin White House.
OBITUARY
Munz sends the following clip...
Feb. 13, 2004 – The Wisc.Post-Crescent
His daughter remembers him as a man with a pad of paper and pen, always writing articles or jotting down memos. For the man who first used the term "psychedelic," the end came in Appleton. Psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, 86, died at home Feb. 6. Osmond and his wife, Jane, had been living with their daughter in her Appleton home for the past four years. He moved to Appleton from Alabama. Euphemia Blackburn, 45, said her father had been an invalid for about 13 years. "He went quietly at home," Blackburn said Thursday. Osmond, born in England in 1917, is said to have coined "psychedelic" in a letter to British author Aldous Huxley to describe manifestations of the mind. Osmond, researcher of such mind-altering substances as LSD and mescaline, gave Huxley mescaline in the 1950s. Huxley related his experience in "The
Doors of Perception." Osmond was interested in researching the way LSD altered perceptions of
time and space and whether it could help could help alcoholics kick their addiction.
CRYPTQUE – I might as well live.
Yeah well, it was a weekend not so much lost as spent running behind the metaphoric bus, and not managing quite to get on it, mainly because of Mixmaster Eric and his using me and the CityBeat crew as guinea pigs for his glow in the dark cocktails, although the golden-orange ones were very nice – Carmen Miranda’s Tropical Pussy or something. I really have to compose the names of Eric’s drinks for him. I did create a moment of drama, though, when the TV in the bar was running by default, tuned to some History Channel-type show about famous executions, it being the anniversary of the hanging of alleged Lindburg baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, and everyone was suddenly watching with such rapt and grisly attention that I felt I had to remonstrate with full Shakespearian projection that this was not appropriate bar-viewing on a Friday night – even the 13th – and then storm out for a smoke. When I came back, Jimi Hendrix was on the jukebox and the lights had been dimmed and all was much more as I felt it should be. So I guess I prevailed, but maybe I am turning into an irascible old geezer. Who knows?
DIALOGUE
The following exchange occurred on Sunday afternoon with Henry Cabot Beck, although you do need an extensive knowledge of old movies and Tennessee Williams to follow it.
Re “Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard.”
Beck – We're going to find that like Orson Welles' Mr Arkadin AKA Confidential Report, guys who could actually come forward and talk about bending elbows, snorting blow, chasing West Texas hookers, tipping cattle, and evading the war with GWB will have disappeared, one at a time, in the vast indifference of the Texas outback. Other movie references: Cliff Robertson in Picnic, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) in Written On The Wind, Anthony Franciosa as Jody Varner sucking up to Will Varner (Orson Welles again) in The Long Hot Summer. All stories about bad sons with too much money, mean and miserable, trying to make daddy happy or stand in his shoes. If this were the film Giant, GWB would be seen as a child playing in the dirt with an toy oil derrick, a tin soldier and an empty whisky bottle. Chill Wills would play Dick Cheney.
Farren – But where is Jett Rink?
Beck – He's Phil Spector.
Farren – Oh, I though he might be Ted Turner. More important though, in the Giant analogue, where is Liz?
Beck – To my mind, the tragedy of GWB is that he never had a great, big-titted fag hag Liz Taylor dominatrix drama queen to pick him up by the scruff of the neck like Roy Horn and drag him away from Big Daddy like Maggie The Cat did for Brick. Of course GB had Barbara, but Laura Bush is neither Big Mama nor Maggie nor even Hillary. Come to think of it, Bill would have made a good Brick. And worst of all, Big Daddy Bush (Bradford Dillman?) never gave GW the much needed speech about mendacity. Of course the crux of the play is that nearly everybody in it is a lying liar. The world may be ready for Cat On A Hot Tin White House.
OBITUARY
Munz sends the following clip...
Feb. 13, 2004 – The Wisc.Post-Crescent
His daughter remembers him as a man with a pad of paper and pen, always writing articles or jotting down memos. For the man who first used the term "psychedelic," the end came in Appleton. Psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, 86, died at home Feb. 6. Osmond and his wife, Jane, had been living with their daughter in her Appleton home for the past four years. He moved to Appleton from Alabama. Euphemia Blackburn, 45, said her father had been an invalid for about 13 years. "He went quietly at home," Blackburn said Thursday. Osmond, born in England in 1917, is said to have coined "psychedelic" in a letter to British author Aldous Huxley to describe manifestations of the mind. Osmond, researcher of such mind-altering substances as LSD and mescaline, gave Huxley mescaline in the 1950s. Huxley related his experience in "The
Doors of Perception." Osmond was interested in researching the way LSD altered perceptions of
time and space and whether it could help could help alcoholics kick their addiction.
CRYPTQUE – I might as well live.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
###################
A SHORT INTERUPTION OF SERVICE
###################
Due to a bout of Friday 13th drunkeness -- and the resulting hangover -- brought on by Mixmaster Eric and his glow in the dark cocktails, Doc40 for St. Valentine's Day was massacred. And the Sunday post is kind of pathetic. A full account of the incident, or at least some lame excuses, will follow on Monday. The following poem sets the mood...
A LONG WALK WITH THE DEMON
All his life he'd walked with the demon
From the Radium Room to the Palace of Mirrors
From the Canadian border to the Place of Skulls
All his life he'd walked with the demon
At regular intervals, his friends had come to him
And pleaded that he cast it from him
The demon drove him to the madness
The craving for the adoration of the mob
The reason that all but one of his women had left him
The demon might mature and modify
Making him more comfortable with the passage of the nightmare
But he would never be free
The demon would never let him be free
Never allow itself to be cast out or put aside
Symbiosis, home boy, it told him
A twin singularity
Written in 1993. Recorded in the same year with Tijuana Bible for the CD Gringo Madness, released by Big Beat, London 1993.
CRYPTIQUE -- Give me a fucking break!
A SHORT INTERUPTION OF SERVICE
###################
Due to a bout of Friday 13th drunkeness -- and the resulting hangover -- brought on by Mixmaster Eric and his glow in the dark cocktails, Doc40 for St. Valentine's Day was massacred. And the Sunday post is kind of pathetic. A full account of the incident, or at least some lame excuses, will follow on Monday. The following poem sets the mood...
A LONG WALK WITH THE DEMON
All his life he'd walked with the demon
From the Radium Room to the Palace of Mirrors
From the Canadian border to the Place of Skulls
All his life he'd walked with the demon
At regular intervals, his friends had come to him
And pleaded that he cast it from him
The demon drove him to the madness
The craving for the adoration of the mob
The reason that all but one of his women had left him
The demon might mature and modify
Making him more comfortable with the passage of the nightmare
But he would never be free
The demon would never let him be free
Never allow itself to be cast out or put aside
Symbiosis, home boy, it told him
A twin singularity
Written in 1993. Recorded in the same year with Tijuana Bible for the CD Gringo Madness, released by Big Beat, London 1993.
CRYPTIQUE -- Give me a fucking break!
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