CANNIBAL UPDATE

If you look in the Doc 40 archives for Monday December 8th, you’ll find the story of Armin Meiwes, the 42-year-old German computer expert, who killed and ate Bernd Juergen Brandes, in March 2001 at Meiwes' home in the town of Rotenburg. The sexually motivated chow-down was conducted with Brandes full consent after the two had contacted each other through magazine personal ads. This week, a court sentenced Meiwes to eight and half years in jail, deciding that Meiwes had no ''base motives'' thus sparing him a murder conviction. Prosecutors had sought a life sentence, calling Meiwes a ''human butcher'' who acted simply to ''satisfy a sexual impulse'', but the defense argued that since the victim volunteered to be killed and eaten, the crime should be classified a mercy killing, which carries a five-year maximum penalty. According to reports Meiwes was calm after sentencing, chatting with his attorney and occasionally grinning for cameras. For a sense of warped perspective, in the US, one might well get a similar eight and a half years for selling an eightball of coke.

WALK THE BLOGOSPHERE LIKE CAINE
(That’s Kwai Chang, not Michael)

This is something of an experiment. Since I entered the weblog business at the start of December, I have wandered the ether and wondered at the sheer volume and diversity of the what is being blogged out there, and also the disturbingly high levels of fantasy, isolation, depression and rage. In the last week, I started picking up random snippets as I passed, like daisies in the field, and here is a sampling of the results. These anonymous quotes are not edited even as to sequence, and the original spelling is intact. Obviously the following of links constitutes a certain rudimentary navigation, but, apart from that, all is guaranteed random. I don’t know if this found poetry, a third generation Burroughs cut-up, or merely a reflection of the C21 condition of computerized humans. You decide and let me know.

Female age 14
I woke up this morning after having an extremely wierd dream about the extermintation of human beings.
Female teen
my name is mary...and im sick of xanga
Male teen
i've got some money now, finally, and i'm not entirely sure how to spend it. i'm going to get my conch pierced soon.
Male age 27
The problem was the gum was laced with some addictive additive, highly refined sugar or perhaps heroin.
Male teen
AHHHHH! HOW THE FUCK COULD U DO THIS TO ME...I THOUGHT U WERE MY FUCKIN FRIEND U FUCKIN BACK STABBER...U OUT OF ALL PPL...YEAH SOME FUCKIN MAGIC U DID...FUCKIN BONIN THE GIRL I LIKE...YEAH...AND U...I THOUGHT U FUCKIN CARED ABOUT ME..FUCKIN BULLSHIT THAT IS HUH...I GUESS U FUCKERZ R MEANT FOR EACH OTHER...U GUYZ CAN FUCK ANY-FUCKIN-TIME U WANT...I CANT BELIEVE U GUYZ WOULD DO THIS 2 ME...AFTER ALL THE SHIT THAT IVE DONE...THIS IS THE FUCKIN THANX I GET...FUCK U ALL...IM FUCKIN OUT!!!!!
Male adult
Hacked a few sites and know the ropes well enough for me or my friend to not jump your ass.
Male adult police officer
it's a bit disconcerting when officers get involved in gun battles twice in one week.
Female adult peepshow performer
He's ba-ack! Everyone's favorite virus-chaser, and the fair-haired boy of the peep show. Hard to believe that a guy who looks like Malibu Ken and wears a Rolex would be so willing, nay hungry, to lick other guys' cum off the floor of the booth.
Female adult chef
As I was making dinner I found myself stabbing an uncooked spaghetti squash Manson Girl-style, over and over again. I was aiming for the fifty-cent piece-sized label on its fat yellow side, full bore concentration toward my target. I caught myself thinking, "...hmmm...I'd always thought stabbing someone was the easy way to kill them but now I see that a certain amount of accuracy is involved.
Male adult
Imagine a party with a thousand hot man (at least) all tripping on X (real MDA not the bullshit you get today), crystal (meth/speed), acid and coke, horny as fuck, grinding together in a huge ballroom under an artificial sky filled with stars and lights and a gigantic floating disco ball. For a 24-hour period I was taken on rowdy rides that always ended with me getting nailed to a wall and fucked, hard.
Male adult
she was collared the whole weekend and spent it in skimpy night clothes.
Female teen
i stealed it from someone's lj who was linked to Yume-chan's lj...heh. I's a theif.
Female teen
last nyt naginuman kmi nina agot n jokim kina monty, andun cna ajoy, jenny at ang jowa ni jenny
na si ariel...Bday kc ni ariel kya my painom...
Male teen
...i broke my headphones today...because i am an angry man...an angry young man...watch out before i kill all my friends...
Male adult musician
...and adam still refuses to drive with me, yet i've never given him a near death experience...i don't get it...when i drive, I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING! goddamn it...

FROM THE EMAIL

Roger makes it clear that Elvis (see yesterday) absolutely refuses to leave the building. Not content with the possibility of a religion, he has, in the UK, inspired a political party with the following mission statement. “We believe that Presley is still alive and is now a sixty eight year old left wing revolutionary committed to over throwing the capitalist system which turned him into a fat media joke.”

For more – http://www.theplace4.co.uk/elvisseeninbaghdad/

Roger also reminds us to remember what Humpty Dumpy said to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

CRYPTIQUE – On your feet or on your knees.

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THIS BLOG IS DAILY, SO LOG ON REGULARLY AND EMAIL YOUR FRIENDS
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THE SOUND OF ONE MIND BOGGLING

Over on the comments board a discussion has been triggered by Jett (when you’re a Jett, you’re a Jett all the way) over the worship of Elvis Presley as a viable religious alternative, and arsydd is perfectly correct. I did start toying with the idea in fictional form in the novel The Armageddon Crazy back in 1989, and by around 1998, as the Millennium approached, I had pretty much decided the Elvis faith might well be the coming thing, and wrote accordingly in Mojo and elsewhere. My basic thesis was that Elvis Presley had unknowingly tapped into primal human response; that he was something a modern fertility god. Moreover, his story was another version of the prehistoric fable of the sacrifice of the boy king that has been reflected down the years in The Fisher King, the New Testament, the Arthurian legends. A healthy non-judgemental, pillhead change from Islam or the old Judeo-Christian ethical bullying, I though, and even contemplated a gig in my old age as a Shaman of El (with enough of a stipend to keep me in a gold suits and a holy Cadillac.)

Then a number of things happened that made me less optimistic. The 21st century arrived and much of the pre-Millennium metaphysical – Elvis, chupacabra, aliens, Satan cults, mothmen, etc, – appeared, if not actually to melt away, at least to become chimeral and transparent in the grim light of the new world order. Also, what looked like the first real nucleus of Elvis worship underwent what I could only define as a schism between the life-affirming, young-Elvis, rock & rollers, who celebrate on January 8th, and the grim, and probably Republican women who stage The Death Day in the August humidity of Memphis.

This is not to say that Elvis has gone, but he’s certainly in danger of being swamped in the present wave of mindless trivia, as the metaphysical lifeforce is syphoned of by sneaker manufacturers for their TV commercials.

But trivialization emerges as today’s theme. I have a diatribe on the subject in this week’s LA CityBeat that argues the TV show Entertainment Tonight is the embodiment of epidemic stupidity and dumbed-down distraction.

BOYS ARE STUPID

I have a good friend who frequently ends her emails with the line “BOYS ARE STUPID”, after she’s been castigating me for my lack of attention to detail and my use of mendacity when I’m losing an argument. (But we all know how the Doc loves a sound castigation.) I guess it was inevitable that the phrase should wind up on a T-shirt, and so it did, going just a little further to “BOYS ARE STUPID – THROW ROCKS AT THEM.” I smiled until I discovered it was also inevitable some fool should attempt to make the joke an issue. The fool in this case was a talk-radio idiot called Glenn Sacks who broadcasts here in LA, and has actually managed to get three chain stores to pull the shirts from the racks, because they “encourage violence.” It’s been my observation that little girls have thrown rocks a little boys – and vice versa – since the monkey met the monolith, and I don’t think a t-shirt is going to make that much difference. Are we of the Doc40 crew the only ones who have lives?

COMMENTS

Did I say lives? Another matter under discussion is the comments board. Some girl, Lord Marmite, and davinian all opt for the conventional form of a separate comment under each post, while others like the anarchy of the current formless comment heap that seems to taking on a life of it’s own as a diverse and decidedly weird miniblog. Me, I kinda lean to the anarchic, and, since the tech seems to be resisting the former, it may well stay as it is for a while, maybe until it collapses under its own weight. In this matter, however, majority will probably rule, so let’s hear from you.

WHALE BLOWS UP REAL GOOD

Proving that, despite our protests, we are not exempt from the seduction of trivia, I can’t resist the following wire service tale from Taiwan. The decomposing remains of a 66-ton sperm whale exploded on a busy street in the southern city of Tainan, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours. The 56-foot dead whale had been on a truck headed for an autopsy at a university earlier this week, when gases from internal decay caused its entrails to explode The whale had died after it was beached on the southwestern coast of the island. (On the other hand, maybe an exploding whale isn’t that trivial.)

CRYPTIQUE – Moby no dick.

WHAT THE FUCK? – For a few hours on Thursday afternoon, the Google ad at the top of the blog was for Bush’s reelection campaign.

ANOTHER STUPID AND REALLY DANGEROUS IDEA

A story in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune can hardly be anything but cause for new levels of concern about what exactly the bloody White House thinks it’s doing. As I read it, according to “military sources”, the Bush administration, well put out by recent assassination attempts against Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, and a resurgence of Taliban forces in neighboring Afghanistan, is preparing a U.S. military offensive that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. I could be wrong, but, to a grizzled and paranoid science fiction writer, this would seem like an incredibly bad idea, in that it would set the Moslem Fundamentalists in fresh ultra-uproar, and further destabilize a highly fucked-up nuclear power, the stability of which is already about as tenuous as the snail bladerunning on the sharp edge of the proverbial straight razor.

ELVIS SHOULD LEAVE THE BUILDING

It's obviously nowhere near as serious as Pakistan going ballistic in a megaton blaze of Isamic, radioactive glory, but I also feel damned uncomfortable with the idea that the Elvis Presley Estate has authorized what would appear to be the fucking silly idea of cutting the quarter-inch master tapes of the Elvis Sun recordings into one inch strips and then encasing them in plexiglass plaques that can be sold to the true-believers, like pieces of the True Cross, as objects touched by the Magnetism of the King. Okay, so all of the music contained on the tapes is cleaned up, digitally preserved, and totally safe, but, hell, somehow it doesn’t seem right to be putting a knife into such originals. If Graceland Inc. needs the cash that bad, couldn’t they have called McCartney, Springsteen, Ted Turner, Felix Dennis and assorted other rich guys and asked them if they wanted to buy the whole uncut reels?

LINK OF THE DAY

Hip Spinster is a natural diarist with wondrous and on-the-money insights on all manner of topics from bars to cars to poetry to rock & roll, love, literature, depression, alcohol and the lousy shape of the human condition. Visit, but treat her right. She blogs at...http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Did you hear something?

POSTSCRIPT

And just as I'm posting this I find out that James Brown is back in the slam on a domestic violence rap. Damn, James wassamatter wit you? You're motherfucking 70, man. Like, old enough to know better.

THE GASPS OF DEMOCRACY

In the snow and bitter weather of icy New Hampshire, the alleged deciding of our fate continues with a wide-margin win for John Kerry, but the mainstream media, not sated with last week’s spontaneous destruction of the Dean campaign, leaps ahead with full scale trivialization; tales of Drew Barrymore doing a documentary on the presidential campaign and traveling with Wes Clark, Kerry having to deny he's using Botox, Al Frankin getting his glasses knocked off, and NY Times resident nitwit David Brooks attempting to spin Edwards “Two Americas” speech. Meanwhile the Bush machine stands in menacing reserve like the fiscal equivalent of an SS panzer division, with the capacity, I understand, to spend a million bucks a day on the SOB’s reelection all the way clear to November. Shee-it, I know with that kind of money, I could probably fix anything. I even wonder about today’s rumor that the real reason Dick Cheney is running all over the planet trying to convince the world that he has no plans to conquer it is only to thwart a palace coupe that in which Bush would dump Cheney in favor of Rudy Giuliani as VP. It could so easily have been concocted in some evil White House sub-basement, and tossed like a bone of false hope to the opposition. Kinda like the python giving the mouse a fleeting but erroneous idea that it might not be swallowed and digested after all.

One of my problems, of course, is that Democrat primaries always take me back 1968, when the Dems milled about like chickens in the rain, as cities burned and the SE Asia war raged, and Hubert Humphrey presented himself as the natural succesor to LBJ, while all the time the dark prospect of Richard Nixon bore down on us. But, wonderous day, a white knight in the shining form of Bobby Kennedy suddenly made it seem as though democracy might actually work one more time. Then finally the shock, horror and a scream of “No! Not again!”as, in the moment of winning California, he was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel by yet another implausible lone gunman (with a cleanup by the LAPD and a young-but-rising Daryl Gates) and the sun went out, Hell moved closer, and everything turned ugly.

FROM THE EMAIL

HC Beck informs us...

NO PAPAL THUMBS UP FOR BIKER FLICK

In an official statement released today, a spokesman for Pope John Paul II disputed widely published reports that His Holiness saw and enjoyed the new biker film "Torque." The film, which went into wide release on January 16, ignited a firestorm of controversy when studio publicists started spreading the word that the Pope had viewed the film in his Vatican City apartment and had pronounced the film "awesome." According to the publicists, producers of the film had presented Pope John Paul II with a special DVD edition of the film, complete with narration by the film's director, never-before-seen footage, outtakes and bloopers. Coinciding with the release of the film, reports started emerging in the mainstream press that the Vatican had issued the following summary of the Pope's private screening of "Torque" "He saw it, and it was good." But in a strongly worded statement released today, a spokesman for the Pope denied in no uncertain terms that the Pope had given two papal thumbs up to the biker flick, adding, "His Holiness did not see 'Torque,' nor is he entirely sure what the word 'Torque' means."
In other news, the Dalai Lama today denied widely published reports that he called "Along Came Polly" "the feel-good movie of 2004." In a prepared statement, a spokesman for the Dalai Lama said, "The Dalai Lama was, frankly, disappointed by 'Along Came Polly,' and warns moviegoers that all of the funny parts are in the trailer."

AND COUPLE OF LINKS

John Skipp, novelist, filmmaker, splatter punk, wit, gastronome, and a damn fine dude with whom to share a table at a book signing, blogs and more at – http://www.johnskipp.com/

While the spendid Jay Babcock of Arthur mag fame does the same at – http://www.jaybabcock.com/magpie.html

OUT OF THE RISING SUN

Yesterday I did an interview for a Japanese rock magazine called Quest, which took up most of my afternoon and then I spend more hours reading the corrected m/s of my new novel Kindling (for a full description, and a shot of the cover I would refer you to http://www.thanatosoft.freeserve.co.uk/deviancefiles/kindling.htm)

I’m now two weeks late with the bloody m/s which is not my style at all, but a combination of overwork, poverty, flu, and an intense depression at the way Tor Books is currently treating me like mid-list scum, left me too depressed to look at for a number of days.

A combination of all things Japanese and the fact that Kindling is set in a whole imaginary alternate world prompts me to post the following from Yukiko in Tokyo, who rocks very politely, and quotes Mishima, who, I suspect, we in the West do not properly understand. The good news is that fact that Doc40 now appears to be rocking too has cheered me up no end. Also Yukiko’s remark about “Peeping Tomism” is highly apt in that it’s totally how I feel on my prowls of the blogosphere that have taken me to the domains of everyone from distraught teenagers to the journal of a witty and erudite brit call girl who blogs under the name Belle de Jour and defines her days of the week in French. http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

Yukiko writes...

I enjoy your weblog. Long time ago, when the word "internet" was known to only a handful of tech people, someone told me that the development of the internet would entirely depend on a single thing: Peeping Tomism. He was proved right. What a pleasure to know what has inspired someone whose creative works you admire - today. As you pointed out, some posts are too local to make much sense over here, but I don't mind since Japan is usually too unique in nearly every level of human activity. But what you write there is mostly applicable to us, too. Also, the fact that Farren-sensei has started weblogging reminded me of Mishima's diary which he published as "Holidays of a Novelist". One day Mishima impressively wrote about the period 1945-47/48 (when he was around 26 years old) as follows (again, please put up with my lame translation):

“Around that time, although I could do nothing practical in real life, I had sympathy and anticipation for vice whirling around in my mind. While doing nothing significant, I was certainly ‘sleeping with’ the epoch. However counter-epoch pose I might have taken, I was, anyway, sleeping with her. Compared with this, the current time -- the year 1955 or 1954 -- is not enough to make me sleep with it. Ever since I reached so-called the ‘reactionary" period’, I have never slept with an era. Should a novelist always sleep with his/her contemporary era like a whore? Of course, a novel should inevitably have some features of the current time. However, aren't the solitude and abstinence of an author in a reactionary period more prolific to create great stories?
Yet, a novelist must have, at least once, the experience of sharing a bed with an era and, apparently, he/she needs to be energized by the memory of it.”

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THIS BLOG HAS NEW POSTS ALMOST DAILY, SO COME BACK SOON, WORD UP?

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A COMMERCIAL

I have a new book out. Or at least the paperback edition of the last hardback. UNDERLAND is now in the stores, although the publishers, Tor/St. Martins are doing their level best to make it a well kept secret. So buy a book, strike a blow, support the scribe. Go you local store, or look on Amazon. UNDERLAND, the last for the moment of the Victor Renquist counter-culture vampire stories, is loads of fun being choc fill o’ not only vampires, but the Hollow Earth, Nazis, flying saucers, the NSA, serpent gods, snow, government corruption, alternative history, plus all the usual lurid sex, drugs and violence. (Someone should really make a movie.)

I would also recommend THE DNA COWBOYS TRILOGY and JIM MORRISON’S ADVENTURES IN THE AFTERLIFE.

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DENY EVERYTHING, BUT ONLY WHEN BUSTED

The following quote comes from no less than yesterday’s New York Times.

“If we were a true empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth's surface than we do. That's not the way we operate.” – Vice President Dick Cheney, on whether the United States considers itself an empire.

Now I must confess that I found this a tad curious because I thought it was only we deluded radical nutters were of the opinion that the Bush Administration harbored an intention of conquering the known world by high-tech advanced military force. I could be wrong and am certainly open to correction, (let’s face it, friends, I’m always open to correction) but it seemed to me that, up on the “reasonable” level of the NYT, such ideas were dismissed as paranoid hysteria. Indeed, I have read a number of right-wing columns that made exactly the point and poured scorn on the concept that bellicose neoCon think-tanks like Plan for the New American Century (PNAC) were running the show. Thus I feel forced to ask why Dickie is going to all this trouble to deny what are only the hallucinatory fears of the likes of me?

OLD HIPPIES JUST GET WEIRDER AND THEY HAVE NO SENSE OF TIME

And talking of hallucinatory fears, (and nutters) I discovered the following anonymous screed in my wandering of the blogosphere, and felt it needed to be reproduced. Damn, but I didn’t know this kind of thing still went on. If nothing else, it makes me feel a lot more comfortable with my own insanity. Let’s not forget, though, that one of the greatest practitioners of this kind of thinking was the long incarcerated Charlie Manson.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to whom this has occurred, but suppose this whole thing was a smokescreen for Dylan's death in a motorcycle accident in Woodstock (site of a festival - from which Dylan was notably absent - held the same year as the memorial service on the zebra crossing) and subsequent replacement by an actor who looked the same, except for the beard, but had a different voice ('I can't see your face anymore, your voice has changed...'). This would explain the presence of the Beatles (featuring J.W. Lennon) on the cover of J.W. Harding. And of course, it's not Johnny who's in the Basement but Bobby, like, as in under the ground in upstate New York. 'He travelled with a gun in every hand'. Could this be a reference to the multi-handed doll on the cover of Sgt Pepper? The apparent reference on which to the Rolling Stones is actually a reference to the author of Like a Rolling Stone (also there depicted, along with a lot of other dead people - 'some are dead and some are living'), over whose grave a stone (also, incidentally, the maiden surname of his mother, Beatty Stone) has just been rolled. God (=JWH) said to Abraham (Zimmerman, of Hibbing, Minnesota), kill me your son. The covenant of HW61R (what is Dylan wearing on the album cover?) not only foreshadows Dylan's own death on the symbolic Highway 61 of his semi-rural idyll, but echoes the covenant made by Robert Johnson (who produced Highway 61 Revisited?) with the devil at the crossroads on Highway 61 decades earlier.
And of course there's all the Freewheelin' stuff (parked VW vehicle etc.). George acquired this album in Paris. But as well as designating France's capital city, 'paris' is also the plural of the noun 'pari', meaning 'bet'. So the Beatles were actually the Roman soldiers attending the Christlike Dylan's death. 'In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes'. Hilltop? Clearly an allusion to The Fool on the Hill, and the fact that it's not McCartney who's dead but Dylan; the Paul is Dead thing is just a ruse to 'fool' the world. 'On the Hill'? A possible reference to one of the sites of the fooling taking place, viz I Dreamed I saw Saint Augustine ('alive as you or me'), itself a reworking of 'I Dreamed I saw Joe Hill'. It's merely a dream that St Augustine is still alive - and that's how alive Dylan is.
And what model Triumph did the accident occur on? A Bonneville TT 650cc. Bonneville? Salt Flats? Salt? Pepper...?
Just what was going on in Woodstock with all that apocalyptic imagery (e.g. All along the Watchtower - incidentally, magazine of the "JWH's" Witnesses - , with its 'barefoot servants' and 'two riders')? Yes, the apocalypse. Of St John. In Woodstock. Or St John's Woodstock? Are the Beatles the four horsemen? Is Ringo the Joker? Is Lennon the Thief (he stole a harmonica - a symbol closely associated with Dylan - in Arnhem en route to Hamburg; when he sings 'they're going to crucify me' does he mean as Christ or as Thief by Dylan's side)? Dylan sings of 'lies that life is black and white', knowing the truth that it is death - his death - which is inextricably connected with the black and white of the zebra crossing. 'Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now'. It's as if he knew in 1964 - the year he met and 'turned on' the Beatles- that he was to be replaced by an actor younger than him. 'If I ain't dead already, then you'll know the reason why', sings Lennon. The reason why being that Dylan - to whom he has not long before alluded - has been offered as blood sacrifice.

FOR MONDAY, MONDAY

Today, being a Monday, I would also recommend Modern Drunkard Magazine.

http://www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Baby needs new shoes.

POETRY ON SUNDAY

The idea of posting poetry on Doc40 has been a question that I’ve recently mulled to only partial avail. Should I? Shouldn’t I? There was so much other fun to be had, but then a hip spinster of my acquaintance started posting poems on her blog that had previously been about angst and drinking, so I decided what the hell, some of you might enjoy it. This piece was written two or three years ago, it’s been performed a few times when Andy Colquhoun and I have been out doing our solo Hendrix and poetry thing. It was on the short list to be recorded for the Dr. Crow CD, but the composition had so many movements and stuff, it would have busted our shoestring budget. It’s also a great exercise in borrowed lines from other sources that span Oscar Wilde to Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Because it was...

Just something to do between cigarettes

That was what I said as bought myself a ticket
Ventured into the darkness and sat down
Right there in the very first row
To take a good look
At Little Egypt and her tattoo
Her ruby
And the diamond big as Texas on her toe
But lord, lord, hey pardon me ma'am
It was really nothing
It was...
Just something to do between cigarettes

That was what I rationalized
As I cut myself free
From all tiresome reality
As I merged with the movie
And drifted through the sheen
Of the screen with a prodigious thirst
And became one with the black and white
There somewhere in between
But I swear to you all
I considered it...
Just something to do between cigarettes

And in the flash of a moment
I found my phone was tapped
And I was on the lam from Special Agents
Of the Red Queen
Who thought busting themselves a poet
Would provide a path
To painless professional prestige
With maybe blackmail as a fallback
And I told myself as I ran through the sewers
In a voice like Harry Lime
Hey you guys, this is a terrible mistake
It was...
Just something to do between cigarettes

And later that was the only
Explanation I could offer
To the girl with short black bangs, the satin dress,
The fuck me sandals and Rayban sunglasses
And who was pointing a revolver at my head
And seemed to be extremely angry about something
I'd done or maybe failed to do
But it didn't mean nothing, baby. It was...
Just something to do between cigarettes

Just something to do between cigarettes
And on a day trip in a dayglo blue bus
To the end of the night and all the way out
To the leading edge of insanity
Straining with bleeding ears
To hear the multitude sounds of the Earth
The million half notes
Played on the stringed lute of the world
By all the winds of the air
From Loanshark Laments
To the Chorus of the Cutting Crew
The requiem of the Murder Review
The faces lost and masks regained
And I will never be the same
A full half century pissed away
(Should I go or should I stay?)
And it seems like only yesterday
(I hardly believe in yesterday)
When all I needed
When I assumed all I needed was...
Just something to do between cigarettes

Just something to do between cigarettes

MARMITE

Some discussion has been taking place on the comments board on the matter of Marmite. For all of you who don’t know, Marmite is a brand of salty savory spread made from brewers’ yeast. It is a disgusting looking black/brown viscous paste that is spread on toast, or dissolved in water as a hot drink. It comes in a mysterious brown-glass jar with a Victorian label. Small British children become addicted to it at early age after being fed “Marmite soldiers”, small slivers of toast spread with the stuff to dip in their soft-boiled eggs. My personal, heart-stopping weakness was to fry slices of bread in either butter or bacon grease and then slather it with enough Marmite to burn off the roof of your mouth. The finished product is quite as daunting as Elvis’ fried peanut butter and banana creation. Marmite is alleged by some to cure hangovers, but I’ve never noticed that it did, beyond the obvious benefit if hot greasy food and lots of B complex vitamins.

For more check – http://waterpistol.davinian.co.uk

FROM THE EMAIL

The fine fidicen writes...
When this Interweb thing first hit I thought, mmmwaaahahahhaha, poets and freaks finally have the means to create, publish, and distribute from one point and on their own--this is the end of the JudeoChristiaNixonic Era... the Beast has been born in Bethlehem West, we shall hound the heathens to the far reaches of some doomed and frozen galaxy.
Then things sort of went nowhere except a slice of the smarmy indie musicians did all of their rot, and fairly poorly for the most part. Now seems like things are catching on. A non-Iraq voter has raised 25 or 40 million mostly via youth on the web and he will fuck things good even if they kick him out of the dance and now there's all this blogging and such, from Hollywood to Fallujah, not to mention blazing radical journalism like Counterpunch and tall walking bitches of digests like What Really Happened, Common Dreams, and Smirking Chimp. One could really get optimistic if one wasn't too careful.
So Bravo, we need you in fishwrap yes, but this is double plus good, and I will pass along to the ranks. 2004 is the time and the place. I reckon this is our moment to matter, at least until the next one comes--and I could live without that one if we fail here.
Give Them Hell,

And Dan forwards this important heads up...
Dear Friend,
As you probably know, Ralph Nader is considering running for president again in 2004. Like millions of Americans, I am disturbed that Nader may again cost the Democrats the election, and once again tip the balance in our closely divided nation to George Bush. Nader says he will make up his mind in the next few weeks. The link below will take you to a message about Nader's potential candidacy and a simple step you can take right now to oppose such a run.
Come watch Ralph Don't Run:

http://www.turtlerock.com/RalphDontRun

CRYPTIQUE – Without bread, you’re toast.

SQUIRM, YOU FAT BASTARD

Isn’t it fun watching radio-tubby fascist talk-pundit Rush Limbaugh’s porcine wriggles and squeals as he tries to weasel out from under accusations of felony doctor-shopping to feed his Oxycontin habit? Better maybe than the aura of sleaze gathering round the White House. This nutshell on the state of the play comes from MSNBC. Lawyers for Rush Limbaugh reject a plea deal of 1 felony count, and prosecutors reject the defense offer of no felony counts, but some drug rehab (hey, didn't he already do that?) So a standoff ensues, with prosecutors saying they have evidence that Limbaugh committed up to 10 felonies.

Meanwhile, in a related tale from Yahoo News...Israeli police had to close an entire floor of their station because the pungent scent of tons of confiscated marijuana was making them high.

ANNIVERSARY WATCH

Having noted the birthdays of Popeye, Elvis, and Godzilla, and also Chinese New Year, let’s not more seriously forget that yesterday was the 31st anniversary of Roe v Wade, another tattered flag around which we defenders we may yet again have to rally.

COMMENTS

So it would seem that, for the moment, the comment board is working and people are starting to complain which I guess means all is right with the world.

CRYPTIQUE – Are you sure you won’t be sorry?

SPACE IS THE PLACE

For your appreciation, my analysis of George Bush’s speech of last week on his plans for Mars and the moon appears in this week’s LA CityBeat. Click and check it out. Although it was written before the Spirit Rover went off line, I think I have that covered. And for those who appreciate seeing how the process works, take a look back at Jan 10th, 04, for my first thoughts on this matter.

MIND CONTROL 101

Half asleep on the couch, I semi perceived a TV commercial in which, I swear, the voice over was an actor doing a passable impression of Ronald Reagan. What this means in the scheme of things, I'm not yet sure, but I don’t think it bodes well. And for you in the UK, imagine if you suddenly heard the voice of Thatcher selling fish fingers or toilet paper.

Chinese New Year – Happy year of the monkey.

FINGERS CROSSED

Thanks to the mighty Rich Deakin, the comments board (the tiny link over on the top right of the page) seems now to be working. Apologies to all whom it previously thwarted.

GET RIGHT WITH GOD

According to MSNBC an Israeli rabbi has written a prayer for devout Jews to overcome their guilt after visiting a porn site on the internet. The rabbi recommends recitation of the prayer when logging on -- or having it flash up on the screen -- so they've got some coverage if they enter a porn site accidentally or even intentionally. The prayer: “Please God, help me cleanse the computer of viruses and evil photographs which disturb and ruin my work... so that I shall be able to cleanse myself of sin.” I ask myself, would it work for the contents and godless ideas of this weblog?

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM

Yesterday I was complaining how no one seemed to be posting any comments even though the numbers of incoming hits were starting to look quite healthy. Then natalien informed me that she had attempted to cheer me up by posting a comment only to be confronted by a formidable column of error messages. The same was also confirmed by jfabiani (who decided the comment tech obviously hated him.) Thus it seems that we don’t have the technology, or, to be more precise, the technology we do have needs fixing. Life is always a work in progress. Right now I’m clueless, but help is on the way. (Thank you, Rich.) In the meantime, if you have something to say, you can always email me at byron4d@aol.com.

BUT ANOTHER PROBLEM SOLVED

Since Jan 8, I’ve wondering about Godzilla’s 50th birthday. Finally I asked Yukiko in Tokyo and her response was succinct and immediate. “Godzilla's birthday is an easy question to answer. It's 3rd November, 1954, when they released the first film. On 3/11* every year, various events are organized in Japan to celebrate his birthday.” So we have a lot of time to plan a huge, scaley, radioactive-breathing, building-eating, motherfucker of a wingding, friends and neighbors.

(* That’s 11/3 to you Americans. Right around the presidential election. Which brings us super-neatly to...)

FROM THE EMAIL

From Charles Lewis (The Buying of the President 2004) via Greg Palast

Our electoral process is broken, with about half or more of America's eligible voters not voting in every federal election cycle. After the Florida recount debacle, in which the likes of Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe lectured us on how to conduct democratic elections, we still do not have a single, standardized system of voting throughout the nation. The campaign process has become so expensive that it limits the talent pool available today to only millionaires or those willing and able to raise substantial sums of cash from wealthy and powerful interests with business before the government. Forty members of the current U.S. Senate are millionaires; less than one percent of the American people are millionaires. And big money mixed with irregular and high-tech redistricting help explain why the incumbent reelection rate in the House of Representatives the past three elections has been more than 98 percent. These are the kind of numbers we expect to see in countries like North Korea or China, not the United States.

WINSTON CHURCHILL’S PARROT SAYS HELLO (HELLO)

No rants today. Spent the day at VH1 being a talking head. (Don’t ask, we all like to be on the telly. I’ll tell more when the thing’s about to air, and I know I made the cut.) I couldn’t however pass up this news story out of London. (And a chance to paraphrase the Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band.) Seems that a 104 year-old female Macaw called Charlie who once belonged to Churchill, is still alive at an English parrot sanctuary. Charlie is old, even by parrot standards, and reportedly does little but say “hello” and “good-bye”, but, every so often, she does break into a flow of invective against Adolf Hitler, although this may just be tabloid hyperbole.

Hey guys, when are some of you going to get down with comments? It’s the little link up on the top right of the page, between “the horror, the horror”, and “Funtopia”. Feedback makes a poor boy feel wanted.

Meanwhile, check out this fine political message...

http://www.liberaloasis.com/Bushmovie.swf

THE REBEL STAND

“What are you rebelling against, Johnny?”
“What’ve you got?” – Dialogue from The Wild One

Last Saturday I halted myself at the start of a rant about how liberals now want to call themselves “progressives”, I presume in the belief that the word “liberal” is now so tainted that it has become untenable. By Sunday, I had realized that I shouldn’t let it worry me. I was never a bloody liberal anyway. Yes, I embrace certain planks of a liberal platform, but liberals have always recoiled from a whole lot of what they assumed were my goals, firmly convincing me that liberalism was only ever a half-measure, and fell well short of the downfall of the Patriarchy and the overthrow of Western Civilization by lunchtime. And now they want to be called “progressive” I have to wonder just how much progress they really intend, and am thus holding off from flocking to the progressive colors.

I will admit, though, that part of my problem is a matter of heritage. Like the great majority of Englishmen, I’m somewhat disinclined to join clubs, parties, and organization. The British are notorious for being what sociologists call “unclubable”. Our juvenile gangs were always amorphous, like mods and rockers, and never went in for club colors and names like the Sharks, Jets, Diabolos, or Amboy Dukes. I have never enrolled in AA, the NRA, the IRA, the CIA, the PTA, or the Dead Rabbits. It’s all those damned cards that you have to carry, plus a bad case of the Groucho Marx syndrome; not wanting to be a member of any club that would have me as a member. Back when I was a teenager, my pal Alan Moore (no relation) tried to enroll me in the Young Communist League, dangling the temptation of commie gals who believed in free love. I was given a nice enamel badge, but I never completed the paperwork or went to a meeting. (The free love turned out to be largely mythic.) Which was just as well, because, if I had, I would have been excluded from entering the US without a lengthy process of recanting. I was once Minister of Information in the White Panther Party UK, but that was mainly an vehicle for agitprop ploys, and the confusion of the aforementioned liberals.

I fear I have always taken the stance of the lone rebel. The rebel stand is maybe a legacy of the Irish side of the family, but, by this stage of my development, I have been standing like a rebel for so long that it’s become a way of life. On the other hand, the political climate has turned so grim that maybe it’s time that we rebels gathered around some improvised black flag and began making a few demands of these progressives, in particular how we want our time honored, impossibly utopian, sex, drugs, and advanced rama-lama to be a part of the agenda – free, legal and polymorphous – otherwise we start slitting a few throats in the name of progress.

(And as I finish writing, I hear Kerry won in Iowa, which moves me nearer giving up on the whole process and endorsing Al Sharpton, because the fix is in anyway.)

TRIVIA
A couple of weeks ago I watched The Seven Samurai, and realized, after all these years, that Yoda is totally based on the Old Man of the Village in the Kurosawa classic. Same face, same wrinkles, same way of walking. Check it out if you don’t believe me.

CRYPTIQUE – She has your number, and the frequency, Kenneth.

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THIS BLOG HAS NEW POSTS ALMOST DAILY, SO Y’ALL COME BACK REAL SOON, Y’HEAR?

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FROM THE EMAIL

QM II -- Yukiko writes from Tokyo

Your post about the Queen Mary II (see Jan 15 '04) – I also noted the news, but mainly because of the point that the ship is, as you predicted, already cursed by the gods of the sea -- by deaths of 15 guests including a child/children who were invited last November for a special exhibition. A boarding bridge collapsed suddenly and they fell to their death off it. Maybe by now someone else may have told you this. I couldn't believe people were in a party mode so innocently at a place where 15 people died only a few months ago. But then again, the idea of the respect to the dead may be different in Japan from the West - the Japanese government STILL sends a ship every
year to Iwo Jima in order to collect bones of the dead soldiers and residents.

Or perhaps it's just the very rich in the West who have no respect.

RETRO FASCIST COOL & VAMPIRES -- From Henry Cabot Beck

There's a movie due this June called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and the spectacular trailer lifts its imagery wholesale from the Superman Fleischer cartoons. Turns out the director's mother ( I think) was on staff at Fleischer at the time, and helped design the stuff. Takes place in 1937--retro-futurism. Angeline Jolie (small part), Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. And if you really want to get your kicks, check out the trailer for Van Helsing, starring beautiful vampires, vile, snarling werewolves, and the Frankenstein monster. Can't vouch for either picture, but the trailers are just fucking brilliant. Links follow...

http://www.skycaptain.com/home.html

http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/van_helsing/large.html

A SUNDAY KIND OF BLOG

Maybe, instead of doing the Sunday paper crossword and laying in the warmth of a winter bed, eating toast and marmalade, you might like to play a dumb-but-cool, inter-gender game that I found in my wanderings called What Kind Of Beautiful Woman Are You.

HE YAM WHAT HE YAM

It turns out that not only is Godzilla celebrating his 50th birthday in 2004, (see Jan 8, 04) but Popeye the Sailor makes it to 75 this year on a diet of canned spinach (which means he’s six years older than Elvis Presley)

AP offers a nutshell bio...Popeye began life in 1929 in the popular "Thimble Theatre" comic strip as a limited story line guest. He graduated to movie shorts, many by the renowned animator Max Fleischer. Popeye battled everything from sassy goats to the bloated bad-guy Bluto while pursuing the affection of girlfriend Olive Oyl. He even appeared in a video game in the 1980s, collecting falling hearts from his rail-shaped love. He was played by Robin Williams in the Robert Altman movie version.

Unfortunately, like Godzilla, Popeye has no specific or designated birthday on which we can all get crazy.

SATURDAY MORNING, SATURDAY MORNING

I was going to get off on some rant about Al Franken being signed to spearhead the progressive radio channel. Mainly because I can’t stand Al Franken. He was the lamest thing on the classic Belushi/Akroyd/Radner/Murray Saturday Night Live and, if anything, he’s grown less funny with age. As the voice of the progressive-left Franken will combine all the panache and political passion of Elmer Fudd with an irritating know-it-all, preppie cynicism, and I can’t think of a better MLK Day gift to the White House. But then I thought, what the fuck? It’s Saturday. Who needs it?

So, instead, here’s a truly bizarre conspiracy theory about George Bush and weird accusations of multiple cross-gender rape. Apparently the fable has been kicking around for a while, but it’s the first time that I’ve ever stumbled across it, and thus I pass it along as a bit of weekend web surfing. The trail of the tale starts with an old posting on the Counterpunch website. Take it from there.

http://www.counterpunch.org/carter1220.html

I suppose, before exiting, I should, in fairness, admit an element of envy where Al Franken is concerned. My ego, and also my bank account, would hardly be adverse to a gig on “progressive radio”. And, hell, didn’t some critic write that I had a voice like an “evil Jeremy Irons”? But I ain’t holding my breath for offers. I’ll probably have to wait until they set up the Johnny Yuma Rebel Radio From Hell before being loosed on the airwaves.

SANTA MARIA!

Ever had one of those days when it seems that the walls of the world were closing in, and you feel that maybe the human race should be quarantined? That sense of living-in-Mordor started as I watched the Michael Jackson forensic rodeo getting underway around the Santa Maria courthouse just down along the coast, with fans singing that song about Tom Sneddon, lawyers assembling like a mob summit, and locals selling twenty dollar hotdogs to the minions of the world media.
But I’ve already had my say on the Jackson matter in the current LA CityBeat, so, for the moment, you can check that out while I rest my case.
Meanwhile I could only marvel at the story out of Dutchtown, Louisiana, where two high school kids, Adam Sinclair and Chris Levins were arrested on charges of felony terrorism. Hardcore Trenchcoat Mafia, and fans of Klebold and Harris of Columbine fame, the boys were ratted out as potentially dangerous by a bunch of cheerleader-looking classmates and their parents. (The cry of Maud Flanders is heard throughout the land.) When the cops busted down the door, they supposedly found clear and present evidence of incipient terrorism in the writings of drawings of the pair.
My first though was of a recent edition of Sixty Minutes when a high school girl described how her school was put on “full lockdown” and each student was sniffed over by a police dog for “contact with marijuana”. Do we really expect the youth to remain sane on the face of the Thought Police?
I also recalled when I was fourteen. Fuckin’ hell (as we used to say), if they’d seen my writing and drawings, I probably would have been summarily executed, not to mention the .22 revolver with the broken hammer and the unexploded WW II, P-AT anti-tank rocket that was hidden behind the record player, until my stepfather stumbled across it and called the Army.
And as I conclude, fear stalks Hollywood that the collagen for those big Angelina Jolie lips may be Mad Cow contaminated.

TECHNOLOGY MARCHES ON

The Doc 40 comment system has just been put in place, courtesy of the excellent Rich Deakin who pilots the Funtopia website. It’s a little discreet link over on the top right of the page, just below “the horror, the horror.” Hurry and you might just be the first. Email to byron4d@aol.com is also still very welcome.


THOSE WACKY CANADIANS

The following story was carried by the wire services and also forwarded by Henry Beck.

BARRIE, Ont. (CP) - A marijuana "factory" concealed within a sprawling old brewery just steps from one of Ontario's busiest highways is proof Canada's pot problem has reached "epidemic proportions," police said Monday. The former Molson brewery in Barrie, Ont., plainly visible from Highway 400, one of the province's busiest commuter routes, was raided on the weekend by some 100 city and provincial police officers acting on a tip. Inside, police found marijuana with what they said had an estimated street value of $30 million, along with a grow operation of staggering proportions - the largest and most sophisticated in modern Canadian history.
"This is not a ma-and-pa operation," Barrie police Chief Wayne Frechette wryly told a news conference in this central Ontario city an hour's drive north of Toronto.
Across a 5,400-square metre complex the size of a football field, police found more than 25,000 pot plants growing everywhere - even inside the cavernous indoor vats once used to brew beer.
Citizen Beck enlarges on the story...“This was in effect a hydroponic Silent Running space station, a luxury liner, Battlestar Cannabis, with a crew the cops speculated might have been brought in blindfolded or under the cover of night, because loose lips sink ships. And they say nobody thinks big anymore.”

Meanwhile I rather question the use of language in the story, and especially the reference to Canada’s epidemic “pot problem.” From where I sit in Los Angeles, a city where BC bud is a welcome import, Canada hardly seems to have a “pot problem”. Indeed, it would appear to have a highly organized, high-tech, marijuana agri-business what is only waiting for full legalization to yield beaucoup revenues and tax benefits. Compared to the US, with its hundred of thousands of incarcerated reefer felons, its massive and costly drug enforcement industry, and its chicken-shit politicians too tremulous and self-serving to speak out against the seventy-year total failure of the War on Drugs, Canada hardly has a problem at all. And before anyone starts screaming the late Maude Flanders’ scream of “what about the children?”, consider, if marijuana was legalized, how many resources would be freed up to educate kids that maybe they should hold off on smoking dope at least until they have learned to read and tie the laces on their sneakers.


QUESTION OF THE DAY

Is it cruel to laugh when Ted Nugent hacks himself up with a chainsaw?

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THIS BLOG HAS NEW POSTS ALMOST DAILY, SO Y’ALL COME BACK REAL SOON, Y’HEAR?

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CRYPTIQUE – You know who are.

THE BIG SHIP SAIL$

(Is that an iceberg or are you just pleased to see me?)

Yesterday, on Entertainment Tonight, I watched the massive, top-heavy bulk of the Queen Mary II sail out of Southampton for Florida, with its on-board casino and planetarium, a full complement of passengers each paying up to $48 thousand a ticket. I couldn't somehow ignore a nagging feeling of unease. Wasn't this almost pornographic display of wealth, without even a single Irish immigrant in steerage, some weird affront to the gods of the sea? Maybe I've watched too many movies about the Titanic, and seen The Poseidon Adventure too many times, but I seem to recall that whenever a passenger ship was billed as the biggest and most luxurious of all time, it had a horrible habit of sinking in mid-ocean. Also, with the War on Terror still raging, isn't a monster liner like the Queen Mary II a impossibly tempting terrorist magnet?

(And the chains of the sea will have busted in the night/and be buried at the bottom of the ocean. – Bob Dylan)

(If I had a boat/I'd sail out on the ocean/And if I had a pony/I'd ride it on my boat. -- Lyle Lovett)

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S 122 YEARS OLD

The following post comes from the desktop of critic, picker, and raconteur Henry Cabot Beck. It should be noted that the conspiracy theory in this piece of pointless but fascinating cowboy triva incorporates two gunmen and a lone victim.

Sworn Statement Again Challenges Billy The Kid's Death
Calif. Man Tells N.M. Officials Outlaw's Infamous Death Was Faked

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Was there a conspiracy surrounding the death of legendary Old West outlaw Billy the Kid? Legend says the man often called William Bonney was gunned down at age 21 by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881 in Fort Sumner, N.M. But a California man says the notorious fugitive's death was faked. Homer Overton said he was told by Garrett's widow more than 60 years ago that the dead man was actually an unwitting impostor, a drunk who was shot point-blank in the face by two unlikely pals -- Garrett and Billy the Kid himself. Overton's sworn statement is being offered as evidence for exhuming the body of Billy The Kid's mother. Some New Mexico officials want to compare her DNA with that of a Texas man who claimed until his death in 1950 that he was the real Billy the Kid. A hearing on the exhumation petition is set for Jan. 27 in Silver City, N.M., where the outlaw's mother is buried. Town officials oppose disturbing the gravesite. More

IS O’NEILL THE REAL DEAL?

Paul O’Neill’s current inside revelations about the Bush White house, and his description of a GWB cabinet meeting as “a clod in a room full of oafs” (yes, I know he didn’t really say that, I paraphrase for effect) is so in tune with the way I have always imagined things, it does give me at least a sliver of hope that we may actually and eventually rid ourselves of the arrogant, corrupt and stupid men who are currently driving the planet to such a Titanic doom.

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A COMMERCIAL

I have a new book out. Or at least the paperback edition of the last hardback. UNDERLAND is now in the stores, although the publishers, Tor/St. Martins are doing their level best to make it a well kept secret. So buy a book, strike a blow, support the scribe. Go to your local fine goth store, or look on Amazon. Underland, the last for the moment of the Victor Renquist stories, is loads of fun being choc fill o’ vampires, the Hollow Earth, Nazis, flying saucers, the NSA, serpent gods, snow, government corruption, alternative history, plus all the usual lurid sex, drugs and violence. (Someone should really make a movie.)

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THE COCAINE SUBMARINE -- A RERUN FOR FUN

I have elsewhere recounted the weird tale from some three or so years ago, about the thing behind the Texaco station in Facatativa, Colombia, but since it was to a limited audience, the retelling would seem like fun. It’s such a piece of urban...or, more precisely, jungle...narco-legend.

When phone taps revealed mention of something big going down in a warehouse behind a Texaco station in the small town of Facatativa, fifty clicks outside Bogota, the Colombian National Police suspected a hoax. As far as the cocaine business was concerned, the place was the back of beyond, but a squad of local cops were dispatched to take a look, and to their amazement they found a mess of highly expensive and highly specialized tools, plus a large metal thing. When experts arrived from the capital, the thing was identified as nothing less that a small submarine, of what appeared to be of former Soviet origin. It had apparently been shipped to Facatativa in bits and was being re-assembled. Locals told of foreigners, apparently Russian, who showed up at the warehouse around sunset, worked all night, and then vanished with the dawn, but the strangers seemed to have stopped coming a few weeks prior to the first police visit. The experts observed that the sub had been modified to give it cargo space with a capacity to haul some two hundred tons of coke, and a unholy alliance between the Colombian drug lords and Russian Mafia was suspected. What the National Police and everyone else were at a loss to explain was how the sub was being put together in a location that was not close to any navigable waterway, and a full two hundred miles, across the Andes, from the Pacific Ocean.

FROM THE EMAIL

Jay Babcock of the excellent Arthur magazine writes (and, if his thesis is correct, what an improvement that would be.)

If the War on Terror is Vietnam (kinda), and Bush is Nixon (kinda), and Dean is McGovern (kinda), and "Lord of the Rings" is "Lord of the Rings" (it is), and if the youth proportion of the pop is growing (it will be a higher percentage in2010 than it was in the '60s!)... then, gosh, you might reasonably expect tons of good pop music overground *and* underground (Outkast! White Stripes! The Darkness! etc), interest in spiritual/mystical matters (check the magick/occult section of your chain bookstore lately?), rampant drug use (check those pot and ecstasy stats lately?) and... now... see below -- the return of hetero group sex adventurism...

Jay

He also provides a link to a story in the NY Times about a new vogue for multiple partner sex parties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/fashion/11SWIN.html

HEY, COOL!

Wandering around the ether, as I have been wont to do since I came late to this weblogging business, I just discovered Tom Tomorrow's blogsite, This Modern World.

For those of you who know about this all ready, well okay, I said I came late. For those who don't, check it out. Fun stuff and subversive, and A Small Cute Dog For President.

FUTURISM

Yesterday’s post about the Bush space plan, that seems to be getting the shit promoted out of it in the Sunday media, started me thinking yet again. That boy George wants to put a man on Mars smells like a sour parody of a world or a country having any serious future vision, or entertaining an even fractionally utopian aspiration. We merely fight or fix the next election, while the planet lurches from Catholic overpopulation to corporate toxins and then gives up and gets drunk.

A few months ago I completed a novel called either “Rocknovel” or “Love Me, Ah!”. It’s essentially a story about a down-on-it’s-luck veteran rock band struggling through a last desperate tour. Striving for both veracity and a multi-level density of prose, the sex, drugs, artist stupidity and femme fatality are punctuated with conversational digressions that, as anyone who has been on the road knows all to well, are the hallmark of endless band travel. I also saw it as a fictional means to air abstract issues in way that reflected real conversations between assholes in the bar. So far the major publishing houses have reacted to this fiction style as though it was a symptom of advancing insanity and advised me back to fantasy. I persevere, but that’s beside the point. Accept this as either a teaser of free fiction or a trigger for discussion or radical techno-realignment.

(And if you’d like to see a more salacious excerpt, email me at bryon4d@aol.com)

The following conversation takes place on the Bullet Train between Tokyo and Osaka’...

"Trains could save the world."
Max frowned as he unwrapped the egg and cress. "How do you figure that?"
"High speed trains. Mag-lev.” Dook proceeded to launch into a discourse on the subject of high speed trains. “We have the technology, the energy savings would be incalculable, and get us out from under the oil jones. Plus it’s very hard to highjack a train. The thing runs on rails so where could a terrorist order it to go?" He appeared to have given a good deal of thought to the subject. "Think of it, three, maybe four hundred miles and hour. It wouldn’t even take that much longer than by air. LA to New York in a day and a half. Would that really be a problem?” Dook had the experienced traveler’s knack of being able to break off and stare silently out of the window for a while and then come right back to what he was saying as though there was no seam. “And the possibilities for amusement and diversion are practically endless.”
“You mean like the club car?’
“That would be the obvious one, but it doesn’t have to stop with mere booze. Hell, on a state of the art high speed train, you could have cinemas, shops, gambling, stuff to keep kids quiet. With no payload problem you could provide all the fun of the fair.”
“You make it sound like a traveling mall.”
Dook shrugged. “Why not? You could even have one car that was a strip joint.”
“Blackjack and lap-dances at four hundred miles an hour? Just rocking and rolling across the plains?”
“Actually, mag-lev would be very smooth and quiet. Quieter than this even.” Dook suddenly grinned. “But it’s a thought, though, isn’t it? Oh course, it will never happen until someone manages to loosen the stranglehold the Twentieth Century Petrochemical Gang have on the global economy.”
At times, Dook could make statements that were delivered like communiques. It went against the dumbed-down ettiquette or the group interaction where life was supposed to be a joke, but Max loved him for it. “Dick Chenie’s old boys?”
“The very same.”
Beyond the window Japan continued to rush past.

TO THE MOON, GEORGE

For the low end imagination, interplanetary travel is the old 1950s B-movie scenario of putting four or five grunts and a girl with big tits in a can with fins and shooting them off to Mars, where they wander about in bubble helmets for a while, pick up a few rocks, and, if they aren’t killed by Martians, climb back in the can and blast off home, sometimes taking a lethal alien lifeform with them.

Since the current White House as never exhibited anything beyond the most unpleasantly mundane of low end imaginations, I suspect the GWB space program will amount to little more than grunts in a can, overlaid by a mind bogglingly massive federal-industrial superstructure of corporate fraud and corruption. Meanwhile the NASA shuttle fleet is grounded and two guys are sitting in a half built space-station that’s leaking air.

After George has made his space speech, I hope I’ll be commenting on it more eruditely elsewhere, but right, now, as the story unfolds, all I can do is whistle and mutter “damn.”

Damn, but I’d like to see humanity make it to the stars. Like Sun Ra said, “space is the place.”
But, damn, I don’t want to go there on any spaceship commanded by a member of the Bush family.

Open the pod bay door, please HAL.

Or, as Lt. Ellen Ripley once remarked. "Blast off and nuke 'em from orbit."

FROM THE EMAIL

Munz has sent me a link to the online edition of a magazine called While You Were Sleeping (www.wyws.com) which contains an interview with Hunter S. Thompson. The doctor is in fine form, and also a handy reminder that all this debate about how the left needs to adopt the newspeak of the right to evict GWB from the White House is essentially bullshit, (see Doc40 Archive, December 5th, 2003) and that, in our everyday dealings we are quite capable of speaking plainly, and it?s only when a TV or a TV camera is turned on that the language becomes stifled and absurd.

Setting aside the fear and loathing and the fact that both Johnny Depp and Bill Murray have played him in the movie, the unique fact about Hunter is that he will talk to the media same as he talks the assholes in the bar. For example...

So, these Jesus freaks, these primitive hillbillies - really, worse than hillbillies: hellboys - they don't know anything, really. They're ignorant. And they don't know that what they're trying has been tried many times before. Yeah, it's called fascism. It's called state socialism or - fuck, I hate to say this ? but, theocracy. The separation of church and state has been the centerpiece of the American nation for 200 years. So we just try to brush aside 200 years of not just American but, shit, the whole world history. And you simply can't, anymore, get away with it....you know, it's not like a monarch, you can't just tax the peasants until they believe. They can't force them to work for nothing, confiscate their crops. You know, "all lands are royal lands," that worked back in Robin Hood's day in the Sherwood Forest. But it's not going to work when a bunch of cowboys with greasy oil hands reach out to seize nations that go back to, shit, 5,000 years before this alleged Jesus Christ.

The problem here would seem to be in that Hunter is promoted by the media as unique, and it?s somehow suggested that one has to be a drunken, multiple-abusing, veteran freak in order to call a fascist a fascist, and in this way he is clown-marginalized when he is, in fact, a national elder statesman of vision and clarity. (As in this second example.)

If every dead-head in this country voted next, or had voted in 2000, we would have a different government today. And not that that would guarantee anything, but we would all be a lot better off than we are now. The dead-heads carry a huge potential impact vote. At any age! I don't give a fuck what age. I've been a Grateful Dead addict ever since I met them. And that's an organizing basis. What the fuck? If they all voted, we could throw the president out. It's fun to throw the president out of the White House. I've done it. I know.

HAPPY ELVIS’ BIRTHDAY (Footnote)

(Isn’t it fun how time runs backwards on these weblogs?)

At 6.00PM (Pacific) I watched The Simpsons (rerun) and noticed how a picture of Montgomery Burns shaking hands with Elvis Presley was prominently displayed on the wall of Waylon Smithers' office. Coincidence? Planning? Demi-divine intervention?

(Thank you. Thank you, very much.)

HAPPY ELVIS’ BIRTHDAY

That Elvis Presley had a profound effect on my young life is hardly a secret. I’ve written four books on the man. One profound, two trivial, and one a best-seller. I still wear a small Elvis totem on the leather thong around my neck that carries all the gris-gris wampum talismans I need to stop planes crashing and get me home when drunk and incapable. I guess the idea that, had he lived, Elvis would have been sixty-nine today is food for less than savory thought. I hardly see Elvis pushing seventy in as debonair a fashion as Paul Newman, and suspect that, even with the basic will to survive, he would have been a even worse mess than Marlon Brando. Ho-hum.

I also learned the Godzilla will be fifty sometime this year. Maybe we should throw a party. First we would have to agree on the date.

(I still don't have the comments tech up. Write me at byron4d@aol.com)

DID YOU MISS ME?

If indeed anyone is really reading this, I wonder how much I really need or want to reveal about my day to day doings in the immediate world. This is partly because I find it hard to imagine why anyone should be interested in my habits, aliments, problems, deprivations, desires, needs, or complaints. Although it does seem to work for others. Since I fell into the weblogging habit, I’ve looked around some and discovered folks out there in the ether who want to chronicle everything from their shopping to their sex lives. I’ve glanced into he minds of potential teen suicides and a great many young women complaining about the deficiencies of their peers and boyfriends. I even found some male who appeared to be writing in a heavy metal glossolalia of his own devising. He was sufficiently weird that I considered a link, but then decided that he was better left alone. It could be embarrassing if I hooked him up with you all and then he blew up his high school. I guess that’s why I avoid the personal trivia. Fear of public embarrassment.

Thus, all I have to report today is that, over on the Funtopia site, the lastest episode of the weird-fiction serial Slide On The Run has just been posted. Hit homepage on the right >>>>> and then following the flashing links.

Oh yeah, and tomorrow is Elvis' birthday.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2004 and the 20th century recedes; Hiroshima, Treblinka, Eddie Cochran, Humphrey Bogart, and the Somme. But, to paraphrase the old song, "they just don't know what's going to replace it", although I figure there are some quite hellish agendas out there.

My take on 2003 is the cover story in this weeks LA CityBeat. As of this moment I don't have a lot more add, except...

"SATAN WAS A LESBIAN"

I stumbled across a fine collection of 1940s and 50s soft-core pulp fiction paperback covers on a site called vintage sex. Sharing them by way of a New Year cyber-gift.

BIG GOOGLE IS WATCHING YOU

I have been watching the advertisements at the top of this page with some interest, and have noted that they change with the content of the posts. Since I’ve only been doing this for less than a month, it is hardly a perfect study, but once Star Trek was mentioned, the process started. It seems to take a couple of days to kick in, but, within 48 hours, there it was, a banner for online Trek DVDs. Then, after a dialogue with kaymo about AI, ads for robotic hard and software replaced Star Trek. My suspicion is that some devious, probably Google-driven robot scans for preset keywords and adjusts the advertising accordingly. This is, of course, the same technology as Carnivore that the NSA and Homeland Security use to catch terrorists. But we trust Google. Why? Because it’s Google. No better reason. A dear friend suggested I keep a list and see if my theory pans out over time. Ever the Instant Gratification Kid, however, I decided I would attempt to force the issue. So let’s post the following random list and see what happens...

John Wayne
The Simpsons
The Central Intelligence Agency
Godzilla
50 Cent
Dildo
Universal Pictures
Newsweek
THC

(byron4d@aol.com)

SERIOUS STUFF

From the excellent fidicen, links to two first rate pieces by Renana Brooks on Bush, the character myth, cognitive dissonance, neo-con newspeak, and what to do about the emperors bloody clothes (see also Dec 5th.)...

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1212-09.htm

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=brooks

Also a piece on the 9/11 Independent Commission on the seemingly disastrous cluster fuck that broke out between the FAA, NORAD, the Air Force, and Dick Cheney after four passenger planes were reported hijacked on the morning of September 11th, 2001...

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essayairdefense.html

FROM THE EMAIL (Quite amazing)

Hi Mick,
Thought you might like the very literal machine (AI?) translation of the Flirt piece (see Sunday 12/28) courtesy of Google Language Tools. At least it seems Gabba Gabba Hey is (for the most part) the same in any language! Really enjoying the riff btw, Doc40 is now a regular stop.
Cheers, Sid

====================================

Figure cult of the London underground sin from when it worked like usciere fo the UFO Club in 1967 and therefore leader of the Deviants anarchists (to when they recovery), Mick Farren worked like journalist for the NME for three years on ending of the Seventy. In particular, just during the outbreak of the punk rock. In the 1977 the Ramones arrived in United Kingdom in order to promote their Leave Home, and the British weekly magazine dedicated it cover to they and an enthusiastic article of Roy Carr. In appendix to that article there was the space for a piece of Farren, that it provocatively proposed a various reading of the sound ramones, and that, riletto today, in effects it offers to the cue for one various reading of punk American 1977. "When the Ramones has begun to record discs, people have endured them compare to you to the New York Dolls, the MC5 and the Who. This is one mistaken analysis. E' like comparing a cat to the uvaspina and saying that of she is descendant, solo because both are hairy!" Farren set up its controversy on a fundamental concept in order to comprise the sound of fratellini the Ramone. "the true masters of reference of the group of Queens are The To Libs, The Dovells, The Shangri-las, The Ronnettes, The Crystals, the Beatles". Just the riccioluto cantante/intellettuale he emphasized that, although the rough and dirty sound of the group, that that was to the base of the plan was the riscoperta one of melodia ultra the POP of the Fifty, the Spector sound and music from College of the end of years Fifty. It was alone the 77, and already Farren sputava in face to the public English its truth, that one of the difference between punk rock English and the that American. "the Ramones has taken the tradition of the baroque POP and they have reduced it to the bone? this is minimalismo in its higher and pure shape ". Today that cervelloni of The Wire and the post rockers of all the world they strive hard the spirit in order to define the concept of minimalismo in music, farren scovò it just in the attitude of a group therefore new but tradizionalista, a band that riproponeva the sounds of the vocal groups of the ' 50, the scarnificava, filled up it of chitarristici cutting guitars riff and introduced it with a primitivo "one two three four!". This shining reading, teorizzata, we insist, already in 1977, offers the cue in order to reflect on the difference between first vagiti punk rock Americans and that more mod and exactly "rock" of English, you define in way the much most elastic one than many it puts into effect them "expert" of rock and vanguards in matter of sonorous minimalismo, and it points out us how much is unjust to cite ramones when we speak about trash like Blink and the other rubbish punk from Mtv. Who writes never has not loved particularly the punk rock, but she found, seppur the sound of the Ramones young, entusiasmante, from the moment that truly seemed to listen to one brought up-to-date version of music from college of the 50 and of the surf movies. Farren was pushed still more in in its esuberante teorizzazione of a new minimalismo... "the Ramones uses often the phrase here the wanna, that it is the more important in the dictionary of the minimalista". Its conclusive words still today turn out convincing and entusiasmanti, therefore felt and various from the intellettualismo (to the money of the majors) of many experts of punk rock that today vaneggiano and scream their maldestre theories. "the world has need of the minimalismo of the ramones... is a band that it has distilled the moral, politics and the social philosophy in the Gabba phrase gabba hey... The world of it has need, hour ".

SUNDAY IN THE DARK WITH NO-ONE

I guess in a combination of Sunday angst, the aftermath of so-far wretched holidays, the art avoiding art, and a general sense of impending disaster, I looked myself up on a web search, maybe to convince me that I still existed. Among all of the on-line stores specializing in obscure books and records (and heaven only knows I have enough of them) I discovered this lovely review from Richie Underberger. Thanks Ritchie, you brightened a dreary day.


GIVE THE ANARCHIST A CIGARETTE, by Mick Farren (Pimlico). Though Mick Farren might not have been a hugely recognizable name to the rock public in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was very much in the middle of Britain in both the underground rock scene and the general counterculture. {-Give the Anarchist a Cigarette} is his memoir of his wild early years, covering his flailing (yet ultimately successful) attempts to be in a rock group in the mid-1960s; his years as lead singer of the shambling psychedelic band the Deviants; his work as a journalist on the British underground paper {~International Times}; and his edging closer to the mainstream in the 1970s as a writer for {~New Musical Express}. On its own steam, Farren's story is very interesting; he got almost as much an inside view of the British psychedelic scene, as a fan and performer, as anyone, and likewise was much involved in the political protest and social counterculture of the time with {-International Times} and other activities, such as the psychedelic {~UFO} club. What makes this a truly fine read, however, is that Farren is also an excellent and extremely witty writer, churning out story after story of madcap adventure (and quite a lot of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll) in the British hippie era. These rope in characters from the most famous rock stars and writers to obscure groupies and hangers-on, from Led Zeppelin, Joe Boyd, Barry Miles, and Germaine Greer on down. For those who are interested, here at last are thorough details on his erratic yet intriguing band the Deviants -- their recording sessions, their chaotic gigs, the weird rotating cast of musicians, their ignominious bust-up on their first American tour. More than that, though, this gives a great sense of the adrenaline rush and heartbreaking disappointments of the hippie era, as well as its hangover into the 1970s, ending with Farren's decision to leave Britain for the US at the end of the '70s. Fans of Farren's writing were waiting a long time for a comprehensive account of his experiences during this era, which had leaked out in bits and pieces of various of his writings, and when he did put it all together in this book, he delivered the goods in splendid fashion.

I also found, on a website called Flirt -- The Snob Way To Indie Culture, a quite extraordinary analysis by one Federico Ferrari of a comment I wrote about the Ramones way back in 1977, in which I expounded the theory of rock & roll minimalism and suggested The Ramones were direct descendants of the Phil Spector classics, but stripped to the bare essentials. I received a lot of rock-crit flack at the time, but was later vindicated when Spector himself attempted to produce the Ramones. I don't know if Mr Ferrari agrees with me because his essay is in Italian, but it looks damned impressive.

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON GUV ARNOLD

“Between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandled feet.”

Perhaps it’s the holidays or maybe all those who voted for the clown are still in denial, but I haven’t seen too much adverse reaction to the news that Gov. Arnold has, under some obscure and almost forgotten law, invoked special emergency powers so he does not have to consult the legislature on aspects of state spending. My paranoia is also reasonably well know, but, in this case, I hardly think it’s paranoia to look a little askance when Austrians start helping themselves to dicatorial powers, especially Austrians nicknamed “The Terminator.”

Which neatly brings us to...

Before the this bog commenced, kaymo the science fiction novelist and I had been exchanging emails on the subject of AI and how if real artificial intelligence was developed, it might well consider, like HAL 9000, that humanity was redundant. The subject came up when the recent remake of Battlestar Galactica introduced the idea that the evil robot Cylons had originally been created by humans, but now we have moved on to Arnold and the Terminator trilogy.

Re T3

Caught this on Satellite t'other night. Struck me how the vision on this concept has darkened irretrievably to full black. T1 ended with the ominous dark note, the pregnant Sarah heading for Mexico and life waiting for the end. But it wasn't a guaranteed nuclear war etc. T2 was
the obverse, with the happy ending and the nuclear war averted. Full H'wood Happy Endings Mode. An uplifting vision for the Clinton era. T3 is back to T1 and more so, leaving John Connor and bride to be stuck in the deep shelter while the warheads rain down and the hellish future begins. Goodbye Happy Endings, Hello Republican world view.
What began as a warning against Reaganist "Star Wars" and the idea of AIs taking control of nukes and thereby of our future, passed through a secondary warning and a vision of that future averted and now ends with a gloomy shrug-- there's nothing we can do about it-- we can't stop ourselves from going down the automated, robot controlled missile system chute with the risk somewhere down there that we create true machine intelligence and it junks us. Seems like a grim analog of the political processes we've been through these past thirty years.

Slumped in front of the Boxing Day TV, I just saw Joss Stone singing "It's A Man's World" for James Brown at the Kennedy Centre Honors. What a voice, Janis Joplin but with such a sweet pitch, she doesn't need to cheat with grate and growl, and to think she's a teenager from Devon, England, home of dangerous cider and my mother's family. Blues turns up in extraordinarly places, and I am now a shameless fan.

XMAS 2003

Got no sleigh with reindeer,
No sack on my back
You're gonna see me coming
In a big black Cadillac

-- Elvis Presley, Santa Claus Back In Town

Christmas 2003, which would seem to be a paradox within itself. I said a lot of what I had to say last week in LA CityBeat and a year ago in Spook Links to a little literary Xmas album, I guess.

Right now it's raining in LA which rather suits the mood.

FROM THE EMAIL

Hister 333 comments on “Beam Me Up”

That was freaky. It got me thinking, what if it's like the 'net, and it's not YOU that travels, but your genetic information. That would mean you would be reassembled by the sub-atomic particles there. It wouldn't be too much of a leap to say you could travel to two places at once, and end up with two bodies. It could easily reach the point where there's no point in even existing, because there's millions of us everywhere, and any one of them dies can be replaced. One thing I can be sure of, is that it makes my brain hurt.

QUOTE OF THE DAY (well...actually yesterday)

"Why do they want to look at my medical records? They didn't look at Bill Clinton's medical records." -- Rush Limbaugh

Welcome to the War on Drugs, Rushie. After $60 million and years of raking, all they could come up on good ol' Bill was some ill-considered sex. You, on the other hand, have been tagged as popping more pills than Jerry Lee Lewis in his prime, and now the DEA are wondering you've been junkie-hustling every silk-suit, $200-haircut croaker in the market share for OxyContin scripts. Ain't no conspiracy, Fat Boy, just how us narco-evildoers have been forced to live for most of the past century. Feel lucky you ain't being held in county. You ain't Elvis. Word?


BTW -- This Doc40 blog, like Erebus, has reached the point where it's started to eat its own tail. But the posts from before the start of time aren't lost. You can look under "archive" which, I think, is just over on the right there >>>>

Oh yeah, and if you're a stranger reading this, and want to comment, well, I ain't down with the comment tech yet, but I can be emailed at...

byron4d@aol.com

Kaymo the novelist replies to the previous post...

Most likely it just an "excursion"-- a massive tongue of superheated core material, heavy with iron, that's working up into the Mantle. But, it could be the beginning of a reversal. In which case compasses aren't gonna work very well for a few thousand years. We'll have lots of "little poles" and they'll migrate around etc. If that had happened during the 16th century etc. I think we might all still be in Europe, and the Injuns would have been left alone to get on with it.

FILE UNDER “ONE MORE THING TO WORRY ABOUT”

I have heard about this before on the websites and in the small press publications of the extremely paranoid, who seem to think that this situation would bring down every computer, communications device, and even simple electric motors, and plunge us all back into a new and probably well deserved stone age. I even wonder what it might do to the pick-ups on the average Stratocaster.

EARTH'S POLES APPEAR POISED TO FLIP

Article Published: Friday, December 12, 2003
By Douglas Fischer Oakland Tribune

SAN FRANCISCO - The Earth's magnetic field has weakened so fast in the past 150 years that scientists suspect the planet's magnetic poles are on the verge of flipping, a chaotic process that could dot the planet with multiple poles for centuries until two stronger poles again emerge. The change would wreak havoc with satellites and navigational aids and leave the Earth exposed to blasts of charged solar particles normally deflected by a strong magnetic field. Speaking Thursday at the American Geophysical Union, an annual international scientific gathering, scientists
cautioned that much is still speculation.
Any flip of the Earth's magnetic poles would happen over several thousand years. More likely, they said, turbulent forces deep in the planet's molten core are sending an errant but not unusual "excursion" to the surface that will ultimately fade and disappear, restoring the planet's protective magnetic field."Chances are this is going to die out," said Jeremy Bloxham, chairman of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. "Reversals are pretty rare." But history is rife with examples. The magnetic field has flipped between 200 and 300 times in the past 150 million years, based on studies of sea floor sediments.
The poles last flipped 780,000 years ago. But the rate of decay scientists are measuring is consistent with a reversal, Bloxham added. More worrisome is that a large patch over the South Atlantic has already reversed and is interrupting some satellites. A change wouldn't be catastrophic, at least as far as scientists can see. No mass extinctions have been tied to past reversals, said John Tarduno, a geophysics professor at the University of Rochester in New York. Typically during a reversal, the Earth loses its two traditional poles and weaker multiple poles pop up and fade away, powered by convection flows deep within the Earth's core, said Tarduno. Compasses would not point "north" but to the closest, strongest field, be it over sub-Sahara Africa or Des Moines. Then, after about 1,000 years, two stronger poles would emerge.

DON’T BEAM ME UP, QUITE YET.

I have never been a big fan of the idea of being disassembled into my component sub-atomic particles, beamed or otherwise transmitted somewhere else and then reassembled, so when, last week, a think tank in Birmingham, England, predicted – a little rashly I thought – that in a hundred years computer capacity would be such to make such a thing so, I was forced to re-analyze why I was firmly against the whole business. The first time I encountered the idea was in the Dan Dare strip in The Eagle when I was about five years old. The Treens on Venus had a device called the Electro-sender which beamed Dan Dare and his lower class sidekick Digby (this was England in the 1950s) from somewhere near the Venusian flame belt to the northern capital of Mekonta. Even this early, a hint that all might not be right with such a system was implanted when Digby came through somewhat disarrayed. Then The Fly was released with all its help-me, help-me, Vincent Price consequences. (Which were repeated twice with Jeff Goldblum and then Bart Simpson getting the insect head.) Finally I watched all those decades of Star Trek with only Dr. McCoy treating the transporter as a potential hazard.

For most, the fear is seemingly that one won’t materialize in the same physical shape as one left, but this has never worried me. Any kind of travel involves risk, and all one can do is play the odds and hope for the best. My distrust of the transporter is far more metaphysical. I wonder if the “you” that arrives at the destination is really the same “you” that left the embarkation point. Okay, so it’s identical in every detail, atoms, molecules, mannerisms, memories, but is it really "you"? What’s to guarantee that it’s not an entirely new entity, an exact replica in every respect, but a different being, while, meanwhile, the original “you” is dead, gone, finished, croaked, deceased, and otherwise tuning up with the Choir Celestial. By this reasoning, a whole stadium full of James T. Kirks could have died riding the transporter in Star Trek, and no one really ever gave a rat’s ass as long as the replicas were seamless and perfect. Even the replicas wouldn’t know the difference because, according to their memory, they would have gone through the process unscathed. They swear blind that they're the original. (They only find out to their eternal cost, the next time they are beamed up or down.) In other words, no one cares whether it’s the real “you” are not. As long as it’s a close enough facsimile for rock & roll.

AMONG THE CURRENT EMAIL

Munz informs me that The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened? by Uncle Bill Burroughs' long-time friend and trustee of the writer's estate, James Grauerholz, can be downloaded from http://www.lawrence.com/burroughs/

While HelgaLA forwards the following – “JACKO FINDS ISLAM: The King of Pop is restyling himself as Jacko X. Michael Jackson last night became a member of the Nation of Islam - and sources said his religious changeover comes along with a shake-up of his personal staff. High-ranking members of the Nation of Islam have been working to bring Jackson into Reverend Louis Farrakhan's flock - and Jackson's conversion is now well-known in the Nation Of Islam community. Exactly why Jackson converted was not clear to sources. But Fox News' Web site reported yesterday that Jackson's brother Jermaine, who converted to Islam in 1989, has been seeking to win favor with his more famous sibling, and has brought Farrakhan's chief of staff, Leonard F. Muhammad, into Jacko's inner circle as a "bodyguard." That's just one of many changes under way in Jackson's inner circle, sources said.” Which I guess is as good a way as any to remind the world that he’s one more black man up on a possibly bogus rape rap.

While the lovely natalein offered a link to a funny, Bush-bashing cartoon that should maintain morale among the troops. – http://flash.bushrecall.org/

WHY A BLOG?

Blog? You gotta a problem with that? Yeah, I’ve started to blog even though my dislike of the word kept me away from the whole process for quite a while. I mean, blog wasn’t even on my spellcheck. (But then again neither is “spellcheck.”) Finally a very dear friend dared me – on penalty of my techno-pride – to I check it out. And, in the course of a single weekend, I took to the process like a duck to water. Or maybe Daffy Duck walking off the cliff (but he only falls when he looks down.) Obviously blogging is a seductive lure for us egomaniacs who believe their every thought is of such immense fucking significance that needs to communicated to the world. I was also attracted to the fluidity and ease of the system, and that, in a weird way, it rather resembled an advanced and more lucid version of Uncle Bill Burroughs cut-up fixation, plus blog-time tended have the appearance of running backwards, something that would obviously have its attractions for me. Also I like the transitory, message-in-bottle feel about it. Is anyone out there actually reading this?

After running for a few days on a simple blogspot template, Rich Deakin of Funtopia came into the picture and customized the whole thing which made me very happy, and I’m now free to start thinking, gathering, cutting, pasting, and generally keeping a non-linear internal diary and scrapbook, with links, lures and all kinds of good stuff -- plus the usual errors and typos -- and hopefully something new at least every couple of days. The admiring and the pissed off are welcome to email me at...

byron4d@aol.com

...but be warned that relevant communications may find themselves posted. The friend who got me started also told me to talk to Rich about activating a comments device, but that is obviously something for the future. Assuming, of course, that there is a future.