WEEK END

After a week of weirdness, I ask myself, should I laugh when I hear Attorney General John Ashcroft has gallstone pancreatitis, “a serious and painful abdominal illness"? Or is that mean?

Mick Farren;s stuff in this week’s LA CityBeat. First up a preview of The Sopranos.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=721&IssueNum=39
And then Andy Klein and I double team the dreary Oscar Show.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=726&IssueNum=39

FRESH FRIDAY LINKS

Our pal hipspinster blogs on Elvis Costello
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/
And Belle de Jour, our favorite call girl, weighs in with more of her chic and unique weberotica
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

JACK ELAM

At the beginning of the week I mentioned being sad at seeing the great character actor Jack Elam on the Academy Awards tribute to those motion picture stars who had died this year. This prompted some correspondence, and now Henry Cabot Beck unearths bits of an old, unpublished interview conducted just before Elam’s death....

ON SAM PECKINPAH
Peckinpah tried-just died--to get me to do-what was the name of the western in Mexico?-(Jenny, his wife, tells him) The Wild Bunch, and I turned him down, wouldn't do it. For a very simple reason. Cause if I did Sam's pictures, we're personal friends, and that means I had to live with him on location. And if I live with him at night it'd mean dinner, poker-he loved to play poker too, and I knew I'd be seeing a lot of him and drinking together, right? I knew I couldn't live through it. I can't drink that much, I can't run, it was just a rowdy life for three or four months, which it's gonna be, so I turned the picture down. It almost broke our friendship up, but it didn't, because later on he came along and made me an awful lot of money on another picture that he did, Billy The Kid-(wife chimes in: "Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid"), in which I had a very small part and made a fortune. I did a cameo in it, worked three days, and he made the studio carry me at full salary for three months. Bought me two Lincolns out of the small change left over.

ON FRITZ LANG:
The only one I was really in, was the one with Marlene Dietrich, Rancho Notorious.He was a character, but he was a gentle-I loved him. We had a great personal friendship which developed. We had an instinctive liking of each other. And a lot of directors I don't like for sour shit, because to be a director, it helps a lot to be a prick, and in this case he wasn't. He was mean, people thought, but he wasn't mean at all. He was brusque, but he was certainly a gentle (?), but he was very very brusque, though, in his handling of people. But he was very kind if he liked you. There was a fellow named Dan Seymour, he was in all of Fritz' pictures-they had a personal relationship, and that's where I met Dan Seymour was on one of Fritz' pictures, course I worked with Dan on other things, anyway I was very honored, I felt honored, because of being invited to a very special dinner at his home one night. He had a home high in the hills over Hollywood with a view for a million miles, you know, looking over Beverly Hills and everything, it was a strange house to me, it didn't go with his character because it was a modern house and it was a catered affair, a very very lovely party-twelve or sixteen good friends of his, and I felt very flattered to be invited because…

I enjoyed the man's company a great deal. He was very very considerate to me personally.

(Rancho Notorious)

We had a lot of fun. We got to match coins to see who got to walk by Marlene Dietrich's dressing room when she was changing cause she never closed the door. I won a couple of times.
I remember Fritz had a couple of problems, seems to me he had a couple of serious problems with the cameraman (Hal Mohr, who also shot Destry Rides Again with Dietrich), because the cameraman's very important in a Dietrich picture and three or four times-cameraman's very important on a Fritz Lang picture because Fritz Lang pictures were big pictures-but I remember that Fritz would line up a shot, he'd walk it through, then you walk away, go to your dressing room, wherever you want to go, and the cameraman and his crew light the set, which takes maybe an hour, or in some cases two hours, then you bring everybody in, you run the scene, then you shoot it. And I know that more than once on a Dietrich situation we'd come back and the scene had been changed, the positions had been changed cause the cameraman had changed the positions. And Fritz would say, "That hurts my shot!" and he would argue. But he had a brusque manner and its definitely a very very strong accent, as I'm sure you know. But Fritz was a very kind man; I liked him very much. And as far as I'm concerned he was a very good director.

(More tomorrow)

CRYPTIQUE – It’s a shotgun romance.

THE DRUMS JUST GOT LOUDER

I'VE ALWAYS CONSIDERED WRITING IN CAPS TO BE A SYMPTOM OF INSANITY. LAST NIGHT I WENT OUT FOR A FEW DRINKS, TOOK A NAP, AND THEN WOKE UP TO HEAR HOWARD STERN PREPARING TO BE TAKEN OF THE AIR BY THE BUSH FCC. CHARGES ARE EXPECTED TO BE FILLED LATER TODAY WITH FINES RUNNING INTO THE TENS OF MILLIONS. I REALY DON'T CARE IF YOU LIKE STERN OR NOT. FREE SPEECH IS BEING PISSED ON FROM A GREAT HEIGHT. HE HAS 18 MILLION LISTENERS AND WANTS GWB BOOTED OUT OF OFFICE. THUS STERN MUST BE TAKEN OUT. THAT IS CURRENT GOVERNMENT THINKING.

AMONG THE POINTS IN THE SCARY MADNESS...

SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R KANSAS) HAS BEEN PERSONALLY CONTACTING VIACOM BOARD MEMBERS AND THREATENING THEM, REMOVE STERN OR ELSE.

IF YOU WANT TO CONTACT BROWNBACK HE'S AT...

http://brownback.senate.gov/CMEmailMe.htm

BROWNBACK ALSO LIVES IN A FUNDALMENTALIST CHRISTIAN COMMUNE IN WASHINGTON WITH A NUMBER OF OTHER CONGRESSMEN THAT IS FUNDED BY A RELIGIOUS SECT CALLED "THE FELLOWSHIP".

A REPUBLICAN WHISPERING CAMPAIGN HAS THE SLOGAN "A VOTE FOR KERRY IS A VOTE FOR BIN LADEN.

STERN ALSO RECOMMENDS YOU DO A GOOGLE SEARCH FOR THE BANNED KORN VIDEO

(I'll post more stuff later. Right now I'm listening to the world turn weird.)

I HEAR THE SOUND OF DISTANT DRUMS

And they ain’t Ric Parnell. These are the marching drums of something very unpleasant. Trust me. I’ve heard it before.

I find it easier to believe in evil than coincidence. And I’m really coming to the conclusion that since a rather stupid, but infinitely unscrupulous man suddenly realized that he might not be president this time last year, he is prepared unleash any evil, like a nasty idiot child uncorking ancient bottles without a clue to what corrosive potions they really contain. And this is why we suddenly seem awash in an undertow of fundamental evil? The talk is of anti-Semitism and how the Nazis used Passion Plays to their genocidal ends. Homophobia and godforsaken religion go up like the smokescreens to hide what is really burning. Up on the message board, Blanche wants to know why she (?) should give a rat’s ass about Howard Stern?

(The full Stern/Clear Channel story is told much better by Maureen Farrell on BuzzFlash)...
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/03/far04006.html

Am I paraphrasing Dietrich Bonhoffer?

First they came for Tommy Chong.
Then they came for Howard Stern.
Then they came for the gay weddings.
(The mistreated mateless mother? The mistitled prostitute? Please fill in the rest. There’s going to be eight fucking months of this shit.)
In each case I did nothing
And when they came for me, I found there was no one left to do anything.

Or, in other words, when you’re fighting the good fight, you might find yourself on the line with some real assholes, but protect them and pass the joint or the bottle, because they’re your assholes.

But laugh, if only to keep from crying.
And don’t cry because when it comes to it we have love, laughter, and some mean motherfucker mean-ass magic of our own. If we can remember where we put it.

And talking of laughing

BILL CLINTON FOR VICE PRESIDENT

Writing in yesterday’s NY Times, Stephen Gillers, an NYU law prof got about as funny as a law prof gets. Making the case for Ol’ Boy Bill as VP...

Amid this conjecture, however, one name is conspicuously absent: Bill Clinton.
Mr. Clinton's strengths would compensate for Mr. Kerry's weaknesses almost perfectly. Not only is Mr. Clinton the most talented campaigner of his generation, but he is also a Southerner —and since 1948, when Harry S. Truman chose Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky as his running mate, every successful Democratic ticket has included a Southern politician. Besides, people might even pay to watch Bill Clinton debate Dick Cheney. So why not? The first objection, the constitutional one, can be disposed of easily. The Constitution does not prevent Mr. Clinton from running for vice president. The 22nd Amendment, which became effective in 1951, begins: "No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."
No problem. Bill Clinton would be running for vice president, not president. Scholars and judges can debate how loosely constitutional language should be interpreted, but one need not be a strict constructionist to find this language clear beyond dispute. Bill Clinton cannot be elected president, but nothing stops him from being elected vice president.
True, if Mr. Clinton were vice president he would be in line for the presidency. But Mr. Clinton would succeed Mr. Kerry not by election, which the amendment forbids, but through Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which provides that if a president dies, resigns or is removed from office, his powers "shall devolve on the vice president." The 22nd Amendment would not prevent this succession.

FROM THE EMAIL – WUSA

Doc40 regulars will remember how Clear Channel’s media manipulation raised recall of the old Paul Newman movie WUSA about a radio chain with Nazi ambitions. 00SOUL firms up the background, and also makes some powerful recommendations of culture worth consuming in these trying times...

Not to get pedantic or literary on y'all, but "WUSA" was the film version of Robert Stone's "Hall Of Mirrors," which is -- along with Nelson Algren's "Walk On The Wild Side," Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer," and John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy Of Dunces" -- one of the four best novels about New Orleans extant. Aside from the right-wing politcal machinations that you already noted, Stone's book is notable for its opening sequence sporting possibly the finest first-person point-of-view from inside the drowning mind of a drunk that's been put to paper.
Stone is also notable for writing "Dog Soldiers," which became "Who'll Stop The Rain" when it was made into a similarly excellent film. Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, and Michael Moriarity starred in this amazing-it-got made tale of the Stateside moral corruption spawned by Vietnam.
He followed this with "A Flag For Sunrise," a bone-crushing indictment of America's '80s policies in what is obviously El Salvador. Still waiting for the film version of that one ...
After that came a good, but not great Hollywood novel and a couple of others that we still haven't read. But for the opening trio alone, we nominate him to the status of "hipster saint."

CRYPTIQUE – Are you ready, boots?

THE DEATHSTAR

The matter of the November contenders is now settled, and short of a lone gunman or some other external intervention, it will be Kerry v Bush when the time comes. And that may well be the next problem. With 245 days to go, the Bush machine and the Bush money have months to throw anything they like at John Kerry, and almost unlimited resources with which to manufacture the ammunition. I would be foolish to pretend that the Bush campaign will be anything but a political Deathstar, a massive, obscenely funded juggernaut, that is formidable, although not by any means invincible, because, as we all know, to blow up a Deathstar, all one has to do is fly along the correct trench under heavy fire and drop the bomb in the right vent or conduit. Maybe not easy, but not impossible, given courage, fortitude, and a suitable supporting cast of reliable and friendly androids

It’s late at night, am I’m aware that I risk going down in an welter of mixed metaphors, but if the last ten days have proved anything, it’s that we not only have to tackle the Deathstar itself, but also all of its related rabid dogpacks who cannot be defined as part of the Bush machine, but are all working to the same concerted, corporate, and essentially fascist agenda. We have just seen a combined counter-attack by these allied interests, a laying of smoke to allow the Chimp Boy to cover himself after the massive floundering that set in following his disintegration on Meet The Press. Clear Channel, the religious right, and Mel Gibson have spun the focus to redundant debate over gay marriage and all the incipient homophobia contained therein, the nonsense over Janet Jackson, Jesus, and the negation of Howard Stern, when all attention should really have been centered on the electorate's coronation of John Kerry, and the primary Deathstar soft areas, like the scary economy, and the quagmire in Iraq. Tomorrow Bush will launch a full Deathstar cash attack with TV ads in seventeen states designed to take the gloss off the Dem primaries. The long haul to the presidential election is not going to be easy, and definitely not pleasant, but it's so crucial fucking crucial we have to hang in for the long summer haul. No ruptures in the Force, okay?

BUT CHEER UP

Seems like there might just have been Martians a billion years ago.

FROM THE EMAIL

Fidicen pays tribute to Jack Elam (and we run his letter in full, even though Doc kinda likes Clint Eastwood.)

Good on ye for saluting Jack Elam. I thought I was the only one who knew who he was. His death saddened me much this year and I will give the pretentious silly twits at the 'Academy' (ha) a pass from further bombast for acknowledging him in death in a way I assume they never did in life. What a putrid thing, the Academy Awards. Whoops, more bombast. When I am King, all awards will be banned, from the Nobel on down, except for those in sports, which is in fact about winning in the first place. For "artists" to participate in awards programs is to betray everything that is art but then again Hollywood is not art at all. So why not just give the awards to the highest grossing productions in each category? That would be honest. I might even watch that, even though I hate almost every movie I see now. I thought Mystic River a piece of shit, one of the most overwrought and manipulative, hate filled and cynical bids for box office gross I ever endured. I grew up in that area and know people not unlike those characters, but the film was absurd, an insult to anyone who ever tried to write or tell an honest story. Fuck Eastwood. You want treachery? Intensity? Woozy, booze soaked hard assed men trying to get ahead in a wicked, corrupt world? Watch Jack Elam in Pat Garret & Billy The Kid. Now there's a film that's honest even when it lies.

CRYPTIQUE – Beans, beans, spinach, beans...

WIN ONE FOR THE BEAST

This is surely too good to pass up. I can only hope it presages the Rapture and all these bloody (and I use the word advisedly) fundamentalists will vanish straight up their own apocalypse. From AOL...

ROME, Ga. - Tickets at one movie theater screening Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ are being deemed decidedly unholy. The number 666, which many Christians recognize as the ''mark of the beast,'' is appearing on movie tickets for Gibson's film at a Georgia theater, drawing complaints from some moviegoers. The machine that prints tickets assigned the number 666 as a prefix on all the tickets for the film, said Gary Smith, owner of the Movies at Berry Square in northwest Georgia. The 666 begins a series of numbers that are listed below the name of the movie, the date, time and price. “'It's from our computer and it's absolutely a coincidence” Smith said. '”It has nothing to do with the film company or any vendor. It's completely in our computer.”

To paraphrase the old radio serial, The Shadow, “Where evil lurks in the hearts of men, the computer knows.”

JACK ELAM RIP

One of the few redeeming moments in the otherwise mind-numbing 2004 Oscar show was when poor dear departed Jack Elam appeared in the role-call of the dead, in a tiny clip from his epic cameo in Once Upon A Time In The West, in which he traps the fly in his gun barrel. With his one glass eye, he was my all time favorite western character actor, and teenage skanky role model, and if you don’t know who he is shame on you.

FROM THE EMAIL

Lordmarm writes from Texas

There's no explanation for Houston. It just is. Elron, Bush, the listis endless. See the latest Harpers for a fun piece on Repuglican fund raising in that fair city. But it's not all corruption and oil. Get your ears around Jandek (http://tisue.net/jandek/) if you want a truly alternative vision of that eldritch city. You've never heard the blues so desolate and scary and horrible. But the execution capital of the free world is Huntsville, about an hour's drive north nof Houston. According to the city's website (http://www.huntsvilletexas.com/) "there's something for everyone in Huntsville!" And don't miss this:http://www.txprisonmuseum.org/ for sheer ghoulish weirdness. There are plenty of anti-execution protest sites online. There are usually people with banners outside the gov's mansion here in Austin. But we're not really Texas -- but I guess that'll change now that Tom Delay's redistricted us and turned us into a suburb of effin' Houston...

CRYPTIQUE – Did the lights flicker?

MORE PORNO SPAM POETRY

Last Sunday, (February 22nd) Doc40 ran the first piece of poetry created by online porno sites masking their content from the latest generation of spam blockers, parental controls, government surveillance, and god knows what other manifestations of online moral enforcement, by using unintelligible scrambled and cutup text around the crucial hotlink to the site being promoted. I was intrigued by the way in which it resembled the cut-up works created by William Burroughs and Brian Gyson.

Here’s some more.

There is, however, another less noble reason for running more of this stuff today. As I warned yesterday, when I turned command over to Henry CB, I spent Sunday working with Andy Klein on a blow by blow account of this year’s Oscars (which turned out to be a tedious, time consuming, waste of electrons), and the full account hilarious will appear in next weeks LA Citybeat. But, in the meantime, I’m beat. It’s been a long weekend of work.

This more another found verse...

THEIR MUSHY LIFE

She , The i l there
half n t also squeezing
The run a sports also scrawny.
On , smooth n m the in
I flashlight it king-sized the mom s
a the her, there wet special
I need I chasing m t are want.
Are which, Or apple t t is left The nice.
On sickening, It super human
v b he motherboard The rubbing the dropping.
427 wheel,
Their mushy is life on phone
Their mushy life
d g ghetto v c country
he anyone earth it molecule
The present.
The present.
The present.
firebreak minsk audobon
discriminatory freemen mit limb arsenic
discriminatory freemen mit limb arsenic

And if you think all this is stone crazy, there another site who takes a slightly different approach to the same concept
http://www.sperare.com/spam_poetry/blogger.html



MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE

Two of our very best cyberfriends have new blogs posted...

Hipspinster reflects on eerie coyote kill and human rage
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

And belle de jour also writes poetry and goes shopping with her mum who’s going to a lesbian wedding
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Burn the envelope, please.

IDOL INDECENCY

Hard day Saturday, out doing serious legwork on a project in progress, and then up bright and early to join the great Andy Klein for the CityBeat Oscarwatch. Thus you ain’t going to be hearing too much from me probably until Monday. But, here at Doc40, unless, like the other week, I get myself incapably hungover, we try to deliver, and thus I turn over command on this fine leap year extra Sunday to my old pal, Henry Cabot Beck, co-conspirator, NY Daily News film critic, and one-man guitar picker in the late lamented Tijuana Bible (see Funtopia music).

Henry, you have the con,
(Farren has left the electron stream.)

WILLIAM HUNG

Yeah, well the obvious truth of American Idol is that Cowell is all attitude and no taste, and the function of the talent show is to find the best cruise ship or theme park or TV jingle singer. They will never discover the next Etta James or Wicked Pickett or Slim Gaillard, which is why William Hung is the real hero of the hour, and his popularity a great implicit condemnation of the entire stupid process. By the way, there must be a zillion William Hung websites now. He's become the internet/TV equivalent of the novelty song, the Flying Purple People Eater or Alvin and the Chipmunks of our time. America really loves its mutant culture, though not as much as it should, I don't think. All hail Bubba Ho-Tep.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/shebangs.html

JAILHOUSE GAY WEDDING

(Only Beck could come up with this perverse spin -- MF.)

There's a wedding goin' on, up in cellblock #9 Once the dust settles, and Arnie gets on board, I'll be looking forward to the first prison nupitals in Folsom or Quentin. I expect the wedding song will go something like:
Number forty-seven said to number three:
You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see.
I sure would be delighted with your company,
Come on and do the jailhouse rock with me.
And I'll be checking the papers for that gay shotgun wedding, when Clem's kin makes Buford take them sacred vows on accounta that night, back at the holler, when he made Clem squeal like a pig. As for GWB, I figure he's against gay marriage cause he's a tad nervous about outrunning Earthquake McGoon on Sadie Hawkins' Day.*
(Today is Sadie Hawkins Day, isn’t it? – MF)

WUSA

Farren wrote yesterday: I wonder how many of you recall an old Paul Newman film titled WUSA, in which Newman, a alcoholic DJ, who carries his martinis with him in a sharp aluminum Thermos, goes to work for a fascist radio network dedicated to an American dictatorship...
A great, rabid left wing picture, like Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming, and, I suppose, M*A*S*H. I haven't seen it in years. There's also a 1975 picture by West Wing TV director Jeremy Kagan about an upper-class revolutionary, played by Sissy Spacek, called Katherine that I remember being good enough that they cut it for subsequent airings. More and more I miss the seventies. Don't get me started.As for Mel Gibson, it helps to think of The Passion as one might a lesser but no less feverish picture by Ken Russell or Alejandro Jodorowsky or even Kenneth Anger. Of course the hype, controversy and the marketing (all the same thing) pull it out of that arena a bit, but at its heart it's a curious vanity movie that only fervent old school Catholics and blood-of-the-lamb evangelicals will really respond to. Some fetishists, I suppose, as well (one definition of fetish is "an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion "), but there are far nastier films in the world, like Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, which was put together by Pasolini, who made that other famous Jesus movie, The Gospel According To St. Matthew. Oddly enough, Pasolini is also credited for the story on an all-Chinese animated version of Jesus' life, Yesu (1998), even though he was murdered in 1975.

FROM THE EMAIL

(From Roger)
Following this with interest, thank God (or Mel Gibson!) it's not got here to the UK (yet ?)
What is spooky is that our old mate Orwell says it all in 1984.

"Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it."

Well if they get there way and remove all the filth..it'll be back to browsing National Geographic in the public library...with airbrushed copies of Health and Efficiency* changing hands on the black market....

* For you Americans, Health and Efficency was an earnest, small-format nudist mag that featured naked people playing tennis, and doing bad Isadora Duncan dances. It was much resorted to by desperate English schoolboys of the late 1950s, who believed that the only person on the planet having two person sex was Elvis Presley -- MF

CRYPTIQUE – Yeeee doggies!

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

I wonder how many of you recall an old Paul Newman film titled WUSA, in which Newman, a alcoholic DJ, who carries his martinis with him in a sharp aluminum Thermos, goes to work for a fascist radio network dedicated to an American dictatorship. Clear Channel seems determined to make the movie all reality. I keep coming back to the phrase corporate totalitarianism, and some may think I’m overstating, but I would suggest the that right now the communication conglomerate, with its Zero Tolerance Broadcasting Decency Campaign does seem to the be setting itself up as Bush administration’s own Ministry of Truth. Although I’m not sure going after Howard Stern, no matter what you might think of him, is a terribly smart idea. It’s a move that might just shift working stiffs back to the left where they ought to be, and properly make “blue-collar conservative” an oxymoron. They also seem to have forgotten that some of Howard’s biggest fans are rank and file law enforcement.

For chapter and verse on Clear Channel, (courtsey some girl) go to...
http://www.takebackthemedia.com/radiogaga.html (And do scroll down to the visual aide to the whole unholy relationship between Clear Channel and the White House.)

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

And over at the Office of Vice & Virtue, Mel Gibson, while making the crucifixions run on time and bloody, is not neglecting the merch. Henry Cabot Beck sends the following clip...

You can buy "witnessing tools," including lapel pins labeled in indecipherable Aramaic (yay Aramaic! What a comeback! Who knew?) and lapel pins with crucifixes, and packs of "witnessing cards" to swap with your Jesus-happy friends, just like the Disciples did when they sat around the holy campfire, swapping tales of sad lost goddesses and making s'mores with communion wafers and pink Easter marshmallow peeps. But nothing says "slightly masochistic Jesus fanatic" like adorning your fine self with a two-inch silver pewter crucifixion-nail pendant, hanging 'round your neck from a nice 24-inch leather cord. Oh my yes. It's an actual product, available right now for about ten bucks from Mel Gibson's official "Passion of the Christ" movie Web site, while supplies last, which they will forever and ever because they're doubtlessly made in bulk by Malaysian sweatshop workers wearing faded "Lethal Weapon IV" T-shirts who all believe in a very unhappy Allah. Irony, it knoweth no boundaries.

For full story...
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/02/25/notes022504.DTL


LOVE IS HATE

But what could be more decent and wholesome than a televised execution? Isn’t Mel helping prove that? After the recent Doc40 post on the subject, kaymo seems to have the bit between his teeth...

We should do more on this. I have lots of qs. Like why Houston, Tex? What is it with the culture there that makes that town so fond of executions? And why the opposition to having them on TV? When, who, what etc... It seems so mewling, puking, sickly and weak of this stern visaged, balls of steel, minds of adamant, hearts of stone right wing rulership that they should want to hide the moment of death from those designated as the enemy to all things wise and wonderful (and usually white). if I can grab some time I will dig into this in coming days.
(Comment above or email byron4d@aol.com, especially from you guys from Texas.)

NADER IS RALPH

My considered, and I hope final thoughts on the Ralph Nader bit for the presidency came out this week in LA CityBeat – http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=693&IssueNum=38

CRYPTIQUE – Mind crossing your feet?

THE ELEPHANT ANALOGY

In response to yesterday's half-assed missive from A. Huffington, kaymo explains all we know about global warming (which may not be that much.)

Global Warming is still a very tricky thing...the models for mapping it are still soooo crude. Analogies include: Imagine an elephant in a sealed off room. There is no video, no audio, no smell sensor, all we have to examine it with are some mechanical arms. We know that it's pretty big and it may be dangerous. The elephant is getting angry about something, but we don't know what, exactly. It may break out of the room and if it does we're in trouble, in fact it does seem to be getting restless. It may be upset by our bad breath, or it just may be going into Musth, in which case all bets are off and let's get the hell out of here.

Google: Greenland Pump.
The G-Pump is an area of the North Atlantic where water from warmer parts that has drifted across the Atlantic and way north, cools off enough to sink down through the fresher-- therefore lighter-- water already there. This water is "heavier" ie saltier, because it's been on the surface a long time and it started out in warmer climes where evaporation removed a certain amount of the water and left the salts behind. This "North Atlantic Drift" begins with the good ol' Gulf Stream and it basically keeps Europe from looking like Labrador though they're on the same Latitude. If you've flown from Europe to the US in a window seat you may have noticed just how stark the difference is. Once the heavier Drift water sinks it drops all the way to the bottom of the ocean and flows back south in a huge bottom current that after about 4,000 years or so surfaces again in the Indian Ocean. Now, it is estimated that the Greenland Pump has weakened by between 20 to 30% in the past fifteen years or so. Reasons for this weakening include a sharp increase in the fresher water melting off Greenland's ice cap. Should it stop functioning then the "pull" on the warm North Atlantic Drift water will be much reduced and the Drift will be reduced in turn. Which will mean a very chilly period for Europe's 500 million inhabitants. It's happened before-- during the Little Ice Age (1450-1650)the Thames regularly froze over and England's viniculture gave up the ghost. But, the effect will be (maybe already is) felt all around the Northern Hemisphere. The result could be a quite abrupt shift to a rather more extreme climate, with hot dry summers and colder winters. Needless to say this will be great for the British Air Conditioning and Central Heating industries, both of which have struggled to find customers in a land where the ambient temp tends to be in the mid 50s F. It may also be tough for the US corn and wheat belts, especially if the interior of North America experiences a strong drying trend. The potential losses to world food stocks of having the climate of Iowa-Ohio become more like that of Saskatchewan-Manitoba are huge. Winter wheat is great, but American fattens its meat animals on corn and the difference in productivity between a field of Manitoban wheat and one of Ohio Corn is pretty damn huge. This may be the answer to America's problem with waistlines. As to the big question-- are we causing this change? Answer: maybe. The fact that the warmest years on record are clustered in the post 1980 era does point that way. But we're working with pitifully frail data. The elephant may just be in a frisky mood, ready for a change, or it may be that our CO2 emissions have maddened it. Either way, when push comes to shove it's going to blow our house down, big time.

BUT OH THAT THE ELEPHANT WOULD SIT ON SIMON

The joke has always been that Simon Cowell would reject Bob Dylan out of hand if he was ever a contestant on American Idol (I think that’s Pop Idol to you UK homeboys). And now here is the loathsome abomination actually saying it for himself. (Culled from the current TV Guide)...
Bob Dylan? Too ugly, too boring, too whiny, and too serious.
Yeah, well Simon, you’re an idiot babe, it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

AND A SHAGGY ORGAN STORY (but true)

From MSNBC
A drug suspect trying to pick up 119 pounds of marijuana at Buffalo Niagara International Airport instead got two boxes of human organs, one box containing a heart intended for a transplant. The Canadian woman was arrested 12 hours later when she attempted to exchange the organ boxes for the packages full of pot, which was wrapped in plastic and smeared with mustard. Her accomplice, a New York man, was also arrested. The heart was delivered to the transplant recipient in time for the emergency surgery. What is unclear is why it took the culprits so long to realize the airport's mistake -- the boxes were labeled "PLEASE RUSH, HUMAN TISSUE FOR TRANSPLANT."

CRYPTIQUE – Blood on your saddle.

THE END OF THE WORLD IS CONFUSING

The following is an excerpt from a newsletter from Arianna Huffington...

If he’s smart enough to use it, the Democratic nominee may have just been handed the perfect cudgel with which to pummel President Bush — and cripple Karl Rove’s attempts to position his man as America’s go-to guy on national security. The weapon in question is a new report on the grave and gathering threat posed by global climate change — and the potentially cataclysmic consequences of the Bush administration’s obstinately ignorant approach to global warming. And the thing that makes the report so frightening — and the prospective bludgeon so crushing — is that it wasn’t authored by some crunchy granola think tank or a band of tree-hugging Earth Firsters, but by the U.S. Department of Defense. That’s right, the Pentagon — Rummy’s playpen. In fact, the report, which was slipped to the press earlier this month after being kept under wraps by the White House for four months, was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, a legendary DOD figure, nicknamed “Yoda” for his sagacity. As head of the Pentagon’s secretive Office of Net Assessment, Marshall has offered national security assessments to every president since Richard Nixon. And this latest assessment pegs climate change as a far greater danger than even the scourge of international terrorism. Dryly entitled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” the report reads like the plot summary of the upcoming Dennis Quaid doomsday flick, The Day After Tomorrow in which global warming pushes the planet to the edge of anarchy and annihilation.

But this scenario is not science fiction. According to the Pentagon study, the question is not if abrupt climate change will happen, but when. It could be, according to the report’s authors, as soon as the next three years, with the most devastating fallout potentially occurring between 2010 and 2020. At that point, we could find ourselves in the midst of a new ice age in which mega-droughts devastate the world’s food supply, drinkable water becomes a luxury worth going nuclear over, 400 million people are forced to migrate from uninhabitable areas, and riots and wars for survival become commonplace. But the Bush White House remains unwilling to address — or even acknowledge — this looming peril. Instead, the oiligarchs in the administration continue to fiddle while the atmosphere starts to burn, routinely ignoring scientific evidence and international consensus, and casting a questioning eye on the very idea, let alone the fact, of global warming. It’s a stance that has warmed the hearts —globally, no doubt — of the Bush Pioneers and Rangers in the oil and energy industry, making them feel very generous indeed. As last week’s release of a scathing letter signed by 60 prominent scientists — including 20 Nobel laureates and former science advisers to both Republican and Democratic administrations — makes clear, the Bush administration has made an art out of ignoring science. Particularly whenit comes to the issue of global warming.

Unfortunately Arianna, a recent convert from right wing Republicanism, is not so well versed in the techniques of doom-saying as those of us who have been at for decades, like (say) kaymo, Doc40's own grim prophet of destruction. She gives no references, no chapter and verse, and even mistakes it as a party political issue and not another indication that this planet is just sooo fucked that we might as well stay loaded until The End. Fortunately, here at Doc40, we can at least manage to run a Google search, which revealed that the source of her alarming information is a month old issue of Fortune (apt, AH?), from which we lifted the following excerpt...

Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power. Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change. Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.
For the full story – http://www.fortune.com/fortune/subs/print/0,15935,582584,00.html

BUT CHEER UP

Here, courtesy of Henry CB (who’s name I misspelled yesterday) is a new animation from the great Joel Veitch, that is quite as good as Viking Kittens or Gay Bar. – http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song/

MEANWHILE...

The FCC seems to be rolling hard in it’s clean up of the airwaves, and also providing Bush with another fatuous smokecreen. Bubba the Love Sponge is history and Clear Channel jerked Howard Stern from its stations just as Stern joined the League of Extraordinary Bushwhackers (LEB) by furiously turning on GWB and backing Kerry. But more of this later as the news comes in.

CRYPTIQUE – Jesus H. Christ, Mel...

COME WITH ME TO THE CASBAH

The following small wonder came in today from Henry Cabot Back...

DEAR Citibank Members,

This E-mail was _sent_ _by the Citibank server_ to
veerify your_ E_MAIL addres.
You musst clmoetpe this prsecos by clicking on_the link
below and enttering in the smal winddow your CITI-bank
ATM Card number and Pin that you use in the local ATM Machine.
This_is done - for-your pcertotion -G- because some of_our
members no logner have accses to their email adrssedes
and we must verify it.

Aside from qualifying as the most inept webscam of all time – or at least to date – the looney clip from Henry also started me thinking. I’m well aware that my imagination tends towards overcook a lot of the time, but that’s how I earn a living (distant laughter), and also how I keep myself sane (more distance laughter), but it serves as yet another reinforcement of my fantasy picture of the internet. Al Gore dubbed it the Information Super Highway, conjuring, for me at least some rolling, big-deal perspective that had elements of Heinlein’s Roads Must Roll, the world of the clone-makers in Star Wars II, the Venusian city of Mekonta, and Osaka International Airport, all clean and chrome, plexiglass, and airstream tubular, with order and efficiency, a precision of integrated and organized traffic. And maybe that’s why Old Al found himself incapable of defeating chump-chimp George W. because at least Bush, probably courtesy of Dick Cheney, and with rich-boy contempt, could see a little, if iniquitous, vision of the true unkempt nature of reality.

For me, the internet has always seemed far more like a some middle eastern bizarre, a souk or casbah, part futurist, part medieval, a space-floating Interzone, unplanned, asymmetrical and labyrinthine, although easily negotiable by those who know, with narrow accessways between gimcrack structures, who’s flaws are hidden by hypnoswirls of niteglo color, and all the whores, hustlers, cutpurses, deadrabbits, footpads, swackdogs and gutter jumpers at which an adventurer could ever hope to shake his swordstick. Quack croakers with dirty instruments want to enlarge your penis, brothel-shills do it with domestic beasts, and that’s only the promise of better things inside, swarthy bunco artists whisper of fortunes in Nigeria, and politicians with corrosive blood want your money even more than they want your vote. Sexualized cartoon hentai-children retail their tears in darker alleyways, dancing in come-to-me display for dangerously scarred and mind-numbed teenage gunpersons on r&r from the carnage of their X-cubes, while dealers in long coats of a million pockets whisper transactionally of every dubious pill know to man and crustacean, to calm your mind, roll up your eyes, or keep you fucking to Sunday. Pop-ups like dirty grey beggars need beating, while mules look for their 40 acres, and the gambling games tell you there’s ninety minutes in every hour and a hundred seconds in a minute and the odds are in your favor. And you should believe that when pigs eat your brother.

And in the middle of it all, there’s Doc 40's Own Cozy, Leather-Jacket Gin-Joint, 24 Hour Global House Party, and Medicine Show, offering sharp conversation, bad ideas, honest politics, cheap stimulation, dirty concepts, and links to revolution, right out on the stairs. The girls are smart, the women wicked, the men at least reasonable, poets cut up, the aliens behave themselves, the cats help themselves, the fire escapes work, and there’s never a cop around – even if you need one. And that, my friends is why I attempt to keep it all going. Even if it is only a bunch of freaks on a stream of electrons. Come on back now, y’hear.

MEANWHILE
London’s blogging callgirl Belle de Jour seems to have acquired a stalker...
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com

AND A LAST WORD ON DEATH

I'm not quite sure how many Americans want to see executions live on TV, but according to a recent poll, it’s a hefty and bloodthirsty majority. I’ve been against capital punishment since I first saw Susan Hayward in I Want To Live, essentially figuring that a society should act according to a higher moral standard than its killers. (And if you’ve got a problem with that, the comments board is up on the right.) On the other hand , I do think, if we’re going to put people to death, it should be televised, just so we see exactly what is being done in our name. And if we’re not sickened by it, we are hardly worth the designation civilized.

CRYPTIQUE – Embiggen the girl.

HARD DAY AT THE KEYBOARD

Not so much to relate today, except the desire to maintain continuity and keep you all coming back. The entire day was taken up by finishing a story on the new season of The Sopranos and resolving yesterday's fury at Ralph Nader into something more manageably literate, (plus deftly and insouciantly linking the two) and following that, I find myself flagging and in that void-like moment when I really wonder if it’s all making any difference at all, or if it’s just creating the illusion of doing something to camouflage basic political impotence. Or maybe I wonder if I can still write at all. Both pieces are destined for LA CityBeat and will – editor’s willing – appear in print and online -- Nader Thursday next and The Sopranos the week after.

But hell, I can’t really believe it’s a waste of time. If I did, or began to, it really would be the cue to blow my brains out. The idea can be quite attractive in these grim days when very little seems to work as it should, but mercifully two things mitigate the self-destructive urge. One is a Hamlet-like fear of the void and the other is the quasi-logic that, since nothing remains the same, it might actually get better.

Meanwhile, there’s enough in the email in the box to make the log-on worth the effort. Plus our lovely Doc40 pal hipspinster has a new blog posted.

That’s – http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

FROM THE EMAIL

Jamie-in-Canada sends this unique perspective on the 21st century world...

Went to funeral for wife's cousin. He was Sergeant at Arms for oldest bike club in Toronto, The Last Chance. All wearing Hell Angels patches now. Province of Ontario has biggest HA group in world. Dozen or so at the funeral were all 5'10" looking like 400lbs of pork on kebab. You'd think with chemical business they'd be a little thinner. And what's with this new clothing empire they're building. T-shirts, jewelry, pants, hats, all from the RedWhite company. Nike should be so well represented.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

Kenshim proffers a shaggy president story...

SLEEPLESS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

One night, George W. Bush is tossing restlessly in his White House bed. He awakens to see George Washington standing by him. Bush asks him, "George, what's the best thing I can do to help the country?" "Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did," Washington advises, then fades away. The next night, Bush is astir again, and sees the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moving through the darkened bedroom. Bush calls out, "Tom, please! What is the best thing I could do to help the country?" "Respect the Constitution, like I did," Jefferson advises, and dims from sight. Bush isn't sleeping well the third night when he sees another figure moving in the shadows. It is Abraham Lincoln's ghost. "Abe, what is the best thing I can do right now, to help the country?" Bush pleads. Abe replies, "Go see a play."

And Dick 13 passes on a chance for direct action...

Subject: Censure President Bush

Dear friend, In an attempt to escape responsibility for the misleading statements that led the nation to war, President Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and push any political damage into 2005, after the upcoming election. But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. And now that reality is setting in, the President seeks to pin the blame on someone else. We can't let him. Congress has the power to censure the President -- to formally reprimand him for his betrayal of the nation's trust. If ever there was a time to use this function, it is now. Join the call for Congress to censure President Bush now at: http://www.moveon.org

And fidicen feels differently about Ralph Nader...

Really think vilifying Nader does more harm than good to the Democrats and the cause of defeating the fascists. We must take the inclusive high road (a la Roosevelt vs. 3rd party man Thomas in 1932--look it up if you don't know) and cannot allow ourselves to be defined and hemmed in bypotential Bush rhetoric and dirty tricks, a core mistake of Gore. A true blue message, stated presidentially, cannot lose this time and most of Nader can be safely co-opted. First and foremost, Nader, and the very few in the handful of swing states who might NOT vote Dem because of him (as opposed to any Green, Lib, or not voting at all people) can be neutralized by respect for their inarguable positions, their right to seek office and vote their conscience, and for their chutzpah to do so at this time. Include them in the discussion and show respect and my guess is they leave in October.

CRYPTIQUE – The sound of one foot walking on eggs.

RAGING AT NADER

I stayed up all night and watched Ralph bloody Nader announce his run for the White House on Meet the Press this morning. Refraining from screaming “Egomaniac weasel shithead!” more than four or five times – I contained my thoughts into three basic points.

1) Nader is attempting to take the progressive, anti-corporate high ground. This means that, if Kerry (or whoever) attempts any bold or radical initiatives on health care, prescription drugs, oil dependancy etc., the door will be wide open for accusations by the Bush campaign that the Dems are merely caving in to pressure from the Nader left, and cry "how can you elect a president who can be pushed around by Ralph Nader."

2) Where will Nader get his money? He says from web appeals, but it would be all too easily possible for Bush to keep him in the race as a spoiler and energy drain, by covertly channeling funds, with or without Nader even knowing it.

3) Nader gives the impression that he believes he can pick up many of the young and idealist Dean supporters to be his campaign grunts, almost as if he had some divine right to their support. As one who is not so young but still shamelessly idealistic, I'm disgusted, because, bottom line, what he betrays by this is nothing more than a cynical contempt for their idealism.

Right now I’m lobbying for print space to expand this analysis.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

The matter of Bush’s monstrous heap of cash money is pointed up by a webclip from some girl...

Specifically, while the president attacks Senator John Kerry (D-MA) for accepting money from lobbyists, a new study shows "the president accepted more in direct contributions from lobbyists in one year than Kerry did in the past 15 years." All told, Bush collected at least $6.5 million in "bundled" contributions from lobbyists last year alone.
Full story – http://www.misleader.org

And some girl also spotlights Bush’s under-the-radar attacks on women’s rights...

Thumbing his nose at the Senate for the second time in recent weeks, President Bush today appointed one of the most virulently anti-choice and anti-privacy judicial activists, Bill Pryor, to the Eleventh Circuit federal bench. Just a month after his surprise appointment of anti-choice Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit bench, Bush proved today that he'll go to any length, violate any rule, and upset any precedent to pack the courts with anti-choice extremists. Mr. Pryor has called Roe v. Wade an "abominable decision." The truly abominable decision is to give this hardened anti-choice crusader a seat on the federal bench. This outrageous appointment puts a judge who opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest in a frightening position of power over women's lives in Alabama, Florida and Georgia.
Full story – http://prochoiceaction.org

Which brings us back to Nader and his totally cavalier attitude to abortion rights in the 2000 campaign, retold on the Headblast website – http://davidcogswell.com/

In that campaign his response to a question about whether the Republican Supreme Court would endanger the right to abortion, Nader said if the Supreme Court struck down Roe vs Wade it would just go back to the states, as if the lives of women in Bible belt states were not a concern to him.

BLIMP LIKE AN EAGLE

Kaymo sends another of his military-industrial horror tales, which fits quite neatly with the revelations on last night’s edition of 60 Minutes that the Patriot Missile System (PMS???), so touted by Bush Sr, as a Scud-buster in the first Gulf War, is in fact better at shooting down US planes that enemy missiles. In Pentagon-speak it has “high fratricide levels”.

You heard about this one?
USAF is working on the Evolutionary Air and Space Global Laser Engagement, or EAGLE, a gigantic blimp about twenty to thirty times as big as a Goodyear blimp. Slung underneath it would be an array of huge mirrors designed to reflect high power laser beams that would be directed from either ground based transmitters or from orbiting power satellites. The reflected laser beams would be used to destroy enemy missiles, planes, limousines, you name it. This monstrosity is being created at the Air Force Research Lab's Directed Energy Division. At first glance this looks like just another Pentagon mega-turkey. A way of spending lots of taxpayer dollars and allowing young, right thinking science types to have rewarding careers. But apart from the grotesque mismatch between acronym and gas bag there's also the Pandora effect to consider. If the US can do this, so can others and do we really want colossal airships patrolling the stratosphere ready at a moments notice to fry just about anything chosen as a target to a crisp?

CRYPTIQUE – It beats working.

– AND IF YOU FIND DOC40 QUAINTLY AMUSING, FOR FUCK’S SAKE SEND A LINK TO A FRIEND!

SUNDAY POETRY – A NEW TWIST (and it goes like this)

Uncle Bill Burroughs should have lived to see this. He would have loved it – online porno sites masking their content from the latest generation of spam blockers, parental controls, government surveillance, and god knows what other manifestations of online moral enforcement, by using unintelligible scrambled and cutup text around the crucial hotlink to the site being promoted.

Even I thought the porn vendors were getting a little bold when, one afternoon (as is my habit) I rose and opened my email to find a clear and graphic sample image of a rather depressed-looking young woman felating a carthorse. There is little that shocks the Doc, but after coughing into my first Coke and cigarette of the day, I decided those responsible were sailing a tad close the contemporary winds of censorship, but that is really beside the point. John Ashcroft and worried webservers had unwittingly turned cyberpanderers into post-Beatnik techno-poets.

In the course of their subterfuge, the porn spammers were busily, but, I assumed, unknowingly, creating a form of found poetry, hugely resembling the works created by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, first with paper and scissors, and then with their various models of cutup engine, a technique later "borrowed" by David Bowie in his Thin White Duke incarnation, or so David boasted at the time.

Most of this kind of spam seems effectively random, although some spammers betray a self-awareness and creativity over and above their basic mission of smut-camouflage, by arranging the text into fanciful and maybe symbolic typographic structures – unless of course some HAL 9000 artificial intelligence is at work and playing long with the game. Unfortunately these line and column formations are destroyed by the act of removing the codes prior to posting. Which is a pity but inevitable. Unless someone had a smart idea.

As evidence that nothing is ever wasted in the constantly expanding culture, I have started to collect these items. More are always welcome, and I will post them until they stop coming or we all get bored with the exercise. (Send to byron4d@aol.com.) Here is the first example. The title is imposed, but I don’t think that’s breaking the rules...

LUCRETIUS CONCEDES.

On televison program,
On sit, a exciting there overcooked I shabby also f x, is forked
he .soup, Their she child and and comedy g g a early.
dull,
Is I'll or British pastry bar n u,
it becoming he stabbing a doctor.
&&&&
There wanna,
She dusty, their pie she generic object web site a hill on geeky
The could? I high,
On right are vibrator a k or slow their dirty their against it
don't gonna.
The text,
A buying the creamy a five dollar bill I because leaf,
a before it of he .

Is suit,
found there four n p is deep
or biscuit also run
h a there until and tender she atom f e is silky.

It brothers y p, I about v o I shiny the brain throughout
j q and trailer q l a are king on does also she frosty. 318
Or bat b b, ours u o he train
I lonely there dropping u s he smacking h o on home
I great gun. Or store y p, She ;)
The coloring book, I bed and n v she mail. n f

adjectival deflate

delirious happy aunt bernice prissy
delirious happy aunt bernice prissy

I'd love to perform for you. manicuring Lucretius concedes.

COMMENTS BOARD

Funtopia Rich, the Doc, and I are wondering what to do about the comments board. Suggestions? Maybe a second one?

CRYPTIQUE – See Spot die.

NADER, I’M MAD AT’ YA!

Okay, so now I’m good and pissed off. You, me, even David Letterman, we’ve all spend months hammering away at George (smirking) Bush, and finally, in the last few weeks, we’ve seen some cracks appear. But just as we were started really to wonder if the light at the end of the tunnel was actually hope, and not the on-rushing train of neo-Con dictatorship, Ralph Nader lurches in this weekend, demanding everyone's attention like an ignorant drunken whore at an otherwise perfectly pleasant party. Fuck you, Ralph, you opportunistic, egomaniacal, shithead. Your vote syphoning got is into this mess. You’ve already had quite enough of our attention this year when millions of us sent you emails telling you, quite politely, to stay the fuck out of the race. But you didn’t, and now we hear you will announce whether you’re going to run for president on Meet the Press tomorrow, and I have to get up at fucking 8AM on a Sunday to see what you think you’re doing. I swear, if you run, I’m coming after you with pliers and a length of old Harley Davidson timing chain, because, pal, if you fuck up the 2004 election and put Bush back in the White House, you deserved the hurt being put on you -- with extreme prejudice. If for no other reason than, in the current political climate, no one in their right mind is going to hand you the cash to run EXCEPT THE FUCKING BUSH CAMPAIGN ITSELF!

Which makes nothing more than a treacherous bought-and-paid-for creature of the Bush White House, with less ethics than a 10th street crackhead rentboy. Go away Ralph, before we do something you’ll regret. This isn’t finished by a long shot, but I’ll wait until you announce before getting any more serious. You are enough, right now, to drive me to drink, and you wouldn’t like me after I’ve been drinking.

AND TALKING OF DRINK

In last year's LA CityBeat Xmas gift guide I wrote.

For the bohemian who has tried everything, what better than genuine Czechoslovakian absinthe? The forbidden green goddess of demimonde decadence is a legendary aphrodisiac, a subtle and colorful hallucinogen, and only quasi-legal. Plus the romantic imbibing ritual – involving sugar, ice, and a naked flame – is super-seasonal. Better hurry, though. Online absinthe suppliers, La Boheme, promise a ten-business day delivery to the US, but the stuff does have to be ordered in the UK and the shipped from the Czech Republic. (We tested an order, though, and all worked as advertized.) Compared to other exotic liquor, absinthe isn’t cheap, but measured by hallucinogen prices, it’s a steal. A sample starter of 140 ml., in a highly keepable stainless steel flask, is $34.99, while the 70 cl. Absinthe King Gold could fuel an orgy at $199.99. But before you dim the lights and break out the satin and lace, also order one of the decorative absinthe preparation spoons that start at $12.99, and find some elegant, goth-green, tumbler-sized glasses for real belle epoch class. (All orders come with history and full instructions.)

Go to www.laboheme.uk.com

Well, Fidicen took my advice and here’s his report...

A large cylindrical package arrived at the office yesterday and despite an angel on my shoulder loudly advising I wait until nigh on the weekend, by 9:15 p.m. I was dimming the lights, chilling filtered water, and pulling out the sugar cubes. At approximately 9:25 I toasted my cat as well as the visage of Arthur Rimbaud gazing down at us from a lovely French import edition of original manuscript facsimiles perched above the poetry section of my library. I'd read about the first taste being difficult and had to laugh knowingly as the beclouded green fluid met my palate like a sweet and dear friend. Admittedly, subsequent tastes were occasionally odd, but my mostly empty stomache can assume the blame there. I took to it like a doctor to medicine. I felt light effects quickly, knew something was afoot, and noted a desire for only upbeat and happy music and thoughts. A couple more rounds in and a rising exuberance began to take hold, I upped the volume on the stereo and gleefully took a call from a journalist friend and found my thoughts lucid and animated and being received as such.
After quaffing another, the confines of my apartment would not suffice. With but little concern for my obligations on the morrow, I put on my coat and dashed up to Sunset in search of after midnight adventure. Definitely a social drink; I don't expect to drink alone on this one again. Of course there was a special breed gulping down alcohol on a Tuesday night nearing closing time following a three day weekend in quaint old Hollywood. I made fast friends and promptly got myself in a heck of a condition, overflowing with lust and verging on drunken madness. Easy to understand why those old poet and painter bastards got themselves in a knot. Jesus Z Christ, what's cutting off an ear when you're on a jag with this lady?? Of course I saw no indication that it would provide creativity, or even augment it--assumed that was mostly the mythmaking of spastic hack writers with a hard on for fin de siecle Europa. Then again, perhaps more mysteries await me. Mostly I noted a cocainesque thing of nasty confidence building, quickening of thoughts, and bodily unabashedness. Quite the devilish dash to add to an 140 proof concoction.

Bartender, another.

More carousing, they generously offered me a free Newcastle Brown, and finally forced me out around 2:20 upon which I happily bounced homeward and jumped into the building's jacuzzi. For good or for ill, not a soul seemed to be around. God knows when I went to sleep but I do know about waking. Talk about a world class hangover. That's got to be the true danger with this stuff. Interestingly, the effects were clearly still upon me, a lucidity and positivity, gentler under the duress of my newer condition. Somehow I got to work, even though my brain really is preferring not to function. I found myself not wanting to hassle with bothers like other cars and rules of the road. Outdoor oxygen seemed very necessary, and continues to beckon as I report to you from the confines of a dreadful, stuffy location near LAX. Not sure what else will help but the lunch truck is due any minute and I will be customizing a burrito with a hefty compliment of the hottest chilis they have. Purge we must. Usually the world's intrigues find me, but the Green Goddess has been fickle despite my heavy acquaintance since the age of 15 with the likes of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Hemingway, and those wacky impressionists and cubists. Naturally I've never even seen Moulin Rouge, but perhaps I might now.

Obviously more research is necessary.

CRYPTIQUE – It’s not easy being green.

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COMMERCIAL
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IT’S THE DOC40 HISTORY CLASS (for Dysfunctional History Month)

DEPT. OF MONKEY AND MONOLITH

Fifty years ago today -- on Feb. 20th, 1954 -- President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to nearby Edwards Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens. And that, according to some theories, is when it all went really wrong. For just the facts (ma’am)...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4306380/

DEPT. OF ROCK AND HARD PLACE

I wrote this cautionary tale from the elder days of rock & roll, on how psychedelic music was corrupted into progressive rock, for Mojo. It ran in December ‘03 issue, but I figured, now the mag’s well off the stands, I’d post it for those among you who like this kind of esoteric musicological trainspotting...

PSYCH TO PROG

The Who were at the Marquee. The place was packed with rabid mods blocked on fine SKF Dexedrine. I think the tune was Smokestack Lightning, their early auto-destruct finale. Townshend had pulled round his two stacks of sixteen 4x12s so they faced each other leaving a nine inch gap. Holding his shell-shocked Rickenbaker by the neck, like a garroted vulture, he thrust the guitar into the space to create an electric alien banshee. Moon killed his kit in primitive anger management, Entwhistle made a noise like a nuclear submarine stripping it’s gears. We’d obviously come a long way from Be-Bop-A-Lula or Apache. It this wasn’t the future it was quantum progress.

More progress a couple of years later at the UFO Club, Pink Floyd played Interstellar Overdrive; similar psychosis, but far less rage. The piece commenced with a repeating four chord theme, little more than Green Onions in reverse and descending. The crowd was now stoned on Moroccan or Manfred’s acid. The paisley tide swayed and waved, submarine and languid. The theme cleared the gravity well, and meandered with whirling Binson echo boxes, out past John Cage and Albert Ayler to somewhere near moons of Saturn, straight from a Dan Dare hallucination, courtesy of Syd Barrett. Here again was rock & roll shaping its future, and making clear it was boldly going where none but Sun Ra had ever gone. Sadly, Barrett would soon be mistaking the dawn for a supernova, and being advised to take a rest from piping at the gates, but no matter, Sgt, Pepper was upon us and all manner of weird floodgates were bursting.

In the beginning, psychedelic meant novelty records; My Friend Jack Eats Sugar Lumps by the Smoke, Granny Takes A Trip by the Purple Gang, but, very quickly, the Rolling Stones went Marakesh/Owsley/Satan, while Steve Marriot and Pete Townshend were hard at work on a psychedelic pop idiom for Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Pete’s underappreciated pop masterpiece, I Can See For Miles. Strawberry Fields were taking us down. Nights grew so neuron-hammered that we listened to Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground over and over, and very loud, and breakfast with Boss Goodman meant Paki black, bacon sandwiches, and all four sides of Live Dead. The MC5 were actually playing Sun Ra songs along with the more predicable rama-lama, while Jimi Hendrix blazed a trail all of his own to places where few humans could completely follow. The air was day-glo electric for those who Jim Morrison called the “stoned immaculate.” The only fly in the ointment was an insistent voice from the other side of the dressing room demanding we hold on a minute.

“Hold on a minute? Why?”
To engage in what seemed to be a very pointless argument turned out to be the answer. Was psychedelic music nothing but a drug groove? The slogan was bandied about; “what can be achieved by drugs can be achieved by other means.” To we Star Fleet dopefiends, the concept was plainly nonsense, but a number of bands, led by a Syd-less Pink Floyd, were backing off from public association with the drug culture. On one level this was an understandably pragmatic. In 1967/8/9, the official heat was on, from the high profile busts of Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones, down to the constant stop-and-search street harassment of the velvet and hairy. To blatantly promote oneself as “psychedelic”, or as a “drug band” was a red flag to the drug squad. In our neck of the woods, the Deviants, Sam Gopal, later Hawkwind, and all the stoner combos to follow, acted nonchalant, bollocks to pragmatism, and went our merry way flattering ourselves that we lived outside the law, and at least tried to be honest. Others, though, with their eyes on the prize, the contract, and dreams of shipping platinum, became circumspect. At the same time that CBS was developing their fatuous marketing campaign “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music”, house hippies working for major labels brainstormed for a generic term not so overtly druggie as “psyche”. The term Progressive Music floated from some hellspawned corporate meeting. A decade later, punk would be sanitized to suits and narrow ties by the sobriquet New Wave, and so it went when Psyche became Prog.

The house hippies had correctly noticed the all-night idiot dancers in what Zappa dubbed psychedelic dungeons went even more bananas than they were already were over America by the Nice, and this was absorbed as a template for Progressive. The greatest template of all, of course, was Whiter Shade of Pale – one of the most beautiful and deliberately witless pieces of pop music of all time. The major-label house hippies failed to grok, however, how, by embracing this approach, they were opening a Pandora’s box of pretensions and ugly trousers. Bad lyricist wrote screeds of illiterate Pre-Raphaelite poetry, but worse than that, keyboard players were encouraged. Led, as far as I could tell, by John Lord, Rick Wakeman, and Keith Emerson, these were a breed who had gone to Guildhall or some lesser college, and needed to get fancy with G-sharp diminished ninths, while making portentous judgements about Good Music. Unfortunately, rather than pillaging Bartok or even Richard Straus, and totally leaving Carl Orf for metal to discover years later, they leaned to the pop classics, Ravel, even Elgar. Sometimes it worked, as in Roy Wood’s early shoe-horning of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 into the bad-trip, proto-punk classic, Night Of Fear, or, on a more grandiose scale, Townshend’s orthodox operatic design for Tommy. Too often, though, grandiose became the dumb bombast of (say) Robert Plant’s Band of Joy. Progressive Music had to be de-capitalized, and some u/g press wag, maybe Charlie Murray, shortened it to “prog”, making it sound like a Saxon mining implement.

My real problem with prog was that I sensed totally different and more valid progress being made well away from its beaten tracks. Capt Beefheart represented progress in spades. With Trout Mask Replica, he had established rock’s own Mars Colony. The Stooges braved the metaphor of napalm in the morning and prepared for Search and Destroy. David Bowie sang Lou Reed like Anthony Newley dressed as Veronica Lake, while Bob Dylan was taking us down home for another look at country music. In such circumstances, it became very hard take the pomp and circumstance of King Crimson (even with the wit of Bob Fripp) as significant musical progress. Strange fusions were coming, but, for me, the strangest would be tragically denied us. Two great Kubrick monoliths, Jimi, post-Experience, and Miles, in Bitches’ Brew mood, appeared to be drifting into each other’s orbit. But then Jimi was a sunbeam, and that was the end of that. But damn, if nothing else, that would that have been progressive.

Of course, the psyche/prod conflict is now only in the minds of collectors. Those of us from back in the day have pissed over a lot of bridges in the intervening years. For the most part, we have kissed, made up, and even worked together, learning the lesson that method and madness are by no means antithetical, but are in fact two symbiotic halves of the same creative process. But remember, all of the above is highly subjective and shamelessly biased.

CRYPTIQUE – Smoke if you got some.

UTOPIA – SCHMUTOPIA

Yeah, well, it was nice to consider thinking outside the box for a moment, but sinboy was right. If you’re sick and ain’t got medical care, metaphysics can get a trifle luxurious, and thinking outside the box becomes academic in the face of the truly absurd shit the other side keep throwing at us as they strive for dictatorship. The following comes from Arianna Huffington, in her email newsletter. I have my reservations about Arianna. Never been too trusting of the pitstops, honky tonks, and the Highway Patrol parked behind the Exxon sign out on the Damascus Road, but in this case, she’s close to the money...

Remember that divisive pre-9/11 campaign staple? Well, it’s flared up again — with a vengeance and a rash of new administration actions clearly aimed at shoring up the president’s Christian conservative base. In the last month, the president has traded in his too-tight flight suit for a revival tent, backing a new anti-obscenity crusade, anti-condom sex-ed programs, a renewed commitment to fighting the drug war, and his attorney general’s efforts to poke around the private medical records of women who’ve had abortions. He even hinted in his State of the Union that he’d be willing to endorse a constitutional ban on gay marriage. But that’s not even the worst of it. The Justice Department has recently assigned a team of FBI agents to focus exclusively on adult obscenity cases. That’s right, with the war on terror in full swing, our war president is going to have a group of G-men doing nothing but working the porn beat when they could be tracking down — oh, I don’t know — terrorist sleeper cells. Talk about your misguided allocation of manpower. I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel safer knowing the feds are going to be keeping close tabs on Jenna Jameson.

Except Arianna doesn’t take it far enough. The old Duke of Wellington taught me that it’s half the battle to chose the battlefield and be the first to arrive. (Of course, it didn’t work for Robert E. Lee, but that’s another story.) The bloody fundamentalists are making the running, comrades. We are under heavy bombardment by the cultural trivia of oppression and it is wasting a great deal of our time. And it will get more intense and viciously witless as this election year progresses. Witness the following nonsense relayed by Jay Babcock

Can American cultural life get any more absurd? I'm laughing to keep from crying...

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., Sunday, Feb. 15, 2004 – Bobby Labonte overcame early problems in the Daytona 500 and fought back to finish 11th in the 46th Daytona 500 Feb... The hood of Labonte's car is both a shameless movie plug -- The Passion of the Christ, coming soon to a theater near you -- and some new-style proselytizing for the Gospel. Yes, witnessing has moved from the revival tent to the fast lane. "It's a chance to get the word out," Labonte, who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, said about the ad on his car. "Someone who is curious about Jesus and has never been saved sees the race and says, 'Hmmm, I'd like to see what that's about.' ... Maybe we can change their minds." NASCAR racing and the Christian faith have often worked hand-in-hand, from infield services for drivers, crewmen and officials to the pre-race invocation to the annual break in the schedule for the Easter holiday. Now comes a car promoting The Passion of the Christ, a soon-to-be-released movie that already has drawn lavish praise from conservative clergy -- including the Rev. Billy Graham -- but angry denouncements from Jewish groups fearing it will stir up anti-Semitism. For Labonte, it was a no-brainer to plug Mel Gibson's film on the No. 18 car, especially since the movie focuses on the seminal event in the Christian faith -- the crucifixion of Jesus."I know how much it has impacted my life and my family's life," said Labonte, a former NASCAR Nextel Cup champion.

http://www.bobbylabonte.com/news/04_news/040215_race.shtml

AND IN RESPONSE TO SINBOY OF YESTERDAY

some girl writes...

sinboy is cute, but...????
Quoting him: "I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them." Oh, that media. always trolling for freaks. or maybe they were kind of hard to miss, what with the slaughtering of the pigs and all. i mean, i see what he sorta means, but...i dunno. i would a more cynical point about it being natural for leaders to abuse their power, human nature, blah blah ... but then i'd feel bad for raining on his hard-work utopian parade. hee. anyway, i love reading about his little commune or whatever, but does he really think it's never been done before? adorable. hmmm....a true libertine? and a boy, no less. kewl.

AND FINALLY MORE FARREN

For a more reasoned and erudite analysis of the current Democratic primaries try the cover story I seem to have written for this week's LA Citybeat.

http://lacitybeat.com

CRYPTIQUE – Rome wasn’t burned in a day.

UTOPIA REDUX – First Response To Yesterday’s Post

Sinboy writes...

Polymorphous yes. Utopianism? Are you effing kidding? This shit takes work. One of my tribe (*) just broke her leg on the way to thecourthouse to help with the same sex marriages in San Francisco. She's a massage therapist, has no health insurance, and is going to need near
24 hr care for a while. The really shitty thing is that she's a marathon runner, and was just recovering from some pain from her last try at training for an AIDS marathon. That Heinlein guy never mentioned this in Stranger In A Strange Land. But somehow I don't feel cheated. If you're still worried about the whole "Manson cult" thing, you should see the scar one of my other family members just got. A lamp fell on him. He's this intense biker tech guy with a superman fixation. I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them.
(*)there's no word for what we do as a family. It's not common enough to get a definition. Some call it polyamory, others call it open marriages, and some would call it communalism. The words aren't what's important.

While some girl corrects a couple of Star Trek details I screwed up.

Star Trek: TNG is set in the 24th century. That would make it THREE hundred years in the future. Not two hundred. And you didn't key in a code to get what you wanted from the replicator on the Enterprise-D. You just told it what you wanted. You know, like, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." And there you had it.

GAY WEDDINGS

Again I stand corrected. There were 2500 gay weddings in the Bay Area over the long weekend, to which I can only paraphrase Col. Kilgore in one of my favorite movies. -- "I love the news of gay weddings in the morning. It's news of...chaos."

WHAT US WORRY?

But this clip from the New York Times may indicate that all this discussion of a better world may be totally academic...

Recent astronomical measurements, scientists say, cannot rule out the possibility that in a few billion years a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation. “In some ways it sounds more like science fiction than fact," said Dr. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist who described this apocalyptic possibility in a paper with Dr. Marc Kamionkowski and Dr. Nevin Weinberg, from the California Institute of Technology, last year. The Big Rip is only one of a constellation of doomsday possibilities resulting from the discovery by two teams of astronomers six years ago that a mysterious force called dark energy seems to be wrenching the universe apart. Instead of slowing down from cosmic gravity, as cosmologists had presumed for a century, the galaxies started speeding up about five billion years ago, like a driver hitting the gas pedal after passing a tollbooth. Dark energy sounded crazy at the time, but in the intervening years a cascade of observations have strengthened the case that something truly weird is going on in the sky. It has a name, but that belies the fact that nobody really knows what dark energy is. In six years it has become one of the central and apparently unavoidable features of the cosmos, the surprise question mark at the top of everybody's list, undermining what physicists presumed they understood about space, time, gravity and the future of the universe.

CRYPTIQUE – Surf or fight!

ANYONE FOR UTOPIA?

How many of you remember Star Trek: The Next Generation? That was the second version of the show that boldly went where no TV show had gone before, the one with the Patrick Stewart and his shaved head as captain of the slick, new-model Starship Enterprise, with the bar and the “holodeck” where all fantasies were made virtual reality. The Mk 2 Enterprise also came with a neat device that looked like a microwave and could supply anything from a dry martini to clean underwear just by keying in the appropriate code. In a small backstory aside, viewers were informed that, when this marvelous stuff simulator was invented, money was abolished on Earth, and a whole new social order introduced.

This was supposedly two hundred years in the future, but it would seem that from MP3s to weblogs, the situation is already with us in the contemporary arts, and the obsolescence of money becomes technically possible. Okay so the record companies sue downloaders, and techies work on encryption devices so we still have to pay to watch movies, but these are only holding patterns. Writers wonder where it will all end. Some turn tricks, others pose as Nazis. Agents cop attitudes, and don’t return calls. Drummers move to Montana where bars still pay the band to play blues for drunks. Web and print scuffle for the same advertising dollars. Chaos is virtually upon us. And yet we can hardly have a culture that is entirely driven by elves, amateurs, and the unemployable.

You may have noticed that I’ve taken a day off from Bush bashing. This doesn’t mean that I have given up on evicting the weasel from the White House, but today I started reflecting on the shape of things just a few miles further down this road. The battle is not merely to get John Kerry into the White House for nothing more than a Dem course correction. Fear of the future is rapidly becoming the 21st century malady, and when the ignorant get scared they run to daddy. Daddy, of course, in political terms, is, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff, (I don’t have a link to hand, look him up!) points out, the totalitarianism of dictatorship. That is why I am so bent on bashing Bush. I recognize, with, I hope, some accuracy that the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld quartet and the voice of PNAC are the thin end of an Imperial American dictatorship.

Maybe with Bush currently polling five points behind Kerry, he is not so invincible as he looked at the end of last year, but what’s ahead? Can the kind of democracy formulated by 18th century gentleman farmers cope with a techno-driven social upheaval that promises to be as radical and disruptive as the Industrial Revolution and the Italian Renaissance combined? Right now half my cable channels are down, but Comcast, while trying to buy Disney, have instituted a policy of charging me $1.99 to complain to a human being. They have a monopoly on my TV service, unless I re-tech to satellite, or go back to eight channels and rabbit ears with bits of tinfoil on them. I’m not only screwed but left prostrate for further uninvited penetration. That is how corporate capitalism copes with change.

So, brothers and sisters, what are your thoughts on all this? I am not preaching doom and gloom, and ain't that a change? A golden road could be paved for our tried feet, but it will require a massive creativity. But the very survival of creativity is being choked off. I’d really like to hear from all who read this. Short comments on the absurd comments board, but longer reflections to byron4D@aol.com. They will be posted.

NOTE

How many gay weddings were there today in San Francisco? A hundred?

RESPONSE TO YESTERDAYS BECK/FARREN

from mfc
Henri LeBeque...how dare you mention mendacity and not Burl...and I think there's room for The Rifleman in there somewhere

CRYPTIQUE – Somebody say amen.

DID YOU MISS ME?

Yeah well, it was a weekend not so much lost as spent running behind the metaphoric bus, and not managing quite to get on it, mainly because of Mixmaster Eric and his using me and the CityBeat crew as guinea pigs for his glow in the dark cocktails, although the golden-orange ones were very nice – Carmen Miranda’s Tropical Pussy or something. I really have to compose the names of Eric’s drinks for him. I did create a moment of drama, though, when the TV in the bar was running by default, tuned to some History Channel-type show about famous executions, it being the anniversary of the hanging of alleged Lindburg baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, and everyone was suddenly watching with such rapt and grisly attention that I felt I had to remonstrate with full Shakespearian projection that this was not appropriate bar-viewing on a Friday night – even the 13th – and then storm out for a smoke. When I came back, Jimi Hendrix was on the jukebox and the lights had been dimmed and all was much more as I felt it should be. So I guess I prevailed, but maybe I am turning into an irascible old geezer. Who knows?

DIALOGUE

The following exchange occurred on Sunday afternoon with Henry Cabot Beck, although you do need an extensive knowledge of old movies and Tennessee Williams to follow it.

Re “Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard.”

Beck – We're going to find that like Orson Welles' Mr Arkadin AKA Confidential Report, guys who could actually come forward and talk about bending elbows, snorting blow, chasing West Texas hookers, tipping cattle, and evading the war with GWB will have disappeared, one at a time, in the vast indifference of the Texas outback. Other movie references: Cliff Robertson in Picnic, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) in Written On The Wind, Anthony Franciosa as Jody Varner sucking up to Will Varner (Orson Welles again) in The Long Hot Summer. All stories about bad sons with too much money, mean and miserable, trying to make daddy happy or stand in his shoes. If this were the film Giant, GWB would be seen as a child playing in the dirt with an toy oil derrick, a tin soldier and an empty whisky bottle. Chill Wills would play Dick Cheney.

Farren – But where is Jett Rink?

Beck – He's Phil Spector.

Farren – Oh, I though he might be Ted Turner. More important though, in the Giant analogue, where is Liz?

Beck – To my mind, the tragedy of GWB is that he never had a great, big-titted fag hag Liz Taylor dominatrix drama queen to pick him up by the scruff of the neck like Roy Horn and drag him away from Big Daddy like Maggie The Cat did for Brick. Of course GB had Barbara, but Laura Bush is neither Big Mama nor Maggie nor even Hillary. Come to think of it, Bill would have made a good Brick. And worst of all, Big Daddy Bush (Bradford Dillman?) never gave GW the much needed speech about mendacity. Of course the crux of the play is that nearly everybody in it is a lying liar. The world may be ready for Cat On A Hot Tin White House.

OBITUARY

Munz sends the following clip...

Feb. 13, 2004 – The Wisc.Post-Crescent

His daughter remembers him as a man with a pad of paper and pen, always writing articles or jotting down memos. For the man who first used the term "psychedelic," the end came in Appleton. Psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, 86, died at home Feb. 6. Osmond and his wife, Jane, had been living with their daughter in her Appleton home for the past four years. He moved to Appleton from Alabama. Euphemia Blackburn, 45, said her father had been an invalid for about 13 years. "He went quietly at home," Blackburn said Thursday. Osmond, born in England in 1917, is said to have coined "psychedelic" in a letter to British author Aldous Huxley to describe manifestations of the mind. Osmond, researcher of such mind-altering substances as LSD and mescaline, gave Huxley mescaline in the 1950s. Huxley related his experience in "The
Doors of Perception." Osmond was interested in researching the way LSD altered perceptions of
time and space and whether it could help could help alcoholics kick their addiction.

CRYPTQUE – I might as well live.

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A SHORT INTERUPTION OF SERVICE
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Due to a bout of Friday 13th drunkeness -- and the resulting hangover -- brought on by Mixmaster Eric and his glow in the dark cocktails, Doc40 for St. Valentine's Day was massacred. And the Sunday post is kind of pathetic. A full account of the incident, or at least some lame excuses, will follow on Monday. The following poem sets the mood...

A LONG WALK WITH THE DEMON

All his life he'd walked with the demon
From the Radium Room to the Palace of Mirrors
From the Canadian border to the Place of Skulls
All his life he'd walked with the demon
At regular intervals, his friends had come to him
And pleaded that he cast it from him

The demon drove him to the madness
The craving for the adoration of the mob
The reason that all but one of his women had left him
The demon might mature and modify
Making him more comfortable with the passage of the nightmare
But he would never be free

The demon would never let him be free
Never allow itself to be cast out or put aside
Symbiosis, home boy, it told him
A twin singularity

Written in 1993. Recorded in the same year with Tijuana Bible for the CD Gringo Madness, released by Big Beat, London 1993.

CRYPTIQUE -- Give me a fucking break!

INSPIRATIONAL PARABLES

I’ve always hated that story about the guy with no shoes who meets a guy with no legs and doesn’t feel so bad. You know why? Because the guy with no shoes was a wino with prostate cancer, and the guy with no legs was a billionaire Columbian drug lord with one of these ultra-tech wheelchairs like Stephen Hawking. (And while we’re on the subject, how did Stephen Hawking cheat on his wife?)

THE RED OCTOBER TRACTOR FACTORY

Whenever I hit one of the sloughs of depression and despondency that make artists such a pain in the ass to be around, I remind myself of the two Russian soldiers who, during the World War II siege of Stalingrad, manned a machine gun nest in the Red October Tractor Factory for 52 straight days, frequently starving and always freezing. I mean, how can that determination and suffering be compared to, say, the fear of creative failure or the pangs of unrequited love? And yet maybe one or both of them, in another time and another place, ached for a lost love to the point of suicidal contemplation. Which, of course, begs the question can pain, or joy for that matter, ever be quantified?

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

(WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR MR. PRESIDENT? #1)

Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard. Clip courtesy of Billy via natalien...

During the Vietnam War, I was what filmmaker Michael Moore would call a "deserter." Along with President Bush and countless other young men, I joined the National Guard, did my six months of active duty (basic training, etc.) and then returned to my home unit, where I eventually dropped from sight. In the end, just like President Bush, I got an honorable discharge. But unlike President Bush, I have just told the truth about my service. He hasn't. At least I don't think so. Nothing about Bush during that period -- not his drinking, not his partying -- suggests that he was a consistently conscientious member of the Texas or Alabama Air National Guard. As it happens, there are no records to show that Bush reported for duty during the summer and fall of 1972. Nonetheless, Bush insists he was where he was supposed to be -- "Otherwise I wouldn't have been honorably discharged," Bush told Tim Russert. Please, sir, don't make me laugh. It is sort of amazing that every four or eight years, Vietnam -- that long-ago war -- rears up from seemingly nowhere and comes to figure in the national political debate. In 1988 Dan Quayle had to answer for his National Guard service. In 1992 Bill Clinton had to grapple with the question of how he avoided the Vietnam-era draft. Now George Bush, who faced this question the last time out, has to face it again. The reason is that this time he is likely to compete against a genuine war hero. John Kerry did not duck the war. But George Bush did. He did so by joining the National Guard. Bush now wants to drape the Vietnam-era Guard with the bloodied flag of today's Iraq-serving Guard -- "I wouldn't denigrate service to the Guard," Bush warned during his interview with Russert -- but the fact remained that back then the Guard was where you went if you did not want to fight. That was the case with me. I opposed the war in Vietnam and had no desire to fight it. Bush, on the other hand, says he supported the war -- as long, it seems, as someone else fought it.
It hardly matters what Bush did or did not do back in 1972. He is not the man now he was then -- that by his own admission. In the same way, it did not matter that Clinton ducked the draft, because, really, just about everyone I knew at the time was doing something similar. All that really matters is how one accounts for what one did. Do you tell the truth (which Clinton did not)? Or do you do what I think Bush has been doing, which is making his National Guard service into something it was not? In his case, it was a rich kid's way around the draft. In my case, it was something similar -- although (darn!) I was not rich. I was, though, lucky enough to get into a National Guard unit in the nick of time, about a day before I was drafted. I did my basic and advanced training (combat engineer) and returned to my unit. I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp, but I found them inconvenient. I "moved" to California and then "moved" back to New York, establishing a confusing paper trail that led, really, nowhere. For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky.
To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed. In the end, I wound up in the Army Reserve. I was assigned to units for which I had no training -- tank repairman, for instance. In some units we sat around with nothing to do, and in one we took turns delivering antiwar
lectures. The National Guard and the Reserves were something of a joke. Everyone knew it. Books have been written about it. Maybe things changed dramatically by 1972, two years after I got my discharge, but I kind of doubt it. I have no shame about my service, but I know it for what it was -- hardly the Charge of the Light Brigade.
When Bush attempts to drape the flag of today's Guard over the one he was in so long ago, when he warns his critics to remember that "there are a lot of really fine people who have served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National Guard today in Iraq," then he is doing now what he was doing then: hiding behind the ones who were really doing the fighting. It's about time he grew up.

(See tomorrow for #2)

A MUSICIAN JOKE I NEVER HEARD BEFORE

A young child says to his mother, "Mom, when I grow up I think I'd like to be a musician." She replies, "Well honey, you know you can't do both."

CRYPTIQUE – Friday 12A

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ANNOUNCEMENT

For those of you in and around Los Angeles, Mick Farren will be signing the paperback of his novel UNDERLAND tomorrow, Saturday, Feb 14th, 2.00PM – 4.00PM at ...
Dark Delicacies
4213 W. Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, 818-556-6660 / 888-darkdel

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