A funny thing happened on November 4th. I voted for a Presidential candidate who won.
I know, a lot of you did, but I’ve voted in every election since 1980, and this is the first time I marked the ballot for the person who actually won. Now I am left with this odd feeling that something is terribly wrong.
Continue reading “Soon we’ll find out who is the real revolutionary”
I was having a beer with some young chaps from work the other night, and the Clash song “Rudie Can’t Fail” came on the jukebox. I said, “Ah, London Calling, the greatest rock and roll album ever made,” and one of the guys I was with whipped out his combination phone/computer/teleportation device and typed in “London Calling,” and said, “Got it!”
I didn’t think anything of it, but the next day he had the album on his iPod and was listening to it. A couple of days later he came in to my office and said, “So why is London Calling the greatest rock and roll album of all time?”
The baseball playoffs are underway, and today the Phillies beat the Dodgers. Isn’t that – I don’t know – exciting? I don’t get it, myself. Rooting for a professional sports team. Isn’t is kind of like rooting for Hummer to beat Land Rover in sales this quarter?
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the history of regional rivalries in professional sports. But it’s been a couple decades, at least, since players showed allegiance to anyone other than their agents. When I was a kid, pretty much the same group of guys would show up every year and put on Viking or Twins uniforms. There was a continuum there, and you felt like the players represented your state or your city.
Okay, I’m going to rave about a fringe movie again, one that will only appeal to one out of every hundred people who read this, but it’s what I do, so don’t try to stop me. The last one, Rockers, is mainly of interest to old school reggae lovers and Jamaicaphiles, and this one will hit a chord primarily with old punks and possibly fans of Diane Lane and Laura Dern. It’s called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.
It was one of Lane’s first films after A Little Romance, which made a big splash in 1979 and landed her on the cover of TIME magazine. Lane had just turned 15 when they began filming The Fabulous Stains, and Laura Dern was even younger (12 years old when filming began!), with only a bit part in 1979’s B movie classic, Foxes, to her credit.
Continue reading “He Was an Old Man in a Young Girl’s World”
So, this band I was in during the late 1980s was in a movie. It was a lot of fun. You know, pretending to play for hours while they film you from on top, behind, up your nose and every other which way you can imagine. Yeah, it was a real blast. “A little more energy, fellows!”
If you needed proof that even the Republican party considers the next presidential election to be a “gimme” for Obama, look no further than the decision today to run Sarah Palin as Vice President next to John McCain.
From the great state of Alaska, where every politician is either under investigation or already indicted for corruption and fraud, Palin is herself under investigation for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan because he wouldn’t carry out a personal vendetta for her and fire her former brother-in-law from the state police.
Continue reading “The answer my friend, is blowing a lobbyist out back”
Someone asked me why I write such angry things about Christians. I’ll answer here, so everyone can point and laugh in one convenient location.
I don’t have a problem with Christians. I don’t really care about them. They never cross my mind, honestly, you know, with the exception of the times when one of them says something profoundly idiotic, which is just about every four seconds.
Continue reading “All of human history on the head of a pin…or a pinhead, I forget which”
I watched the movie Rockers again over the weekend. This is absolutely and unequivocally tied for my favorite movie of all time. Rockers is my Woodstock, baby.
Shot in Jamaica in 1976 and 1977, the golden age of reggae music, this film is packed with legendary roots musicians as “actors,” great music, and a wicked revenge story that culminates in a sort of shantytown Christmas mornin’, iya!
Continue reading “I’m like a stepping razor, don’t you watch my size, I’m dangerous”
Way back in the olden days (January of 1995) I signed a fancy looking contract with Mother Road Publications for a book of poems and short stories. It was a long and drawn out birth (as these things usually are in the small press) but finally, in April of 1997, alternative man appeared.
It was my first book and I was pretty excited about it. When the first 5 or 10 copies came in the mail I opened one of them and smelled it. “Yeah, that smells like a real book,” I thought. Hey, you do weird things when it’s yours.
Continue reading “Harry Potter, I’m coming to kick your ass!”
Well, this is pretty cool; youvebeenleftbehind.com. In a nutshell, this guy, Mark Heard, is running a service that will contact your loved ones for you, via email, after the “rapture.”
The rapture, in case you didn’t know, is when JESUS comes and takes all the boys and girls who have behaved and eaten their vegetables up to heaven to prance around forever in white robes and watch the rest of us suffer an eternity under the thumb of the beast SATAN.
Continue reading “The Land of the Lost, without the Sleestaks”
When I was six years old I wanted to be in the Beatles. But I didn’t have a guitar, and it seemed awfully difficult to actually be in the Beatles, and, maybe most importantly, I was only six years old.
I wanted to be in the Beatles for quite some time, actually. You know, until they broke up and then no one could be in the Beatles, not even really excellent musicians. To fill the void that was left by the dead Beatles, between the ages of 10 and 15 I wanted to be in a newer and decidedly more weird and dangerous crop of bands. Bands like Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and KISS.
Continue reading “Fly me to the moon, then blow that shit up!”
It’s a beautiful time to be a photographer. Just like it’s a beautiful time to be in a real band with real non-computerized music, or to be an artist who paints something other than encephalitic pre-teen girls in frilly dresses with dead deer eyes that only appeal to perverted Japanese wankers and U.S. hipsters who would worship dog shit if you told them it was cool to do so.
I say it’s a great time because I feel the inevitable pendulum swing away from the dead and dying and back to the living. It may not happen tomorrow or next year, but there are a whole hell of a lot of disenfranchised youths out there who are aching for some truth. One of the ways they are finding their truth is with old music equipment, old artistic technologies, and crappy, less than precise photographic equipment.
Continue reading “I can see for miles, but it’s kind of blurry up ahead”
Have you ever heard of Dean Cameron?
I know, neither had I. Then someone pointed me to a site he runs; spamscamscam.com. When I hit the site I was kind of shocked, since the design and layout is lifted – exactly – from a version of datapimp site that was up for about five years.
The internet never forgets! I can tell you that much for sure.
Well, you know, parts of the internet.
In the early days of the WWW, all the print articles panted and drooled over the possibilities that such a permanent, freely available archive would offer. No longer would we be bound to those nasty old books and periodicals. Every grain of human knowledge would be a few clicks away (if not via WWW, then grab all the world’s files with gopher!).
I stuck the knife deep into the heart of datapimp.com on Sunday, and killed off my little 8 year old project. 8 years and three months to be exact, but who’s counting. That’s a long time to run an unsuccessful web business. I think we may have set some kind of record.
By unsuccessful I don’t mean it lost money – we usually made money. Just enough to pay for the infrastructure, such as it was. No one who ever worked on it took away a penny.
Continue reading “I haven’t given up, I’ve just stopped trying”