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[Necrofeelya]
Mirror pleasure death. And suddenly I felt okay, this was my way of dying today.
Personal account from New Orleans
No one could hurt me, if I just kept walking.
I asked him to light my ciggarette, not for advice.
“What’s the matta girl, you’re so beautiful. I bet you could have any man you wanted, other than the one you wanted. Don’t you know it always works that way?”
Ha ha ha.. He chuckled and I turned away.
“Come back girl. Don’t you wanna talk? I could love you. Let’s go for a walk.”
People are dying I told him, and so am I. But he didn’t get it. So I kept walking.
Walking and walking and walking until my coffee was as cold as the wind, and my face was numb, and there was a hole forming in the sole of my leather boot.
I tried to remember all of the hope I brought to this city when I first arrived, as I stood inside a sliver of sunlight hoping for some kind of revelation. And just for a moment I felt okay.
“Hey Sexy,” said another passerby, and I felt sick in my empty stomach.
They all want you, they all wanna love you and touch you all over. You’re so shiny and new to them. Until they see whats inside of you, until they see the scars on your skin, until they see you broken down, the decaying skeleton beneath that your skin.
Then suddenly they feel like some kind of necropheliac. Then it’s back to the girls with new shoes and flowers in their hair. They may not be as much fun but at least they’re still alive.
And they don’t realize that they’re the ones who killed you in the first place. When you were twelve years old and your mother wasn’t home and they said “come here girl, your so pretty. I’ll teach you what life is all about.”
They told you, you were beautiful. And you were. Thank god for that. Thank god for men.
So I kept walking. In search of this wonderful bookstore I’d seen yesterday, I was in such a daze I could hardly remember where it was. But I was determined to find it, and finally I did. And as I sat on the couch writing this, a man stopped and said…
“You’re so pretty, why don’t you smile?”
And I felt like I could hardly breathe.
So I ran home.
I adjusted the mirror just right and undressed myself for it. I ran my cold hands over warm skin, this time without any fear. I’m still alive. But the whole world is burning up and I’m just lying here. Pleasure was as close to death as I could get, so I thought of you, and I let your shadow lick me in-between glances and I lifted myeslf higher and higher with my reflection, until I was dying, I’m dying I’m dying. And I died there in my own arms. I kissed myself and the mirror and couldn’t help but just fucking laugh.
I left the house without my lighter. I asked a stranger for a light, and told him, “Thank you, sir.”
He laughed and said “Don’t call me sir, I work for a living and no one has knighted me yet.”
And he didn’t call me pretty or ask for my phone number, and he smiled and so did I as I walked away.
I thought to myself, strangers are really the most interesting people you can meet, and then for another moment I felt okay. This was my way of dying today.
Ugly Tales and Parables
 Lance Carbuncle
Grundish and Askew, A Novel
Vicious and Galoot Publishing, Tampa, FL 2009
Review by Kent Manthie
So many fans, a real “cult-following”, if you will, loved Lance Carbuncle’s first novel, Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed that he was motivated enough to write a follow-up. This came out in the form of the brand new Grundish and Askew, a strange and twisted tale of two life-long friends, Grundish (that’s all we know him by, never getting a first name) and Leroy Askew, scion of a long line of convicted criminals and prison fodder. But Askew hates to be called Leroy so most everyone calls him Askew. Everyone, that is, except his “great-aunt” Turleen, who only has one lung left and is under doctor’s orders not to smoke, so takes great enjoyment out of the secondhand smoke of someone else. “Blue Llama” is the fictitious name of the cigarettes that the duo smoke.
Anyway, Askew has one main goal in life and it is to not end up like his father, uncles, grandfather and great-grandfather all the way down the line, who’ve all been locked up in Eastern State Penitentiary, which closed for good in 1971, just after Askew’s father had been paroled from there. Darrell Askew’s one goal for his son was that he not follow the family tradition and get locked up like the last three generations of Askew males. So, according to Askew, “he put the fear of the hoosegow in me…”, telling him all kinds of ugly tales and parables just scary enough to make one want to never get in trouble.
Grundish, on the other hand, was a big guy, for one. When he was 16 he was already six-foot-three and 220 pounds and so was not one to get picked on or take any crap from anyone. Grundish, unlike his best friend, had been locked up – several times, going back to his juvenile days. He’d been locked up in and out of “juvee” many times. It seemed that Grundish had a liking for getting stuff, it’s just that he didn’t cotton to the “paying-for-them” part of it, which is what got him into so much trouble.
When Grundish was 16 his mother sent him to a drug rehab program that he initially thought would be better than going back to juvenile detention. But, man, was he wrong. So wrong that he escaped from there just to finish his time in juvee. [there really is a cult-like drug-rehab program called "The Straights" -and Carbuncle's description of what he referred to in the book as "Straight, Inc." is straight out of what is on freedomofmind.com, an anti-cult website, just type in "The Straights" in the search box and you'll be able to read almost the exact same conditions that former members describe. According to Steve Hassan, the founder of Freedom Of Mind, "The Straights are indeed a cult"; they fill all the criteria of a brainwashing, individual-separating, dogma-spouting organization - a cult in the worst sense of the word-KM]
Time passes, the two grow up, Askew manages to stay out of prison, but Grundish, on the other hand, does a few more stints in real prison, until, after his last lockup he vowed not to let himself get caught anymore.
From there on the pair live together in a trailer park, Askew delivering pizzas and Grundish would get by by breaking into a house where the occupants were out of town and basically stay there, eating their food, drinking their expensive liquor and wearing their expensive clothes, then stealing all the good stuff he could find and come home with tons of expensive meats, clothes, electronics, etc.
The two lived happily like this and then one day, after getting thrown out of the nursing home she was in for killing the home’s dog, Stubs, who she thought was an “angel of death”, because so many old folks seemed to die soon after Stubs was around them. A kind of “canine grim reaper” you could call him, Turleen, Askew’s “great-aunt” or some distant relative – neither were quite sure what else to call each other – moved in with the two because she didn’t really have anywhere else to go, no other family to take care of her. They didn’t really mind and she wasn’t much of a bother anyway.
Their adventure really begins when Askew suddenly starts to unravel and starts going psychotic, killing and maiming people who’ve done him wrong, and on and on.
One day, after Grundish goes a little nuts himself, throwing frozen stolen hot dogs at all the child molester-neighbors at the trailer park (they didn’t really have anywhere else to live, you wouldn’t want one as your neighbor, would you?) and then when one of them, known as “Bumpy D” comes at the pair, as if to fight back, but instead pulls his pants down and “ka-plooey” – all over Askew’s face, he goes into a blind rage and beats Bumpy D so savagely until his face looked like hamburger and he’s dead, they have to get the hell out of the trailer park ASAP and so, they take all they can, load up Askew’s beloved El Camino and take Aunt Turleen with them and hit the road. Going on an adventurous road trip that involves killing a couple other people, including Mr. Buttwynn, at whose house the trio was staying at because they knew the family was out of town. What they didn’t expect was for Mr. Buttwynn to sneak out of the vacation, leaving on the pretext of having to go back to work and instead heading home for some hot sex with this little teen-aged prostitute named Dora. Long story short, Buttwynn surprises the two drunken guys while playing pool on his pool table and it ends with Askew beating Buttwynn to death. They don’t kill Dora or hurt her, but end up taking her with, which is what she wants.
So now there’s four of them.
I’ve probably told you too much here anyway, so I’m just going to say that the book is very funny. In fact, I haven’t read a book where I’ve laughed out loud since I read (and reviewed) Watch Out! By Joseph Suglia.
Carbuncle is a very stylish writer, who is also very clever in his prose. He drops bits of song lyrics from Frank Zappa, (“Is that a real poncho, I mean, a Mexican poncho, or is that a Sears poncho?”) to Bob Dylan (“Your long-time curse hurts, but what’s worse is this pain in here/Ain’t it clear…”) Carbuncle’s writing style is a very enthralling one, the book is a veritable page turner, all the way to the end, which I am not going to spoil by giving it away, just that there includes two dogs (one is the ghost of Stubs) from another dimension and Alf, the Sacred Burro and an 89 year-old lover of Turleen’s who happens to be named Jerry Mathers.
The best part of the whole story is that it is not a predictable trashy, Danielle Steele-style kindling paper, but an imaginative, almost hallucinatory tale of madness, traveling and free spirits doing what they want.
So, to get to the heart of the matter, pick up Grundish and Askew at your local book dealer or, probably more easily, on Amazon.com.
- KM
AntiQuark, Sky Dancer
Hungry Eye Records
Review by Kent Manthie
The other day, someone turned me onto a relatively new band, AntiQuark, and their new CD, Sky Dancer, out now on Hungry Eye Records. AntiQuark is threaded by electronica, rock, pop and a kind of new-new wave style. Their first single, if you want to call it that, “Man From Mars” has a techno-club, dance beat behind a sensible pop melody.
The Atmospheric ethereality, notwithstanding, AntiQuark are a combo of pop music players nonpareil. The first track, “Man From Mars” was probably recorded as a label-catcher or radio-friendly fare, as its pop sensibility shows, but when one digs deeper, like “Planet X”, which mixes a mission control-to-spaceship radio contact sample with swirling sounds and an edgier beat, a song destined to be remixed infinitely for loud, danceteria club mixes. Besides the space connotations it evokes, “Planet X” also has a very sensual output to it, there’s something to it that would definitely bring two hot, sweaty club kids together in a feverish dervish sort of dance. “Shameless” is a sweaty, swinging minuet that oozes sex and is driven entirely by synths and drum machines.
The vocals on Sky Dancer remind me a little of The Wolfgang Press, but with a much more trance-inducing, mesmerizing, spaced-out, melting environment style.
Other songs worth mentioning are “Drawer 4”, another song that digs deeper into their electronica side along with “Planet X”, the latter of which starts out with samplings of mission control-to-spaceship radio transmissions and has an atmospheric, ethereal vibe to it that also gets all hot and bothered, with heated up sensuality and is sure to bring together two ecstasy and liquor-fueled club kids together.
Another song which leaves the space junk (ie, old satellites, orbiting scrap metal, etc, nothing to do with their awesome touch) behind and goes straight for the heart is “Aldila”, a slowed down, breathy sex storm of a song, just perfect for making love to, with its big beats, its quiet synth waves and whispered French lyrics, it is another kink in anyone who thinks this band is a one-song combo.
But it is a one-woman band. The entirety of AntiQuark is Ant Dakini, who founded AntiQuark in 2001 and since then has recruited SergioO to add the sensuality of his vocal style, which was a good move.
Besides being an innovative transcendent musician, Dakini is also a marine biologist who specializes in shark biology. So, she is a busy woman, to say the least, but a very studied woman as well as gifted with musical greatness.
Keep on listening and you should be tempted to buy the Sky Dancer for your next house party or for the next time you’re out clubbing and bring home some that special someone.
-KM
[Q & A]
Ducky Waddles Emporium Survives
One of San Diego’s fine art bookstore owners talks candidly about the challenges of staying in business in today’s cyber-oriented environment.
“The proliferation of hand held hardware platforms that display e-books such as Amazon’s Kindle will render print books almost obsolete.”
A discussion with Jerry Waddle, book seller and art dealer.
Email interview by Reviewer Rob
Reviewer Rob: Hey Jerry, you mentioned a few things over the phone that I’d like for you to elaborate upon. I will try to recreate them here…
1. “The day of the independent bookstore is just about over.” Could you expand on maybe why this is exactly? Many large and established long-time San Diego bookstores have closed their doors recently. Does this worry you?
Jerry Waddle: The day of the Independant bookstore is just about over. On one hand you have the retail giants, Barnes & Noble, (800 stores), Borders, (1000 stores), Wal-Mart, (4000 stores), Costco, (350 stores) all with the buying power that allows them to purchase books for much less than the Independents pay. Then you have the on-line monster Amazon that offers retail prices on new books that are often less that the wholesale cost that Independents have to pay. Next in line are the giant used book sellers ABE (owned by Amazon), Biblio, Half.com, (owned by E-bay), Alibris, and others whose mega sellers have millions of books priced at $1.00 each but their volume is so large that they actually make a profit of about $.25 on each book but this profit comes from the S&H fee rather than the price of the book. It’s impossible to compete with these monsters.
2. “Books will not disappear, there are too many out there.” Then you mentioned electronic reading devices like Kindle. How familiar are you with these new contraptions and how are they going to play into the book market in the near future?
Books will not disappear, there are too many of them out there but there will be very little if any profit to be had in selling them. As the Independants go under, their stock that doesn’t end up in the landfill is purchased by the giant on-line vendors for pennies on the dollar and this then provides additional stock to be offered at $1.00 each. The proliferation of hand held hardware platforms that display e-books suh as Amazon’s Kindle will render print books almost obsolete. The Intel-Reader even transforms text to digital and then allows audio playback. It’s only a matter of time until technology will allow HD book illustrations to be viewed on your TV screen and if you need to print a picture you can get high quality photo reproduction from your printer downloaded directly from your hand held device. Any printing costs will be transfered from the publishers to the book buying public.
3. “My online book sales have increased, doubled this year, while my in-store business has decreased dramatically.” Where do you ship to and where are your book-buying customers geographically? How do they find you and what are they looking for?
My online book sales have increased, doubled this year, while my in-store business has decreased dramatically by as much as 80%. I ship books all over the world. My customers find me on line. I sell on ABE and on my own site and I specialize in hard to find titles and I try to price them very competitively so when a potential customer does a search they find me.
4. “I am getting rid of stock, much of it at 50% off!” What are some of the current best book or art buying values that are to be found at your store this month?
I am getting rid of stock, much of it at 50% off! Having initially priced my books competitively, discounting them by 50% makes them real bargains.
5. “Getting rid of a lot of the stuff that’s irrelevant…” Is your focus going to be art as in painting, modern illustrations, art history, cartooning, art photography, or what will you focus on with your new store?
Getting rid of a lot of the stuff that’s irrelevant… Not irrelevant in the general sense, just irrelevant to my future specialization.
6. “Ducky Waddles will be a center for cultural studies.” Tell us about this. Will you have classes, serve food? What will it be like?
Ducky Waddles will be a center for cultural studies.
In addition to my art gallery, the book store will be specializing in “The Arts”, fine art, applied arts, photography, architecture, design, fashion, graphic art, street art, body art, music, poetry, drama, etc. These are subjects that I have always covered very well. I may have the finest art book selection in San Diego County. I will be refining my stock to this end and continue to host art gallery events, poetry events, music events, lectures and discussions on topics of interest to my clientele. By doing this I hope to remain relevant to my customer base and sustain my position in the community. If my public doesn’t agree and support me then I will close my store.
While this scenario may not represent the future that Ray Bradbury prophesied in Farenheidt 451, it does feed into the dumbing down of our society that has resulted from the inability of our public school sytem to adequately educate our young people. Kids don’t read books, they watch TV, movies, and play video games. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “A book is a book. How many more do you have to look at?”
Thanks for everything, Jerry, for all you’ve done for local literary and art culture and for all you will continue to do in the future! ~RR
:::
Visit Ducky Waddle’s Emporium
online:
duckywaddles.com
brick & mortar:
414 North Coast Highway 101
Encinitas, CA 92024-2529
(760) 632-0488
The Hidden Lives of Unhappy Hipsters
“It was comforting to know that the neighbors had stopped speaking.”
:::
“He couldn’t stand another night with that smug hookah.”
:::
“He sipped his tepid coffee and pondered how to tell her that, in fact, the pants made the sack dress even less appealing.”
:::
[From unhappyhipsters.com. ]
Emily Wells
The Symphonies: Dreams, Memories & Parties
Creative Control Records
Review by Kent Manthie
It’s been a little while since I last wrote up a review of Ms. Wells. Last time it was for her debut solo CD, Beautiful Sleepyhead and the Laughing Yaks. What I can recall of that disc is that it was a beautiful, atmospheric showcase with a bit of “small-town” flavor to it. The songs were eclectic, some melancholy, some full of hope, but never dark or depressive.
On her latest CD, The Symphonies: Dreams, Memories & Parties, Wells takes a slightly different approach to her style. This time out it has a more urbane hook to it, even a little hip-hop flava thrown in for good measure, but still around is the ubiquitous violin that she’s been playing since she was four years old. It actually fits in quite well with the rest of the music.
Born in Amarillo, Texas, she and her family moved to Indianapolis in 1990. But having had enough of those small town blues she set out on her own and went a-traveling, ending up in that city of cities, New York, where she set up shop and stayed until 2002 when she moved out to Los Angeles, which is where she has decided to stay and make it her “home base”.
Now, when I mentioned that this was her second “official” CD, I was referring to CDs that were “professionally” made (whatever that means), but really, she’s been putting together her own CDs of whatever kind of stuff that she felt like doing. This is going back to when she was 13 and recorded a cassette tape full of her music and actually produced 100 copies, which, I suppose, are or will be soon, much sought after.
She not only is quite the musician and a wry songwriter, but she has an angelic voice that resonates well, it’s not too timid and not too brash, but it has a signature all her own.
With all those self-made recordings of hers she did get some attention – she received some attention from Epic Records (a division of Sony Entertainment) and flirted with the idea but in the end she demurred from signing with them (smart move!)
The attention has been streaming her way, nonetheless: in September of 2009 she appeared on “Last Call with Carson Daly”, one the myriad late night talk shows, where she performed “Symphony 1: in the Barrel of a Gun” to a, no doubt, stunned audience. So, it’s nice that talented indie artists are getting some media attention.
Besides the aforementioned tune, a couple other standouts on The Symphonies… include: “Symphony 4: America’s Mercy War”, “Symphony 6: Fair Thee Well & The Requiem Mix” and “Symphony 9 & The Sunshine”. In fact, the whole CD is a great, chill-out CD that is always a treat to listen to, so it’s hard to pick a favorite. Really, it should be just listened to all in one setting.
I’m hoping that Ms. Wells is going to wow us with another unique, golden album sometime soon. I know I can’t wait and also would love to see her play live (coming to San Diego anytime soon?) -KM
Barley Wine Review
Flying Dog Horn Dog Barley Ale
by Jennifer Nastri
At one point in time I was quite a beer snob. Ironically before I was twenty-one my taste in beer was strictly imports or microbrews only. It had to cost $12 a six-pack to be good enough for me. The older I got, the cheaper I got, and now if it’s over $4 a sixer, you can pretty much forget it. Thank God I live in the land of pleasant living, where Natty Boh flows like (and some say tastes like) water and Pabst Tallboys for $2 a pop are the norm. Other than cider (how I love it so), I just don’t drink many brewed concoctions (technically Long Island Iced Tea and that delishus Iced Tea Vodka aren’t “brewed”) anymore. So when I found out I’d be reviewing barley wine, I knew I’d have plenty of past experiences to draw from. Adversely, it’s good to know that those days of yore when I knocked back Guinness, Red Stripe, Harp, Rogue, Sam Adams (not only Boston Lager but the seasonal Cranberry Lambic and Old Fezziwig as well as the elusive Triple Bock), and Samuel Smith’s, Peroni, Stella Artois, Chimay and Bass with reckless abandon weren’t just to get shitfaced at seventeen. They would later serve me as an excellent comparison point of research for this review I’m writing today. Yup, research. Why not?
Due to my extensive knowledge in all things alcoholic (and pretty much all things bad for you), I was surprised I hadn’t heard of barley wine (there’s something I don’t know all about? Believe me, I was just as surprised as you) and so I did a bit of “research”. First off, don’t let the name fool you, barley wine is a misnomer, and is no more a wine than Mad Dog. Barley wine is only a wine inasmuch as it has the same alcohol content as wine (8-12%) but is made of grain (such as….barley, uhh duhh) in lieu of grapes or other fruit. In the United States, where we value truth in advertising above all else (please get the sarcasm) barley wine must be identified as barley-wine styled ale. Though the barley wine I purchased and imbibed (oh yeah, I just said that) clearly was labeled as barley wine, it looks like your typical four-pack of high end beer (too fancy for something as cliché as a six-pack, puh-lease). Well at least the brand I got did. I wasn’t able to find a large selection. In fact, I didn’t have a selection at all. Granted, I did all my looking on a Saturday evening and around here liquor stores are closed on Sundees (calm down, we can get carryout), so I wasn’t able to devote much time to scouting out different stores and then picking and choosing from a wide array of selections. I didn’t know much about barley wine, but I did know that you couldn’t pick it up just anywhere, I couldn’t get it at the corner bullet-proof plastic corner store; the normal high end joint where I usually get my spirits. After stopping by and calling a few local liquor stores to no avail I was both worried and intrigued. What if I couldn’t find any and why couldn’t I find any? Was this stuff like absinthe? Was I gonna have to wait for someone to bring me a bottle from the Czech Republic? A few of my friends have had barley wine, yet no one could remember which liquor store they had bought it from or who made it. This just made me wonder if barley wine was so powerful it had erased their memory due to some sort of inebriant-induced blackout. I HAD to find some. Baltimore, of course, didn’t let me down. At a gourmet liquor store in Charles Village, I found one mythical four-pack left. Brewed by the Flying Dog Brewery (local, Western Maryland) I got me some Horny Dog Barley Wine to enjoy the following day with some friends during the Ravens/Patriots Playoff game. I figured we were gonna get our asses handed to us so badly, I better be in a stupor to dull the pain.
Sometime around the 3rd quarter, after eating my way through the first two and the realization we were gonna continue to make Tom Brady pout like a little bitch, I poured myself a glass. The first thing I noticed right away was that it was thicker than your average beer, almost syrupy, amber in colour and with little to no head. My friend and I clinked our glasses to our impending win and took a sip. Her first reaction? “Ew”. It’s definitely different than our steady diet of Boh. Though a bit bitter, it is also very crisp with a distinctively sharp aftertaste not unlike Rogue lager or even Bass. Just amplified. It very much brought to mind Samuel Adams Double Bock. A more tolerable concoction from Jim Koch and his Boston Brewing Co. than the corked blackness that is Samuel Adams Triple Bock, an ale so thick and potent not only is it illegal in most states at about 25% alcohol by volume, it is drunk in shot form only. Even then, you best have a chaser nearby.
The Horn Dog Barley Ale rests somewhere comfortably between the two. You can definitely taste the hops with that bitter-but-not-necessarily-unpleasant familiarity. There is an underlying fruitiness, but it’s most definitely a sipping beer. There will be no thirst quenching gulps or shotguns of barley wine during warm summer nights on a cigarette and bottle strewn front porch. Well, at least not for most of us. Americans are known for their love of watered down beers, so for those that prefer European ales, barley wine should be just what you’re looking for, save for the syrup-like consistency.
There very well could be chilly autumn evenings on a cozy couch with a Chimay glass of barley wine. Though I recommend you have a pillow on that couch because at 12% alcohol, after just one on a full stomach I was ready for a nap (as was the cranky Tom Brady, I’m sure). The combination of the heaviness of the ale and the high alcohol content hit me pretty quickly. It’s a sleepy, easy, happy buzz, and since it is a dense and hoppy flavoured beer you’re almost forced to slow down and appreciate each taste. Apparently barley wine is the closest thing to what our founding fathers and their founding fathers drank. Basically, barley wine is what beer was before Coors started tappin the Rockies and modern breweries started brewing beer as we know it today. All in all barley wine made an already good Sunday even better, but I’m not gonna rush out and buy some just to keep around. It’s a seasonal or occasional drink, and there just isn’t a permanent spot open next to charismatic (not to mention cheap—in a good way) Mr. Boh.
Sonic Youth – House of Blues, San Diego January 7, 2010
[Unattended] review By Kent Manthie
Something finally great rolled into San Diego on Thursday night: Sonic Youth played at the San Diego House of Blues.
SY now are officially a quintet with the addition of producer/engineer extraordinaire, Jim O’Rourke, who is or is not a member – I get differing opinions on that – Mark Ibold, ex-Pavement was recruited to be the “fifth Youth” but O’Rourke showed up downtown San Diego on January 7.
The show was packed – a sold out show, not surprising, given their preeminent status as the best art-noise-rock band around and the NYC downtown, grittiness of their style doesn’t hurt either.
Sonic Youth, misnomer though it may be nowadays, still haven’t lost the touch that they had back when they were young and carefree when they put out such classics as Sister, EVOL, Bad Moon Rising and their 1989 classic Daydream Nation.
This time out, supporting their latest CD, The Eternal, which still has the same intensity that’s gone into all their previous works, SY did a smattering of new tunes off the new album and, no doubt, wowed the crowd with the intensity of the new stuff, opening the show with “No Way” and then “Sacred Trickster”.
The show was mostly a showcase for the newest of their tunes, the stuff from The Eternal , which also included songs such as “Anti-Orgasm”, “Antenna”, “Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso), “What We Know” and much more.
Always loud as hell and full of artfully crafted feedback, guitar noise, not to mention the bombastic drumming from Steve Shelley, the band did its usual innovative antics and had to be fired up to play
I know I haven’t forgotten the two times I’ve seen Sonic Youth, the last time being in Minneapolis in June of 2000, when they played, with Stereolab, outside, on a stage set up in the space in front of the Walker Art Center, one of the two very cool and hip museums in that city (along with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts). Stereolab played first and, WOW, I was blown away by how well they pulled off their show live, that having been my first time seeing them (the second time I saw Stereolab was, coincidentally, at the San Diego House of Blues). Anyway, that night after Stereolab wrapped up their amazing show, the warm summer night’s sun started waning and soon darkness fell and Sonic Youth took the stage, not to be outdone by the previous band, they really lived up to their tag as a “downtown art-noise-rock band” and delivered a masterwork of a show, doing strange but interesting things with their guitars to make unique sounds and textures and with Kim even playing trumpet on one of the tunes. It was magic. The other time I saw them was when, along with Social Distortion playing first, SY opened up for Neil Young, on his Ragged Glory tour, with Crazy Horse in 1991, just after the first Gulf War had started – this was like January 16 or 18th and Neil didn’t let that go unnoticed, doing a Hendrix-like, anger-filled “Star-Spangled Banner” to get the show going.
For their encores, SY did two classics: “Shadow of a Doubt” and ”Death Valley ‘69″. My biggest regret is that I didn’t get there to see the show due to a miscommunication and subsequent transportation issues, the only thing that’ll make up for that will be when I see them live next time. - KM
Analysis
By Kent Manthie – Jan 9, 2010
When making an announcement that he won’t be running for governor of New York (like we really need or want the likes of him), “former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani…claim[ed] that this nation “had no domestic attacks” under President George W. Bush.”*
And you wonder why this idiot isn’t planning on running for governor. Maybe he ought to go take a class in recent American history first, so to get his stories correct. Giuliani is the third such crass Republican that has made a similar misstatement for no other reason than to attack President Obama and his administration, which is doing a much better job than the Bushies did. As far as I can tell, Obama hasn’t lied to America about the wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least Obama is doing his best to mitigate a terrible situation he inherited from former President Bush and his henchmen Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith and Richard Perle, to name a few of the hawks that were salivating at the prospect of invading Iraq at least two or three years before the “terrorist” attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and the plane that putatively was en route to another terrorist attack destination but was forced down in a deserted field in Shanksville, PA.
After these terrorist attacks that DID happen under Bush’s watch – eight months into his “selection” as president by the majority conservative (Republican-appointed) Supreme Court (Bush wasn’t elected by the popular vote, he lost by over 500,000 votes and because of the Republican controlled state of Florida with their purposely confusing “butterfly” ballots which caused 1000s of votes to be thrown out due to “overvotes” or “non-votes” – meaning that there were those infamous “hanging chads” still stuck to the ballots, which, even though it was obvious who was voted for, got tossed out anyway and if Gore had just won one of several close calls in states, the whole Florida debacle wouldn’t have mattered because Gore would’ve won the popular and electoral votes handily). But I digress, like I said, after those attacks that did occur on Bush’s watch and occurred even after many warnings and indications that something “really big” was about to happen – like, say, airplanes being used as missiles, targeting buildings in big cities, in order to create chaos and interfere with the economic system and martyrs out of a bunch of losers that were brainwashed by people who didn’t care about life, but worshipped a cult of death that wasn’t Islam at all, after Bush’s DCI, George Tenet missed boatloads of intelligence that practically screamed “we’re going to be under attack in a short time” as well as many other “classified briefings”, etc and the attacks happened anyway, Bush’s first action was to send armed forces over to Afghanistan, where these al-Qaeda training camps had been operating with impunity for years and bomb the hell out of them and then to take out the evil, theocratic, 12th Century living Taliban, all the while searching every nook and cave for Osama bin Laden, now public enemy #1, but never finding him or even his number two, the bespectacled doctor, how ironic – one who is trained to save lives now planning mass murders, the whole Afghanistan adventure seemed to be going well – the Taliban had been run out of the government, we installed our own puppet government, led by a former employee of UNOCAL, Hamid Karzai, who now, we know, is as corrupt as a Louisiana politician. But what we (the US government, that is) needed to do was to stick around awhile to make sure that the hard-core Taliban supporters were dead and gone and, like cockroaches, didn’t suddenly make a comeback (as they have done in recent months and years). Instead, once he and Dick Cheney had the chance, even over Colin Powell’s – then Secretary of State – objections – that is, until he went before the UN assembly and made a complete ass of himself in defending his boss’s warped logic of reasoning why Iraq ought to be invaded, Bush took many troops away from Afghanistan, troops that would’ve been useful there then and that might have prevented us from needing another 40,000 or so more troops today and Bush called up many more armed forces -even National Guardsmen and all the reservists to fight the most lopsided war of choice in history – the most unnecessary war in history – all to avenge his daddy’s besmirching by not finishing off Saddam in 1991 and because of his warped mind and his DCI’s bad intelligence that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction” which he did not have. Sure, he didn’t go out of his way to be helpful to weapons inspectors and show he did not, but that was just a bluff, a way to puff up his chest towards Israel – who do have lots of nukes as well as we do too. In fact, years after the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner over the USS Lincoln with Bush in a flight outfit, it was revealed that, indeed, Saddam did not have any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. It was true that he was working on some type of nuke program, but basically as a deterrent against Israel, who had most of their nukes aimed right at Baghdad and as militaristic as Israel are, wouldn’t be afraid to take Iraq out.
So with all this mixed up intelligence, wrong information and a hastily put together and badly thought out plan to rid the world, finally, of this “evil dictator” who is a “threat to all Middle East nations’ security”, etc. Bush, even though 99% of the rest of the world didn’t agree that he was a threat and did not support the Bushies war plan at all. In fact the Bush administration made much enmity between the US and European countries like France, Germany, Russia and bullied the rest – weaker states like Italy, Czech Republic and Spain, to go along with his warped reality. And of course, the UK, especially Tony Blair, being the US’s lapdog in all things to do with foreign policy, went along with every step that Bush made without questioning a single thing about these wild, untrue claims. Blair may not have made even a squeak about this wrongheadedness, but the citizens of England sure did and that is why in the middle of Tony Blair’s 3rd term in office, quietly resigned and moved on to some UN post or other to make way for a guy with a tiny bit more of a backbone, Gordon Brown, even though all through the Iraq debacle Gordo was Chancellor of the exchequer; he sat right by Blair in the House of Commons during their weekly (weakly) “questions for the prime minister” at which members of the House of Commons would be able to directly question the PM about whatever matters were on their minds, be it of international importance (usually doggedly pursued by the leader of the Conservative party, the main opposition party, but don’t forget there’s also the Liberal Party and the Free Scottish Party as well, who don’t get equal footing with the opposing Tories).
So what I’m saying here is that Obama has done nothing “wrong” – he didn’t get us into this mess – do you finally understand that now, Dana “Empty Head” Perino, former propaganda minister for Bush (aka Press Secretary) and Mary Matalin, big-mouthed Republican nobody.
On Jan 21, Barack Obama took over as President of the US and as such he inherited a financial disaster that was the fault of greedy Republicans and Republican-backers on Wall Street who took advantage of many not-so-bright former renters who desperately wanted to own a home and who listened to all the propaganda about how easy it’d now be to get mortgages even if you had little or no credit and soon it seemed that non-traditional lenders (meaning non-banks) like Countrywide, just to name the most egregious of them all, were soaking these poor folks for everything they had and then something happened – the housing bubble burst – it was a bubble stupid, of course it was going to burst! And with that bursting of the bubble, thousands, if not millions of homes became “underwater” overnight – meaning that the loans they originally took out for whatever steep price their house was selling for – say it was a million dollars – had just lost half of its value and now it’s worth $500,000 but the borrower is still stuck paying off the million dollars borrowed to pay for the original price. What happened next? Foreclosure after foreclosure and because it had suddenly become quite attractive for hedge funds and other shady investment firms to bundle up a bunch of subprime mortgages into a security that was sold on the open market – basically a bet that all these loans in these bundles would get paid back – with interest – with no problem – but guess what? They didn’t and soon bankruptcies were flying out the door, people suddenly realized that they’d be fools to keep on paying a loan on something that was only worth a fraction of that loan so a lot of them just left the house keys in the mailbox and said – screw it – keep the damn house! Other, more desperate people tried like hell to keep paying their mortgages but in the end the banks won out and gleefully kicked all these families to the curb and kept the houses – houses that you can now go to auctions and buy for maybe 50-60 cents on the dollar. Banks don’t want to have a bunch of inventory of houses – they’re not real estate companies, for chrissakes, their banks!
That was all Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke’s doing, along with the heads of Goldman Sachs and some other creeps. All Bush appointees. Bernanke’s lucky – he was appointed to another term by the Senate. But good ol’ Ben did have some good qualities. While we did have this terrible financial mess, Ben kept interest rates down at a very low rate for a long time, waiting out the crisis and keeping inflation at bay. So he does deserve some credit there. Plus he’s a smart guy, a scholar who specialized in studying the great Depression. But Hank Paulson – he was a sneaky guy, a former insider – the CEO of Goldman Sachs before Bush tapped him to be his third Treasury Secretary.
I could go on and on about all the derivatives and the credit default swaps and the bailout of AIG and the automakers coming to the table, hats in hand asking for more money, as well (which they got – except for Ford, which smartly, did not want the government dictating who could run its own company and taking any kind of stake – and now look at how well Ford is doing vis a vis GM and Chrysler), but I’ll just leave it there and say that Obama had a lot of awful stuff on his plate when he entered office: the wars, the financial debacles and a lot of money troubles that each party blamed the other for (hint – it was the Republicans’ fault and that party should go the way of the Whig party back in the 1800s. We need a real liberal party to counteract what is becoming a very centrist, if not almost right of center Democratic Party. That would bring in real change and even if a “Liberal” party didn’t win, it would force the Democrats to rethink what it is they stand for and for whom they are doing their bidding.
Well, let’s hope this year is better than last – with Bush gone it can’t get any worse, that’s for sure! -KM
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Scott Brown, Pimp
Thanks A Lot Massachusetts
Political Analysis by Kent Manthie
With the crazy, upset victory of Republican Scott Brown, a jerk who, during his victory speech, even pimped out his daughters, saying “…they’re available”. Well, at least they’re over 18 and he’s not inviting statutory rapists to come sweep them away, but that would be poetic justice. One of his daughters was even a horrible contestant on the horrid, “look-what-this-country’s-come-to” show, “American Idol” about five or six years ago and in the immortal words of Simon, that mealy-mouthed Brit, “You’re good, but you’re not fantastic”. That may have been just the way one could’ve described Martha Coakley’s campaign – “good, but not fantastic”.
Pimp
So is it all his fault that he won? Did the voters in Massachusetts somehow turn into idiots overnight? Well, not exactly: Martha Coakley, his Democratic challenger was not, in my eyes anyway, that strong a candidate. Her being a woman had nothing to do with it, but it seemed to me that every time I saw her being interviewed on TV or giving a speech somewhere that she was very lukewarm, very “milquetoast” in her campaigning style, she just kept on repeating the mantra, the “party line” about healthcare and typical platitudes that hailed Obama and what the Democrats are trying to get done in congress even as obstructionist Republicans don’t have any ideas to add to the table no matter what bill is being considered. They just want whatever the Democrats do in terms of offering legislation, to fail so they just keep on voting, lock step, in party line 60-40 votes. So far, I’ve seen no bipartisan working together on anything of any substance. What the Democrats sorely needed was a fighter, someone with balls, be it man or woman, that could articulate exactly what it was they stood for and also what a continued presence of a Democrat in the seat held by Teddy Kennedy for 40+ years would mean, not just for the people of Massachusetts, but for the country as a whole.
For Massachusetts to elect a Republican to the Senate, something that hasn’t happened since 1972, it shows that it wasn’t Scott Brown by himself who was catapulted into the seat, but the overall ineffectiveness of Martha Coakley. Even though she was in synch with the Democratic talking points and said all the right things, she just didn’t do it with enough “gusto”. Somehow, this former Mass. Treasurer just didn’t have an effective campaign staff and the timid, almost mousy personality of the candidate herself was her own worst enemy. She should have stood up there and repudiated everything Scott Brown stood for and, in contrast, articulate all the benefits that she’d bring to her home state and to the country as a whole. But instead, Coakley decided to go with this “nice” campaign, where nary a negative word was spread, no mud slung and no dirt was dug up on Brown’s record as a state politician to be used against him, so it was almost like Coakley was working for Brown’s team as well. I also think her and her campaign just took it for granted that she would win, after all, no Republican has been elected to the US Senate since 1972.
With what was at stake and the obvious closeness of the polls for both candidates – I guess Joe Kennedy (no relation to The Family), being an independent, third party candidate didn’t even really count, since there was no op-eds or articles about him or interviews with him in any publication that matters so people were unable to really make up their minds about a legitimate 3rd party candidate and what he could’ve offered up as a candidate. The only time voters ever really heard anything from Kennedy was during the Senate Debate, where he not only had a chance to enumerate the things he’d bring to Washington, DC, in terms of changing the status quo or at least his vision of what an independent, non-party controlled candidate could offer the electorate in terms of how he’d vote for bills, his ideas about controversial issues, etc. After that it was like Joe who? And from then on up until last Tuesday it was, to pundits and their editors, just a two-way race between a Republican and a Democrat. I think, even if he didn’t have much of a chance in hell to win, Kennedy at least deserved a little ink to get his message out. If nothing else, he should’ve written an op-ed for the Boston Globe or even the New York Times. But I guess he took his underdog status in stride.
But the real tragedy here is that Scott Brown actually won a seat that many all over the country figured was a shoe-in for a Democratic candidate, Massachusetts being such a liberal state. That, right there was how the Dems lost the seat: hubris. They figured that this upstart, Brown would go down in flames like all the rest of the GOP challengers over the past 38 years. So, instead of hammering the GOP candidate, Coakley and her campaign just seemed to rest on their laurels, speaking at the typical stump speeches, mouthing the talking points of the DCCC and saying how she would be the logical choice to take over the seat left open by the unfortunate death of legendary long-time senator Ted Kennedy.
Well it looks like they were proved wrong – way wrong, in their estimation of voters, people whom the Democrats had assumed they had in their back pockets. Instead, it was Scott Brown who kept on hammering the Dems, mostly the recent health-care initiative, still up in the air. Brown’s message was that he would be the “41st senator” on the Republicans’ side, meaning, of course, that he would do everything in his power to kill the bill. It looks like for Harry Reid and his group of now only 59 senators (he needs 60 “aye” votes to overcome a GOP filibuster). Really, in the clips I saw on TV of Brown making stump speeches and talking to reporters he was just saying the same thing over and over – that this health care bill isn’t what the “American” people (whoever the hell they are) and he kept on referring to arcane tax and spend issues associated with the bill that would once and for all (even after all the really good parts have been eviscerated from it just to get the 60 Democratic “aye” votes) give Americans who have “pre-existing conditions” the right to continuing and/or initial coverage instead of being dumped when found out or denied coverage because of something that they now need coverage more than ever for.
Well, thanks a lot Massachusetts, you ruined it for everyone else in the country, now nobody’s going to have affordable health care just so you can win a friggin’ election. But we can’t just stop there and say he’s evil incarnate, which is why he won. No, he won because of a lazy electorate who took it for granted that the seat would be filled by a Democrat – they all figured – well, my neighbor’s going to vote for Martha so I’ll just stay home. Plus blame must be laid squarely on the Democratic candidate herself. If Martha Coakley had seen the handwriting on the wall months ago she and her campaign team could’ve overcome this by digging up dirt on Brown, meticulously checking his record as a former State Senator and his other posts as state this and state that. Coakley herself could’ve been a lot more of a fighter and not this “nice, how-ya-’doing?” personality – remember that old maxim – nice guys (and gals) finish last – well, that is exactly what happened on Tuesday – the jerk won and now we as a nation are going to be paying for it.
And to think, it all could’ve gone differently had their either been a better candidate or if Martha herself had been up to a challenge she obviously didn’t expect. She should’ve come out swinging and let her side be the ones to tell you what she stood for and how she would work in the Senate, etc, but instead she was blindsided by this upstart.
The bright side of all this? Well, it is 2010 and that means it’s a mid-term election year, meaning that not only are some Democrats going to be vulnerable but so are Republicans. Let’s hope that this race will serve as a lesson in how not to campaign and that in the coming months, the economy gets better (something the Dems will be able to take credit for), unemployment goes down and, in general, things start looking up. That will improve the Dems chances at the polls come November. Also – don’t take anything for granted – Teddy Kennedy never did – I remember him saying that in one of his re-election years, when he spoke of his seat as never being a shoe-in, that he worked hard to campaign and keep on getting re-elected.
So, don’t hold your breath and wait for the horse race in November, if you want anything good to come out of this country (I’m almost ready to move to London) you’d better do some grass roots organizing in your district – be a delegate, answer phones, do whatever you have to do to get the right people in office and don’t let yourselves get fooled again.
Say ‘Bye-’Bye to Dems Working Majority in US Senate (Thanks a lot, Mass.)