2013 brought on a critical Portuguese connection to the modern garage punk world with Rui Themoteo and Esgar Acelerado releasing the Black Box single from Nordic punks, The Maharajas, thus officially opening up Chaputa! Records for business. Fifty-eight releases later, Chaputa! still thrives and will mark a decade releasing records in the fringe circuit with the new 7″ single from lauded Suisse garage punks The Jackets, entitled “Life’s Not Like The Movies”/”Attracted,” which will see release on May 26th, 2023.
“Life’s Not Like The Movies”/”Attracted” is the second partnership between the Portuguese label and the Swiss trio, with a split 7″ between The Jackets and The Courettes marking their first production together. This new release is the band’s follow-up to their “Pie In The Sky”/”Misery of Man” 7″ debut on Wild Noise Records from early Spring. The recording was handled by Sebastian Zwahlen at Shirt-Off Studio in Bern, with the notable Jim Diamond on the mixing and mastering helm. Graphics work concept and realization stems from Mathieu Desjardins of Méconium éditions.Since the band’s Wild Noise debut earlier this year, The Jackets have entertained crowds across Italy, Switzerland, and Spain, culminating with a performance at The Wild Weekend in Mallorca. The Jackets have announced new tour dates in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Germany and a return to Spain with more in the works.
“Life’s Not Like The Movies”/”Attracted” will be available in both black and yellow vinyl, with pre-orders now available through Chaputa! Records.
The Jackets Upcoming Tour DatesJune 16th: Bone Fest! (Amsterdam, NL)June 30th: Espina Fest (León, ES) w/The Maharajas, Kate Clover, and more.June 28th-July 1st: Spain Tour TBAJuly 7th: Technikum (Winterthur, CH)July 8th: Murrayfield Pub Festival (Chiasso, CH)August 6th: Celebration Days Festival (Clermont, FR)September 2nd: Gravepit Open Air (Schüpfen BE, CH)September 9th: Berlin Beat Invasion (Berlin, DE) w/Los Peyotes
“”The US is the only government on earth who has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars for geostrategic dominance, who’s been strangling populations with starvation sanctions and blockades around the world…” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“They murdered their own president in plain sight in broad daylight on camera. Then they murdered his brother who was on his way to becoming president. They murdered Patrice Lumumba Salvador Allende and millions you never knew. The #USA is an organised crime syndicate. It has many “families” but there is only one capo de tutti capo…” (-George Galloway)
“In our country the ‘Left’ demands more censorship. Media doesn’t protect leakers, they hunt them for authorities. Corporations have merged with the Gov’t. CIA is on TV giving us the ‘News’. We are normalizing Political Prosecutions. Journalists are jailed for reporting war crimes.” (-Black In The Empire)
Mark Hamill drink the kool-aid. Stop it. You’re ruining Star Wars for me.” (-Sabby Sabs)
Pompeo openly said he would interfere in the 2019 UK general election to make sure he got the result he wanted. Not a single media outlet thought it was a problem.” (-Vob)
“The goal is to keep us fighting with as much hostility as possible over issues which inconvenience our rulers as little as possible. It’s really amazing how successful they are at this.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“If you root for the punishment of those who expose the lies and crimes of a corrupt government, you just might be a fascist.” (-Janus Tireias)
“The white person you see calling himself a liberal, Is the most dangerous thing in the entire western hemisphere He’s the most deceitful” (-Malcolm X)
Hating rural areas and/or people in and of themself isn’t normal, and is often a sign of classist brain rot.” (-Ellie Gabalus)
“Further escalation in Ukraine will not lead to our victory, but it could trigger a nuclear war..” (-Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern)
Um, I’m sorry. We are supposed to believe that a 21 year old national guardsman had access to highly classified CIA assessments on foreign allies? If people can buy that, we’re screwed. If it’s actually true, we’re way beyond screwed.” (-Anya Pamparyl)
“US – Those leaks from the Pentagon have proved very useful to the White House after all.
Biden is now looking into how they can expand its surveillance and control over citizen knowledge. Monitoring everything you do will be the new normal.” (-Bernie Spofforth)
I only saw her in real life one time, at the Johnny Thunders memorial when she did “Stupid Girl” and just tore it up. I wish I had all her music, if you have any of her hard to find, import only stuff I’ve never heard, well, let’s just say I’d love to hear it. She’s my kinda rare wildflower!
Man what is up with all the modern ripoffs? Ya know like nobody writes new movies, they reboot old movies. Nobody forges their own sound anymore, they just copy somebody elses. Angels In Vein ripped their name offa Angels In Vain. All my old bandnames are currently in use and one songwriter even wrote a whole tune based on my old fanzine’s title. So now some sports team has stolen the name London Cowboys from the old punk band. Did the guy who did the Sons Of Dolls website pass away, or just quit updating it? that was my fave online zeen since Darren Stockford’s “She Didn’t Like Rocknroll” website or “Beer For Breakfast”. Steve Dior and Barry Jones were phenomenol rocknroll motherfuckers way back in the old early Roxy Club in London who collaborated with Chrissie and Keith Levene before joining forces with Jerry Nolan and Killer kane as the Idols on Trak records. Barry worked at Max’s. London Cowboys are one of the most exceptionally rockin’, underrated bands almost no one I know has ever heard of, kinda like the Boys and Hollywood Brats, Filthy Lucre was also rad!
You know when Mick Mars got in the shit slinging with the douchey former bandmates he mentioned how it was him who not only named the band but found the financial backer that allowed those dudes to buys shit like clothes and big amps and smoke machines and lights in the early days. I thought that was a refreshing thing to hear someone talk about cause it matters-all my life I always totally alienated everybody I met from famous or even semi famous rock groups, cause I’d always ask them how they paid for stuff like recording costs and pressing records and making t shirts and going on tour-I so desperately wanted to know how they did it so I could emulate that model, but of course, nobody wants to come clean about how they did it, they just like to hide behind their own grandiose make believe mythologies, I did not even realize forever how I was offending all those people and that in the haves world, you aint supposed to ask where the money is coming from. I’d always see all these bands just making these overnight jumps from being Pearl Jam fans, to getting a hat, to holy smokes shazam, getting to make videos, buy motorcycles, play big shows with super famous people and having super famous guest stars on their mediocre albums and you know, I knew they weren’t doing it on no record store or Subway wages, back when I had my last ill fated glitter gang, I’d have people ask me why I don’t just “go on tour”, as if vans are free or something, it was really hard cause if you come from poverty it is not impossible, but very difficult, to compete with people who have a gravy train and can pay for shit. It was hard not to take it personal when one day you are co writing really beautiful music together and everybody’s excited by the quality of the songs and the next day the whole band has split to join some coverband with rich people. You can’t tell nobody the rich people bands all suck, first of all, they’ll never believe you and say it’s sour grapes, but second of all, why waste anymore energy on people who are mercenary opportunist bandwagon riders? Let ’em embarrass themselves with corny cover bands. Plasmatics were one of those put together bands some rich guy named Rod Swenson conceived and paid for, but hell, so were the Four Horsemen, one of my alltime fave rock bands was created by Rick Rubin. Kim Fowley invented the Runaways and Hollywood Stars. A lot of bands are put together for the sole purpose of making money. I did not realize that as a kid, I thought it was all just friends with a couple 12 packs of Strohs or Miller High Life jamming in the garage. That almost never happens anymore, people coming together to collectively express something, I mean I can’t even remember the last bands that made it following any kindof traditional, organic, old school, four lads, D.I.Y., loyal stick together trajectory. Who were the last bands who made it that weren’t industry assembled or sugar daddy financed? There is this weird law in capitalist society where people will only ever help people who don’t need help, ya know what I mean? Rich people love to cos play as blue collar, cos play as street gangs, cos play as poor, but you always find out they had an inheritance, own shit tons of property, have family in publishing, always knew David Geffen, and their mom dated Bowie, ya know what I’m sayin’? I like the Plasmatics more than KISS. They were fun, outrageous, super cool and entertaining and paved the way for everybody from W.A.S.P. to GWAR to Toilet Boys to Texas Terri. On a nothing to do stuck at home boring as fuck depressing Sunday, Plasmatics can make you feel at least a little bit more alive. I got an old song called “Where Is Wendy” I’d really like to re-record. I used to have a Plasmatics t shirt, but it got stolen along with some boots and ten pairs of contacts and some stretch pants and a Sputnik t I had in a bag the one time I went to that shitty overcrowded punk bar in the Whit, the old junkie part of Eugene, Oregon. Fuckers.
…was all there was to do in my town besides loitering at the arcade or record store so I peer pressured my skate rat stoner buddy Dave, and my new wave keyboard karate pal, Jaysin; my preppie rich kid Van Halen friend who was forbidden from socializing with us black t shirts Dustin; a latchkey metal mullet Randy Rhoades and Michael Schenker and Gary Moore influenced scales practicing metalhead soloist Deke, and the school shrink’s kid Chris who was supposed to become the drummer but he never got past kinda just being our potsmoking sidekick in a Member’s Only jacket, oh yeah and Deke’s Butthead, J.R., we called ourselves Harlot and sometimes my rapper friend Austin would accompany us on garbage cans and pots and pans like Fat Albert’s Junkyard Gang, cause nobody could afford a real drumkit and the school shrink was too busy providing cover for richkid sexual predators and bullies to wanna invest in his son’s collaborative musical aspirations, but we started off playing covers at girl’s houses when the parents were gone, you’d have thirty kids over and one 24 pack of beer and me singing through the bass amp and it all sounded awful-really long, boring versions of “Roadhouse Blues” and the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Pretty Vacant”, “Sonic Reducer”, “She’s Like Heroin To Me”, “Sweet Jane”, “I Feel Alrite”, “Livin’ After Midnight”, “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams”, “Sister Ray”, and “Garbage Man”, shit like that. I was penning early anti racism and anti dress code songs, and shit about income inequality, and the bogus class-based juvenile justice system, where we lived, but you know, my peers were not really as enthusiastic about the amateur hour original rebel songs, and after many years it seemed, of looking for a drummer, we finally found a goth guy from the downtown city school we’d never known about named Scruff and he programmed some drumbeats for us that were okay in a Soft Cell sorta way, and then, him and his guitarist Brig introduced me to some hillbillies in the deep rural suburbs who lived with their parents and had a sortof Dead Milkmen influenced jokey novelty band that made bedroom tapes of their Dr. Demento/Devo/Dead Kennedys parody rock, they had a real drumkit, so our goth friend became our drummer but alas, my mainman skate rat guitar hero superstar Dave got relocated to Missouri for his senior year, really delaying all my Let’s Make Records ambitions, but I kept quietly compiling songs and met a smalltown hellraiser mechanic who’d gotten kicked out of the dorm at the training college for drunk cooking and burning the place down while passed out and he and I commenced a songwriting collaboration that lasted about thirty years. Goth dude Scruff moved to Ft. Wayne upon graduation and I didn’t blame him, our town sucked, but that left us without a drummer again so my first girlfriend who I really loved, she introduced me to her cousin who played drums in the school marching band and liked the Smiths and the Jam and a buncha Oi bands, Dustin and Deke and I think even Chris and probably J.R., were herded into the military, and were replaced by Brig and Bobby C., an older girl magnet we found at National Record Mart in the mall. All the locals insisted he looked “just like” Michael Hutchence who was the biggest star in the world at the time, so his local fame and heart throb popularity brought our upstart punk band floods of new attention from normies and like cheerleader types. I hassled my big jock friend John to replace our celebrity bassplayer Bobby when he left the band to become a coverband semi professional singer. For me, that was a lot of fun, the whole adventure, especially when we became more adept at composing our own Rebel Anthems that our growing entrouge of beginner punk and college rock kids and metal dudes and old hippie Jesus freaks and dangerous biker River’s Edge people all seemed to connect with. People were singing along with my lyrics that they knew by heart and other bands were covering our originals in five different cities. We’d make little xerox tape covers and sell cassette ep’s outta the nearby town’s tired old pickedover used record store I worked at. Girls would drive there from all the little hick towns like Gomer and Convoy to buy metal magazines that Skid Row was on the cover of and some would ask to take my picture, which was cool, cause you know I’d always been raked over the coals by all the oversized Aryans at the jock school for being gawky, weird and ugly, strange and awkwardly effeminate, but now that L.A. Guns were on MTV, my friends and my Alarm and Lords inspired black leather bandido glam band were suddenly getting the big green light from all these corn fed heavy metal dames in too tight Cinderella t shirts. Good times! We made band stickers and put ’em all over town, self published a fanzine just about our own little band and the music we liked, our other interests like fashion and nightclubs, and radical ruckous politico activism. We’d play soup kitchen benefits, boy’s club shows with thrash bands, bizarre country concerts on bills with commercial country bands, Metallica cover bands, redneck farmer barbq’s, one of my favorite things to do back then was make band fliers for our shows, you know-cut n paste collages. Now I live way out in the middle of nowhere and only know like two local musicians, only one I might really be able to work with, and I’m trying to arrange a time for us to convene when my kid’s asleep so we can run through some songs I’ve got written, and maybe lay some skeletons down for my long distance artistic genius comrades to add synthesizer and guitar parts to. Meanwhile, mostly stay busy caregiving and doing chores and helping out on some people’s big ranches and booj compounds, growing a garden, encouraging teenager’s creative interests and trying to steer him away from violence senstaionalism and dummy consumerism. It’s funny how I’ve been so inspired by that John Waite “Hard Way” movie, it’s all about sticking to your guns no matter what, he’s obviously traumatized by how bad he got rippedoff by the music industry and I think he’s in love with Allison Krauss, but yeah I’m totally into John Waite’s music-he writes the same kinda songs I do, but his are obviously way better. I listened to “Union Jacks” and the Baby’s Anthology yesterday while I worked on the yard and I just so wanna get behind a microphone and do it all again, ya know? Yes, I am old but all my still standing idols are doing it-Michael with the Lords, the Damned, the Cure, Billy Idol, Psychedlic Furs, Love & Rockets, John Waite, Michael Des Barres, Peter Wolf, Junkyard, Circus Of Power…”Let’s Rock Some More!” I was watchin that Lords show and thinkin how if Stiv was around now, nobody would give him a big budget to say those kinds of things, he’d be banned and cancel cultured and written off as a “conspiracy theorist” and Facebook unfriended by some of the same exact people who claim to venerate him and collect all his work and frame it and keep it under glass and show it off, same with Joe Strummer. Can you imagine the Twitter crybaby pushback if Joe was here today sayin’ stuff against nazis and how “if Adolph Hitler was alive today, they’d send a limo for him anyway”. The Murkkkan public are so heavily propagandized by the spooks, they love the spooks now and hate the Kennedys. They love the censor squads and hate the left. They call people who question the election nazis but applaud Gropey Joe for superfunding actual nazis. It’s a really crazy time, I see why people are so confused and kept in a state of fear on purpose, order from chaos, never waste a crisis, the bad guys had all this shit planned out in advance. The billionaires who own our government and media are waging war on us, the worldwide poor, and shitlibs are on board, 100% complicit. Even “rockers” are trotted out to obediently recite official narratives, while so called “journalists” who never reveal how they work for rightwing think tanks, techsurveillance companies, weapon makers or intel keep demanding there be even MORE consorship and collusion between intel and pig media propaganda platforms. Fuckedup fading celebrities are carted around to manufacture consent for fascist police state and wars based on lies for one world-government Davos honchos. Why can’t any old punks think for themselves anymore? Try asserting that everything on tv is pretty much fake, duplitiious, deceptive fiction for powerful one percenter agendas, (“some side effects may include…”) and the Starbucks shitlibs get mad and defensive, stop returning your calls. They cling to how it was their wife said Hillary Clinton’s turn and Mayo Pete is just adorable and Rachel Levine can not tell a lie, and Pelosi and Double Down Doctor Doctor Doctor Jill Biden are brave and heroic and fighting Trump and Putin for science and pro nouns, the Thank Obams and pussy hats insist that AOC breaking every campaign promises and totally selling out the left so she can be promoted by the permanent Goldman Sachs/Pfizer/Raytheon/Blackrock shadow government is somehow a victory “for women”. What bullshit, ya know? I can’t help those people, they really have been Blue Anon brainwashed. Sometimes I think, “if I only had a band”, I’d have a much better chance of planting seeds with the Black Friday Shoppers. Seems like the Davos creeps even scared motherfucking Chomsky-ya know? But like he said, the general population do not know they are being propagandized, lot of ’em don’t even know what the word means. How do you wake up people who were safespace trained at feelings school to love censorship and J. Edgar Hoover and self identify as woke cause they pledge all their alliegence to a half a dozen multihued and gender, gender, gendered fake politicians who vote with the Republikkkans 90-95% of the time? I’ll tell ya another thing that’s sad as fuck. Watching once heroic rebels sorta melt into their own celebrity, you know what I mean? When rocknrollers become unreachable cause they’ve been famous so long, they can only be around sycophantic asskissers. Like Joan Jett says, as soon as you’re famous everybody’s nice to you all the time, and an awful lotta ex punks just got assimilated by the Borg, believe in the system, are in bed with The Man, love the Azov nazis, and don’t even know it, don’t even think about it. Look at Duff. It’s a bummer when that happens. I hate when people get sucked into wanting money, or choosing the moolah over the gang of equals. Mark Hamill is a sad shadow. Rebels don’t promote empire narratives.
“Shameless and sadistic, a common theme we see all around the world in countries where the fascist-socialist-globalist WEF/UN politicians have infiltrated our governments.” (-John Van Zeist)
“How else could someone with a personality as insufferable as Medhi’s hold jobs for the Emir of Qatar, two global billionaires (Omidyar & Bezos), AND Comcast? Bootlicking pays well.” (-
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”
(-Henry David Thoreau; Essay On Civil Disobedience)
““Far more violence has been done in obeying the law than in breaking the law.” (-Robert Frost)
“The real story here is that the US government classifies everything under the sun so that average Americans don’t know what they’re doing. Plus there are over 1 million people with classified status. When you are a secretive military state with millions on your payroll, you can’t keep everything quiet.” (-Lee Camp)
“When evil men make bad laws, righteous men disobey them.”” (-Pastor Butch Paugh)
““Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” (-Albert Einstein)
“Only the truly evil do not believe in civil disobedience under any circumstance. If you refuse to disobey when the government demands that you commit atrocities, you are devoid of values. Every man with a conscience has some line in the sand over which the Government may not pass!”” (-David Kreiss)
“A reminder that the CIA paid the Dalai Lama $180,000 per year to protect a brutal theocratic aristocracy that tortured and maimed poor peasants in China’s Tibetan region. People like the Lamas are the US’s true “allies.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Fucking moron. Pathetic, power-worshipping empire simp. My god the mass media are so disgusting..WikiLeaks HAS published leaks on Russia. What kind of sick fuck publishes a smear piece on Julian Assange in the year 2023? How hard is it to do 30 seconds of research before publishing? The New York Post is a 220 year-old newspaper for fuck’s sake. It’s 2023. Assange has been in prison for 4 years for the crime of good journalism. Everything his supporters have ever said about him has been fully vindicated, and everything his detractors have ever said about him has been fully invalidated. This debate’s been over for years. Also what kind of idiot thinks Assange was some kind of omnipotent hacker who had access to every government’s secrets? He was a leak publisher; he could only publish what he was given. People who wanted to publish damning information on Russia went through outlets like the NY Times.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The New York Times and Washington Post helped the FBI capture Jack Teixeira.
We knew they worked with the state, but they’ve given that idea a whole new meaning. What a bunch of snitching rat bastards.” (-Margaret Kimberley)
““Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.”” (-Howard Zinn)
Had a nightmare that I leaked some classified information and was arrested and waterboarded by New York Times reporters.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“It’s funny to think that, less than a decade ago, “woke” and “red-pilled” meant the same thing. Every empire has been destroyed by the vices and ineptitudes of a corrupt, incompetent, out-of-touch elite.
If you can grasp this simple historical fact, then you can decode the truth behind all of the headlines we are seeing today.” (-Primo Radical)
Ya know, to me, the Hollywood Brats are as mythical as King Arthur and the Knights Of The Round Table or some shit, totally iconic, larger than life super heroes from days of yore. If you find yourself stone cold sober, anguished about all the grotesque fascism of Macron’s WEF goonsquads in France beating up people for the cashless society oligarchs, or just kinda pissy on a stuck at home Saturday alone, you know there is always that one thing you can do in case of emergency, break glass and turn up the Brats. As vital and important to me as the Dolls or Heartbreakers and I feel the same way about the Boys. I turn to the Brats when I am all outta hope.
A friend and kindred spirit and fellow traveler still carrying on the rebel poet tradition when most of our other last bandis and long gone jetboys have moved on or punked out. He is the real thing, a great producer, guitar player, songwriter, and rocknroll badass after my own chrome and tattered sentimental heart.
Ya know it’s still unreal to me that Nikki, Kusworth and Epic and Rowland are all gone! One of the real golden eras of my mostly humiliating life was when I lived with some people in an old drafty rent controlled apartment in Cambridge, we were all young, musicians, cartoonists, indie film and hiphop enthusiasts and a couple of us worked at record stores and loved all the jangly glam and bullet proof poets and velvet clad dandies who came before us. We were definitely from the same Ragged School as the Jacobites and Joneses and Hollywood Brats and Crybabys and Dogs D’Amour. That was the last hours of my original pirate band still actively collaborating and we were quite prolific in those years, all we really did was write and record more songs about revolution, drinking, and some new wave girls who’d broke our little hearts. Me and those two guitarists were a real formidable combination, none of us were pitch perfect Robin Zanders, but together we sounded pretty fabulous in a wet alleycat sorta way. The famous music writer Sleazegrinder was an early fan of our band the Original Suffering Bastards, he used to know the words to all our songs and frequently came to see our whiskey sodden rehearsals. First time we met, he gifted me with a copy of the Beasts Of Bourbon’s masterpiece, “The Low Road” and we became fast friends after that. I hosted his tv show for about a year and he wrote columns in all my early fanzines before he was famous. We went through half a dozen bassplayers and could only keep a drummer for maybe one recording session or haphazard show at Rvere Beach’s townie metal bar at a time. We were so visible on the club scene that local entertainment weeklies would publish photos of us decked out in all our chartreuse regalia and black leather strides out on the tiles makin’ the scene with our dangerous girlfriends and we had an extensive entrouge of rocknroll fans, a pretty significant cult following of people who came to our parties and shows, wrote about us in fanzines, filmed our practices, covered our songs, made t shirts from our band logo, the whole bit, which was always astonishing to me, cause we seldom played out and rarely recorded. We had perpetually tortuous drummer problems, all my life. Our shabbiest tape recorded rehearsal cassettes circulated and people seemed to really connect to the stuff we were doing back then. Local scenester Mikey D had me on his radio show. People said we sounded like the Crybabys and Black Halos who were still called Black Market Babies in those years I think, and Suicide Kings and Dramarama, and we were flattered by all those comparsions. We thought if D-Generation got a major label record deal there was a lot of hope for us. We were wrong. I still believe in some of the songs we co wrote in that velvet basement back then, still hope to record ’em before I die. Some of ’em have been beaten to death by other bands cover versions and I can’t stand to hear ’em no more, but all our stuff from back then was definitely informed by our love of the Jacobites who one of my life’s dearest soul sisters first got me hip to. Love, love, love ’em. It’s always been my fantasy that if I struck it rich, I’d buy that old apartment and turn that basement into my recording studio. I used to have a beloved sax player from those days who explained to me one time why I kept experiencing so much friction and confusion about my relationships with the bandmates and roommates and he said, “Everybody loves Hank Williams but nobody wants to live with Hank Williams”, I had to think about that. I loved my Hank Williams like friends, so ya know, I was just different. The sax player and his indie-cinema movie critc wife moved back to Hellhole, Ohio. The lead guitarist who’d been my best pal since we were like 12, he hung up all the blue velvet jackets and frilly girl’s blouses, went to med school and vanished into the daytime world. The reckless beat travelin’ rhythm guitar man lived in his van with his dog down by the river for a number of years before finally landing in a veteran’s aid apartment and I am gratified he got off the streets. He says he can’t fit in the snakeskin pants anymore and has nerve damage from motorcycle wrecks, barfights and that time he crashed through a windshield prohibiting him from playing much guitar or dominating the lip of the stage with his oversized and legendary windmilling Billy Duffy like guitar posing, or serenading scantly clad hippie chicks on bended knee, and swingin the bottle and jumping around like we used to. Our hard partying Irish tambourine bangers and sometimes bassists both apparently moved back to Ireland-one works at a newspaper and the other one was so handsome, he’s probably still making girls swoon in our old age-that’s why he could never really dedicate himself to a scuzzy gutterpunk gang, he had too many women following him around. One of our roommates became a baker. We had some good times back then. I’m still am who I am and looking for a new guitar hero for my gypsy camp bonfire outskirts of town glamrachist torch and twang cowpunk glitter gang.
Blonde Angel – YouTube that’s what Andrew Loog Oldham aclled Marrianne Faithful, but it of course reminds me of my first love, the girl who got me into the Smiths and Depeche Mode in like 1983 or 1984 or something.
“Imagine if a Russian media outlet worked with their security services to lead a manhunt for a leaker. That would be seen as the most evil thing in the world, and proof that it’s a totalitarian hellscape. But when the NYT does it for the US regime it’s Brave and Heroic Journalism…it’s hard to believe they actually proudly published this. It’s like if Daniel Ellsberg wanted to hand them the Pentagon Papers, and they immediately called the FBI and CIA to rat him out and then gloated about it. It’s so incredibly bizarre, and shows just how depraved they are…” (-Zei_Squirrel)
““Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.” (-Albert Einstein)
I really enjoyed the Don Letts movie, I was wrong when I thought I already knew everything about Don Letts. This film is very educational and informative as well as entertaining and you know if you are a parent or auntie or uncle or mentor to any young people, it is a good one to show all generations to follow, so they can see what is possible, even if it does not happen just like that everyday, anymore. It all started out a cool kid from Brixton who worked at early punk boutique Acme Atrractions and got ahold of an early video camera and started video taping shows at the 100 Club, creating the landmark “Punk Rock Movie” and the iconic “London Calling” video, expressing himself by whatever medium he had available. All my loved ones know how much I love Big Audio Dynamite. I had no idea the Don did all those videos. I mean I knew about Lydon and the Clash, but he created some of THE best videos of all time, one after another. Bam. Musical Youth “Pass The Dutchie”. Bam. Pretenders “Back On The Chain Gang”. Bam. Gap Band “Party Train”. Just on and on and on and you don’t stop. I’m glad he’s enjoying a resurgence.
““Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.”” (-Mark Twain)
“Who wants to bet that US surveillance state cut-out Belling Cat has had access to classified documents?” (-Margaret Kimberley)
“Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.” (-Benjamin Franklin)
“This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority and to forces that deprive people of their life and liberty and right to pursue happiness, and therefore under these conditions, it urges the right to alter or abolish their current form of government – and the stress had been on abolish. But to establish the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offenses and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes.” (-Howard Zinn)
BREATHE, HYDRATE, TAKE VITAMINS, GET SOME SUNSHINE, LISTEN TO MUSIC, SELF CARE & PRAYING
Bitterness, animosity, resentment and anger can grip you enexpectedly if you find yourself trapped with no mobility or freedom. I do my best to entertain myself with very limited resources and mercifully my wife bought me a fresh notebook, some pens and a new memory card for an old camera we found, so I photograph flowers and sunsets and I write lyrics for future songs about this fuckedup world we live in. Two differnt friends asked to hear summa my crummy old demos this week and I was flattered when they liked that stuff cause it was all poorly recorded, unfinished and recorded with mutinous mercenary sidemen who weren’t really committed to the operation, so it was a wonder any of it ever, ever generated any positive reviews, but it all did. I also got two scathingly meanspirited, flatout hateful reviews and those were my favorites, honestly. I think they were right about all of it. I’m restless, irritable and discontented. Keep tryin to recruit a new rebel army. Wanna gypsy glamarchist real rocknrolol band, wanna travel, play shows, record new music, in the immortal words of Joe Strummer, “LET’S ROCK AGAIN!”
“Marianne Williamson and Joe Biden have the same foreign policy. It’s the same politics, just in a different wrapper: Imperialism for blue collar Boomers and imperialism for hipster Millennials. RFK at least has a fundamentally different perspective on US empire, the WEF, etc.” (-Primo Radical)
“We are in the Upside Down.” (-Dr. Drew)
“It’s incredible how easily Americans are propagandized. If their TV tells them “this is your enemy” – most of them believe it.” (-Empire Of Lies)
“How can the US talk about Russia criminalizing journalism while it continues to pursue Julian Assange?” (-Medea Benjamin)
“Why are the most vocal, liberal gun control advocates also some of the most vocal supporters of war in Ukraine?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Its Saddam WMD time with China. A steady drum beat of Anti-China propaganda… it’s hard to believe that Americans are stupid enough to believe it again…” (-Garland Nixon)
“Believe our propaganda numbers not your lived experience. The economy is strong! Joe Biden is competent! Dianne Feinstein is competent! Joe Manchin is a decent human being!” (-Redbox rage Against The War)
“You won’t believe this but Bellingcat never got around to doing any coverage of the actual documents, and instead focused their super journalism skills on tracking down the leaker for the FBIWho gives a flying fuck if the leaker shared “racist memes” on Discord? He could be a KKK jihadist Branch Davidian and the documents would still be real. The government would still be engaged in systematic deceit about critical foreign policy issues. God this is so pathetic. They’re blurring out the documents on CNN and the New York Times! Just too dangerous. Your eyes will melt, and then you’ll start speaking in Russian. Through some sort of dark-arts trickery, a large number of people have genuinely convinced themselves that affirming devotion to “America” is synonymous with affirming devotion to the inviolable sanctity of the federal government’s classification regime. So impressively stupid. What matters is that you’re a Drama Queen crying “treason” because you stumbled into some dumb ideology where you’re professing devotion to the federal government’s classification regime. It’s fundamentally stupid to think of any nation-state as your personal “adversary,” like Spiderman’s adversary was Doctor Octopus. It’s just stupid jargon that anthropomorphizes a faraway, abstract entity for you to hate.” (-Michael Tracey) …..more psy ops manufacturing consent ffor more censorship and usual demonization of all whistle blowers.
“Both Parties are far more interested in waging wars, enriching themselves and maintaining US hegemony than improving the lives of American citizens.
Stop listening to what comes out of their mouths, and pay attention to what they’re spending our money on.. If you turn on that TV and think that somebody like Anthony Blinken is telling you the truth about what’s happening in the world, I don’t know of a nice way to tell you how gullible you are.
This is not just because Dems are in charge of lying now, they’re all psychopaths. I stopped this “Lesser of 2 Evils” voting strategy a long time ago, because it just guarantees that the Establishment gets to make sure one of their candidates wins.
What pissed me off the last election for my community is that they had no idea that Biden was the greater evil. We just found out that our Gov’t is lying to us about this war too, and nobody even cares. Jack Texeira will go down in History as ‘The Leaker’
Officials like Blinken, Austin, Sullivan and their corrupt crew who the leaks showed were lying to us again, will continue lying about this war and many more to come with no consequences. We have been introduced to another episode of ‘The Leaker and the Liars’ and our Gov’t once again played the role of the Liars, but only the Leaker will face any punishment. What a shock! China built stuff, and the United States bombed stuff
I wonder why the world chose China. What I’ll call the non-Western world knows exactly why this war started, what America’s role was in provoking it, remembers what the US Gov’t has done to their countries and knows our owners don’t give a damn about freedom and democracy.
That’s why Russia will never be isolated.
Ukraine the country described by the world as the most corrupt in Europe, before the war (Of course now they are all angels preparing for sainthood) has Zelensky and his merry band of criminals being accused of stealing $400 million
I’m surprised it’s not more. Our Gov’t and media will succeed in making this story all about the leaker, Americans will totally ignore the fact that these same people in power got caught lying to us again, and this war that they all know Ukraine can’t win will continue.. China went around the world making deals and the United States went around the world making threats.” (-Black In The Empire)
“It’s pure madness that anyone could claim, with a straight face, that the country with the most prisoners and the most homeless people is “the freest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world. Neoliberalism is an inherently nihilistic system.
That is the root cause of the madness that we are experiencing right now — politically, culturally, in our work lives, which impact our personal lives.
Why are so many people depressed & “crazy”? Washington, Wall St & Hollywood.” (-Primo Radical)
Some more on John Waite’s documentary: even though I aint got his sparrow like vocal reach, ya know I got the feeling and when he talks about trusting your own best instincts as an artist and not listening to know it all saboteurs and the importance of not compromising for the sake of pleasing the machine, or not signing away all your rights and not letting predators fuck around while you’re the one paying out of pocket in the studio, I know what he’s talking about-in the car with my family, Alice Cooper was saying the same shit-how you do two takes and keep the one with the most feeling or mix them together-years ago I foolishly got involved with people who thought you make records by photo shopping out any flaws, but for me and my kind, people who share my faith in heart and soul over money and access, we understand the beauty is in the flaw. The flaw is the beauty, crack where the light gets in. Flawed Is Beautiful. Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Rowland S. Howard could not sing like Adam Lambert, but I don’t care to listen to Adam Lambert, ya get what I’m sayin’? When Westerberg thought he needed to surround himself with paid companion studio hack perfectionists, he never brought forth anything with the crackling glory of Bob Stinson era Replacements, crackpipes and empty bottles and bald man in flowered dresses before Cobain, you know that was the most beautiful and soulful and vulnerable and courageous shit that ever happened. Music aint sports, it’s not like ice skating or gymanstics at the Olympics. Love & Rockets once sang, “I wanna hear a song that makes me believe in something. I’m not convinced anybody was ever better than Peter Laughner aside from maybe Jim Carroll who mighta had a better band. Anyways, these are the kinda artists I like-the ones with heart. Nothing less. Elton John says the Stones shoulda kicked Keith Richards out cause Elton understands hitting the proper high note and selling the proper number of units and shit like that, I mighta liked maybe three old Elton songs mostly cause he had a real great lyricist in Bernie Taupin, I liked some of his words, but you know, if you’re anything like me, you know that Keith Richards & Tom Waits song, “That Feel”. People who got it and people who don’t. Keith has that feel. In ways that radio friendly, royalty asskissing, mansion remodeling, industry weasel, Disney soundtrack warblers will never understand. Same with Bob Stinson, Peter Laughner, John Waite, they all got that feel, that’s how they do what they do. They are all feeling. John Waite is All Feeling Plus Plus Plus. same as Sinead, and Chrissie Hynde, but they are the rarest of all birds. John Waite even had Johnny Thunders play on one of his records cause he gets it. Toto might hit all the right notes but I don’t listen to Toto. I listen to the old Replacements.
British singer, songwriter and actor David Bowie posing for a photograph with American novelist William Burroughs for an interview published at Rolling Stone magazine in February 28, 1974.
Ya know whoever programs classic rawk radio stations should be ashamed, always the same overplayed shit by Journey and now fucking also Nirvana, we’ve all heard those same twenty songs by the same ten bands enough. They could at least play some different fucking ZZ Top song. Nope, just the same one everytime. Like punishment. Alice Cooper has a night time show where he riffs on all the times he met the Beatles or Keith Moon or Jim Morrison or how Jimi’s best stuff was usually the first take with the flats and sharps and feeling and emotion, vbut even his show is obviously not lovingly selected by Cooper cause I just don’t believe that guy’s a fucking yes fan. man I always thought yes sucked. And Rush. I can’t listen to that stuff. They might play one Van halen, Def leppard or Billy idol song an hour but even that’s just the overplayed hit. I used to have friends in radio, but just like with every other corrupted and weaponized cultural institution in the Divided Slaves Of Amnesia, you get promoted for sucking, by lying, if you go with the flow, it’s through dumbfuck obedience and conformity that they rise to the corner office, not by any spontaneous deep track record playing, or being fyunny, actually awake in this moment alive when all things are possible, aint no motherfuckin’ Dr. Johnny Fevers or Wolfamn Jacks around anymore. Just shit and lies, liars and shit. They all seem to have wives who want to go on vacations or build a new room for the winebox sister’s visit. I’m to the left of Left Of The Dial.
Would you believe these guys came to town but I missed ’em cause i was goin’ through a breakup and shit and just did not wanna be around the trust fund people who ran the shit bar in the grunge years? It’s rare when I can find other people who can even kinda share my appreciation for wild rocknroll cause most of the stuff I like is not anything similar to Bon Jovi or Soundgarden or Foo Fighters or Whoever. Kim Salmon is one of the people who used to make me wanna relocate to Australia where people seemed to like to drink and party and get wild at night, all my favorite artists are from Australia, don’t ask me why, but you know you can just go right down the list-Chrissy Amphlett, Spencer P. Jones, Michael hutchence, Jim Thirwell, Tex Perkins, Nick Cave, Rose Tattoo, etc., etc. Really trying to reconvene a little nowhere basement band like this and nobody really gets it and while I try my little heart out, there’s always somebody across town who can emulate whatever people like us seem to like and put it all on credit, it’s like Mad Libs in Lewis Leathers. I had a golden flyer somebody saved for me from that show but just like everything else, ya know, I touch it and it seems to disappear, or jest get’s somehow hijacked and semi plaigirized by the fat record collector with all the expensive vintage echo machines, they just moan through heavy reverb, got nothing to say besides look at my expensive shit.. Sometimes, it can really get you down. Murkka music scenes are all monopolized by predators and money havers. I always knew I’d fit in way better Down Under. I love rocknroll ya know? The Beasts Of Bourbon, the Surrealists and the Scientists, These Immortal Souls, Spencer P. Jones playing with the Gun Club, Fur Bible….Everybody affiliated with that whole scene, they are all geniuses-it astounds me. I always tell my friends at the hobo jungle bonfire down by the railroad tracks that Rose Tattoo’s what they should play whenever my credits roll. Have a toast with Night Train.
Coffee with the birds, had crazy dreams last night. Did not expect to see you there! Still thinkin’ about Alice fom the Ultras. One of the last artists I thought had a real special vibe all his own, he may have been influenced by Bowie or Rozz, who wasn’t, right, but he was a uniquely distinctive and original starburst that burned twice as bright as any of the others. Made all those say nothing hack, hairdye boxes of the Sunset Strip seem even more mediocre and insufferable, cause he showed us all how it’s done. I thought only Inger and Gio could really even compare. He really was a poetic star. Ehhh, what a crazy world this is. Such a hard fight, just getting by. I got to venture out into the public today and have no desire to do that. Social anxiety, compassion fatigue, hard putting on a false front and having to teract with a mixture of sadly robotic tv commercials and full of shit, got-mine power holding maximum predator class landlord types always spoiling for battle with less powerful people they can leverage the system against. I keep saying how sad it is that here among the Divided Slaves Of Amnesia it is still so senselessly dog eat dog with only the me, first, me-me-me-show, my name in BIGGER LIGHTS merchandising, and vanity branding and stickin’ close to the home team yesman echo chamber gravy train being the only real motivations of the Shit Havers. Rich people really love to put the screws to the poor, that’s all they get off on, cause even non stop Ebay and Amazon and posh catalog antique shopping seems to have lost it’s big buzz for them, so the next stage of entertainment for inheritance spenders after buying property is harming people, punishing the poor, fuckin’ with us just for the hell of it, same reason cops kill black people in parking lots, same reason Israel keeps bombing their neighbors and beating up people in a mosque for having a different religion than themselves-just cause they can,. Eighty percent of the country is barely getting by, just scraping by, having tension and conflict in our homes over how many groceries we are all consuming, ever since they did the contolled demolition of the economy during Covid, and Klaus Scwab sent his puppet Synema in to kill a minimum wage raise that might allow the proles to afford rent. Pharma funded cable tv meassaging made everybody scared and focused exclusively on gender divisions, gender studies conversations has replaced every traditional progressive-leftist-pro-unions-peace-anti censorship-free speech-my body/my rights liberal value, and diverted people from discussing peace or defending human rights or civil liberties, while class war is relentlessly being waged upon us lower ranking have nots by the secretive billionaire class who college wannabe elites seem to worship, trust and admire, even though the so called leaders and phony represaentatives and pig-media have been wrong about everything for years and never apologized for lying about 9/11, building Number 7, WMD’s, rigged primaries and a big cover story regarding Seth Rich and Micahel Hastings by falsely distracting people with “Russiagate!”, they all lied about Julian Assange, Gaddafi, fracking, poisoned water in Flint, declaring Palestine air, water and soil “Safe” based on no real data, even our once venerated former leftist Saint Chomsky was saying people should be rounded up and concentration camped during covid, he never said sorry about that, not in public anyways. There’s been a lot of excess deaths and just mysterious Died Suddenlys, here in my desert town where all the sevety-something new age ladies are still wearing masks because they hate Trump so much and associate being maskless in the fresh air of spring with being Republikkkan, that’s how batshit the culture war horseshit has gotten. Elderly people are arguing in public about trans-swimmers even though none of them know any trans-people in real life. I call it pig media divide and conquer smoke and mirrors, transpolitation. Big tech in collusion with the government is taking away our free speech, Julian assange is still rotting post stroke in Belmarsh while those red carpet fakes on the Fraud Squad are doing their usual shuck and jive half assed make pelieve prancing around about how they disapprove, but they aint done nothing real or brave about it with all their power in all these years. They just got the polls and know the majority of the country beleieve he should be free so they’re gonna do a performative little schoolplay, but never force their superiors hand. They never take any real action for the people, only for the military contractors and oil boys, big pharama, Blackrock and Bayer/Monsanto. Shitlibs will see the headline grab and believe the Squad really did their best. It’s like Chelle Obama posing with fat kids at the White House organic garden while Obama appointed a Monsanto lobbyist to the head of the FDA. Industry has totally captured the regulatory agencies that were supposed to protect us from those industries, and like seventy five percent of the country still watches corporate media which is all bullshit propaganda, tv keeps everybody in a Right Versus Fake Left culture war hypnospell, blaming people with different views on top down narrative manufactured controversies. Who gives a fuck about Stormy Daniels or Qshaman? Cults. Cults give a fuck. Red and Blue Anon. Nobody in my town is being paid a living wage so all the rightwing bullshit about “nobody wants to work” being echoed mindlessly by all the shitlibs is nonsense. You boomers with the bands who got lucky in the 70’s, who among you is gonna work two fulltime jobs and still not have enough money to pay the motherfucking rent on a fucking dump. That’s why millenials say “Okay Boomer”, but I’m kinda less inclined to wanna get involved in a generational ageist fake culture war, either. I know boomer aged motherfuckers who work at the grocery store all day for shit wages, frontline eheroes, remember? And they live is shithole trailers and get sick and die sooner than all the self congratulating Thank Obamas and Whole Foods Got-Mines. So yeah that’s what’s on my mind, smoking’s stupid, so I’m smoke free right now but then I have an urge to consume more water on these hot days or whatever, ya know, everything costs, the carbonated water has tripled since Gropey Biden took office. “Blame Trump” they all tell me, how tired I am of bullshit partisan pingpong, the pasttime of the on script, team uniform devoted, yes ma’am, popularity seekers. I’m working on my garden, about to go weed. Sure I get loneley and bored in the desert but I’d rather spend time in nature now, listening to the birds then have to hear another human I used to really like just parrot the most fucked up stupid corporate media tv commercials on the rare occassion I can make contact with someone from the long gone past on the telephone. Dr. Drew is right, we are in the Upside Down. Pirate reference for you Pirate Lovers.
The really kooky side of desert living here in the Upside Down is it does tend to attract all these affluent crackpots, the UFO crazies, everybody’s a make believe psychic, all the middle class men are play acting as shamen with big sticks and Gandalf raps, and all the old divorcees who married their twin white pitbulls say they are receiving psychic transmissions from invisible apparitions from other dimensions, every last ripoff airbandb or tourist trap trendy new age gallery owner also insists they are the ones with all the very special esoteric knowledge and elite double secret magical, mystical know how, but they are always hunting for personal assistants and apprentices to do their grunt work in exchange for permission to be in the presence of their enlightened selves. Kinda like in that Dracula movie we keep seeing advertisements for. Every time we set foot in public someone is having a vision about how either the wife or I have soembody on the other side…and there is a man…and blah blah blah. They all wannabe that Jennifer Love Hewitt chick on her old occult drama tv show, “The Medium” or whatever. Meanwhile, even Penn & Teller became bullshitters for the establishment. Where’s the Amazing Randi when ya need ‘im? This whole country’s just a buncha fakirs, charlatans, prosperity gospel hustlers, guardians of property shuck n jivers, just-me not-sees, and self deputized hoity toity healing crystals astological karma police taking YOUR moral inventory while they drown in their own excess, gluttony, lion’s share and unearned privilege, but what about pro nouns, right? Identity politricks is all a big hoax, they don’t care about you safespace protected feelings classers, either. Go ask anybody from Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, or Occupy Wall Street movements-they all got five minutes of lip service from the swells in the tower right before the ruling class doubled down on fucking them all over even worse. You don’t ask no poor people about freedom or civil liberties, do ya? Cause you don’t really wanna know. you got your hallpass from the ruling class and now you’re busy consuming cause you earned it with your merit and your extra special Sneetches starbellied protected class status. I met this 20 year old at the dollar store-he asked me if I was in a band and I had to say no of course but turns out he used to play violin and guitar until he was involved in some kinda tragic industrail accident resulting in his hands both being paralyzed to various extents, he had on an Ozzy bootleg concert t shirt, said his mom was taking him to Randy Castillo’s grave sight, once his dad gets out of the hospital. I liked him, he reminded me of my childhood hombre who pursued a career in medicine before the big khaki panted white coat, official narrative word balloon makeover. I got three associates recovering from chemo and one friend who is having health problems who flatout does not trust doctors, but as long as the super rich keep making lots and lots of money on the backs of the poor both here and abroad like in those Chinese swet shops, and their middle class enforcers, narrative contrntrol compliance officers enjoy some scraps of privilege, and monopolies get bigger while the indies shrink and vanish, I guess all good Murkkkans think they are winning at something. I’m opposed to mushroom clouds and human experimentation, I don’t think warpigs or creeoy secret island billionaires should be above the law but Bush declared he’d bomb the Hague if theye ever tried to hold the empire accountable for all the mass murder of Muslim brown people in oil rich regions. We were so naieve back then we thought Obama was gonna help the poor and stop the wars and then we put our sucker born every minute hopes into the idea that Bernie could change the DNC, but no. It was just a lot of empty bullshit campaign speechifyin and gettin’ in line with the imperial far right Lindsey Graham and Dick Cheney endless war agenda. We wre duped again and again. Politicians aint here to represnent us little people, they take big bribes to write laws allowing the gestapo to round up and weed out anybody from the lower classes that steps outta line with 25 percent of the world’s mass incarcerated population, as a warning to all those trains on time cowards-I’ve seen it all my life. They don’t even like thomeless veterans (“Get A Job!”) and remember when the frontline workers and first responders were supposed to be heroes? Only until they get damaged or sick or whistle blow about safety problems like all those railroad workers betrayed by Biden and Bernie and the Squad, need help.
I know pigmedia and every bought and paid off professional propaganda whore is gonna be trotted out to slander Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if he runs for president-look what happened to all his family members, including JFK Jr., but I hope he gets the word out about how WW3 is a bad idea, we are being lied to, and our food supply is even at risk now. So he gets my support, I’ll tell ya that. Drop in the bucket, I know. Everybody knows the DNC rig their primaries, collude with bigtech to censor facts about shit like Hunter Biden’s corruption in the Ukraine and control the debates and only promote willing props of the facsist war and surveillance state.
I went to a thrift store yesterday and felt like I almost got runover by some retrement aged lady couple who had Black Friday Stampede Frenzy, they were second hand store cherry picking for either online resell or a hipster boutique, or some rental property furniture, one of ’em looked at me and smiled sheepishly cause she somehow realized I was observing their mad, mad greedhead aggression. Someone had dropped off a load of fresh donations and they were like in a rampage to get out there and make some auction bid offer before any of the lowly poors. Boomer Aged Airbandb owning Kalltha Kops Karens are the most entitled people, man. We used to see the actual la Costa Nostra mob babies at Palladium, or the Arabs with diplomatic immunity leaving their limos idling in the middle of traffic but man the Boomer Aged Airbandb owning Kalltha Kops Karens, you don’t wanna even be seen by them, they will go to any length to keep control of their enviornment and they don’t like the looks of any working class dudes who are off the clock, they should be mopping something. The beatup dresser’s all yours. I don’t need any object as badly as they need every object.
When I was a runaway kid, even if I was sitting tow stools away from that guy, I just became a shrinking wallflower kinda slipped away. He frightened me, honestly, it was just too much. I recognized I was sometimes in the presence of real outlaw greatness but what would I even have to say to that guy, all I had to talk about back then was how I was in love with a girl who liked the Smiths but her parents hated me, I kept getting beatup all the time because I wore makeup, and how I really liked the Lords Of The New Church. Not that many adults were that interested in hearing a drunk teenager talk about that stuff. Whenever I think of Jim Thirwell, I think genius. Like Nick Cave and Prince and Phoebe Legere level genius. Makes me wonder how Trent Reznor was allowed to slip into the mainstream back before grunge. Thirwell is timeless. Truly epic. Excessively brilliant, too much, really. When I was 14 and 15, I had a much older girlfriend who I livved with who taught me about everything and probably saved my life in many ways, she ran around with all those people-the underground of the Lower east Side, I was so young that all I could really feel about the older artists she was friends with was a sortof detached awe or bitter jealousy, I mean all those cats she socialized with were way beyond my frame of reference I was so, so outta my depth, there was no way for me as a smalltown greasy punk to compete with all these realized artistes so I did not really even try-I thought they were super intimidating even as they became everyday fixtures who I saw all the time-Foetus, Zedd, Kern, the dude from the Swans, they all lived in my neighborhood back then but I was just too shy to really get that involved with any of them. I do remember having some good conversations with Stiv Bators, Peter Zaremba, John Spacely. I used to help Spacely shoplift from that bottle store on Astor Place. But anyways, here is Jim Thirwell, the best of the best….!
“Monsanto’s evil is not gone. It’s just in disguise. I reveal the truth about one of the most hated corporations in the world on the new episode of “The Most Censored News” at youtube dot com/BehindTheHeadlines” (-Lee Camp)
“The collapse of U.S. influence over Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom’s new alliances with China and Iran are painful emblems of the abject failure of the Neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony with aggressive projections of military power. China has displaced the American Empire by deftly projecting, instead, economic power. Over the past decade, our country has spent trillions bombing roads, ports, bridges, and airports. China spent the equivalent building the same across the developing world. The Ukraine war is the final collapse of the Neocon’s short-lived “American Century.” The Neocon projects in Iraq and Ukraine have cost $8.1 trillion, hollowed out our middle class, made a laughingstock of U.S. military power and moral authority, pushed China and Russia into an invincible alliance, destroyed the dollar as the global currency, cost millions of lives and done nothing to advance democracy or win friendships or influence.” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
“It is still an overreach of power when the people charging and caging protesters exercising their constitutional right to dissent are democrats. It’s just as fascistic!” (-Hannah Riley #Stop Cop City)
“I don’t vote for Democrats or Republicans for the same reason I don’t vote for Amazon, Black Rock, Citibank, or ExxonMobil.
They’re the exact same things: corporations.” (-Stephanie Voltolin)
“Being pissed at Democrats for kicking millions off Medicaid and slashing food stamps for poor families isn’t “playing into Republicans’ hands”. Liberals are seriously fucked with this logic. If they don’t want their bad behavior to be pointed out, maybe don’t do bad shit.” (-Prof Zenkus)
“The media blackout on Biden taking Medicaid away from millions is journalistic malpractice.” (-Holding Biden Accountable)
“We have a massive housing crisis here and mega landlords are using that to push out low income people for no reason at all to raise rents.” (-Barbarism Critic)
“Susan (@SusanSarandon), the issue that Stephanie raises is at the root cause for leftists rejecting electoral politics. Why fight the system if we’re going to assimilated into that same system after a progressive loses due to the primary being rigged?
It seems to be manipulative.” (-Liam Dorris)
“With special forces, mercenaries, Western arms & a global propaganda arm created & maintained by the West, the Russia Federation is indeed fighting the “West” with Ukraine providing the NATO ground forces in yet another losing battle for the West.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
THE PRESSURE IS A MOTHERFUCKER
Man, we keep having to take on more side hustles just to barely get by, the stress is anguishing, ever since the monopolies started robbing us during the Covid shutdowns and they have not only not relented, but they’ve actually INCREASED all the super inflation at the grocery store and gas pumps and the Biden admin is cutting the social safety net and foodstamps again but of course the middle class people don’t care and just never stop talking about Stormy Daniels and “RUSSIA!” We are so fucked, all my brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution. I’m kinda in a bit of a blue funk here this morning, it’s tough parenting under all this kinda stress, it’s hard on relationships and there is this ever tightening vice grip of expectations on all us poor people, and the higher ups get to sorta extort always more energy and attention from us, as if our only value is in them wringing us dry like batteries, this fuckedup country really is feeling more like the Matrix, everyday, ya know? In Missouri, fanatical rightwingers even wanna defund public libraries. Torturers and rightwing imperialists like Desantis and Lyn Cheney and Nikki Hayley are all waiting in the wings cause nobody really wanted Gropey Joe the first time. I wanted to make art, make records, entertain the working class and make a difference, help raise consciousness in my time, ya know, but it feels like I’m running out of time, and like Erin Brockovich says, there aint no cavalry on the horizon, Superman aint coming to save nobody. The fix is in. Always has been. So where were the spiders?
“As a former MSNBC Democrat I feel I can say that they are the most brainwashed people in America….Afghanistan and Russia have worked out so well that our Gov’t should absolutely try to start something with China next, I mean what could possibly go wrong?
What else are neocons to do? China didn’t take our jobs, our politicians and corporations gladly gave them away. The US officially states Taiwan is part of China, so our country doesn’t recognize Taiwan’s independence. China isn’t threatening us, we’re surrounding them and using Taiwan to stop their rise. Russia has survived 10 rounds of economic sanctions that we were told would destroy their economy and end their ability to wage a war. They survived approx $125 billion in cash, weapons and training given to Ukraine by NATO. I should thank the Biden Administration for being so incompetent that in spite of the fact that the owners will stop at nothing to remain the world’s hegemon, they actually accelerated the start of a new multipolar world. More American taxpayer dollars go to killing people around the world than taking care of our own citizens. When I stopped voting
for Democrats because I realized what a corrupt, lying Party they were, it didn’t make me start voting Republican.
It just made it clear to me how screwed all Americans really are, including the Black community that has let the Dems con us for 5 decades. How could anyone claim that NATO is really a part of this war? They are just providing training, intelligence, $125 billion in weapons and cash, and have placed 10 rounds of economic sanctions to try to destroy Russia’s economy. They are more like innocent bystanders.
The rulers will once again try to get people more interested in finding the ‘Leaker’ than holding them accountable for telling us a bunch of lies again. It will work. The US Gov’t committed more than $100 billion in American taxpayer money to their donors and Ukraine the most corrupt country in Europe The results have been weapons manufacturers getting richer, politicians getting kickbacks, 20% of Ukraine being taken and lots of dead soldiers. The only war the West is winning is the propaganda war, but the problem is that the only place they’re even winning that is in the West…Seriously now Are there really adults that can look at people like Hillary, McConnell, Pelosi, Biden, Ted Cruz or McCarthy for example and think to themselves “Yeah, I know these people really care about me”?” (-Black In The Empire) Russia is beating the West, and the world is noticing.
“One of the biggest obstacles to building a robust anti-war movement is people’s belief that their own individual activism and opposition makes no difference, which is simply not true. Your individual activism and opposition makes *ALMOST* no difference, not no difference. These might sound similar, but they’re actually literally an entire infinity apart. If your efforts to oppose our track toward WW3 made no difference, then those efforts would be pointless. But if your efforts make even the slightest bit of difference above absolute zero, all that means is a lot more people need to join you to help turn us away from this dangerous trajectory. Hollywood has given us the wrong impression of how these things work, because the narrative structure of movies always places all its emphasis on the actions of the individual protagonist having an immensely consequential effect. Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star. Frodo destroys the One Ring. The Avengers save the universe. They need to make the hero’s actions have major consequences to make you care about their adventure. But real life isn’t like that. In real life it takes many, many people to bring about real change. The actions of one individual make very little difference; even people like me who have larger-than-average voices are just a tiny drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. Real change doesn’t depend on the individual, it depends on the collective. We can see this just by looking around society, at what a massive billions-of-cast-members collective improvisation human civilization is. It takes the collective to keep civilization functioning, and it will take the collective to change it. One bee sting won’t protect the hive, but many bee stings is deadly. The bee doesn’t hesitate because its one individual sting isn’t going to bring about its Hollywood ending — it just stings. We need to be like that. Sting with all the power of your one sting, whatever that may be. Organizing. Attending protests. Guerrilla street activism. Writing. Tweeting. Making memes. Distributing literature. Talking to people. Making videos. Whatever you can do to help wake up the rest of the bees and alert them to the threat that our collective hive has come under. You won’t stop the empire by yourself. You won’t make a major difference. But you will make *A* difference. And there’s nothing anyone can do to stop you from making that small difference that you can make. Take that unstoppable small difference and work toward getting as many of the others to do the same, because enough unstoppable small differences will necessarily add up to becoming an unstoppable big difference. And once we hit that point, healthy change becomes inevitable.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Sometimes I wonder if I’m more sick of these lying Democrats and Republicans or our citizens that keep fighting to defend the corrupt team of their choice” (-Black In The Empire)
LOOKIE HERE. OOPS, WHOOPSIE DAISY, ANOTHER ACCIDENTAL ACCIDENT IN A WORLD OF COINCIDENCES CAUSE ALL THE SMART PEOPLE TELL ME THERE ARE NEVER ANY CONSPIRACIES OR BILLIONAIRE TECHSUREVEILLANCE MICROCHIPPED CASHLESS SOCIETY ROBODOG ROLLOUTS OR DEPOPULATION AGENDAS UNDERWAY! WHOO! WHAT A RELIEF!
“There will be immense pressure to increase the police budget and for the left to roll over, but we cannot let that happen. The time to begin organizing a massive protest is now. The left can create an alternative to the boss’s party, but only if we fight for it.” (-Rampant Magazine)
“Happy Easter! Police murdered an environmental activist in your backyard.”
“So this is love Well she finally kissed me Had me all fuckedup inside I was in love but Cupid missed me She up and left and I almost died But I was young and I was far from lonely I been that way for a long, long year Needed a girl to call my one and only Is that you?”
For some reason the feral desert cows that the insane assholes of this state’s bureau of land management want to kill off for no good reason, other than wanting to decrease everybody’s ability to be self sufficient as they poison the farmlands with their toxic fires and gmo seeds and Roundup and shit, these feral cows like to wonder around at night and always seem to fertilize this particular patch of land I inhabit, I feel like I mighta heard ’em clompin’ around out there about four in the morning, I aint been outside to investigate yet, but I just hope they did not knock down my fence cause I been workin’ so hard to repair that fuckin’ fence. Anyways…Ya know like everybody else back in 1987, I had high hopes of Guns N Roses carrying the torch for wild rocknroll, but they just got too rich to be good, too much too soon and fell in love with that merch moolah, and lost their songwriter, Izzy, and the drummer Steven Adler who gave ’em that wild, carreening roller coaster reckless train goin’ up around the bend sortof feeling and it was a cryin’ shame and a bummer, and I never fully got over it, much like when Diamond Dave left Van Halen and they tried to replace him with Sammy Hagar who many say is a nice guy, but I guess his frequency is just different from mine, he’s just too Jimmy Buffet for me, too fratboys on spring break. The magic of Van Halen was in having the best drummer, the greatest guitar player, a fun bassist with a Jack Daniels bottle shaped bass guitar and a high harmony Beach Boys vocal appeal, Diamond Dave doing flips and karate kicks and dressed like Ric Flair raided Steven Tyler’s roadcase, he is part ninja kung fu warrior, part philosopher, speaks several languages, is world traveled, has all kindsa interests, loves to dance, does Chaplin like comedy routines and self references as a combat hippie. It was that dynamic between him and Vard, as the band called him, that made all those records so fabulous. Force of nature lightning show sonic illustrator Eddie wanting to be thunderously hard and Dave bringing in all the samba and salsa and surf and dreamy, beachy, melodic pop influences, together, you know there was no one like ’em and never will be. Now, that first David Lee Roth Band, they had something, too. I’ve been wishing he’d reunite the “Eat ‘Em & Smile” lot since forever-I can listen to that album and even “Skyscraper” all day, but mostly, when I need to feel Alive With Pleasure, I still reach for my old Van Halen cassettes. They were really the band that first got me dreaming in technicolor spectacle. Roth is another dude I really love and respect even though I understand he is way to the right of me, politically speaking, but he remains one of the only public figures I know of who is still loudly speaking out about the value and importance of free speech and opposing censorship which I appreciate and admire, I listen to his podcasts every time he drops one and he has given me a lifetime of encouragement and inspiration from afar. Thanks again, David. He was like the big brother I never had. In the punk rock days, nobody knew I was doing my impersonation of Roth, no one could recognize it, cause I look more like Joey Ramone, but it was always Roth. To me, he is Elvis and Evil Keneiva, Bruce Lee and Roy Rogers. Only Little Richard makes me happy like that, just instantly. Shazam! Dolemite, Motherfucker! Okay, and maybe sometimes, Rick James! I took a lot from him, too! But anyways, “Low Rez Sunset” has been my main jam for over a year, I think! Even my old lady likes it.
RICK FROM ACETATE RECORDS SENT ME SOME RHINO BUCKET IN THE MAIL YEARS AGO
and I was surprised by how good they were in a pure and unadulterated impure adulterous sleaze sortof way! You do like AC/DC, all night road trips, greasy spoons on the side of the highway, roadhouse bars where everybody’s wearing black leather and only old school rocknroll’s on the jukebox? Rotgut whiskey bottle, “Blood Sweat, & Beers”? Then you’re gonna love Rhino Bucket in spite of their crazy name. Georg Dolivo has the exact voice summa my old sleaze metal compatriots always wished I woulda had back when I was still singing in some deadend sleazepunk gangs who could never keep a steady drummer long enough to complete a record. Exactly the band my old rhythm guitar player with the Malcolm Young obsession always wanted to be in. They formed in Van Nuys in the late eighties and reminded me variously of AC/DC, Jackyl, Junkyard, Flies On Fire, Supersuckers, Four Horsemen, Uncle Sam, Kix, all scuzz and sleaze and snarl and they had such all night motherfucker road dogs energy to burn. They even got a song called “Monkey Boy Highway” which reminds me so, so much of an old travel companion of mine way back in the day. They will make you want to drink. It’s my understanding that they are huge in Wapakoneta. Check ’em out.
“Liberals are not just brainwashed, like large segments of the left, they are the willing allies of liberal bourgeois totalitarianism.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
Riots in Bordeaux during an unauthorized demonstration against Macron’s pension reform, Thursday March 30, 2023 (Photo by Fabien Pallueau/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Biden brags about giving police $30 billion. That’s white supremacy. NATO is white supremacy. Biden bragging about crime bill is white supremacy. ” (-Margaret Kimberley)
YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IN TRUTH, PEACE, FREE SPEECH, REAL JOURNALISM OR FREE SPEECH IF YOU DO NOT SUPPORT JULIAN ASSANGE & ACTIVELY CALL FOR HIS RELEASE. JUST SAYIN’.
“A reminder that the CIA paid the Dalai Lama $180,000 per year to protect a brutal theocratic aristocracy that tortured and maimed poor peasants in China’s Tibetan region.
People like the Lamas are the US’s true “allies.”” (-Danny Haiphong)
Something suspicious is going on. Last week’s Pentagon leaks have been reported on extensively by the corporate media. Why? When leaks legitimately reveal the inner workings of the US empire, those leaks are either not covered by the corporate media or the leaker is actively…” (-Lee Camp)
One of those fabulous, few and far between real rocknroll bands that were really tearin’ it up way back when I first became domesticated and abandoned the suckass indie pop/post grunge preppie faux punk scene in the late nineties and retreated into home life with my three older kids, so sorry I never got a chance to see these cats live, but they laid alot of high quality music onto tape and we can always enjoy them on Youtube. Hats off to the Dragons!
always reminded me of Brian O’Blivion and vice versa, so talented, and ya know his old band were the zenith of glammy popnroll, am not at all surprised that Redd Kross had the good taste to recruit Jason Shapiro. His solo record is like a cross between that band TSAR, you know the one, that did that awesome tune, “Calling All Destroyers” meets the sugary sweet power pop side of Sparks with some Jellyfish or Imperial Drag for desert! Delicious, but a bit like raw cookie dough, you can end up with a sugar overdose.
“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [libertarianism] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” (-Christopher Hitchens)
CONTROLLED BIG 5 CORPORATE “NEWS” IS STILL FAKE AS FUCK RULING CLASS ONE PERCENTER GATES-RESET PROPAGANDA
YOU THINK USA CARES ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS WHILE FUNDING ATROCITY? YA THINK It”S CLASSY TO BOMB DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS HOSPITALS OF FUND MURDEROUS RIGHTWING PUPPET COUPS LIKE IN PERU?
“The people with all the capital have convinced the rest of us that capitalism is the best system the world has ever seen. As Americans cheer watching our Gov’t transfer $100 billion from us to their donors to spend on a proxy war that they provoked, the non-Western world is forming alliances to protect themselves from us and moving off the dollar
I don’t know if our citizens or owners are dumber.” (-Black In The Empire)
British singer/songwriter INDYA started under the name Laudez Rose. This 10 song album could easily find its place in the dark pop category. “Too Goth To Handle” opens the album and sounds a bit like a punked-up GARBAGE with funky touches. “Leather N Lace” is a heavy rock song that take us to a more industrial territory and “Little Crush” has a bit of a “Government Hooker” (LADY GAGA) thing in it that will sure make you dance. Rock guitars and trip-hop rhythms sometimes flirt together (“Fill Me With Ya Love”) and a song like “I Wanna Be The One” could defninitely be a pop metal hit. You’ll also hear a bit of dub in the dance rock track “Raise Ya Vibration (feat. Israelite)” and some 80s rock with a a hip-hop part in “Ignite It (feat. Mc Neat.) “Wasted” and “Finish Her” both give classic rock a modern revamp while “Ferrari” ends this album with a rockin’ moshin’ vibe. Definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for new sounds with 80s and 90s references. /Laurent C.
“They condition us to hate each other because they want you to blame your neighbor who looks different than you so you won’t wake up and realize that we have far more in common with our neighbors than both corporate parties who actively rig the system against us.” (-Ryan Knight)
“In liberal brainworm land, Julian Assange is not a journalist but Joe Biden’s spin doctor is.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Only the most naive or dishonest believe that mass shootings in the U.S. can only be explained by the availability of guns. We all know that violence is endemic to this culture. How else can one explain the absence of opposition to U.S. warmongering?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“I know this is a mystifyingly fringe view in what passes for today’s “intellectuals,” but avoiding a US-Russia conflict (and so nuclear war) is in fact the most important task. It’s not “justice” to gamble with the lives of millions and humanity’s future.” (-Branko Marcetic)
“Our family has been robbed of four years together which we will never get back. He needs to come home. We need him home.” (-Stella Assange)
ANARCHY EVERYWHERE! CORPORATIONS POISON US WITH IMPUNITY & COVER FROM IDENTITARIAN BOUTIQUE SAFESPACE NATO FAUXWOKE FAKE LEFT SHITLIBS! PRO WAR POLITENESS HUSTLERS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS!
You know who’s back in the studio making new music for people who love real old school traditional punknroll is none other than our colleagues and kindred spirits from Australia, the wild and reckless Leftards, if you aint hip to ’em, add ’em to all your social media and follow ’em and shit, you’ll love ’em.
“Democrat-aligned media are allowed to voice some skepticism about war narratives with China while unquestioningly pushing war narratives about Russia. The inverse is true of Republican-aligned media.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Is it a sign of my campaign’s strength that the Elite of DC’s establishment media simultaneously and shamelessly published an orchestrated and baseless lie to smear me, even before I announce my presidential campaign? CBS News’s Bob Costa, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Vanity Fair, and Salon are circulating fake news that the American people have come to expect and despise. Steve Bannon has nothing to do with my presidential campaign. I have never discussed a presidential run with Mr. Bannon. Journalism should be about “investigate and report” not “invent and report.” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
IF I BELIEVED THEY EVER FIXED THE DIEBOLD HACKABLE VOTING MACHINES OR THEY WEREN’T ALLOWED TO CONTROL THE DEBATES & CANCEL DEBATES & FIX THE PRIMARIES & SHIT & ACTUALLY COUNTED THE VOTES, I’D VOTE FOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. FOR SURE! ONLY ONE TALKIN’ BOUT PALESTINE! WHERE ARE YOUR SHITLIB SUPERSTARS? BUSY AT THE RED CARPET CREEPY ILLUMINATI GALA, OH YEAH!
“Avoiding nuclear war is the single most important thing in the world. This would be obvious to everyone if it weren’t for unforgivable levels of mass media malpractice.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
DEPECHE MODE FOREVER
“And I haven’t felt so alive in years…”
R.I.P. Al Jaffee, ya know when I was growing up we did not have the internet or cellphones or any of that shit, so we did alot of reading and drawing and “Mad Magazine” was my world as a youngster, pre New Wave, it was “Mad”, “Saturday Night Live”, the Monkees, Beatles, comicbooks, Houdini, then I discovered The Doors and Stones and “Playboy” and “Penthouse” and then, it was Prince, the Clash, “Creem” and Van Halen, right? Psychedelic Furs and Duran, Thompson Twins, Billy Idol, Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, Nik Kershaw, the Smiths, even U2 and the Police, on my Sony Walkman I’m ashamed to say….Depeche Mode was one of my main bands as a kid, what I listened to with my first love, some other later loves, the goth chcik from california who used to sneak me into her basement and I came to love her warm house but they tore it down to make more parking lots for the hospital-only industries in that town were the tankplant, the hospital, and the jails, ya know “Black Celebration” is more impactful and meaningful now than it even wa s when they wrote it cause you know all the songs are about death, drinking, seeking some kinda sanctuary from all the fear and alienation in some intimacy. Of course “Memento Mori” seems like a bit of a sequal to “Black Celebration”. I wish they woulda paid Alan Wilder and he coulda stayed with the band, you hear the golden era songs and there’s no question that his genius synth contributions enhanced Martin’s songwriting. I got some kinda dread about having to go out in public today, I just don’t like having to fuck with people very often anymore. I am watching that Brooke Shields movie and she is talking about the problem with beauty and objectification and everybody feeling like they somehow own you because of the way you look if you are born beautiful,everybody wants to capture and possess that beauty, no matter what one may be on the inside. Does not even matter, the beauty is there to be worshipped, bought, worshipped, possessed..That same kinda thing probably happened to my original Depeche Mode girlfriend, as her beauty blossomed beyond description, she was offered everything by everybody so it became increasingly impossible for her to stay who she was when we were young and weird, traumatized teenagers in mourning together, clinging to one another, she became accepted by the world, validated, pursued, applauded, all that stuff. I did not. It’s a bit of a comedy, really, the whole ride is definitely a roller coaster, we finally find friends and they have to leave us either in death or in their celebrity or capitulation or assimilation or whatever. I was thinking about my old goth girlfriends and once close friends who became psychiatrists and how they might think I’m crazier than their actual patients now cause I stuck to the code, ya know what I mean? All those lyrics still mean everything to me, Morrissey’s like that, too, ya know he mentions Gen X and X Ray Spex in his “Rebels Without Applause” tune, some of us were just not made to be part of the winning winner’s popularity contest, acquisition oriented, propertarian beauty world, I’m not meant for capitalist society, and even though Mozzer actually did succeed, and became rich and adored, he still was able to kinda stick to his own ways. I did not change my beliefs to marry into wealth or get the college P.C. official narrative makeover like all the former acquaintances who were conditioned to dismiss all corruption and injustice as mere “conspiracy theories” or “coincidences” or like, “human error and accidental oopsy daisy oversight” like with the Blackrock owned Norfolk Southern train wreck resulting somehow in an intentional “controlled burn” toxic fire in Palestine. I dunno, man, I never became inclined to just trust the loving and philanthropic billionaires to be my super scientific spaceman saviors for woke science. I never bought into the idea that the deep state spooks should be allowed to control the internet or be the media, or that the dark organizations that assassinated MLK and Malcolm X, John Lennon (according to former governor and Navy Seal, Jesse Ventura!) and the Kennedys were the good guys for DC Comics heroism and apple pie and marketing diversity.”Black Celebration” remains one of my favorite records even in my fifties. I only wanna hear music that has real heart. Now they are grooming people to have no hearts, it’s fuckedup, man.
sounds pretty much exactly like you’d expect it to-close your eyes, give me your hands, darlin’, and just imagine ageless Susannah’s coy eternal teenager flirtatious eighties new wave popstar radio voice singing the Rolling Stones song, “Under My Thumb.” You can hear her in your head already, if you were a Paisley Revival eighties kid like I was, or probably even if you’re just a casual mainstream radio listener. I always loved pretty much everything by the Bangles EXCEPT “Walk Like An Egyptian”. I always hated that song, the drums were horrible, whole thing was insipid, but man Susaanah is a real cool rocknroll girl ya know she always selects the best covers, like “Hazy Shade Of Winter” or “If She Knw What She Wants”. I dunno if you saw that movie her mom directed back then, “The Allnighter” but me I always had to see and hear anything she was part of, it’s partly because of her eyes I admit it upfront, and partly cause I find her voice really soothing and like I said her taste is always just exquisite and impeccable. Even Prince fell for Susannah. Being famous is a fuckedup headtrip and ruins most people who have it inflicted upon them, but the real cool thing about Susannah Hoffs is how all sources confirm she is still real people relatable, loves music, writes, is a mom, sometimes I just youtube her and always dig all her live stuff cause she is pop perfection, usually. So yeah if you love her half as much as I do, dig into her new album “Deep End”. It’s pretty fab, like all her stuff usually is. I been her fan since “Hero Takes A Fall”. Been workin outside with the hot sun burning up my back, had to take a break here, hydrate, take my leather vest off, definitely one of those wifebeater only days, gonna have some sunburn on my shoulders, muscles still sore from relocating 15 big buckets of gravel yesterday, gotta go back to the DMV with more paperwork today, don’t expect the bureaucrat Angent Screwyou to let me have my I.D. today, either, really, the system’s meant to torture poor people. Too much work to do, had a couple hours off yesterday, then it’s right back to landscaping, yardwork, adolescent caregiving and part time attending to an older sick person’s needs, I ain’t complainin’ really, aside from the DMV and nonstop stress of parenthood, everything’s okay and I got a Susannah Hoffs song in my head. How fun that must be to have a voice like that! She’s sensational, no wonder she’s a big star-remember when stars were talented in some way, either exceptional as writers or musicians or bringing a unique perspective or point of view, or for having a unique sound to their voice? Now it’s just boy band and manufactured slut puppet rich kids make believing they just invented cross dressing and sicko occult ritual bullshit with a drum machine,.Bring back the Bangles. The Go Go’s, Dream Syndicate, Three O’Clock, ya know? People with talent and ideas saying their own thing. I thought Susannah’s frequent collaborator, Matthew Sweet was only so-so ho-hum back in the day, like I dug his song, “Girlfriend” but thought to myself, “he ain’t no Jim Ellison!” Now all that toxic Miley Cyrus hot garbage the industry pushed on us that aint even music man, makes me have more begrudging appreciation for like even Evan Dando who I thought was just some dumb pothead tall rich kid in an army suplus jacket playing slummy drug addict in the grunge years, he used to get on my nerves-now I can hear “Into Your Arms” by the Lemonheads and think, okay, at least there’s a song there, “Great Big No”, “Big Gay Heart”, Rick James Style”, I worked in Harvard Square during the peak of Alternahunk Evanmania so ya know I was just so NOT a Lemonheads enthusiast, but like I say, no real music is allowed on the airwaves anymore, so I end up revisiting the also-rans, even summa the stuff I thought was mediocre in the alternative era, summ that same shite even sounds almost decent, refreshingly melodic and humane, especially in the shadows of all that mass media promoted occult ritual plastic surgery pop, or push button video game post nu metal/pro war rage rawk they got now.
“Neither Party cares about you, their job is to keep you fighting each other while their donors steal everything we have. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about Black people, they care about Black votes, there’s a big difference
As long as they can get enough of our votes without actually doing anything, other than saying the GOP is racist, giving us some caring rhetoric and symbolism, they will. America, the land where 15 million people are about to be kicked off of Medicaid, but the big news is about a former President paying off a porn star. Imagine if we had a media that actually challenged what our Gov’t was telling them? Unfortunately, they are corporate owned stenographers, terrified of getting on the wrong side of the Establishment, whose job is not to inform, but to tell us what we are supposed to believe. Remember when the Biden Administration ended the 20 year occupation of Afghanistan after invading their country and killed an innocent man and his 9 family members with a drone strike on the way out?
Of course not, because reality is you only care about what the TV tells you to. How can you want Putin in jail and sit in America not caring about the fact that our Presidents are free? The US is still illegally occupying Syria while preaching to the world about respecting sovereignty. I get so tired of the US ‘holier than thou’ attitude, no country kills, steals, starves and interferes more than the US with the rest of the world. We recently even had politicians threatening to invade Mexico. Cut the shit please. It seems like it’s almost everyday now that I go on YouTube and see a different African leader talking about how the US murdered their leaders, couped their Gov’ts, stole their resources, and tried to force our values on them It’s almost like not everybody sees us as heroes. I will admit that it has been kind of nice watching countries all over the Global South telling the corrupt, lying, arrogant psychos from the US and their obedient partners in the West to their face about their hypocrisy and to get lost. The most dangerous Americans are the ones that are still convinced we live in a democracy, our Gov’t cares about people around the world, and their Party and corporate news channels are telling them the truth. Macron is having a tough time His country is on fire, countries in Africa have kicked France out, he got embarrassed letting his pals send him to China and he is tied to a sinking ship called the United States. It was inevitable that the US weaponizing the dollar against any country that disobeyed them was gonna result in the forming of alliances to protect themselves. You didn’t need a fancy college degree to figure that one out. No matter how many deaths the United States causes trying to hold on to their hegemony, it’s already too late. China won and they did it without bombing, couping and sanctioning half of the world.
The US likes to talks about the corruption in other countries Meanwhile at the Pentagon “Hey anybody seen that trillion dollars?” China is bringing Peace to the Middle East
The United States is bringing weapons to Ukraine. If you believe the owners are happy about the possibility of some kind of peace and stability coming to the Middle East or anywhere in the Global South, you have been successfully brainwashed. The US Gov’t is watching their rule of the world come to an end, and sadly our Oligarchy will not hesitate to kill or do whatever it takes to try to maintain their power and control. As Russia and China are trying to bring Peace and Stability to the Middle East, don’t think that the US won’t reach into their bag of terrorists to try to stop it. I don’t like Trump, and I don’t like this BS charge against him either. How about the Establishment either at least try to continue to pretend that this is a democracy and let the people decide if they want to vote for Trump, or arrest all of our other Presidents for their war crimes, if nobody is above the law? I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think there’s a “Statute of Limitations’ on murder.
The rulers of the US are terrified that our citizens might figure out that capitalism failed and only benefits them. The US is fighting to remain the rulers of the world and Americans not only see nothing wrong with that, but thinks that any country that refuses to obey us and wants to grow and improve the lives of their citizens is our enemy. Russia standing up to the white supremacist, terrorist organization called NATO has caused the US many problems,
Many in the world have been emboldened to stand up for themselves, and there are now too many countries for the US to sanction, coup and leaders to murder at one time.The great freedom loving, democracy of the United States recently gave a grand funeral to Madeleine Albright who said on National TV “Killing 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it”
That’s the real country we live in. Taibbi “The Gov’t and Social Media were working together to censor accounts and even censored information that they knew was true”
Medhi Hassan “Oh, yeah! Well you got this date wrong” Does anybody notice how little the United States Gov’t talks about the fact that Ukraine is being totally destroyed as a country?
No need to wonder why, it’s not some kind of strategy, it’s because they don’t care. NATO isn’t at war with Russia, they are providing the weapons, cash, training, intelligence, strategy and Ukraine is providing the dead bodies and destroyed country. While they have people focusing on Trump, Wagner has now taken over and is chilling out in Bakhmut’s Police Station. I looked at several pictures and videos of Bakhmut
Holy Shit!
Is that what winning looks like now? The West came together and placed 10 rounds of economic sanctions on Russia designed to destroy their economy for decades
They spent $125 billion in weapons, cash, training and Intelligence to help Ukraine win Russia is still in Ukraine,and they are weak?
Zelensky is like a crackhead neighbor that keeps coming back for more with a story about how they just need a little more money and this time he is gonna use it and get his life together. Is it too much to ask for Americans to get this emotionally involved about the people in the Black and Brown countries around the world being killed and suffering from the sanctions placed by the United States? The West is panicking over the very thought that they have lost their ability to exploit Africa. I will admit that even when the Establishment got away with the Russiagate spy novel shit to try to get rid of Trump, I still never thought they’d stoop to something like trying to prosecute him for this Stormy Daniels nonsense.
We’ve become a bigger joke than I could imagine. Why does our media say that Taiwan is a country that China ‘considers’ part of its territory?
Almost every country in the world, including the US considers Taiwan to be part of China’s territory
The US just plays it both ways because they need to use Taiwan to weaken China. If the US cares about sovereignty why are they illegally in Syria?
If they care about human rights why are they giving $4 billion a year to Israel? If they care about democracy why do they organize coups?
If they care about freedom of speech and press why is Assange in jail?” (-Black In The Empire)
Been thinking about Spike quite a bit since his old bunch mutinied during the Covid Lockdowns and his best mate Guy Bailey passed away-looking forward to hearing that lp he co wrote with Guy Bailey they were workin’ on ya know he’s gonna record it with Chris Johnstone, Nigel Mogg and Rudy Richman later this year. I feel for the guy because I know what it’s like to have the whole pirate ship mutiny ala the Black Pearl also losing your dearest childhood brothers just makes every day feel so thin and fragile. God bless ’em. Myself, I feel like every cliche about growing old is coming true at once-wakeup feeding cats, making coffee, having teeth issues, knees goin’ out, arthiritic, bad back, PTSD, read the morning obituaries, end up liking the birds, cactus embedded in my hand becoming infected and I’m too blind to dig it out, even the total awareness of being an artless codger and sentimental fool forever longing for what is lost and can not be retrieved, complaining about his aches and pains, the ten daily vitamins, can’t remember certain words, shrinking vocabulary, the whole ordeal, the daily litany of lamentations.
“Oh baby what I wouldn’t give to live the way we used to live, hell yeah I prize my juvenelia, realize it’s growin’ up that kills ya” (-“Hey Remember” by the Naked Flames)
DUANE PETERS
I’ve known a lot of people who struggle with mental illnesses, and almost everybody I have ever known is hiding some kind of addiction-most usually that driving compulsion to obtain always more products or attain more status with titles or diplomas, endorsements or showoff sttus symbols, power trips, vanity, but even the prim and proper pretty talkers are usaully night time wine box guzzlers or big pharma middle class prescription pain pill abusers, so I aint gotta lot to say when the temperance league scolding committes and cancel culture nags all turn against somebody, Im not part of the lynchmob bogus culture war identity bubbles, I come from a pre P.C. world where they all told us they did not give a fuck and to get over it and get a haircut and get a real job and you aint a man unless you drive a really, really, really big truck and have a lotta money to buy a woman, like ya do. I’m not part of the fauxwoke world that judges and crucifies people with mental illness or substance issues in tumultuous, hateful, punishing times such as these where the state goes back n forth between glorifying violence when it’s time to steal oil or fuck with other countries sovereignty like in Peru where the Biden administration did their coup, kidnapped their democratically elected leader and have helped their puppet government assassinate reporters and over 75 protestors last I heard; and then wring their hands about how language is violence if they wanna take down some comedian for making too much sense, it’s a fucking crazy planet we’re living on, and just a handfull of billionaire motherfuckers are perpetuating a lot of the needless death and suffering. The way I see it, you aint no punk if comfortable college educated middle class people aint calling you a Russian Troll or Conspiracy Theorist. Ya know it’s all just like one long ongoing nightmarish heartbreak, watching all our loved ones dropoff one by one, my whole crew is dead and gone, I guess a couple survivors went into the deep retirement-rooms of recoverty, watching sports on television, that kinda stuff, or just flatout soldout and became just like their moms, ya know. It’s hard and lonely doing the long walks alone. I still wanna rock, I’m a like a one man landslide. I’ll tell ya who rocked like a motherfucker. Duane Peters, everything he did was rocknroll all the way, red blooded rebel rocker through and through, ya know he did not come to fuck around. One of the real punknroll motherfuckers, power to the people, street rat scavenger, creator of intensely cool clothing and music and songs and I don’t even care about skateboarding, I’m not a skateboarder, never have been, where I came form, that was like jock culture, not really subversive outlaw rebellious stoner culture, it was preppie jock assholes, the bullies and rich kids who skateboarded, so it was never my scene, it was the opposite of punk in Shmoehio, but I get the how it was different in California. I also don’t care at all about any famous ex skateboard pros having rivalries or beefs. Nothing to do with me. You know I’m always askin’ myself where have all the real punks gone? Most of ’em are dead already, only a few of us still living by any kinda real street level punk ethics, most people who call themsleves punques nowadays are just the rules following, propaganda consuming, stand in line eager beaver tv believers with disposable incomes showing off their three thousand dollar spiked jacket at the museum or whatever, I don’t even like those people-the Pink 182’s, I call ’em, the Offspring fans, that aint my scene, the Green Days might as well be Kalltha Kops Karens or Thank Obamas-only pro war when there is a Republikkkan president, they love the kkkops, and worship any and all authority figures but especially the identity politricks of the fauxgressive do nothing fraud squad supermodels-their preassigned, made for tv celebrity figureheads; and even their own behind the scenes string pulling George Soros and Bill Gates oppressors, I think they all have Stockholm Syndrome, ya know what I’m sayin’. Anyways, when I need a good dose of fast fix Alrite! and Fuck Yeah, Duane Peters has always been such a reliable right on go-to source of energetic anarchism and defying the system and flagrantly livin’ by his own instincts and beliefs. I loved that cat’s music even if he’s got a controversial or criminal past and is probably way, way to the right of me politically, I can see clearly how what used to be the left was all hijacked or infiltrated by Cointelpro disruptors and P.C. fauxwokes so ya know I don’t quit liking somebody’s wild rocknroll just cause their politics seem to shift, I think the left verus right arguments are irrelevant really, a big diversion, when both so called sides support tyranny, fascism, censorship, police state, and endless war. I know people online slag him off as Qanon and it’s possible he went crazy for awhile or fucked up here and there when he was grief stricken over the death of his kid, but I get that. I understand what a horrifying and agonizing hurt that must be everyday, I never “got over” any of my friend’s deaths, so ya know I stand with everybody struggling to make sense of this crazy fuckedup world of lies when it’s usually the corporate media and government doing all the real abuse and bullshitting and dividing all the rest of us. Some people say he’s got drug problems or mental health issues, fuck shit man, doesn’t everybody in tortuous times like these? I hope his other kid with Cory Parks is doing okay. We corresponded a little bit, back n forth on social media way back in the day before I got lockedout of social media for antiwar shitposting. I felt devastated with him when he lost his son in a car accident. I miss that guy, all his rocknroll smoked, he’s the personification of a total rocknroll motherfucker. I got a U.S. Bombs. patch on my Dickies jacket. Still carrying a little piece of black flag for Duane Peters! I don’t really care if the safespace shitlibs say he’s crazy, all his rocknroll still rocks L.A.M.F.
“Any psych students seeking a thesis project? Consider the #BlueAnon cult. They believe in a vast Trump-Russia conspiracy — in fact, in any allegation involving a Russian.
Members are affluent, employed by media outlets, and, like this chap, love spreading pro-war propaganda:” (-Aaron Mate)
“The US didn’t want Nord Stream built US threatened sanctions on companies that built it US tried to stop it from being used US said they would end it It gets blown up US celebrates it US says Russia must have done it Millions then believed Russia blew up their pipeline” (- Black In The Empire)
“If Not Now, When?” The Nation is in crisis. We need people with courage. Power concedes nothing without a demand.
“Julian Assange is the world’s greatest and most famous journalist and he’s in prison solely for the crime of doing good journalism, but sure, let’s all spend our time shaking our fists at far away “authoritarian regimes” for imprisoning journalists. There really is no other interpretation of the First Amendment that makes this TikTok ban okay. If it goes through then Americans should mark that as the end of their constitution, because their government has made it clear they’ll disregard it in the most brazen way imaginable.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“At some point the non-rich in this country are going to realize they are protecting the rich and not the other way around. It’s a totally recent phenomenon that people define themselves by their political party.
It’s just not healthy for individuals or the nation.” (-Erin Brockovich)
“Somewhere in the bowels of Foggy Bottom, a US official is cheering the indictment of America’s top opposition leader for bookkeeping violations while laying plans to sanction a rogue foreign government for hounding a US-trained opposition leader.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Most people dislike believing they and their factions are the ones in power. They want power, while claiming the victim mantle.
Left-liberal opinion-makers constantly depict themselves as the enemies of power centers – US Security State, Big Tech, media – as laughable as it is.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Of course NPR is US state-affiliated media. It’s funded by the US government, all its reporting advances the information interests of the US government, and its CEO’s last job was running overt propaganda organs of the US government. If it doesn’t deserve that label, no one does.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
There are too many countries rebelling and declaring their sovereignty for the US to successfully coup all of them. The Empire is dying. The Middle East is looking to make Peace, Africa declaring their sovereignty, OPEC defying orders, Brazil agreeing to ditch the dollar with China, and countries getting in line to join BRICS. Believe American State propaganda if you want, but they know it’s all falling apart. China won and they did it without coups, sanctions, assassinations, invasions and bullying and on top of that they’ve managed to improve life in their country over the past few decades, unlike the United States. You want to know what a dying Empire looks like? If you live in America you have a front row seat.” (-Black In The Empire)
““If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms. Together we can restore America’s democracy.” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
knocked everything down at the gypsy encampment cowboy ranch we’ve been looking after while the cowboy is out of town, the extreme winds just shake those little R/V’s and cabins and all my dude’s stuff fell off the walls and on the floor, I was just stoppin’ by for a shovel to finish up a fence project, otherwise I’d have tried to box up summa his belongings that are on the floor and secured more stuff on the property, probably gonna head back over there once we get a thumbs up from the owner and see if I can keep some more of his stuff from getting thrashed all the way by the doors slamming and fixtures swinging around and yard furniture getting tossed around by the elements-I never met that man but just seeing his stuff I recognize him as a kindred spririt, older version of myself–it’s still dark out as I have my morning coffee and I see the big full moon still gleaming in the sky over my neighbor’s house-just hope my tomato, lettuce and peppers sproutlings survived the night. I woke myself up snoring and had “Seasons In The Sun” playing in my skull, probably not a good sign. Thinkin’ ’bout my babies out there in the world, dreamt about a long gone golden bartendress and a Detroit songwriter who’ve both already moved on up to honky tonk heaven, I’m surrounded by annoying cats demanding food. Almost wish I hadda cigarette but I’m trying to lay ’em down again to improve my chances of living long enough to see my years absent older kids again someday, hopefully, it’s been so long. Yeah that cowboy has stage 4 badness and I think he wants to come back here and die on that property but the owner wants to convert it into an airbandb naturally cause what else would you ever want to do with land and property, come visit the Haunted Ranch, $200 a night-right? As we age, ya notice how our contemporaries seem to just blindly prefer to go with the flow, they stopped asking real questions back in college cause it jeopardized their GPA and they were going ever deeper into debt to get that good job in navel Studies, they all seem to cling stubbornly to long subverted and corrupted insititutions and carefully curated corporate image McWokeness brand models, ya know? Almost all my ex associates who have jobs in media or adcaemia for instance don’t even wanna know what’s happening in the world unless it involves you know, like praising Beyonce and Taylor for their songwriting talent, or enthusing about Jack Black and Lizzo or Miley Cyrus and Thanking Obama for keepin’ it classy. They don’t want to know. They avoid me like the Covid and if they think of me at all it’s probably as like, their buzzkill Debbie Downer, they just wanna listen to their NPR and get their Venti iced skinny hazelnut macchiato, sugar – free syrup, extra shot, light ice, no whip without having to think about Starbucks’ union busting practices or some oopsy daisy train “accident” the Biden admin already assured them was safe and effective, they’re trying to like. SHOP on their I-Phones, and select some new appliance upgrades for their investment property and don’t need to be hassled by some crazy conspiracy theorists or uptight poor people who don’t even watch Rachel Maddow!!! Unscientific flat Earthers! Man, I wish I had some cigarettes, I’m probably just gonna put my warm coat on and go walk around the yard, that’s the kinda thing I do for kicks now-walk around the yard. I used to take pictures of cactus and clouds and barbed wire fences and old mineshafts and cows but my camera fucking broke, so now it’s just me with the worries, the memories, some photographs in boxes, and all the old songs still throbbing in my old skull. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t drive or I might be on the highway this morning spending money I don’t have on gas, you know, a man gets restless. There’s alot of food insecurity on my block so I’m trying my best to grow a big enough garden that I can give some vegetables away, I’m a novice farmer though cause the climate and soil are a lot different here in the deadend desert ghost town than they were in my easy to grow, always bountiful, old Kentucky homestead.
I think prior to Hope Nicholls the most captivating entertainers or frontpeople I’d ever seen performing live and in person were probably Gibby Haynes, Peter Zaremba, John Sex, Wendy Wild, and Brian O’Blivion. Ya know you might not guess Hope Nicholls is someone I consider a personal influence, but she really did affect me as a bad teen and altered my way of fronting a band and commanding a room when I first saw her back in the halcyon days of Aqua Net and shiny trousers, smokin’ clove cigarettes and makin’ out with black haired girls with nose rings in cars, and drinking big bottles of vodka stashed in the backseat in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Indiana on a Sunday night…Her North Carolina cowpunk meets swampy proto grunge, garage band FETCHIN’ BONES played a kinda fun lovin’ hard partyin’ scuzz rock Americana with guts and soulfulness and kinda helped pave the way for what few good bands came along after postpunk and college rock had gotten buried by the hoax of corporate alternative. They kinda reminded me of the Replacements a little, maybe it was all the crazy clashing thrift store plaid jackets, but they had that same kinda unbridled house party beer drinkin’ and from the heart wild abandon we all used to strive for back in those years before people wanted to just use music as some kinda cheap hustle, vehicle or gravy train, and it became just another bullshit cultural tourist say nothin’ cashcow heavily exploited bandwagon, a tawdry, reduced means of “getting somewhere”. Do you even remember Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper or Flat Duo Jets? You never got the vibe the Bones were in it for the money at all, or even fame or middle school popularity like most middle class indie bands we’ve seen since Sub-Pop, they seemed like they were all genuine friends who used to sit around some fifties style red metal kitchen table smoking cigarettes and drinking hard liquor and cheap beer while listening to old Iggy Pop records together. Maybe cookin’ out, or having a washboard and banjo hillbilly hodown on the front porch. Whatever happened to the teenage dream? I honestly don’t even know any people who still get together in real life to drink and listen to music together anymore, I’m not sure I even see that desire to want to commune, connect, jam, share, collaborate, co create, dance and party and get down in the people’s eyes anymore. Everybody’s just preoccupied with their own divided little compartmentalized niche out for themself me shows, just hoarding their micro empires, the internet and lockdown culture and big boxes and gentrification rents really did kill off alot of ways and places people used to gather and converse and joke and exchange and sometimes even organize and unite-the bookstores are being spied on in Atlanta, the record stores closed, or were replaced with overpriced hipster moneygrubbers, aint no real subculture destinations left, remember when there was a coast to coast left of the dial national highway of local print shop homemade fanzines, college radio stations, punk bars, cable access tv shows, illegal after hours places, band houses that would always let other punks cash on the floor? All that’s gone and replaced with heavily censored social media on expensive surveillance gadgets..that require annual product upgrades. Weird, man! Aint that Murkkka? When I was a kid, we’d always make clubhouses out in the woods or someone’s attic, eventually I had to flee my hick abusers and made it to NYC where I was surprised by how many of us were squatting there in our Hanoi Rocks t shirts on St. Mark’s Place who’d run away from different towns all over hoping to find a place to fit in and make a band like you know–the Deadboys and Ramones and Blondie and the Fleshtones did. You could still almost afford to live in the Bowery back then, if you had some hustle, which I did not, I was riding some older girl’s coattails and couch surfing, but at night, the city came alive and we would go to the Pyramid or the Dive or Danceteria or Save the Robots, my girlfriend and her two girlfriends were all hot foxes so we could get in for free even if our roommate Minkie had to say she was my mom, we wore matching sunglasses, black eyeliner, and orange lipstick, and leopard print so we always got the nod from the wild showgirl doorpeople. Even back in the bigger college towns of the midwest, you gotta understand, there was still a real vibrant undergound within driving distance, we drove to Ft. Wayne every Sunday we could cobble together some gas money to hangout with the other freaks and misfits and castouts and punk rockers. Our band was still not writing any great originals yet, mostly we were still playing some Cramps and Stooges covers. Fetchin’ Bones though, had all the sleaze and fury of an L7 years before Seattle broke, they were like the B-52’s younger heavy metal headbangin’ rockabilly rodeo garage punk siblings, they played a Southern blend of heartfelt, stompin’ CCR swamp rock and heart on her sleeve get down pop gospel. There’s really no honest way to talk about Hope without mentioning Janis Joplin, or Exene, Hope was like a Janis for us smalltown death rockers, she just put it all out there so soulfully, all spontanaiety and raw naked emotionalism. She did have a great sense of humor too and a box of like elementary school music class percussion instruments. She looked her audience in the eyes, that’s what I learned from her, she really got inside us, really connecting with me, made us feel like she was there just for us. Communicating something so honest and deeply felt, like she was communing with us smalltown parking lot weirdos with nowhere to belong, like she was one of us. I still love her. She laid it down and MC5 testified and got all her yaya’s out in such an inclusive and empowering and personal way, she was maybe not as famous but she had the same wild lightning bolt streak of greatness like Iggy or Patti. She went on to play in Snagglepuss, Sugarsmack, Pigface and It’s Snakes. She’s a real special artist in my book. My kinda people. If ya see her, tell her the guy in the red leather jacket and the pink studded flares said hello. If yer ever in the neighborhood, stop by, bring a big bottle.
Man ya know I know everybody’s sick of Bob Marley because of all those Island reissues and annoying white college kids cos-playing as hippie for two years before going to work as supervisors in the saltimines, I used to threaten to do a radio show that was gonna skewer all the fake Jamaican patois white people potsmokers who were always “Jommin'”… but you gotta see this essential documentary about how the CIA was destabilizing Jamaica by Balkanizing it into neighborhood ghetto factions with competing druglord warzones, flooding it with guns and training gangs and turning the youth against the youth, employing dons to keep the neighborhoods down and wanting to prevent socialism from taking root and providing for the long suffering Rasta, Marley was doing his best to stay neutral but was still perceived as a threat for trying to unite the warring factions, slow the killing, and bring all the worldwide black people together, he was biracial ya know said he only served God, wanted to be beneficial to the people, of course armed proxies showed up and tried to kill him, forcing him into exile, when rival gang leaders made peace in prison, they knew they needed Bob to help the people make peace who’d all been under boot of different drugdealers employed by regime change covert operations, same shit they did in the Ukraine and attempted in Venezuela, and even right here in River City, friends, color revolutions, divide and conquer, Cointelpro infiltration, psy ops, false flags, honey traps, panopticon surveillance, astro turf fake protest, manufactured opposition, paying off one side, killin’ off anyone who really wants to help humanity, it’s instructive to see how they used the exact same playbokk all the way back in the Reagan era, spooks masquerading as journalists, drugdealing spooks and gun runners masqurading as soundmen, hired Judas hitman assassins, etc.,etc. When Bob danced his soulful holyman religious dance a big lightning bolt appeared in the sky really seemed like Bob was tuned in to, or with the higher powers. When I hear Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, Joe Strummer, or Marvin Gaye songs, I can still feel that religious shimmer running up and down my central nervous system. That’s the only kind of music I’d wanna endeavor to make at this point of the ride. I’m sick to death of fake media, fake muzak, false movements, false gawds. Some oldsters might remember how the Church Committee revealed way back in the 70’s how U.S. intel had developed a heart attack gun, I suspect they got all kindsa different ways to kill motherfuckers now, like all those Global South and Latin American socialist democracies, all their leaders get sick and die young-notice that? Hugo Chavez? All the street soldiers from Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings, already dead and gone, but here’s Kamala. Joe Strummer died young, John Lennon, Bill Hicks, Bob Marley, lotta coincidences, ya know?
4 They pour out arrogant words; all the evildoers are full of boasting. 5 They crush your people, Lord; they oppress your inheritance. 6 They slay the widow and the foreigner; they murder the fatherless.” (-Bible)
“Republican Party war propaganda claims “China is preparing to kill Americans and we have to defend ourselves”… over Taiwan
The US is not “defending” itself by supporting Taiwanese separatists Beijing wants a peaceful resolution to the Taiwan issue. It’s the US that wants war.” (-Ben Norton)
“Sheldon Adelson, like George Soros, are both Jewish billionaires who donated massive amount of money to causes and candidates they support. Why is it permissible to talk about the former but anti-Semitic to talk about the latter?” (-Glenn Greenwald)
Erin Brockovich on Twitter: “The Brockovich Report: Two Truths & A Lie In East Palestine, Ohio https://t.co/z4YvYFrtqV” / Twitter NO LIVES MATTER TO THE EMPIRE, NOT REALLY…FEELGOOD COMMERCIAL CORPORATE EXPLOITATION OF MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES SAME OLD LIPSTICK OF DICTATORSHIPS! I said before I thought it was exceptionally sleazy how all the fraud-squad people and evil, racist corporations and do nothing shitlib sellout corporate Democrats all jumped on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon for five minutes of tweeting “defund the police”, disgracefully, disingenuously, condescendingly performative Kenta cloth clad crass photo-ops of Wall Street honchos and whores for war “taking a knee” like a twisted, perverse parody of legit civil rights hero Colin Kirkpatrick who sacrificed a million dollar career for the people’s movement, just exploiting the people’s outrage and righteous indignation over kkkops killing about 7 citizens a day, overwhelmingly, people of color. I thought it was really gross how all those slimeballs pantomimed some kinda sympathy for victims of state violence, but then promptly superfunding thevery same racist thugs and giving them more military grade weapons and Bill Gates surveillance tech facial recognition software and more spy tech, and building more prisons and helping the ruling class corporate donors fund a big urban warfare training complex in the Atlanta forest, against the wishes of Georgians, to repress future people’s movements and demonstrations. The problem with censorship, and I’ve been saying this since I learned about Lenny Bruce as a kid, is it is foolish to cheer when the government or techlords silence, shutdown, demonetize, cancel some rightwinger you don’t like, you know all the shitlibs obeyed the studio audience applause sign when it was Alex Jones the rightwing vitamins pitchman being censored, but the state/corporations immediately pivoted to also censoring leftists and progressives like Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, Lee Camp, Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, Black Agenda Report, Paul Jay, every antiwar voice on the Real Left. Julian Assange is still being tortured in Belmarsh and Chelsea Manning was kidnapped and similarly punished for years. Facebook memorably “FB-jailed” O.G. culture creator punk legend Jayne County for self referencing as a tranny at some point and she has been a punk as fuck Bowie influencer and tastemaker and protopunk heroine and Stonewall riotor since before me or Zuckerborg were fucking born, so who the fuck is that guy to tell her what kinda speech to use? Fuck off billionaire spookbot! I think the soldout Democrats also exploit the Transgender community, cause all they have to run on is rainbow flag tolerance since they are in bed with the Republikkkans on every other issue, what are they gonna talk about if not Transacceptance and Orange Man Bad. My suspicion is they are using that discussion primarily as a single issue distraction from every other important topic that adversely affects gay people, black people, people being bombed by our military or beaten by the cops, or mass incarcerated for bullshit victimless crimes, or dying young cause they have no access to real medical assistance, or being kicked out into the cold cause they can’t pay the rent, or they got sores on their bodies and their kids are throwing up cause their community’s been poisoned by all these unexplained sudden train accidents, just happening accidentally, or they are being intimidated by facsists for demonstrating againt kkkops assassinating a tee sitter for sitting indian style with his hands up in a tent…while they perform these empty gestures or pummel strawmen authors or comedians who someone claims are off script usually without even hearing what the person originally said, it’s all just an endless TikTok echo chamber of vanity brand celebrities famous for unboxing products, breaking plates, inheriting money, or makeup tutorials on youtube. I shoulda got into that earlier, mighta been a good hustle. I can’t afford contacts anymore and I never thought makeup with glasses or facial hair was a good look, sorry Roy Wood and Turbonegro. Don’t you think it’s obscenely fuckedup how like almost every grassroots activist from the Ferguson, and Baltimore uprisings just died young suddenly by accidental coincidences? This country’s so bamboozled, I’m not sure there’s much chance of turnin’ them horses round, but like Hedges sez, we don’t fight fascists cause we think we’ll win, we fight fascists cause they are fascists. So today, is some kinda big media Trans Visibility Day and hello to all our brothers and sisters of the revolution and comrades all over the spectrum, everyone should protect and support all victims of oppression, bullying and abuse, solidarity with all persceuted peoples. Also, free speech is our only hope at really co creating a legit egalitarian community beyond our bedrooms or hipster lunch clubs, we all gotta stand together to fight AI censorbots and corrupt politicians and deep state platform owners who are controlling all the people’s discourse on these train accidents and assassinated people of color defending our forrests and rights to protest, censoring all discourse on medicine and war and any topic that contradicts their official story profit motives. I don’t believe the capitalist billionaires love black people, or gay people, or trans people, or poor people, I think they exploit us all sometimes for their own gains. One thing they never seem to teach in those posh schools in the honky zipcodes anymore is Martin Niemoller’s famous quote:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. (—Martin Niemöller)
This is happening again right now but nobody’s paying attention cause all they do is empty virtue signaling with no real action behind it, or parroting simpleminded narratives assigned to us from the secretive Davos billionaire one world government oligarchy, handed down via the spook media and the college whitewashings. We can’t just care about our own tiny culture bubble, our special interest focus groups, but every people’s movement, they’ll greenwash or pinkwash or cheapen and advertising squash any of us, cause it’s only in unity that any of us stands a chance against our common oppressors. It’s easy to get sucked in to culture war bullshit, especially if you spend all your time in some cyber makebelieve Meta echoverse, but please do be weary of the rich politicians and liars and capitalists who only wanna suck the lifeblood from any populist movement and divert and channel that energy back into politics as usual partisan ping-pong. I had an LGBT activist friend so invested in the idea that ya’all’s forever prez Thank Obama was an LGBT ally supposedly, therefore, none of us should ever mention his droning of teenagers or imprisoning of journalists, or the poor black people whose water was poisoned in Flint, Michigan where he did a fake photo op, pretended to drink the water, then went back to his plantation estate on Marth’a Vineyard and did not reappear except to help stop athletes from striking over police brutality and murder, so….We disagreed. The pinkwashing is real. I think you can be pro gay rights and also anti war. So that former friend wielded their celebrity influence and got me deplatformed from a famous, long running underground publication I contributed to. I’m still here fighting for free speech and advocating for all repressed and marginalized peoples, not just white college educated Murkkkan members of this or that pie wedge Preference Group. Any Real People’s Movements that make any strides have to look beyond our own navels and care about downtrodden and persecuted voices and human rights, everywhere. Oh yeah…Organize! Educate! Make your own podcast or fanzine, be your own media! Write some protest songs! Grow a community garden, get to know your neighborhood. You’re gonna need those people, yep, even “the others” when the whole shithouse goes up in flames. It’s fuckedup what they did to Palestine and it keeps happening. Type in train derailments. Oops, whoopsy daisy, another coincidental coincidence. Everybody learned in school whenever there is a crumbling infrastructure incident, the responsible thing to do is set all the toxic chemicals on fire and kill off all the wildlife and farmland so the locals have to sell their property cheap and the train’s parent company can then mine for cobalt without all those pesky organic farmers and Amish people in their way.
Veglam 