“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!”
“The Democrats want you to believe that they are ushering in a new generation of leadership by replacing Nancy Pelosi with Hakeem Jeffries, but the only thing they’re doing is replacing one corporate sellout with another corporate sellout. I don’t ever want to hear again that Joe Biden and the Democrats are on the side of the working class after their betrayal of railroad workers who are simply fighting for paid sick leave.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The Democrats are an anti-union party just as much as Republicans, and I’m past ready for people to understand this and move accordingly. None of these politicians are truly fighting for workers. They’ll sell us out every time. Yep, even the squad and y’alls forever president.” (-Ashley Stevens)
JIMMY DORE WAS RIGHT THE WHOLE TIME!
“It’s 2022 and we have railroad workers that can’t get paid sick leave. And it’s not just them. Too many Americans go to work sick because they don’t have paid sick leave. All our government cares about is money.” (-Sabby Sabs)
“This message has to stretch far and wide.
Please directly message and/or call any railway workers you know.Since this is something that could set a precedent in the whole labor movement-
this kind of wildcat strike COULD be one that draws solidarity actions from other unions in the form of physically helping the strike line to keep scabs out, or blocking trains w trucks & buses etc And the strike has to be militant to keep scabs out.” (-Boots Riley)
“In the US, protestors are beaten, arrested, disappeared, and killed routinely.
In the 1960s and 70s, dozens of Black activists in the Black Panther Party were killed or jailed, some for the rest of their life. If China is “authoritarian,” then what is the United States?” (-Danny Haiphong)
“An investigation just came out showing Congress was involved in heavy insider trading with information they got concerning the pandemic. Yet again we see that we live in a Kleptocracy – rule by thieves. Insider trading is illegal when done by regular citizens but not when done by members of Congress. For a moment Congress pretended they were going to fix this problem with the STOCK Act but then they gutted it so that their criminal behavior could continue.” (-Lee Camp)
“Humbly, I have done over a hundred investigations, analysis and reporting on counterintelligence, internal security and HUMINT. I have been following Whitney Webb for over a year. In my opinion, she is one of the most brilliant, thorough and courageous journalists today.” (-Kevin Shipp)
“Good to see someone protesting the NY Times’ festival of war criminals and financial predators.
Netanyahu, Zelensky, Larry Fink and SBF on the same stage. Where is the antiwar movement?” (-Max Blumenthal)
People like me used to be able to congregate in the big cities and collaborate with like minded weirdos, ya know? People like me were even able to succeed in the genrations before ours, a big part of that was in forging communities with other outcast black sheep in locations where there is affordable living space, in pooling resources and sharing rehearsal spaces and shit like that. Everybody was scrapin’ their action togther with like duct tape and some furniture dragged in off the street, we were all just scavengers navigating a bombed out war zone but we had the otther black hole kids and we relied on each other, the rappers influenced the new wavers and vice versa, the clothing designers were helping the film makers and everybody did indie media and improvised their own right now inventions. It was way more alive back then and way more seemed possible. Wendy Wild used to get me in the Pyramid when I was a kid and nobody ever carded anybody at the Wah Wah Hut or Downtown Beirut, or almost anywher in NY until Giuliani started goin’ after Limelite for too many drug dealers, I loved dirty old NY in the 80’s-everybody was cool back then. ya know? Everybody looked like Sigue Sigue Sputnik times Liquid Sky back when I was a runaway and among the old punks there was a long tradition of cooperation and mutual aid. We were all in it together. People were happy to help. The Ramones helped the Deadboys meet their future manager-that’s how it used to be. Now, only rich people can live in the big cities and nobody helps anybody, except for other rich people. So I tried to get away from the evil forces of gentrification but they are always two steps behind me, even in a dead end, wind blown, monsoon faded, river stinks, brutal weather all year round, no hope, remote little graveyard town. All the businesses closed during Covid, but the tiny elite clique of hotel and art gallery and one bar owning millionaires, they fill the downtown retail window spaces up with art junk just to make it look like there are twenty businesses on that street but only about five of them are ever open. The rest are just property hoarders who prefer to not rent any secondary spaces to poor people, they’re just showing off some of their collectible old junk or art collections in retail spaces that are only open at once a month art walks, or oftentimes, never opened, not in the four or five years I’ve been here, anyway. Some smoke n mirror hucksters keep saying the town is booming, on the mend, making a big shitlib cukecumber water slurping, glorious comeback, and becoming a thriving tourist destination overnight, but that’s just wishful thinking hoopla coming from five developers and airbandb owners who are all fly by nights I don’t expect to be here much longer. They’ll do their usual bullshit cashgrabs, and move on. It’s too dead dull for city slickers here, who are used to non stop stimulation, there’s no strip joint here, no Ikea, or Home Depot, or rock concerts or anything, really-lotsa dirt and cactus, three gas stations, two hardware stores, a couple fast food businesses and a ridiculously jackedup and overpriced captive audience Wal Mart.
Wal Mart has us hostage, only place to go. The other local store has lettuce for $5 a head and Cheezit’s are $7. Wal Mart is the only game in town, where kids have to go to be social. That aint entertaining for those landlordly bourgeoise artisinal middle class people who wanna be seen, wanna be celebrities. The truth is the town is full of old broken down properties and going broke, sick and elderly old people. Alot of drugs are coming in and capturing preteens and teenagers. The restaurants keep dying off, one by one, cause nobody has that kindof money anymore-to eat out with. A fucking hamburger’s nine dollars, now. You can’t buy your kid a pack of chips-they’re four bucks. Only thing that’s stayed affordable is the soda pop that makes everybody fat and diabetic. There’s no real jobs, you can’t pay rent with minimum wage. Property owners want $99 a night for a tiny room, two hundred a week at the ninety nine dollar hotel, you dig? Disintegrating shitholes go for between eight hundred and two grand a month, I mean to rent a tiny place, we’re talking mobile homes, trailers in the desert. Ya know where I used to live there was a beautiful old hippie couple, they used to run a hotel until the man had a stroke, now his wife has to help him do everything, walks him, she obviously loves him very much. I always see them carrying bags of groceries because they have no car, someone was killed like right next door to them, so they are in my prayers alot. They have always reminded my wife and I of ourselves, if we are both still alive here, in twenty years. They always give me and my kid the peace sign. Like I said, beautiful. There’s a garage where I live now so I’ve made it my escapist work space. I been creating a little retreat in my spare time, an elder goth book haven, an eighties cassette tapes hideout, where I can get some briefest respite from loud teen media blare and bad trip hypnoscreens, there’s a big scotch tape photograph and old magazine pinups collage of all my saints lookin’ over me, it’s been kinda cold out there, but peace and quiet is nice every once in awhile. I’m pretty stressedout lately, we had to withdraw our kid from the local public school when the disability classoom teacher kept calling the cops on the kid for being disruptive in a disability classroom, nine times she did this, even though he has an IEP plan, an Autism protocol, they are expected to follow by law. The Sports Team there were all caught on video sexually assaulting a male pre teen last year, and all that happened was they fired one assistant coach, like he was the one who did it. Now, there has been a big drug bust at his former school, and fifteen year old females he was on a bad news bears basketball team with three or four years ago, are being taken away in cop cars. They found a 51 year old lady’s dead body in the street of my old neighborhood, maybe two blocks from our old front door, on the street that nice hippie couple live on, and at first there was some concerned citizen eyewitness chat on social media about it, but that thread was all taken down by a tourist industry focused online administrator, who thought it reflected poorly on the town, and no one has been forthcoming about how she died , certainly not in her obitary, in spite of initial second hand chatter about how police suspected foul play or murder could have been involved, there’s no real news paper of any merit here, so you mostly hear gossip from bored old nosey, know it all neighbors, bored attention seekers, who are usually wrong. There is an American Psycho kid in my town, going around and unremorsefully doing harm to his classmates, you know–one of those winning Kendoll predators who goes around doing egregious harm to his peer group, while having all his crimes swept under the carpet by his overindulgent and unconditionally protective and influential upper class winebox yoga mom. So yeah all these kids are having real issues and adverse reactions to his abusing them. Little towns can be as crazy as the big cities, it’s just all better hidden, I guess, kept buried by the image oriented, appearance based people with city council jobs or hotel investments. You shoulda seen all the sports parents making excuses online for their basketball team sexually assaulting a kid on the school bus and in the locker room, repeatedly. All that usual USA USA rah rah go team is some nutty shit, my brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution. Wrong is wrong no matter what uniform someone is wearing. I been sayin’ that my whole life. The peers though are spellbound by Halftime and game day delivery super specials.
Since I was a new wave kid in Adam Ant makeup and a leather jacket, trying to spike my hair up like Billy Idol or Duran Duran or Flock Of Seagulls and Charlie Sexton, I’ve been getting shit from both sides-the dumb, hatepig, talk radio, gun nut rednecks and their bullying, queerbashing, conservative idiot, cannon fodder, future corrections guard, wrestling team sons (I got a song called “Fat Fucks In White Trucks”) and also the Hillary feminist, power seeking administrative, P.M.R.C. etiquette, country club privilege mongers who want to behavior modify me into compliance, the Kall That Kops Karens who watch Oprah and Dr. Phil and think mass incarcerating Kamala Harris is some kinda beacon for civil rights, they might not get out of their oversized vehicle with their tire iron to have a bash when they disapprove of my objectionable presence, but they’ve used all their snitch power to enlist others to do the dirty work for ’em-their football player fratboy sons, or stupidly aggressive men in uniforms, who they always summon to expel, evict, suspend, detain, or otherwise hassle, harrass, harrangue and step on my blue suede shoes. Not sure if Condoleeza Rice or Gina Haspel or Lyn Cheney are really any nicer or more woke or progessive or humane than Mike Pence, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConell or Dick Cheney, at this point. I feel like the Good Ole Boy patriarchy, the permanent ruling class, the One Percent, campaign funding shadow barons and tech-billionaires with all the money and the deep intelligence ties and Ivy League educations. who really control everything are even surprised they are having so much more success by trotting out a token gay CIA spook to fix software bean counts, or a non binary genderfluid anime chick in a pink gluitter unicorn backpack and quirky animal hat to kill the raise the minimum wage under the cover of her being woke and scientific and diverse while she does it. That’s no progress, they are regressive, damaging tools of power, just identity muppets, empty suits, models, brand logos and put into office by that Klaus Schwab Future Leaders School. Keep an eye on Kyrsten Sinema, they are preparing her to do some more badly damaging and dastardly shit under cover of her sexual identity. I don’t care about no one’s sexual preference. Content of character, not the color of your skin, is what is important, your dietary choices or zodiac sign or favorite brand or medication or sexual position aint really nothin’ to do with me. From my little corner of the universe, the body parts and shades of skin tone and bumper stickers and surfaces matter alot less than the character inside, and manners you treat people with. To paraphrase Diamond David Lee Roth, it aint my business what’s on anybody’s breath after midnight, but manners count-how you treat people. The ruling class have weaponized not only the civil rights lexicon against the people, but they’ve totally misused tokenism/identity politricks, propping up some people of color, ushering a hand full of females, and gay people upfront, allowing them to have more visibility than ever, but it’s all just a ruse, a marketing hoax, window dressing, if the visible members of traditionally marginalized classes are now just in-on the jailing and spying and droning and censoring and child caging, that aint progress. They’ve just co signed to knowingly do wrong to their own fellow beings for money and some title. They’re like black cops. As James Baldwin said, “a cop is a cop”. I see ’em as inhumane class traitors, sellouts, frauds, Aunt Mammies and Uncle Toms. Ajamau Baraka of the Black Alliance For Peace calls the darker hued sellouts who say they care about people, but their votes show they just work for The Man, he calls ’em the black misleadership class, like Corey Booker who is just the face of big pharma in Congress-he’s no friend of the black community. I think of all those smiling butch lady soldiers giving the thumbs up next to dead bodies, or piles of naked and dehumanized Muslim men who were tortured at Gitmo and the only person who went to jail was the whistle blower, John Kirakou and the sicko Florida governor they wanna run for president was in on it. At Gitmo, gleeful. Happy cheerleade standing in the frontow with his big titlke and shit eating grin. That’s just sinster if you ask me. Outright evil. Man, who cares if those lady torturers were gay or female or of multiracial ethnicity ? They are torturers. I liked what Jesse Ventura had to say about torturing people (it’s never okay) better than anybody on the fake-left/corporate centrist side who thinks torture is alright and okeydokey, s’long as Lyn Cheney says it is. Justy cause she said “Orange Man Bad” a buncha times on tv. All the fake progressives who campaigned on universal housing and free healthcare and free college and student debt forgiveness and defunding racist police, those same people are now promoting laws against public protests, passing big gigantic inflated budgets for more spying, more censorship, more imperial proxy war based on lies, more black ops, more psy ops, more jails, more cops, more billion dollar giveaways to foreign puppet governments, while old people I know are without heat in the cold, and people are getting kicked out of their trailers by diverse people in uniforms with nightsticks where I live, and Denny’s where the old people used to go and have breakfast and read the newspaper even closed, and no one can afford the groceries which have tripled. Almost everybody seems crazy and dangerous to me. When the honky sports moms wanna come for you, they think it’s for your own good. They’re gonna impose their beliefs on you as a philanthropic act of service. The old racists and ranchers are more easily avoided, I just stay away from the Moose Lodge and VFW Hall. You can usually see ’em comin’ with their big white pointy hats and gowns and torches. I avoid ’em all.This song’s going out to everyone who keeps boastfully voting for election rigging warpigs, torturers, secret police kidnappers, secret police control of all mass media, union busters, and vote blue no matter who Wall Street saboteurs who won’t raise the minimum wage, or stop mas evictions and utilities ripoffs, or trillion dollar giveaways to weapon manufacturers guised as “helping (destroy) Ukraine”.
“Notice that congress and biden are not entertaining the idea of forcing rail companies to accept the railway workers demands in order to avert a strike.” (-Boots Riley) “
Liberal hypocrites now oppose interminable lockdowns in China after supporting them in their home countries and demonizing those who protested them.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Joe Biden will not be running for President in 2024. Republicans & Democrats will pass his bill to strip workers of power, but enough Republicans will oppose it to pretend they support the working class, that they will again strip working class voters from the Democratic Party.” (-Old Woman Seeking Justice)
“Joe Biden is a Ronald Reagan Democrat. This is who the Democratic Party is. They are full-on Republicans who will always side with their rich pals while decimating the working class.
So glad I didn’t vote for this disgusting piece of shit.” (-Leila Charles Leigh)
“THIS is who Joe Biden is. We were screaming this in 2019 & all through 2020 but all we heard was “Orange Man Bad” – Blue MAGA just as bad as Red MAGA” (-Indie Left News) “
Full sellout from the White House for the majority of rail workers who rejected the deal the President brokered, preemptively denying them the right to strike. This was the “which side are you on?” moment, and the White House chose the railroad bosses.” (-Jonah Furman)
“Once again we see how similar Biden is to Trump on a multitude of issues. The difference between the two are near nonexistent. Yet some will say “Biden is slightly better” My question is: ON WHAT?!” (-Jay Befaunt) “
If congress tries 2break railway workers power by trying to legally force them to take a deal they don’t want- Railway workers must disobey congress and strike anyway. Congress and rail companies will cry about it and railway workers will win. It’ll probably have 2b a wildcat.” (-Boots Riley)
“Gee whiz, won’t it be great when the CIA gets to tell us directly what experimental whatever we have to inject into ourselves and our children in order to stay employed and travel?” (-Whitney Webb)
^ “FYI – ex FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb (who wrote this drivel) is on the board of a CIA linked company that is poised to play a major role in any post-Covid biosecurity crisis (whether manufactured or real) -(Whitney Webb)
I wish I could buy you some free Denny’s to thank you for all you gave, but the economy’s so bad in the southwest, even the Denny’s closed down. Of course I mean, saying thank you some more to the B-52’s.
Ya know I ask myself why I keep sewing together these longwinded raving columns here for such a small circle of friends who probably mostly disagree with everything I say in our old age here, I guess because I’m so concerned about almost no real resistance existing to the Billionaire Agenda, and I’m horrified how almost everyone I see, or ever thought I knew, seems to be in some kinda crazy delusional denial. Everybody’s in a dream they were handed by The Man. Most of that shit aint even real. Hard to find new allies as we get old, I think for me at least, I’ve been burned so many times, that even when some people seem to be exceeding my expectations somewhat, apparently even endeavoring to be square and fair, and honorable and keep their word with my little traveling gypsy troupe, I’m still leery, on edge, kinda suspicious, and probably way too quick to judge, I’m guarded and skeptical nowadays, a side effect from being lied to all the time. I’m perpetually expecting some safe or piano to fall on me, always waiting for the other shoe to fall. Like I got these severe prejudices against rich people ya know, especially investment-property owners, or self proclamed woke people or philanthropists, so like when any landlord appears to be acting humanely towards myself and loved ones, I kinda get all my spidey senses tingling, like what? What’s up with that? We got our security deposit back after cleaning the old trailer we spent a long time in and I was SHOCKED. that is UNPRECEDENTED! Like I said, in my tumultuous travels when somebody gives me something with one hand, they’re usually trying to rob me somehow with the other, so I got a high vigilance and a low trust for empire havers and people with all the cards who wield too much power over all of us, ya know? Shitlib college people do not believe in equality-they believe in hierarchy-ranks and titles and special privileges only meant to be enjoyed by their posh Sneetchy selves. Only time ya ever heard the phrase healthy distrust of authority from mean ex liberals is when they were promoting untested and experimental products on behalf of big business. I have that distrust all the time. I found out the hardest way. People tend to abuse power, even and especilly if they were like, no nukes and save the whales sloganeers, way back in college. If I was a rich airbandb owning, collector scum, landlordly shit-lib, I’d be making hotel reservations and flying to Vegas to see the beautiful B-52’s say their fond farewells. To me, the B-52’s personify every good and righteous and right on value of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the era the media manipulators are so keen on revising ala Trial of the Chicago 7 accuracy: fact vs. fiction in Aaron Sorkin’s Netflix movie. (slate.com) or weaponizing or co-opting or erasing. They were just really nice people, friends, who wanted to have fun and entertain each other-they lived in a little place with some real cool retro second hand surplus and they really created a whole spontaneous magic realm that grew out of their sixties go go day-glo fashion choices and appreciation of Flintstones Futurama and Jetsons jetsetting. I mean the most important thing to me about the B52’s is their realness, the down home sincerity. Nice people who believe in getting along, setting an example, being groovy. Not being mean and full of shit and lying all the time. They were about creating community. Bringing outsiders in. I will always love them for that and know in my heart that the whole punk rock tradition that I invested in, aspired to and clumbsily continue trying to fly the flag for all came from their example. There’s another side to punk that has to do with slamdancing and male bonding and Owning The Most Framed Stuff, writing books about beating people up in the parking lot of some club in the seventies, I don’t have very much to do with that side, those guys just seemed like dumb jocks and dudes with socks on their dicks to me, frat row people, gym memebership havers, spray tanners, I’m not much inclined to even go down their streets no more. Frat Row kinda sucks, ya know? But yeah, the old B-52’s stuff, man…! You ever see ’em live? They are still like one big rockin’; house party, same as the Fleshtones. I like fun, personally. This world needs a little more good natured fun lovers and kooky mixed drinks and freaky attire and old time dancing, every once in awhile. They were never stupid, though, ya know? It was all always shot with light, coolness, inclusivity, tolerance, generosity of spirit, full of heart. That’s my kinda scene. I love the B-52’s. When we were teens I think a few of us tried our best to turn the B-52’s kitchey, lampshade on the head, paisley pajama, bigwig kookiness into our whole way of life. We did okay for awhile. Pretty good run, actually. A good ten years of whacky hijinks and zaney escapades. I was one of the few who did not “grow out of it”. It was not my slumming “college phase”, or anything like that. I was not some cultural tourist, just visiting. I’m signed on for life, as Billy Idol once sang. Man I had some new wave friends named Beth W. and Patti B., who shared my love for alla that. Hather and Lisa Thing, Steffani and Jenna. I’d call ’em up, if I could.
Yeah I get it, I know I’m old fashioned. I wrote a song called “Oldies Station”. You should hear, it’s pretty good, really. Another band that means everything to somebody like me is CANDY! I mean, they said it all before I ever could. They toured with Rick Springfield, made a perfect pop record, had a perfect logo, looked cool, they were like my generation’s Beach Boys or Raspberries. That part where they’re singing, “I wanna know! I wanna know!” That still says it all, man. I dunno what happened to the life I recognize-the clothes, the hair, the magazines, the clubs, the music, where has it all gone? I still believe in preserving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What happened to the Delta House I used to know?
“You should’ve know the guy that constantly shits on Socialism will bust up unions.” (-Unholy Rom 3)
“Americans know the most violent, evil murderers in the world very well, because we voted for them. When the US and the EU decide to abandon Ukraine because they don’t need them anymore you’re gonna have a bunch of pissed off Nazis roaming around with billions worth of weapons looking for revenge. Good thing Zelensky is an actor with a production team or we might be able to see the puppet strings when he is on TV. C’mon now it’s 2022 and y’alll still falling for this democracy shit. Is Europe finally starting to figure out that the U.S. is screwing them over too? If you don’t know this war started 8 years ago, then our Gov’t has you right where they want you. If you don’t know this war started 8 years ago, then our Gov’t has you right where they want you.
Totally unaware of what is really happening or why and forced to rely on what they and their media feeds you as the truth, while they get you to fall for the old evil dictator scam. How about the United States stop messing around and causing trouble in other countries and do something crazy like making life better for our citizens? When Russia hits infrastructure it’s a war crime and when the US hits infrastructure it’s strategy. I know everybody wants to bury their heads in the sand now, but let me remind you that your Gov’t and Big Pharma were wrong and constantly lied to us about Covid and those doctors and scientists that they worked so hard to shut up, were right. Will Americans ever get smart enough to not get lied into wars? Over the past decades our Gov’t is even shocked at how easy it has been to lie to and manipulate our citizens into believing and doing whatever they say, in spite of reality obviously being the opposite and to make it worse to get those citizens to attack those telling the truth.”
“Americans are so propagandized they don’t even seem to acknowledge these blatant contradictions made by our media ALL the time! Western media: China is an authoritarian country where dissent is not allowed
Also Western media: omg look at these protests in China Western media: Russia is an authoritarian country where dissent is not allowed Also Western media: omg look at these protests in Russia.” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“One of the biggest ironies surrounding the Ukraine > FTX > Democrat money laundering operation is that FTX’s underlying issues were exposed by the downturn in the economy, which was fueled by NATO’s suicidal sanctions on Russia. Their own policies helped expose their corruption. When they say “disinformation,” they mean “dissent.” I can understand not remembering the Iraq War & War on Terror.
I can understand not following politics closely enough to get NATO expansion, RussiaGate, mass censorship, Hunter Biden’s laptop, etc. But I can’t understand how anyone can believe the government & media after COVID.” (-Primo Radical) “
Wave a magic wand and suddenly anti-lockdown protesters are no longer “COVID deniers” or conspiracy theorists when they happen to be in China” (-Michael Tracey) “
This is a legacy defining moment for Joe Biden. He is going down as one of the biggest disappointments in labor history.” (-RAILROAD WORKERS UNITED) “
I’M FROM KENTUCKY. I NEVER LIKED SPORTS BUT I ALWAYS LOVED ALI. THE GREATEST.
Biden, Pelosi, Obama-notice how they never stop praising Reagan and Bush? You saw when Gropey Joe put that big gold medal on war criminal Bush, right? When I was a little kid, I remember the older white people from my hometown really hated Ali and also Nader and Jane Fonda. That tank plant town in Ohio where I went to school, the older white fanatical hate group people there did not just hate me and Boy George and Annie Lennon, back in the day, but I remember when Spike Lee made that Malcolm X movie a little later on, they were livid, cause they still hate Malcom X. They still hate me and Nader, too. They really, really hated John Lennon. They are some hateful people. I avoid ’em as best as I can. I’ll tell ya what hurts was all the friends and loved ones who went with them, who followed the crowd, and stayed among the people in the bleachers just yelling for the hometeam to win, winning is all that matters in the middle of the Divided States Of Amnesia. Blue Oyster Cult said, “winning makes losers of us all”. Fucking high school sports is still something my old homies all talk about, it’s like half the so called “News” in that horrible, violence soaked tank plant town. I always knew that sports was how they brainwashed all the gullible joiners and belongers into supporting imperialism, systemic racism, class inequality and injustice, all in the name of “USA, USA!” Fuck that shit. I’m a dropout. I don’t worship the wealthy or respect the uniform. Always been anti conformity, anti-fascist, anti censorship, anti-war. Pro free speech, all power to the people. Politicians, enforcers, monopolies and billionaires are not your super special savior science friends for diversity and feminism, okay? You are being lied to. I remember when you were still into like Ten Thousand Maniacs and Edie Brickell and always wore that Cramps t shirt and had all those bumper stickers on your punk rock car. Remember back in the old Black Flag and Dead Kennedys and Husker Du and R.E.M. college radio days, before U2 sold out, pre 9/11 before you got scared the muslims were coming to getcha and they took all the good, real, uplifting and empowering rebel music off the airwaves, remember when you used to identify as a leftist radical? Now you just shill for Hillary and Bush wars with nicer pro nouns, and a few extra visible people of color behind podiums giving pro war speeches, making excuses for racist cops, or otherwise co signing and being involved in torture and drone wars and domestic spying and total spectrum dominance. What happened that changed you so much? You don’t gotta tell me, just look inside-ask yourself. Was it your mother in law? Navel studies? Being ratpacked by multiple pro warbots on twitter? Was it cause “Obama said…” the water of Flint was safe to drink, and we “can’t look back” at 9/11 or Cheney/Bush crimes? It’s so “Twilight Zone”. It’s exactly like that Rowdy Roddy Piper sci fi conspiranoia movie, “THEY LIVE!” Except it all happened just like that in “real life”, everybody got plugged into their I-Phone Microsoft Updates meta-propaganda-Gates-Reset world and just started watching the unreality tv, doing whatever they’re told, up is down, wrong is right, war is peace, freedom is slavery, billionaires are free speech protectors and scientific philanthopists who just want poor people to be healthy and live longer. Democrats are real progressives, the elections are totally real and not fixed at all, we live in a democracy, science means never asking questions or finding anything out, except whatever it says on the commercial. Taylor Swift and Dave Grohl are like SO talented! Etc., etc. I knew “educated feminists” who fought against Jill Stein. Do you know why? Their blind loyalty to big business they thought she somehow threatened. what a fuckin’ horrorshow. I know other motherfuckers who still go ’round calling sadsack Sanders a sexist even though he already acquiesced to their super mega ultra goddess of fauxwoke pro noun WEF capitalism, Hillary, who destroyed Libya. Let’s face it, kids, the whole politics thing is faked and fixed, we gotta do other stuff-grass roots stuff. Like Answer Coalition and Code Pink stuff. When Sanders endorsed Madame Deplorable and Creepy Sniffer, Gropey Joe Biden, he knows he completely betrayed the working class movement, his whole platform was abandoned by the Squad, he started reciting Russiagate talking points and helped censor the left and efficiently dismantled his whole populist movement, all for Hillary and Gropey Joe’s Davos billionaire donor class bosses, and Raytheon and Pfizer and Monsanto/Bayer and Lockheed Martin. All the old punks just wanna be local popular-that’s the religion of the middle class. Local Popular. Michael Moore used to fight the big corporations, now he just fights Trump. How many Spike Lee and Oliver Stone movies did you pay to go see back in the day, before pig-media convinced you it is totally cool if all their work is suppresed or censored now, for asking too many inconvenient, scientific, facts based, real journalism questions about nazis and melted steel and shit. If you are too cowardly to even say FREE ASSANGE, I can’t help you, you are lost, and by you, I mean AOC. “Tax My Nerves”, is more like it. Real socialists don’t support coups in other countries. Real leftists believe in my body/my rights. NOT, “it’s complicated”. Real socialists believe in free speech and the right to assemble in public spaces. They just dropped free healthcare and student loan forgiveness when it was time to pivot to More War based on More Lies. Man it’s a bummer being a real leftist caue all the shitlibs just wanna watch tv and order products online, talk about how obedient they are and “FEEL GOOD”. College told ’em they have the right as self identifying affinity group whatever fill in the blank to never be inconveneinced or offended. These landlords think they should just get money for nothing. Same with the Fraud Squad. Look where they get their mony from and this is just what’s visible on the books. www.opensecrets.org I think AOC is every bit as destructive as faux woke Klaus Scwab puppet, Kyrsten Sinema, who killed the fight for fifteen, which is still nowhere near a living wage, particularly not now in the rent gouge post Covid Gropey Joe and Bezos inflation. AOC is so transparent and controlled-she is both bought and bossed.
AOC can not stand up for even one real leftist/socialist/humanitarian/egalitarian value beyond meangingless, middleclass feelgood, identity politics, or anti Trump tweets. So heartbreaking, she could’ve kept ONE righteous cause, ya know? Like raise the minimum wage or stop the wars. Free the kids in the child cages, maybe, or universal housing, but nope, she was just another marketing hoax like Obama and grunge. Pelosi told her to sit down and she sat down. You know it and I know it. AOC is no ally of the working class poor.
“I’d much rather live in a society where everyone has healthcare, housing, and food than a society where 3 billionaires own more wealth than half the nation.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Julian Assange is a prisoner of conscience. Free the man, and free the press.” (-Edward Snowden)
Isn’t it wild how every single protest in a country we don’t like is always a protest calling for the overthrow of the government?” (-Radio Free Amanda)
“Not only does the US not have any high-speed rail, but it won’t give sick time to rail workers operating the slow and decrepit train system that does exist. And Biden wants to lecture China, which has 35,000 km of high speed rail? LMAO! The US destroyed Iraq with bombs, not democracy. The US destroyed Afghanistan with bombs, not democracy. The US has aided in the subjegation of Palestine, Haiti, and Syria with weapons, not democracy. The US mainstream media has some nerve lecturing China about democracy. There will be no regime change in China. Western mainstream media pundits and color revolutionaries can dream on. I don’t know who needs to hear this but these protests don’t change the fact that 90+ percent of Chinese people support their government. Western attempts to hijack them for color revolution purposes are already failing. Leftists don’t support protests before investigating who is organizing them. Leftists don’t repeat Cold War talking points. Leftists don’t interfere in other countries’ affairs. The vast majority of those in the West celebrating protests in China are doing all three. Color revolution leftists like Naomi Klein never miss an opportunity to repeat Cold War talking points when unrest occurs in countries that the US is targeting for regime change. When protests happen in the West, the Western mainstream media ignores or demonizes them.
When they happen in China, the same media actively promote regime change to the point of *organizing* the protests.
This is what Imperialism on steroids looks like.” (-Danny Haiphong)
They’ve been sending weapons to actual Nazis to help them commit genocide in the Donbas for years, yet spend a week freaking out about a dinner guest Trump got duped into meeting.
It’s all just so remarkably stupid.
How do people actually buy into this nonsense outrage theater? Both big political headlines right now are complete exercises in double-think & amnesia:
• Nick Fuentes is an evil threat to democracy — but the Azov & Aidar battalions are brave heroes / don’t exist • COVID protests in China are heroic — but evil when they happen in the West
Things are never objectively good or evil — they’re only good or evil depending on what their effect is on the Western elite. If Canadian truckers went to China, they would be hailed be heroes — as would Nick Fuentes if we was a Banderite proponent of Ukraine joining NATO.” (-Primo Radical)
“People who’ve shirked or deferred their moral, ethical responsibilities to the state/zeitgeist resent courageous individuality and traditional values of free speech, rightousness, debate, etc. They prefer vague labels, name calling, and race baiting psuedomorality.” (-Ryan Knight)
“You’re not kidding it’s a dangerous precedent. If Assange is indicted, the NYT, Guardian etc. would be next in line for publishing the same secrets. They should fight for his freedom as if it’s their own.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Along with its NATO partners, France destroyed Libya and fueled the advance of Boko Haram and other jihadist bandits on Mali with weapons looted from Libya’s arms depots. France’s NGOs were part and parcel of this destabilizing project.” (-Max Blumenthal) “
The 4th largest city in the United States has been told to boil their water because it’s not safe to drink.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The problem is not simply that capitalism produces too much, but that it produces the wrong stuff: SUVs, fast fashion and planned obsolescence instead of public transit, affordable housing and universal healthcare. It overuses resources and still fails to meet even basic needs.” (-Jason Hickel)
“How dare Syria not comply with the organization that censored its own investigation to falsely accuse the Syrian government of a chemical attack and refuses any accountability for it.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“Ben Shapiro being on constant hair-trigger alert about perceived infractions related to his own identity group would be more defensible if he hadn’t produced 10000000 hours of content trashing Snowflakes who get overly offended by infractions related to every other identity group.” (-Michael Tracey)
“I despise the corporate media that heroizes Chinese protesting interminable lockdowns.
Not because those Chinese citizens are wrong, but because that same media painted the Westerners who defied the Covidian regime as criminals as they bravely defended their basic human rights.NY Times tech pundit Zeynepis enthralled by Chinese citizens protesting 100 day+ Covid lockdowns and relentless testing.
Yet Zeynep Tufekci proudly called the Twitter manager on accounts that loudly condemned school closures and the damage they did to a generation of US youth. Beyond the corporate media, there’s the respectable leftists torn between anti-communism and fealty to the Covidian regime. Naomi Klein celebrates Chinese protesters but branded her fellow Canadians protesting lockdowns and vax mandates as white supremacists in league with PutinThe trophy for liberal hypocrisy goes to Amnesty International, which issued an unusual statement condemning Canadian anti-lockdown protesters as white supremacists & backing Trudeau’s repression while warning Chinese police against arresting citizens protesting harsh lockdowns. “What’s going on in China has little to do with anywhere else,” you say?
Australia built Covid internment camps & arrested citizens for promoting anti-lockdown protests. Canada seized protesters’ bank accounts. US students were locked in their dorms. Insanity reigned in the West. ” (-Max Blumenthal)
FLIES ON THE WINDSCREEN
Had some Depeche Mode girlfriends back then, you know we were all really moved by Martin Gore’s lyrics and Dave Gahan’s singing of soulful, sensitive, vulnerable, soul baring synthpop outsider anthems, dirges, confessions, love letters, come on’s and emotional laments. Now the hours really are slipping by-an old friend’s father in law passed away, he was a country singer. Just reminds me how we aint got as much time left as summa us wanna think we should have, ya know I started aging this last year. Gray hair, loose teeth, got the big fear in me. Some people I only knew from social media died but I’d been interacting with ’em daily, for years so ya know it still felt personal. A poet from California beautiful and genius in the prime of her life with a big house and gogeous kids, poof. Gone, just like that. No one said why or how. Two underground famous guitarists. An old punk rock roadie, photographer flea market collector guy with great stories who made some important records with his tiny homemade cult band who used to like open for the Misfits and the Deadboys, gone too soon, left his wife to mourn. My highschool rapper friend, a true O.G. philosopher, flashpoint figurehad, community leader, activist soulman. So many people just keep dying suddenly, then there were the pulverizing losses of people I’ve loved so much for so long, the ones I still sent postcards and Christmas cards home to, the ones who I called when I felt bad or got in trouble, they’re almost all gone now. I was saying to my friend in an email how I hope a honkytonk heaven really does exist beyond the clouds for so many people who’ve come into my life and dazzled me for awhile and then disappeared from this world for no good reason. The death problem is for sure haunting my days now. I feel like Lydia from “Beetlejuice”. Faster Pussycat put out another song where Taime’s referencing his missing dad and caterwauling about how songs can take you straight back to all those long gone moments with absent loved ones, it’s called “Like A Ghost”, it’s kinda like “House Of Pain” part 2, very Seventies Van type feeling. I always wonder about what happened to Pussycat drummer Mark Michaels cause he was the one in all the magazine pinups we posted on our walls when Guns & Pussycat ruled the airwaves and the nightclubs back then-no body was ever found, no death certificate, he just vanished. Same with Zowie Ackerman from Leeway and Circus Of Power who I knew a little bit, I’ve got his old address on a scrap of paper in the garage, funny pix of him clowning with also gone Ryan from Circus Of Power in dirty nightclub dressing rooms and nobody knows what happened to him, either, he just went missing like Richie Edwards, no body, no death certificate. How do you go from being on bubblegum cards and the covers of magazines and touring Japan with Black Sabbath to just mysteriously no longer around? Nobody knows what happened to him, either. Too many people I know are dying suddenly in their fifties now. Not overdosing or suicide, just died suddenly. The obituaries all say died unexpectedly. What the fuck? I wanted to see so many people I knew in my younger years again. Bands I wanted to see play are vanishing too, they fucked around until it was too late for Michael Anthony to rejoin the brothers and David Lee, I would’ve loved to have seen a real Van Halen reunion, I don’t care about Ed’s kid or his Foo Fighters friends or that awful guy from the Darkness, at all, just not my cuppa artificial corporate stadium rawk. I still hope to see Billy Idol somewhere before I die. I don’t think it looks likely that a Dogs D’Amour reunion is in the cards-I’m wanted of the few who wanted Skid Row to reunite but the songwriters are gung ho happy with the American Idol guy. To me it’s not Skid Row without Sebastian, even if he says stupid things sometimes, I get why he’s so fuckedup-superfame hit him hard when he was just in his twenties. They’re like Guns without Adler/Izzy-pointless now, just rich guys doing victory laps, playing old songs they own for people who don’t care the old gang aint there. My old road dog travler buddy and sometimes songwriting partner Nasty F. Bastard saw the Cult somewhere this year, said they still hammer out the old jams like viking emperors conquering lost kingdoms. Of course, if you’ve ever read anything I ever wrote here, you know how bad I wanted to make records or at least get these songs I’ve written about all of you on tape somehow, we got some stuff archived on cassettes, I dunno if my old lady’s really gonna care that much about letting people hear ’em if I croak anytime soon, ’cause ya know it makes no sense to us why some people I used to jam with sorta sabotoged our whole scene. I got about four books on this computer about the old pre grunge underground D.I.Y. music subculture and all our crummy fanzines and crazy fun non stop racous house parties and $5 at the door boy’s club punk parties and spontaneous road trips in dodgy spraypainted vans and eighties concerts and shows and sulking in the graveyard and drinking big bottles of vodka with all those dames who disappeared. But yeah the ticking of the clock got louder for me, I hear that old “Black Celebration” song in my head alot. “Forgetting all I couldn’t do today…” Ya know at night when I eat my dinner, I’ve been watching a tv show based on the Addam’s Family by Tim Burton called “Wednesday”, it’s really cute, I love it, and it’s not thusfar altogether as ooky as thet “Riverdale” Archie Comics reboot with Mollie Ringwald and Luke Perry (RIP) that just became too creepy cannibal occultic splatter film for me. If you seen too much violence in real life, all the “Fangoria” gore seems senseless and disturbing. I liked the early episodes and fell in love with the actors but the writing was just too dark n dismal for no good purpose, but to normalize gross shit and bum you out. Veronica was irresistable, could not take your eyes off her. Jughead was well cast, it was just all about illuminati ritual sacrifice and murder and senselessly violent and I quit watching it during the third season, so yeah, so far, “Wednesday” is a treat.
“Your optimistic eyes seem like paradise to someone like me.” Ya know when we were kids, the world was way more sincere than it is now. I blame the social engineers top down monopolist propaganda programming.
“The Democrats do not care about you or your basic rights. The only thing they care about is using you for your vote and fundraising off the plight of marginalized people. If you cannot see that by now then it’s time to take the blindfold off. They are as big of a scam as the GOP. The Democrats are organized to protect their corporate donors.” (-Ryan Knight) “
If you’re going to try and smear me by saying I’ve never covered Israeli intelligence or Unit 8200, you’re just hurting your own credibility. I have over a dozen articles on the subject, just do a basic search dumb dumbs.” (-Whitney Webb)
MAKE NO EXCUSES FOR RACIST REGIMES THAT ROUTINELY HARM, KIDNAP, ABUSE OR KILL CHILDREN!
One of those bands I always felt a long distance sense of comaraderie with were Canada’s glammy 63 Monroe-they started off a troublemaker punk band and kinda went through different incarnations as the lineups changed and they had a garagey phase, kinda got influenced by the sleaze of the eighties metal heyday, kept shifting ever so slightly with the times, but always had a mirthful sense of mischief and frivolity and a ceaseless desire for always more good natured rebellious teenage kicks, ala the Dolls, Ramones, Teenage Head, Forgotten Rebels, Celebrity Skin, etc., etc. I loved that about them. Their lp, “STINKIN OUT THE JOINT” was their rowdy must have, hard to find record if you are into collecting all the underground glam stuff, but in more recent years, more stuff seems to have surfaced like an ep of their early material when they were known as No Fucking Good, or NFG and some more sides called “We Have Enjoyed Ourselves”, “Hijack Victim” and “Last Exit To Rocknroll”. I miss this kinda punk rock, ya know, way back in the eighties, the pre hardcore basement punks all really had a cool, good time, stick together, basement show scene, and it was all about dressing up and having some wild times with your friends, it was not yet hijacked by industry, get rich schemers, xerox clones with uniforms and rulebooks showing off their sixties amplifier and echo machine, aggressive jock bully dickheads, Warped fests, Hot Topics, Urban Outfitters, uncool private school temperance leaguers, or any of that garbage.
The scene was hotter than ever and at the heart of it all was ’63 Monroe, whose stage antics began to take on a life of their own – porno broadcasts, platform boots, nudity, coffins, smoke bombs, dry ice. ’63 Monroe was defiantly flaunting raunchy excess as though they were LA hipsters, not London (Ontario) overachievers. But overachievers they were, contently inventing new ways to tear up their hometown instead of going after the tainted allure of fame and fortune.” – Jeff Warren, Sleazegrinder.com
“Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because profit-seeking competition-based systems reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. That’s why we are ruled by sociopaths, and it’s why looking to “philanthropy” as a solution to our problems is a ridiculous joke. If you want to make more of something (money, material goods), then capitalism can be a good way to do that. But if you need to make less of something (pollution, inequality, exploitation, sickness, homelessness, etc) it’s worthless, and other systems must be looked to.The “Maybe the very rich will feel charitable and fix our problems for us” solution assumes that the very same people who are wired to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply about everyone they stepped on to get there. Find me a capitalist business plan for leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist business plan for keeping someone free of illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing gets what they need, for giving resources to a struggling parent. You can’t. Capitalism can’t do this. These are the most important things in the world, and no possible iteration of capitalism has any solutions for any of them whatsoever, apart from “Well hopefully rich people will feel very charitable and fix those problems.” And how is that solution working out? It’s a joke.”
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Anyway, to quote what I always heard from liberal censorship advocates: Twitter is a private company. If you don’t like how they censor, go start your own social media company (and hope AOC doesn’t get Google/Apple to destroy it), or go figure out how to join a Mastadon instance. When Musk announced his intent to buy Twitter, many warned that every government and corporate weapon would be used to destroy him if he attempted any restoration of free speech. Online censorship is the most valuable tool of Dems, media corporations and the US Security State.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Democrats turn on rail workers right after the midterms
I told you vote blue idiots that voting for the Democratic Party is essentially giving them permission to screw you. When you vote for them they shift to the right after The true dumb dumb left refuse to acknowledge this.” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“How many other government officials, news outlets & celebrities have been bought off in schemes like the FTX operation?
How much of the “aspirations for democracy” (i.e. destabilization of nations opposed to Washington hegemony) can be traced back to money laundering & bribery? The plot for Ukraine to join NATO is demonstrably part of the PNAC neocon worldview. When Bernie & AOC talk in terms of “democracy vs authoritarianism,” they are basically quoting Cheney & Rumsfeld. They might as well be ranting about “Islamofascism.” The conflict in Ukraine can be traced directly back to George W. Bush. After tearing up the ABM treaty in 2002 and backing the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, Bush pressures NATO to announce aspirations for Ukraine and Georgia to joint the alliance.” (-Primo Radical)
I could swear being anti-monopolist was a prerequisite for political liberals in the not-so-distant past. Now it’s encouraged, to facilitate de-platforming. I’m the one who hasn’t switched belief systems. I was against monopolies before and still am. I supported free speech before and still do. Hilarious to call it progressivism when you cheer for giant monopolistic corporations like Apple and Google to control information flow. Even the concept of being proud to think in step with a group is new. Having your own idiosyncratic set of beliefs was considered healthy until pretty recently. Now individualism is often just seen as a stalking-horse for wrong-think.” (-Matt Taibbi)
“The USA is the world’s “wealthiest” country (although only the rich benefit). Yet its public services are so bad that its 4th-largest city is warning residents to boil their water.
Many formally colonized, developing countries have much cleaner water than the ultra-capitalist US” (-Ben Norton)
“Wave a magic wand and suddenly anti-lockdown protesters are no longer “COVID deniers” or conspiracy theorists when they happen to be in China.” (-Michael Tracey)
Even the US empire’s top economists are now saying this is no ‘normal’ recession but instead a massive economic shift. They won’t admit it, but we’re witnessing the great splitting of the world’s economies combined with environmental destruction.” (Lee Camp)
Leaving aside the fact that a nation which bans political parties, shuts down opposition media, imprisons opposition leaders, and is vastly more accountable to Washington than to its own people is in no way a “democracy”, that’s just a profoundly disturbed way of looking at life.
It’s disturbing how many people I encounter who claim Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worse than America’s invasion of Iraq because Ukraine is a “democracy”. How fucked up do you have to be inside to believe human lives are worth less because of their nation’s political system? A mother holding the remains of a child whose body has been ripped apart by military explosives does not care whether her country is considered a “democracy” by the western governments who are invested in that country’s military outcomes. I do think this is basically what many of them are saying. They can’t say “It’s worse because Ukraine is a white civilized European nation,” so they say “It’s worse because Ukraine is a democracy.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
MAX BLUMENTHAL, WHITNEY WEBB, KATIE HALPER, AND SOME OTHER REAL REPORTERS DOING JOURNALISM RATHER THAN PENTAGON OR PHARMA P.R.
“Jimmy Dore went on Fox News to talk about how both parties are corrupt and put corporations and billionaires over everyday people. Telling the truth about the U.S. oligarchy to millions of people is good actually. What’s weird is thinking this is bad.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Amazing things are happening in Mexico: Left-wing President AMLO just held a historic rally and march featuring 1.2 MILLION supporters, celebrating 4 years in government.
Basically the entire corporate media is against AMLO, but he’s one of the most popular leaders in the world.” (-Ben Norton)
IT’S COOL TO HAVE INFLUENCES BUT YA GOTTA PUT YOUR OWN STANK ON IT
“One beer aint gonna kill ya…” (-Mike L.)
November 2022
Desert ghost town. Sunday. One of the town’s two hardware stores is closed, as my wife rightly says, that’s why people never stay here. They roll the sidewalks up at like eight o clock. Most all the stores close down on Sunday AND Monday. The big hipster main drag tourist hive is only open maybe four days a week, six hours on those days…maybe. No record store, no train depot, no bus station. Just rundown trailer homes and miles of dead earth. Open hardware store cashier asks if you are “Moose or veteran”, cause if you vote Reublikkan, they give you a ten percent discount, but like all their shit is jackedup stupidly high. Eighty dollar axe, one hundred fifty dollar wheel barrel. Ten dollar margarita salt, ten dollar spice for your grilled meat. It’s cowboy country and they expect their clientele to be rich, like them. We’re in there looking for drill bits that work on masonry ya know for some nails to go into adobe walls, and this worker is coughing and sneezing and appears to have the Covid and I’m thinking about his predicament-to go to work or not to go to work. I wish he would have called in, personally. Bored on long desert days when time stands still, I hate tv, and rummage endlessly through old boxes of stuff I managed to save, came across a VHS video tape of one of my worst band’s worst shows. On it, I’d sharpied the words, “Jeff Dahl’s Copy”, almost like thirty years ago or some shit-sooo glad I never sent it to that fella, it was not worthy of outta town scrutiny. I dunno where I first met Michael L., the guitar player, in all the red scarves, but it was probably in a bar, might have been through a local grunge photographer who he slept with. He was the Kentucky approximation of a Dogs D’Amour dandy. Gregarious, got loud alot. Played “Too Fast For Live” on cassette in his hatchback. A very lively and flamboyant presence. He was a big all day drinker, much like myself in those years, but even less apologetic. He had a sloppy, primitive, Flat Duo Jets kinda rootsy noise band with a married couple who he sometime had sex with, he was a genuine exhibitionist, I guess you don’t get your penis pierced if you aint planning on showing it around. You remember that band from Sioux City, the Chickenhawks? That was what Mike’s band with the swinger couple reminded me of, or the Fireworks. I liked ‘im cause he was like a more extroverted Izzy Stradlin guy, an Andy McCoy wannabe with a baby fat Elvis kinda face and a boisterous guffaw, and just so flagrantly wore these L.A. Guns and Cinderella black t shirts under his leather Starsky & Hutch jackets, right when that was real frowned upon by all the Just Gone Grunge mainstreamers. I thought that was real cool, cause it was his not so subtle way of saying he was his own man. Or so I thought. Some smartass slacker types might sarcastically, tongue in cheek-wear an Iron Maiden shirt, ya know, disingenuously to be clever or ironic, back then, but Michael L. was not kidding about liking Cinderella, or Guns N Roses. The whole idea for the band we had started together was supposed to be “Hanoi Rocks meets the Replacements”. He was aready hip to both of those bands, which was real rare in that part of the country, in those days. We would empty a case of beer and a black bottle while listening to “Self Destruction Blues” and “Tim” and “Pleased To Meet Me” and maybe some Mother Love Bone for good measure. I hated grunge but thought that Mark Lanegan solo record “Whiskey For The Holy Ghost” was okay and his “Nearly Lost You” radio hit. Mike and The Kid bassplayer both liked Cobain and company more than I did but understood the band we were gonna do was supposed to be an up band, not a downer. I think Mike felt somewhat liberated by my appearance cause he started dressing more like me, cowboy hats and leather pants and concho straps and shit-ya know he’d drive us in his shitty fuckedup car across the bridge to the hayseed thrift stores, pre E-Bay, when they were still good, you could still find quality stuff on the cheap, and we’d look for bolo ties and cowboy shit-After Six tuxedo shirts, and old velvet suitjackets. He was always being asked to leave retail shops and malls and most all public spaces, by rent a cops or nice old ladies, because his favorite thing was to bring an open bottle of Jack with him and take big theatrical sips out of it, wherever we went. Like Slash, I guess. He loved to make a scene, start some shit, create a disturbance, he was all about the ruckous when we first met. He craved not only attention but high drama. He’d see some showoff Republikkkan CEO son, capitalist dude in his vintage car and give ‘em a big loudmouthed barrage of belligerent insults. You had to either love or hate the guy, and I naturally loved him. His only real flaw was his crazy need to become famous overnight. I mean we were both into hedonistic rocknroll decadence and hard all the time partying, but for Michael, it was never enough to “party like a rockstar”. He wanted the fame. Ideally, with the money. Stardom was calling. I was a bit more leisurely, like, let it come or not. Who cares about fame, I was gonna do my own thing my own way, with or without any smalltime fanfare or bigtime papparazzi. Mostly I just liked music and clothes, photography and art, and girls and drinking. We’d sneak liquor into the hillbilly bowling alley in the burbs, and found that was a good place to hangout and be ourselves where we were not drawing too much attention or aggravation from the stern and judgmental, uptight, nine to five Midwesterners, but he could still approach girls with his great bravado and ridiculous jailhouse tattoos and tell ’em how he was about to become famous in his charming southern drawl.
The conservative town we unfortunately lived in was notorious for a buncha insufferably generic, bought n paid for, textbook-mediocrity-copycat impressions of each famous band-they had the Chili Peppers impersonators, the Pearl Jam imitators, the fake Sonic Youths, and so on and so forth. The too loud jukebox at the main bar just blared fucking Nirvana nonstop and that Stone Temple Pilots “Sex Type Thing” song, all day. I started to really hate that shit, cause I’d already suffered through it for like two years at Tower Records, where I’d worked in a bleery haze against my will and better judgement in the Last City I’d eaten through. Now I was in the most uncool, racist, violent, depressing place I’d ever been and the people on the scene were not my tribe at all. There was one local honchos band who just kinda sucked fucking something awful, in my opinion, but they ruled that shithole town-they had big balls and a shit ton of money. Best thing about ‘em was their lead guitar player, who had quit. He was the one with talent, but who needs talent if you have local honcho big balls and shit tons of money? So yeah, they got signed on the strength of their obscure covers to a major label, and all these idiots in slick “Alternative” magazines would all pretend like they were any good, like obedient automotons, yeah they had access to drugs and owned shit, but they were really not very good, at all, it was pure shtick–totally like, the Emperor’s New Clothes. I was the only one who was not afraid to shrug and say, “meh”. They were a glorified cover band. And predators, got off on causing harm-not my kinda people. Some other, older guys from the eighties punk rock days, had started a heavy reverb impersonation of Boss Hog and Royal Trux, and they had all the connections from booking shows over the years, and elaborate collections of vintage gear, and they were releasing a steady stream of recorded output on multiple international Hot Rod Labels. I thought they were cool, if shamelessly derivative. I got what they were doing, they just never liked me, AT ALL, cause it was their turf, their hometown, I was an outsider, showing up talkin’ about the Stooges and the Dolls and they never liked that. That was their gig. Could only be one blackhaired dude who liked Nick Cave per zipcode or some shit. I’ll tell you the odd part is I still begrudgingly like their music even though they treated me terribly, I still kinda like the band. So did my guitarist Michael L., who’d obsessively started clocking their progress, rmodeling himself on their vocalist, they were on the covers of magazines and shit, and he figured his next best shortcut to fame would be to sorta approximate what had been working for them, so he started talking about how I should work on becoming “more like Pussy Galore”, which to me, at that time, just meant-what? Stones covers played badly with a chick bassplayer? I didn’t know what he was talking about, “be more like Pussy Galore”. He was suggesting I write lyrics in character-like imagine I’m a serial killer, he’d say. Or a wisecrackin’ gum shoe, we needed to be more like indie film makers. Him and the bassplayer used to get in these all too serious, abrupt fistfights in the rehearsal room over very rudimentary songs I’d written in my prior bands and was having them learn. We’re talkin’ three chord, Dictators or Romantics type shit-Replacements for beginners, and they were going to the matresses over three chords-straight to sudden fiery fisticuffs over it, and if they crashed into the drums, the wealthy suburbanite metal guy would lose his shit and pile into the fracas punching people randomly-all three of ’em on the floor spilling ashtrays and beers cans and knocking over cymbols, cause our drummer was a total heavy metal guy and he had like professional Tommy Lee quality drumsets and a drum tech who followed him around, his own personal roadie who lit his cigarettes and shit for him, named Cheese. You can’t make this shit up. I was the singer, I wrote the words and you know, I write about my life, not some opaque fantasy of being a faroff “Blade Runner” character or Jim Jarmusch quirky eccentric, it was a zero irony zone that I composed from. I was more like an old school outlaw singer-I told stories, mostly about my friends, maybe wrote some protest lyrics from time to time, but there was nothing that fictionalized or “Twin Peak”s mysterious about it-almost none of it was like, me trying to be an indie film auteur. I was not being abstract or pseudo highbrow, no desire to be-Michael was taking some college writing classes and I think that was where the rather more professorial approach was coming from. He wanted me to be “Blue Velvet” but I was already too “River’s Edge”.
So anyways, Michael L., met a hot little number, and she was always lookin’ fine and wearin’ like the short shorts-had a real dynamite pair of gams on her and impressed the fuck out of him by knowing every word on “Exile On Main Street”. It seemed like we were gradually seeing less and less of him for awhile and he kept all his different little sets of friends all separate. So yeah he’d showup wasted to band practice with increasing frequency but we all drank heavily and it was not at all unusual back then for one of us to pass out somewhere, but he was clearly doing some dope and speed, cause his personality was bouncing all over the place. I had a moodswinging girlfriend who was also having her own personality changes, and alcohol induced blackouts, where she really would not remember anything about what happened last night, even and especially if it involved her breaking glass and screaming abuse, and the neighbors leaving us notes about the noise, or rent a cops showing up to our door and playing cards with me and my bandmates after we tucked her back into bed. It was a weird time. We did not sound anything like “the Replacements meets Hanoi Rocks”. We sounded like the Cramps minus the humor, if they were miserable, and really could not play. The Action Swingers remind me of us back then and the local greasy kid punk fanzine compared us to GG & The Jabbers. Not my idea of a fun time and the buzzkill and gloom of the grunge hierarchy was even seeping in to us. Our publicity pictures taken by that girl photographer I mentioned were way better than what we’d achieved sonically, in spite of some good songs, we needed a better guitar player, and Michael L. felt what we were missing was a better vocalist, you know one who could write film noir lyrics about big city serial killers and act “more like Pussy Galore”. I didn’t get where he was coming from “creatively”, at the time, but then, he hooked up with this very busy math metal drummer who was into like, Helmet. Then, they found a guitarist, who sortof played with all these different effects pedals and he started singing in a cartoon Elvis Presley voice, and while I got distracted by that chick I lived with breaking up with me to concentrate more on becoming local popularity grunge famous, and I was bohomeless again, needing a new place to live, he went away with his new band to San Francisco and were becoming-yep, Overnight Famous, by acting “more like Pussy Galore”. It fucking worked like a charm! Sheesh, farout. I finally saw it-it crystalized-his master plan was actually fucking working. He was branding himself as like, Jon Spencer Jr and people in the big city seemed to really go for that. I was not into the music or lyrics he was co creating at all, I could never connect to any of it, EXCEPT his aw, shucks hell yeah, charming as fuck hillbilly, punk rock Jethro Bodean personality. I love the guy, we were like two peas in a pod, EXCEPT I was not at all interested in any of the fad music of the day and next thing I know, the bassplayer calls and tells me they found him dead. Dead! What the fucking fuck. Some kinda mixture of booze and drugs or prescription medications. Dead, though! Ya know the whole time I knew the kid, he was alll about the merry making and the celebrating youth. Ya know he’d take handfulls of pills, swagger around. Stagger around. This whole operation had taken another dark turn and I was having trouble processing it. My high school friend had also overdosed that year. Other former intimates I’d grown close to were hanging around the town’s superstar popular drug dealers. A local overdosed. Too much. Then another, and another, and it became common to hear that somebody you sat on a barstool next to the night before ws found dead on some filthy bathroom floor. Almost routine. All too fucking common, so many people we knew and loved are dead and gone. All my bartenders, all my ex drinking buddies, some of those girls I met and fell in love with at that disgusting dirtyy dive bar where people overdosed in the bathroom. Michael L. was a beloved rogue. I read all these articles and obituaries penned by adoring big city music people who were really, really enthusiastic about his band, and swooning over his personal style and red velvet jackets. I still miss that guy Michael L., and he’s been gone a long time now. I still hear from people who I’ve never met cause they know I knew him. A famous bassplayer I like in a famous band, her husband was a friend of his, somebody else who was in one of my music groups on line was a drummer of his secondary West Coast band. His main man math metal drummer showed back up in my life, said he wanted me to sing for their band, doing the exact music I was never into. I tried to gently convey that the last thing that appealed to me was fronting a cover band of my dead buddy’s attempt to be more like Pussy Galore. Everybody I was meeting back then seemed to only wanna have a cover band of a cover band of a cover band, like chasing bandwagons that had already left town. Just not my bag at all. It’s okay to start off like, “we wanna be so and so meets so and so”, but then, you’re supposed to revitalize the whole genre, make it your own. I felt for the math metal drummer, cause I know he accrued a lot of grief and guilt over the death of our mutual homeboy, but I could never bring myself to sing those lyrics about film noir serial killers, or whatever it was supposed to be. The math metal drummer assured me we could become overnight famous with his grunge connections doing the refried tribute act, but I was rather more dedicated to my own ouvre, my own scene. I had my own get down. whether it ws appreciated by grunge/”Alternative” locals or not. I had my own songs. The bassist got his suburban Weiland wannabe pot dealer friend to start performing my tunes at open mic nights when the sit on a stool MTV “unplugged thing” was in. Wow, brother-those are MY SONGS. That started happening with alarming frequency. No one wnated to help me record but six different acts were doing my tunes in different towns. You can’t make this shit up. People I met in nowhere places were becoming Overnight Famous. Not me, man, I was working in a kitchen, washing dishes and picking fucking chicken all day for minimumwage in a hairnet and bloody apron. Goin’ home alone and hittin’ the bottle hard. I had my own red leather jacket and songs galore, but admittedly no grunge connections to local major label fame people, or fancy studio owners, or well to do patrons of the arts, or any of that shit. I am not gonna kiss somebody’s ass ass just because their dad bought them an old car or sports bar or recording studio. As The Kid, our bratty Bastard bassplayer used to say, “Fuck Those People”. When my leather barbarian ex guitar player from smalltown Flag City, USA via Allston and Colarado got out of jail, I summoned him to my side, and we resumed making our own brand of young, loud, n snotty punknroll that was never properly recorded and probably still sounded nothing like the “Replacements meets Hanoi Rocks”-it was muddier, swampier-more like the Crybabies probably, meets the Hangmen and Comatones and Beasts Of Bourbon-ya see, he was into like, AC/DC, Motorhead, and heartland Americana-Soul Asylum and Seger, Petty, shit like that, and I was pretty new wave, ya know. New wave and torch songs. We had kinda mastered the art of tear it up and take the waitress home, though. Whenever we played in public, people went wild. We weren’t shy, we came to party with the people. We took our inspiration from the Fleshtones. As he liked to say, I kept him from becoming a full fledged AC/DC tribute band, and he kept me from becoming an uglier Duran Duran. My only real regret about all of it was just never having any prolonged access to recording facilities. Now, I’m almost 53, it’s getting colder, I got a teenager in the home, three grown kids who don’t want much to do with their disreputable hoodlum old man, and I never stopped thinking about making more bad seed rocknroll. My wife’s on the phone with her old dad and I’m rootin’ for the geezer. It’s a nothing to do Sunday, I already fucked around in the yard, did the dishes and vaccumed, and folded the laundry. I’d love to have a drink right now but the kid’s gonna be waking up any minute and require all my positive life force. (RIP) MICHAEL L.
“A lot of people seem to believe that capitalism is the only way to arrange society & therefore we must stick with it as it destroys our world. That’s like believing burning your house down with you inside is the only way to keep warm in the winter.” (-Lee Camp)
CATCH MY FALL
“What happened to Zeke? He’s dead on Jones, man How about Dave? O.D’d on alcohol Oh, what’s Rock doing? Oh, he’s living with his mother What about James? He’s gone straight…” (-Iggy)
Sports people in the burbs are weird, I’ll give you an example. Me and my drummer drinking beer together on the stoop was characterized by the sports moms and employers as me corrupting the good boy from the good home, right? Him and his brother’s bully sports team friends getting drunk together, that was All American red blooded rites of passage and blue eyed innocent campus hijinks. Class privilege was a thing back there. So was all that bizarre hometown zipcode overzealous sports patriotism. My wrestling team, wrong or right. Football players can do no wrong. Or kung fu predators, if their dads owned big houses. It was always fucked up beyond belief or repair back there, that school to prison pipeline can not be reformed: the really awful, cruel, spiteful, ballsout mean people were celebrated, rewarded, promoted. Nice kids, good kids, loving, creative kids were abused, incarcerated, bootcamped, punished, beaten, and railroaded into jails, institutions, or military service to make more space for the dickheads and the sadists. That still goes on today in my kid’s generation, the I-Phone tiktok social media culture of kids telling kids to kill themselves, it seems like it may have even gotten worse, since we were young. You know the scene in “Some Kind Of Wonderful” where hapless dork Keith is befriended by all the hoods and skins and big metalheads in detention? I had that same exeperience, of being embraced and accepted by the big tough guys, the few who weren’t assholes, in my high school years, and the one guy who jumped in and ended up taking some punches on my behalf, in front of the downtown nightclub when I was getting pummeled by a whole mob of rednecks, you know I became sortof very attached to him, had him on a bit of a pedestel for years, he always has a space in my heart. I thought it was just so heroic and courageous, when him and a black dude named Bohickey involved themselves with saving me from furthur pounding. I thought we’d always be like Robin Hood and Little John, Morris & Jerome, Laurel & Hardy. Jake & Elwood, ya know what I mean? A dynamic duo. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Vaudeville comedians, Catskills comics. A Dabba Doo Time. He was a popular kid at the city school and hung around some hillbilly poker players who liked eighties rap music and he was even into like Prince and the Cure. He was big ole redheaded white kid but he could dance. Just pure charisma. He could funk. I thought he was a better bassist than the Jane’s Addiction guy. At first, we still had another bass guy-the local teen heart throb star DJ, but old Bobby was about to move on to a solo career as a frontman. So we needed a new bassist and I knew who I had in mind. The guy who’d been hanging around our band practices and drinking beer with us already, back when we were still doing like Alice, Deadboys, Misfits, Stones and Dogs D’Amour covers. Over time, we’d become regular drinking buddies, we had so much fun together singing, “HEY! HEY! HEY!” from Tom Petty’s “Rebels” at the top of our lungs in the echoy apartment, so I decided he should become a full fledged member of my band. He resisted the idea initially because in the hairband era, tv programming made it seem almost like you should look like Brett Michaels and Ricki Rocket to play rocknroll, this guy was a big giant musclebound dude, so he was not sure he’d fit in with the rest of us scrawny scuzzy black leather Ramones, but I insisted, I started teaching him about Hanoi Rocks, Generation X and Johnny Thunders and the Fleshtones and he started coming to band practice. Real punk rock, rocknroll in it’s purest form, does not require anybody look a certain way. He had a big heart and a sense of right and wrong, a conscience, the impulse to be cool and do the next right thing even if that don’t please the popular consesus or always get the dummy vote. That was the criteria for being in my gang. Side by side, we’d faced all kindsa different challenges and adversaries and again and again we rose to the moment, sometimes just barely lived to tell the tale, there were some near riots at crazy biker jamborees in the woods and the like, but othertimes we fucking almost…excelled. I was already a scarfy bottle swingin’ yo ho ho Jack Sparrow back before Johnny Depp was on Jump Street, so I don’t think it’s a big secret that I was perceived as a controversial figure among some of the parents in the plantation states. The beautiful big rascal bassist had been a real life boy scout and role model for the kids YMCA coach before he started consorting with my lot of damaged wastrels and punks, and it is not an infrequent occurance in my life when various associates have suggested that perhaps I jeopardized their reputations among the straights. Not only did we come up together, though, but as ROTH sang on the long awaited reunion lp with Van Halen, “we came through blood and fire…” True story. Closest I ever got to figuring out what went wrong between us was the guitarist murmuring about how the local popular Catholic school Vespa riding drummer had decided I “was not happening.” And a little quote in a fanzine where they alluded to the ex vocalist being a bit too much. That would be me, of course. Okay so ya know, my loss, really cause personally I always loved all those guys, even as I saw ’em going through different stages in life. The straight edge phase, the gym membership phase, the frathouse phase, the sports bar phase, the respectable businessman, and on and on. Hell the guy he replaced, the ORIGINAL bassplayer had become a GOLFER. We had a ball as kids though, a grand ole time, playing little pissy nowhere shows in nothing places, parties, bonfires, basements, me and the other lads hipping him to all our weirdo subculture. I made him these very diverse mixed tapes all the time-everything from the Misfits and Concrete Blonde to the Standells and Warrior Soul and Little Richard and the MC5, Redd Kross and Kris Kristofferson. The Jesus & Mary Chain and the Stooges and Alice Cooper and all the stuff I write about here-right? You know-Japan, Dream Academy, Theater Of Hate, Skinny Puppy, PIL, Depeche Mode, Age Of Chance, Big Audio Dynamite, Kid Creole-you name it. I remember he got me into EARLY Soul Asylum and shared my love of the Replacements. We also both loved early hiphop and old school funk. He was a big Chili Peppers and old seventies P-Funk and like, Rick James fan. Even after he joined a different band with a guy who’d really gone out of his way to fuck me over, I kept in touch and still made him the traditional play loud all hits mixtapes every Christmas for decades, ya know? Expected to kinda raise our kids together, go on vacations, have more kicks and collaborations, but he took his own path, like in Star Wars, when Han splits cause he says he did not come to fight the empire. I totally did, though! Now we’re old, I’m a hermit, last Jedi in bearded exiled on some lonely planet, he’s a fucking collegetown superhero, living legend frat rock garage punk celebrity, and I have not seen him in years and we don’t even talk on the phone. Sad, ya know? Turned out dude was not infallible, he may have even made some dubious choices and wrong moves himself, but prefers to socialize with people who only see the boy scout image, I guess, but I don’t even know. It’s all just blind speculation on my part, totally, a shot in the dark really, cause like I said, I don’t know this grown up version of my former friend, I don’t know any of those guys anymore. I just carry our memories around like a heavy Santa Claus bag of bricks. I called him up when my girlfriend was pregnant and we were looking for an apartment with some urgency in his collegetown but he was kinda making himself scarce right then and I thought maybe it was cause he felt awkward about being in a band with my old sax player roommate from the coast, and a normie gone punk, squeaky clean from the honky burbs, rich kid I’d kinda mentored when he was loitering around my record store his senior year of college. Like I said, I was a little salty for a couple of years cause he played in some other bands with some backstabber guys I don’t get along with, who took my good trust and misused it, and that kinda came between us, I suppose. When you are as talented and personable and charming and fun as that guy, you become a soughtafter hot commodity, epecially in a middle class collge town. Also, I was friends with his wife in high school, back when she was sortof one of the 120 Minutes watchers, an early REM and Depeche Mode fan, but her preppie girls sports and real estate clique never liked me, so yeah, who knows really, maybe that has something to do with it. I was considered a real bad influence on everybody in that hometown, by the Catholic school sports coaches and influential country club moms. I always say I’ve been “Cancelled Since ’83”! I put that on a tshirt. We did finally manage to exchange the briefest of emails when one of our mutual friends died suddenly, me and the now famous bassplayer, but that was it. From my perspective, we should have stayed together and made some records that shoulda coulda woulda been legendary, me and the guys from that original band, but we did not, and that is that. What do ya do when people you love just kinda ditch you, leave you behind? You just cope, right, learn to live without them. I’m like the glaring answer to the musical question “what’s wrong with this picture” in the eyes of like the sports bar celebs, boojass collector scum and showbiz hustle contingents and I get that. They went with the more midwestern acceptable choice, when they replaced me-a generic baseball cap dude. I stuck with the black sheep, the dive bar crazies, the dropout anarchists, the principled antiwar activists, and loudmouthed free speech advocates and fuck you Last Call rebel alliance. They got like a proper pitch Kendoll kid who fit in with fratboys, but did he have any message, vision, integrity or actual songs? I never saw anything that worthwhile come outta that Catholic school moved to nearby collegetown clique. Aside from some generic white t shirt blonde dude wanting to “pass” among the baseball cap people. I could never even understand the lyrics. Something about him wanting money, staus, and materialism. Drums were still white hot though. I guess they fit in great with the college people, the bankers, the secretaries, the day job people, barowners, the whole gentrification brunching ownership society. That aint the stuff of rocknroll rebellion though. Not so much. Anyways, no explanation came, I was out, other dude was in. Then they moved on to some other bands that played like garage covers on super vintage, extra nice classic antique instruments, in suits, in trendy hipster barber shops and in trendy hipster party town exotic locales and shit. I kept annually, foolishly, stupidly and repeatedly offering my services as a rabble rouser/singer/songwriter/people’s champion but they kept blowing me off completely. I shoulda moved on and got over it but I never learned how. I got their pictures on my wall here but they don’t even write me back most of the time. Drummer got sick so I walked to the store in the rain to buy him a card, he just never responded, I guess he told the guitar player I was “not happening”. Bummer. Yeah? “I just drink and drink and drink…”
I wrote about four books, stored on this computer-they’re all about our wild times back in the ancient days. Never published ’em when I had the chance as not to offend any of thes people’s parents, or fancy wives, ya know? Discretion being the better part of valor, I thought it was always “too soon” and figure some people who are parents now don’t want their kids knowing how wild we were. We were a little bit wild, I guess. I thought we were the boys next door, just the ones in silver pants. I honestly never found out what came between us, maybe the onery bassist was embarrassed by my farout appearance back when wearing pink and purple, and yellow feathers and glitter band sequins, or having big oversized Steve Stevens Aqua Net black haystack hair, was not all hunky dory in the flyover states, I was always really despised by the art police, homophobes, and zero tolerance, authoritarian forces of sports-conformity in the flyover states. It was a real shame to me when him and the rest of that band decided to replace me. We were not only extremely entertaining together as a band, like anything can happen day bring the house down entertaining but me and the guitarist wrote way better than average songs back then. Still bums me out. I waited half my life away, hoping for a reunion record. One of my main struggles in this lifetime has been loving motherfuckers who are just incapable of loving me back. Lemmy says “win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me”, but I got hungup on the people I grew up with, they imprinted on my little psyche somehow. It’s just how it is. To me, all those laughs we shared were way more important and valuable than any sortof social hierarchy vip room rewards of membership or crediot in the daytime world, or whatever. I never wanted to be anything like the people on the hill. No big house or glass coffeetable stacked with expensive art books or glossy catalogs can replace having real friends. Not to me, anyways. “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette til your last dyin’ day”. Whether you’re having a beer on the extravagant wraparound sundeck, or in the dirty alley, what differnce does it make? They watch high definition tv on movie sized, thin screens, I watch old vhs tapes of 120 Minutes on shitty thrift store tv’s, you say potato, I say SUSAN SARANDON. Call me sentimental. I am what I am. Somedays I am proud almost everybody I brushed with from back then still has some kinda band in a different zipcode and are still making music, even if it’s without me. I know I had some small effect on all those blokes. They were all good lads, I guess, I just was not made to fit in to that midwestern world. I’m still like the throwaway kids in that eighties punk movie. TR. “The Rejected”. It’s alright, now.
“When capitalism proponents say “you don’t understand economics”, what they really mean is “you don’t understand that unregulated capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But that IS understood; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient. The “invisible hand of the market” gets treated as an actual deity that actually exists, with all the wisdom necessary to solve the world’s problems. In reality the pursuit of money lacks any wisdom; it can’t solve our major problems, it can only make more stuff and more profits. When capitalism proponents say “you don’t understand economics”, what they really mean is “you don’t understand that unregulated capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But that IS understood; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient. Capitalism has no real answers for problems like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and caring for the needful. Yes “let the markets decide” will generate lots of profits for those set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking cannot address those very serious problems. In fact many of our problems come from the fact that capitalism is TOO good at turning the gears of industry; our biosphere is dying largely because capitalism values making lots of things but not un-making things. We’re choking our ecosystem to death because it’s profitable. The claim that capitalism is the best system for generating profits is basically correct; it’s hard to beat greed and starvation as a carrot and stick to get the gears of industry whirring. The issue here is that merely generating profits won’t solve most of the world’s problems.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Are y’all that dense to not see it’s 2 sides of the same coin, a never ending cycle of sameness, 2 headed beast, DIVIDE AND CONQUER, there will never be an anti war candidate on either side. Some of us actually have a revolutionary mindset and see beyond an illusion of choice.” (-Marisa)
NEWS SPORTS & WEATHER DESK:
“A lot of things have brought on these dire times, but two important factors are that 1) capitalism pushes the sociopaths to the top & they ultimately rule the systems 2) capitalism is the belief in infinite growth on a limited planet. It can only end in collapse if not stopped.” (-Lee Camp)
STAY WILD ! STAY FREE! BROTHERS & SISTERS & FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION, AS STOKELY CARMICHAEL USED TO SAY, “ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE!” FREE ASSANGE!
“Everybody knows I’ve only got one song and it’s much too slow and it’s much too long…” (-Rowland S. Howard)
IF YOU’RE ALONE AND YOU GOT THE FEAR
“Be an adult and engage your critical thinking. Does a madman who goes around invading countries solely because he’s evil and hates freedom sound like a real-life human being to you? Or does it sound made up? Like something you’d see in a Hollywood movie? Like something that was concocted by people responsible for controlling the dominant narratives of our society and funneled into your mind using media?
Marvel supervillains have more depth and complexity than the one-dimensional characters the imperial spin machine concocts to represent its official enemies. Thanos was a more believable character with more understandable and nuanced motivations than the propaganda machine’s fictional representation of Putin. That representation has been overlaid on top of the actual government official who you might not necessarily agree with, but can definitely understand and engage in diplomacy and negotiation.
People who believe the empire’s narratives about its official enemies have fewer critical thinking skills than your average Marvel movie viewer. Think. Be a grown up and think. Someone’s benefitting from the aggressively promulgated narrative that peace is impossible and war is the only solution. And that someone isn’t you.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
PLEASANT STREET
Man, me and my two guitar players met some big haired record store chick and ended up emptying many bottles of wine and spirits with her, playing acoustic guitars and singing in this grand old, Dagwood & Blondie, fifties style, rent controlled, second floor, Central Square kitchen with the big picture windows and red metal table and Rolling Stones posters and fabulous echo. She had a marvelous record collection from working at Newbury Comics and taught us about the Immortal Souls, Waterboys, Jacobites and Snatches Of Pink. We’d stay up all night talking about merry pranksters, yippies and beat poets and Bob Dylan lyrics. I was finding so much inspiration and starting to get more serious about songwriting: “There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air”. It was one of those golden hours that could not last, every autumn, my thoughts drift back to that place and the people who used to drink with us and bang on tambourines and sing along. A famous cartoonist/sax player/country music singer named Bob Starker got me into the Jim Carroll Band during a memorable blizzard one winter. Some college girls named Hope and Ashlieng started hipping me to more modern hip hop culture. A girl named Melissa who married the sax player taught me about indie film and underground cinema. It was good, I did not know how blessed we were. That place stayed real cold in the winter. but it was big as hell, and filled with laughs when we made music and it’s a melancholy feeling when you can’t go back home cause everybody’s supposedly grown up now and scattered off to different parts of the world with their careers and bigfish in the mallpond status thing and and spouses and kids and properties and personal agendas. I guess that is what the dreams are for, revisiting all the magical places. Those of us who’d grown up on like, The Pretenders,Lou Reed,Stiv Bators, and Patti Smith were never gonna be that impressed with Evan Dando, Dickie Barrett, Greg Duuli or Taylor Swift…God bless Mike Scott!
YOU ARE NOT IN THE MIDDLE SCHOOL BLEACHERS, ROOTING FOR THE HOMETEAM AGAINST THE CROSSTOWN RIVAL CATHOLIC SCHOOL, SO YOU HAVE TO CARE ABOUT MORE THAN A FLAG, OR UNIFORM, OR GENDER, OR POLITICAL PARTY.
“NATO has blamed the attack on Nord Stream pipelines on “some unknown actor.” This actor was not named but NATO threatened a military response against this “some unknown actor.” (-Lowkey Online)
“Two administrations ago the US had a president who mocked the idea that Russia was a primary rival and said Ukraine was a core interest to Russia but not the US. After four years of intelligence agency-driven narratives marrying Russia to Trump, liberals are now braying for WW3. Before 2016 Dems saw those who spent energy freaking out about Russia as weird, archaic cold warriors. Now they see anyone who doesn’t want war with Russia as a secret agent of the Kremlin. All because they were trained that Russia = Trump and fighting Russia = fighting Trump. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.” (Caitlin Johnstone)
“Since taking over from Trump, Biden has drastically ramped up ICE detention by 45%, increasing the number of migrants in cages from 14,195 to 25,776. Yet the issue has virtually disappeared from mainstream discourse…”
(-Holding Biden Accountable Twitter page)
“Four regions in Ukraine voting to join Russia is called “annexation” but the U.S. militarily occupying one-third of Syria and stealing 80 percent of its oil is called “democracy.” This is American exceptionalism on steroids.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Asked about Nordstream, Biden waited until the end of a presser to offer a half hearted non-denial denial You’d think there’s be more bluster and outrage over one of the worst acts of industrial sabotage and environmental disasters in recent memory.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Western journalists are completely free to express their opinions. Unless they are the wrong opinions. If you haven’t heard, @kthalps
was fired from The Hill this week for expressing the same view as the UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Watch here and support her work!” (-Alan macLeod)
“Rayan Suleiman, 7, died today after being chased by Israeli soldiers. Following his death, the home of his family was raided by the occupation forces.” (-Lowkey Online)
“The bad news: I was censored and fired by The Hill over defending Rashida Tlaib & labeling Israeli apartheid “apartheid.” The good news: I shot the censored video with an actually independent media outlet (see below)” (-Katie Halper)
“People think they’re really smart when they say “censorship is only done by the government.” Nobody intellectually serious or honest believes that. It’s unconstitutional when it’s the government. It’s still censorship when it’s not the government.” (-Katie Halper)
“I saw the war machine against Russia start with Snowden. Then they got people to think that Wikileaks = Russia. Hillary pushed anti Russia on everyone that disagreed with her.” (-Kazza Frazza)
“As Noam Chomsky has been pointing out repeatedly, the political/media class have been continually indoctrinating the public with the completely false narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked”. Every time the war comes up the imperial spinmeisters utter that slogan, in much the same way Michael Jackson had a quota for how often MTV hosts were obligated to refer to him as “The King of Pop Michael Jackson” when his name was mentioned.
But what does it mean if the war is “unprovoked”? It means Putin didn’t invade Ukraine because of anything the western empire was doing, so it couldn’t have been prevented by the western empire behaving less aggressively on Russia’s borders. It means Putin necessarily invaded because he is some kind of evil lunatic who loves to commit war crimes, or a megalomaniacal tyrant who wants to conquer the world because he hates freedom and democracy. Which means he will keep attacking and invading other countries unless he can be stopped. Which means the only answer to the Putin problem is more war.
This is why empire apologists get angry at those who advocate the only sane and rational position toward nuclear brinkmanship by calling for de-escalation and detente. It’s because they’ve been aggressively indoctrinated into the belief that war is the only answer.
The moronic narrative that the invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” poses a massive obstacle to peace, because if Putin is just attacking and invading countries solely because he’s crazy and evil it means detente is impossible and he won’t stop until he’s decisively crushed. If it’s accepted that the US empire has played no role in provoking Putin’s actions, that means there’s nothing the empire could do to make continued Russian aggression less likely apart from regime change, or at least severely crippling and punishing Russia militarily.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Resistance to radical evil is the pinnacle of human existence.“ (-Chris Hedges)
HELLO DISASTER
were a perfect band that became the rough blueprint for the more pop side of what me and my friends were trying to do, tell stories about shit that mattered with a little melody and a lotta sneer.
“at least I’m not another parody in style or not…”
SHITLIBS ARE FAKE AS FUCK. IDENTITY POLITRICKS IS JUST EMPTY TWEETING FEELGOODIST TOKENISM.
This here column won’t be seen until ya know, Christmas, probably, at the earliest, cause I got a backlog of seven or eight columns archived and it is the first day of October as I write this. If the corrupt powers that be have not blown up the planet by then, we oughta be crowded into a little house nestled way back in the trees by then. I just keep trying to retreat deeper away from this vicious ratrace world where all the middle class people battle for middle school popularity well into their middle and even old age. I don’t think anybody really ever grows up, least not the people who adapted all those affectations of adulthood, the cars and keys and big screen tvs. Evil behind the scenes forces continue to censor all truth telling whistle blower journalists while teachers(!!!) who should know better, and safespace feelings fraud squad programmed college people stupidly repeat shit about how it aint censorship if Gates and Zuck and the CIA and the IDF and Aipac or an industry captured regulatory agency, does it. Anyone unwilling to stick to preferred Davos/Pentagon/Nato/WEF script is branded by these tedious shitlibs as “commies”, or “conspiracy theorists” or “Trump voters” or “anti semitic” or “anti vaxxers” or “cysborn heteronormative pass privileged”, or “tankkies” or whatever. It’s the “educated” classes who most often resort to playground namecalling because the truth does not support their preferred Thank Obama “see no evil”, privileged positions. The think tank/ spook media whores are trying to escalate wars rather than engage in thoughtful diplomacy. Hillary and the Cheneys and Kyrsten Synema and Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Podesta and Pelosi are dangerous. NOT just the white haired, elderly dinosaur Southern, Republikkkan males who take big checks from coal companies or pipeline builders or big pharma or surveillance tech. ALL the pro war politicians who think everyone must die who does not obey the empire, and some who do obey, too. Stop making excuses for election rigging warpigs and police state billionaire, class warriors.
Sunshiny Saturday in my deadend desert ghost town-about five lots down, developers have commenced building yet another new house for some winter months part timer from outta state. Up on the hill to my right, a third Dollar Store is being constructed. You know you live in a deadend ghost town when they only ever build more fucking dollar stores. I spoke to a surprisingly upbeat and cheerful veteran in one of those motorized wheelchairs this morning, and an eccentric dude who works at one of the tourist trap, overpriced stores on the main drag, who was complaining about immigrants at the border coming in to do farm labor. Some RV outta towners are walking around smiling about the bright weather in their big sunhats and shorts, locals are overwhelmingly poor and freakishly hostile about the inflation and the outta town fly by night developers who seem to be making the new rules here and controlling these dumb winebox people on the city hall. I had three cups of coffee and now I’m crashing a little bit, dread my afternoon obligations of the day. I have to interact with more humans later on and anticipate some of them doing their seemingly obligatory moodswinging drama queen theatrics, because they can. You know how people with money all love to hijack any moment, break commitments, cancel or postpone appointments, carry on about their conditions? I’m gonna have to deal with that kinda thing, try to fake a smile through it, and then, probably will have to move some heavy appliances. Now between you and me, what I’d rather be doing on one of the last indian summer beautiful days we’re gonna see for a long time probably would be convening in the garage with some fellow leather clad bandanna wearing rockers and making a loud ruckus that’s a throwback to another time. Where I live now, if I say, “The Stooges”, they’re all thinking, “n’yuk, n’yuk, n’yuk, why I oughta…!”
Last night I dreamt I’d found my band and even woke up with a few lines for a song. Sometimes, it seems like that day just aint gonna come. I got some stamps and still send postcards to my estranged loved one’s other relatives so at least they know I never stopped looking for ’em, waiting for ’em, keepin’ my faithful vigil, praying for their safe return. My life is a whole lotta waiting around on other people. Hurry up and wait some more, the fucking waiting room. take a number and grow some cobwebs, “stare at each other, wait til we die”. That’s the tension between the rich and the poor, when the rich want to move shit, make shit happens, they just pay for it to happen, make a call, pay somebody off, snap their fingers just like that. Like Samantha on “Bewitched”. That’s why some dumb rich Ashlee Simpson/Harry Styles model motherfucker jumpin’ up n down aint art, it’s just access. Why you think that show’s called “Access Hollywood”? It’s like a fraternity hazing, the casting couch aint the half of it. They use their monopoly juggernaut to ram these Taylor Swift rich kids into our consciousness, mostly against our will and better judgement, then, they pay Spin magazine and Rob Sheffield to talk about their fifty greatest songs later on, like any of these lapdancer robots have even five good songs, say it enough and some idiot morons will believe it. Rich people want you to listen to them recite their false narratives, they like it better when you’re off the clock. They can’t have friendships because of their superiority complex delusions of grandeur, so they only have minions, assistants, salaried suckers who have to pretend to agree with their mirror mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all bullshit. It’s crazy getting involved with them, believe me, don’t do it if you can avoid it-hold out, find another way. Their over confidence astounds me, how they tell each other, “everything will come to you”. They say it’s all their lifetimes of accrued good karma, and artsy designer redecorating vision. Megachurch prosperity gospel. In my hometown church they are all about the soldiers, cause one in three families got people in the military, so wave the flags and fill the gold plate and they’ll pray for the imperialist invaders killing families overseas and plundering their oil, lithium, and opium. The peachy cheeked Kendoll church goin’ boys draw big fifty thousand dollar a year salaries to be youth group praise leaders at these rightwing evangelical churches preaching the capitalist prosperity gospel, the gospel of nepotism and money, military and Murkkka, they marry off these underaged little blonde haired goldilocks girls, put ’em in big white McMansions, closets overstuffed with Gucci bags and little white dresses and say it’s all for Jesus. Oh man, it’s tough to take, listening to all that shit. Ya know that Hanoi Rocks line, “And Susie, I just can’t listen tonight…” Whoo! I gotta go interact with people and move some major appliances today, definitely not my idea of a good time. People have become so disingenuous in this culture, it’s hard for me to bear it and nod along, none of them even seem to believe their own media induced scripted garbage, they just been programmed with this superstition that some privilege is gonna trickle down on them if they mindlessly repeat the slogan of the day some more. I used to try to be nice and diplomatic with the coffee shop owners and rent gouging liberal know it alls, middle class tv watchers, but they wore me down with their stubborn, willful, devoted blindness. Now I just stay as far away from them as often as I possibly can. There is no negotiating with plagiarists and gentrification brunchers. All they care about is their selfie, their tiktok, their vanity brand, and their mimosa. Launching their monochromatic home accessory collection, and competing with the meanspirited sisters for the inheritance. I can’t be around that shit. In Eugene, Oregon, activists would tell the shitlib politicians about the way their gestapo cops were abusing the homeless people and they would respond with some bullshit story about how they remember having to share a bathroom at the dorm when they were in college in the sixties, so they know how it feels to be homeless, shit like that. The Mayor used to moan about people sitting around and not doing anything-that’s EXACTLY what she and her colleagues drew big salaries for doing-just rubber stamping anything the unelected city manager and diabolical hotel owners and sports tourist college told them to do. Same exact shit where I live now, but on a much smaller scale.
Before fake progressive controlled opposition empty suit brand remodel Obama ushered in the whole fake identity politics sensitivity studies woke bullshit, people mobilized against wars. They all knew wars were based on lies-even the boomers who are the biggest Ukraine flagwavers nowadays still remembered John Lennon, “Fortunate Son” and “Born On The Fourth Of July”. Now anti war movies do not get made. The war profiteering autocrat billionaires own all the media and weaponized it for propaganda purposes. They coup whoever they want to and tell you to your face they want to depopulate the so called third world. Mostly they just hoodwink everybody with narrative control and puppet celebrities. How else you think they could get so many dumbfuck know nothings to recite their evil bullshit new world order eating bugs and worshipping Hillary, Gates and Fauchi scripts?
“Let me guess. They will conclude that Russia did it.” (-Margaret Kimberly)
“Democrats are actually weaponizing upcoming midterms as a referendum between continuing the U.S./EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine (democrats) & those who are questioning and/or opposing the war ( some forces in republican party). This why I say democrats are primary threats to peace.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“NATO is an instrument of imperialism. By applying to NATO, Zelensky is proving that he was nothing but a puppet willing to risk nuclear winter over a proxy war that is harming Ukraine and Europe more than it’s helping.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Do not start WWIII & risk nuclear war by supporting #Ukraine‘s application to join #NATO. Slam on the breaks before the world breaks apart. Call for a ceasefire & a negotiated peace now.” (-Marcy Winograd)
“House passes stopgap funding bill, including another $12b for Ukraine but stripping funding for health emergencies. Warfare not healthcare?!?! #peaceinukraine” (-Medea Benajmin)
“Cuba, struck hard by Hurricane Ian, fights to recover. But @POTUS
continues with the illegal US blockade, the sanctions & the addition of Cuba to the US state sponsor of terrorism list. Those of you who live in the United States CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES and say #ByeByeBlocade.” (-Vijay Prashad)
“Its a disgraceful thing. Biden seems more right wing than Trump on some issues. How can a blockade of Cuba be progressive?” (-Phillip David Dexter)
“Dear The Daily Show, sorry Trevor Noah is leaving. I’m ready to take over. Just know you’ll have to be fine with me: – Calling Israel an apartheid state – Pointing out the US has killed 6 million people since 2001 – Pointing out the US is the largest prison state in the world.” (-Lee Camp)
“Yes, Trevor Noah is no longer at the Daily Show but did you know that the U.S. has passed another $12 billion for Ukraine while Flint, Jackson, Chicago, and dozens of cities still don’t have clean drinking water?” (-Danny Haiphong)
I had to leave my family of origin at a young age and while I’d always return to my original hometown in Kentucky to see my old fashioned grandparents at Christmas, I could never have become one of those 4-H cattle showing, golf playing, Kentucky Wildcats basketball watching automobile salesman like all my cousins, that just was not my bag, at all-my mother married a dude and moved to a really horrible town in Ohio where I was targeted and harassed all my life by boojie baseball cap wearing shorthaired suburbans, so I had to relocate-I had many good adventures. One of my dad’s friends, Uncle Eric put me up in an old apartment on 11th Street and 2nd Ave. in Lower Manhattan and started teaching me about jazz and Lenny Bruce and shit. I met some chicks named Lisa and Minkie and lived with them for awhile on Rivington Street-they were teaching me about Edie Sedgwick, Jean Genet, David Bowie, and William Burroughs and introducing me to people like Nick Zedd and Ena Kostabi and John Spacely. I had a badass pad back in the midwest when I was 18 that felt like a home and family with my bandmates and their girlfriends and rowdy all night drinking buddy band of brothers for awhile. Then, like I said, it was glorious for a couple years in Cambridge, Ma, me and my main man were still trying to find a drummer for a permanent band, but we got distracted by various hard partying girlfriends and it never panned out. Now that guy is on the road again and that’s a hard life if you ask me, being a ramblin’ man who never settles down, his home is the highway, but I’m glad he’s out there, keeping the gypsy road alive. You know what Willie Nelson says: “the life I love is making music with my friends.”
I used to be, now I’m not what you see, Lord, I try…
Shitlibs cheered when Twitter and other fascistic deep state affiliated techlords started censoring offensive speechifier Trump, but now, they have also all come for every anti war, pro worker voice on the left. Every real civil rights organization, human rights group, research study-scientific method-facts based scientist, every free speech whistle blower advocate supporting Assange or Daniel Hale, they are all getting silenced, too. I know you’re mostly and mainly mad that Trump said grab their pussy when he was bragging to Billy Bush years ago. Biden is on camera in countless videos grabbing people inappropriately, many underaged. If you hashtag “believe women”, you gotta believe Tara Reade and alla Bill Clinton’s accusers, too. Trump always sucks up to kkkops because he recognizes they are the ones who stand between oligarchs such as himself and Cheneys and Bloomberg and Pelosi and the pitchforks of the working class. Biden and the squad superfund the same racist kkkops they do their meaningless tweeting about. What I’m trying to tell you, again and again, is there is not that much difference between the political parties anymore. Mostly just marketing hoaxes and superficial skin deep stunt-casting. I aint mad at Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for telling the truth about inhumane, ballsout apartheid thuggery. History will show that mass murder and kisnapping and poisoning second class citizen’s water and sanctions and torture and burning down houses and shooting kids and stealing land arent okey-dokey, cute or cuddly, jes cause the “specials” are the ones doing it. That’s how the establishment turned the former left into shitlibs-by convincing them at the university that they are the special ones, the anointed, the cuddly folks who deserrve more special privileges, but it’s just some Sneetch ass bullshit. Stars upon ours. Starbellied sneetches. When trends change, the specials will be lasering the tattoo off to stay on trend, ya know? My wife reminds me how I am a sentimental fool for certain people from my past who operate in my own tiny personal life, as sheepdogs, like Bernie and the squad. They always talk me into going back around the herd, the popular kid clique, the oppressor gentrification pigs, and I always get burned, everytime I do. I love some folks who love their popularity so they kinda always make me think it’s gonna be okay this time, we’re just all gonna have some friendly mimosas, but then they put me around the sadists and the bullies, the pay to play posers and showbiz sharks and it goes bad again. Stay away from joiners and belongers, asskissers and wannabe insiders. The in crowd are always gonna love their special parking places and cushy jobs and backstage passes and music festival vacations more than they will ever love some errant dropout black sheep,rebel diehards, no matter how far they go back together. Even if it’s the motherfucker they modeled themselves after, who taught ’em half of what they play act they know, they love their privileges more. I’m persona non gratis with lotsa motherfuckers… except when they wanna have some sexy hardknocks cred, or peddle some vicarious streetwise, been around survivor image. Mostly they all love to pose like streetgangs in combat boots and skull tattoos, but in real life, they’re all about safespaces, cowering, never offending the powerful, and sticking to official narratives. Not punk at all. They believe in nothing and brag about it, they stand for nothing but their own special privilege. They don’t give a fuck about the little people, the outsiders, the lesser thans, and never will. Dead Kennedys who’d be cancelled nowadays by these sniveling shitlibs said it perfectly: “Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death”. Their own convenience, play acting like they did something extra fancy or high brow or hard working to earn all their piles of property, prestige, and privilege. AS IF you and me couldn’t do all that and more outta bed with a hangover standing on our head all day long, while chewing gum and telling jokes.
Am I well aware that summa my former street kid ex friends have assimilated and joined the system and swan around with the fat fratboys who wear the gold jewelry and cologne and throw the rich bassplayer’s money around on cocaine and studio time? Yeah, I know. That’s the worst part about social media-all your sold-out ex amigos are right there with the dickheads and the grunge era douchebags.
“Zelensky is a puppet of the NATO. Ukraine is its pawn. NATO has declared that it won’t stop its suicidal proxy war until Russia is in ruin and the world at the brink of nuclear war. The age of Western imperial decline is also the age of madness.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“The US oil and gas industry intentionally releases fossil methane into the atmosphere through their normal operations at a rate of approximately 1 Nordstream-sabotage every two and a half weeks.” (-Ketan Joshi)
Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, and Alice Walker React to the Assange Extradition Sign Off: “It is a sad day for western democracy.” http://ow.ly/hBbF50JAenU
This record changed my standard of what a song could and maybe should be. People say my lyrics are “too long”, ya know, but they said the same shit to Patti Smith and Rowland S. Howard, Nick Cave, and Jim Carroll. Jim Carroll showed me that pop songs did not have to be stupidly repetitious and banal, Jim Carroll was a divebar, hobo jungle, Stanton Street oil drum campfire, true story tellin’ man just like me. Jim Carroll showed me how to do it. Jim Carroll set me free. I met an artist named Corazon at Rounder/Ryko who played this record when I visited her once. She was really somethin’, sang for a band called Sugar Bitch. I have felt a real love for her.
It’s too late There’s no one left that I even wanna imitate You see, you just don’t know I’m here to give you my heart, and you want some fashion show
But it ain’t no contribution To rely on the institution To validate your chosen art
And to sanction your boredom and let you play out your part
Things got weird for people like me in the nineties-ya know all those preppie fuckers we left the midwest to get away from had infiltrated the underground music scene with their parent’s money for drugs and high school bully popularity clique bullshit, all of ’em imitating fucking Kurt Cobain and Mark Lanegan, but poorly. Musicians in my age group, a lot of ’em quit music, hopped on trends, or just no longer understood or remembered the kind of subversive poetry that had the power to really make people want to come alive and live more fully.
Mine and the late great Tony Coiro’s (RIP) mutual associate, Brother and Comrade Michael Volgare, who I may have met at a Gunfire Dance show, used to hangout with Jim Carroll, they’d go have breakfast together and talk about old movies. That’s pretty sweet. I never met Jim Carroll in real life but his music set my imagination alight, I could always identify strongly with everything he was singing about. I also wrote her name in vain.
Way, way back like 21 years ago or something, when I first met my longtime companion, I would get her to read my song lyrics aloud to me so I could hear how they flowed and I would read Jim Carroll and Leonard Cohen lyrics to her, now we are older and busier and everything is a tough hustle, we don’t get as much time together for shit like poetry and paintings.
Like I said, I used to live on the Lower east Side, pre gentrification, hadda lotta wild adventures, the stories I could tell, it is crazy, being me…. Jim Carroll “City Drops Into The Night” – YouTu
STOP BEING FOOLED BY GENDER-DEMOCRATS WHO OFFER YOU NOTHING BUT A TOKEN PANTS SUIT AND ENDLESS WARS. RICH FASCIST WARPIGS STILL SUCK, NO MATTER HOW THEY SELF IDENTIFY.
CODEPINK – Women for PeaceCODEPINK is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs.www.codepink.org
“52.3% of Puerto Ricans live in poverty. Blackouts were constant after the US privatized the electrical grid. Today, 2 weeks after a hurricane, more than 250,000 people still have no electricity. This is the daily violence of US colonialism. The only real solution is independence.” (-Ben Norton)
“How about we stop giving fossil fuel predators $11 million dollars per minute?” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“US plans for a military mission to oversee the delivery of weapons and other support to Ukraine is “roughly modeled on U.S. train-and-assist efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades.” Does that model inspire confidence?” (-Aaron Mate’)
“Farewell to Her Majesty. One facade comes down and another goes up. No change at HM Prison Belmarsh where an innocent man, Julian #Assange, is incarcerated for the crime of truth-telling. God save the King.” (-John Pilger)
“We have power… Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems… they have power… but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.” (-John Trudell)
“And you wonder why there is no effective opposition in the democrat party. It is not just Bernie’s advisor, Bernie was not serious about challenging the neoliberal capitalist grip on democrat party & caved not once but twice.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Bernie’s foreign policy advisor makes the inevitable transition to a think tank funded by Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and all the absolute worst western plutocrats. The metamorphosis is complete.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“In Cuba, no one dies or becomes homeless from a natural disaster. Not a single life was taken by Hurricane Ian in Cuba. In Florida, hundreds are assumed dead from the same hurricane. Don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t a massive difference between socialism and capitalism.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Nearly 90% of the world population is not backing the US in our current quest for WWIII. This has been admitted by such mainstream outlets as the Wall Street Journal & Newsweek.” (-Lee Camp)
“Fascists Are Red Fascists Are Blue I Absolutely Will Not Vote Blue No Matter Who!” (-Pat The Berner)
“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.” (- Étienne de La Boétie)
“While Europeans want to believe their are the world, the real world understands clearly what is going on & none of us wants to have anything to do with it but we can’t escape because these criminals have the power to destroy us all.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
LOWKEY
“Unregulated Capitalism is a Suicide Pact”: Noam Chomsky talks to LowkeyWhile widely hailed as the father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky has, for well over half a century, also been one of the sharpest and most committed voices critiquing the crimes of the United States government. Having written well over 100 books on a range of subjects, from politics, to media to science and history, Chomsky was at ease …www.youtube.com
“Wyatt joins hundreds of journalists and children on a kill list maintained with explicit support from the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior, which lists an address in Langley, Virginia, has an IP in Brussels, and which has marked off murdered targets as “liquidated.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“I’ve been added to the Ukrainian regime’s official kill list. My alleged crimes include a “deliberate violation of the state border of Ukraine” & being an “accomplice” of “Russian-fascist invaders.” EU nations once condemned the kill list—but not anymore.” (-Wyatt Reed)
CHEAP & NASTY
I remember how exciting it was in the early 90’s, when I self published a low budget cut n paste, stapled togther and copied at Kinkos after midnight trashy fanzine, all these big labels would send me so much shit for review, it was like a part time job just reselling the major label corporate rawk to the plethora of local record stores for $5-8 a pop. every morning, I’d look down the stairwell and a big stack of boxes would be on the floor underneath the mail slot. The amazing thing was I received good stuff too from all over the world. One cd I took a liking to was Cheap And Nasty and no I still aint made enough money moving furniture or doing lawn work for rich people to buy those awesome looking Alvin Gibbs books, yet, but an old boy can dream, can’t he? The really extra fucked up sad part about the tragic death of the marvelous guitarist and artist Timo Kaltio is that I am pretty sure that Cheap & Nasty were plotting a reunion. Nasty Suicide’s a pretty good singer, ya know I saw some of those clips from the sixtieth birthday party Hanoi Rocks reunion that reminded me of my last real life conversation with an old sideman of mine in NY, he was reassuring me that we’d still get it back together to make some more good music while we were both alive but all those old dreams just seem to be paling now, ya know? People think another old bandmate of mine stole his stage name from Jan Stenfors, but people actually started calling him that when an elderly black lady riding the last redline subway of the night from Boston to Cambridge looked at my old cohort in his leather pants and snakeskin patterned suitjacket, no shirt underneath, some silver cross necklace dangling down with his black mop of wet hair and said, “you a nasty bastard!” Because he had vomited right there on the floor of the redline. That kinda thing was once common in our circles. The rest of us barely batted an eye. I “knew” Les Riggs on Falsebook for a couple years, he lived like a hop, skip, n a jump from me back then, so I naturally asked him if he wanted to pound the cans for my antisocial glamarchist band and he naturally declined, being a nine to fiver family man now. He was a good drummer, Cheap And Nasty were All Stars. Les has a lotta great stories, as you would imagine. Timo, you might know, roadied for Hanoi, played in Cherry Bombz, Alvin Gibbs and the Disobedient Servants, Stronzo, Anzi Destruction, Rene Berg, Killer Kane, Dogs D’Amour, Peckham Cowboys, Tango Pirates, with Izzy Stradlin and Guns N Roses, Smack, Anita Chellemah, with all kinda people. Sad he’s gone. (RIP) He was one of rocknroll’s real cool ones. Where can I find a guitarist like that??? I still got the promo photos in my moving boxes out there that china records sent me in like 91, but I tore my personalized autographed Mad For The Racket promo photo while packing for the move today which was a major bummer. All my rocknroll shit’s gone from all the girlfriend breakups, band breakups, midnight moves and evictions ya know, you can’t keep nothing in this world, but on the other hand, I got a Hank Williams Singles Collection on cassette for a dollar yesterday, shit comes and goes. The Kid Congo and lvin Gibbs books are toppa my want list these daze. They got some real boss Cheap & Nasty swag available for import prices online nowadays. I still love that band and you know Alvin Gibbs is def. one of my fave bassists.
DARRELL BATH
said I should move to the UK to find musicians but I always stayed here cause I got kids I never see. He played for every good band in England and elsewhere from the Dogs D’Amour to the Crybabys. I mean all of ’em. Ian Hunter, Nikki Sudden, Los Tupper, UK Subs, Spike Gray, Honest John Plain, Sabrejet, Diamond Dogs, Guttercats, Die Toten Hosen, probably Andrew Matheson…Hunter called him ” a fine guitarist and a walking lyric.” All the good ones are goin’ away while all the evil oligarchs and royals and warpigs and evil tyrants and torturers just live forever.
STOP WORSHIPPING THE PSYCHOPATHIC BILLIONAIRES WHO BOUGHT THE MEDIA! THEY ARE NOT FRIENDLY PHILANTHROPISTS! OR SUPER SPECIAL SPACEMAN SCIENCE-SAFETY SAVIORS! EVEN SANDERS SUPPORTS ALL THE BOGUS WARS FOR EMPIRE!
“Think tanks are narrative management firms where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with reasons why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“No immigrant has taken your job. You were laid off by a capitalist who required cheap labor and took advantage of that immigrant to increase his profits, and nothing makes him happier than to hear you blame the immigrant and not him.” (-Mohamad Safa)
It’s crazy how no good folks can ever seem to rise in the system without being killed or threatened or corrupted. Remember the story of how Dennis Kucinich was threatened aboard a plane by a top general? It’s pretty suspicious how Sanders and Gabbard and all those people got in line and endorsed Creepy Joe Biden.
“The great lie is that it is civilization. It’s not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That’s the great lie, is that it represents civilization.” (-John Trudell)
I STILL LOVE RALPH NADER AND JILL STEIN BUT NO LONGER BELIEVE IN SANDERS OR THE FRAUD SQUAD WARPIGS IN PINK WIGS!
Hello my Brothers & Sisters & Friends Of The Revolution, roosters and coyotes are audible outside the disintegrating desert trailer, last night, me n the boy saw a skunk about as big as a small dog. Crazy kook down the road keeps disappearing our outdoor feral cats which is one of many reasons why our caravan is traveling on down the road. Had some setbacks in our relocation plans but I guess that’s how it always goes. It’s starting to get cold here in the mornings. I’m on my third or fourth cuppa coffee and it’s starting to get bitter in the cup as I peruse the sad news of the day. All the big tech tyrants and their high salaried media mouthpieces are calling for always more censorship of the internet while the government entraps people for protesting, spies on all the people’s communications, and locks our last few legitimate, courageous whistleblower watchdog journalists up in it’s worldwide network of imperial gulags, deploys fake news whores to slay their good names. They killed Michael Hastings in a ball of fire and threw the book at the guy who leaked the Vault 7 files showing how they did it by remote control. I’m kinda depressed, reached out to some people I used to have alot of fun collaborating with-one got busy trying to unscrupulously monetize my song catalog claiming ownership of tunes he only covered, did not compose. One guy blew me off because he is so lofty in the tower and posh important in his own mind. I can’t hire sidemen to record my songs with cause I got kids and zero surplus, hard laboring for outrageous electric bills and obscene grocery bills. It’s a slave minded thing to say but I feel lucky to have found some honest work in hard times such as these. One guy I know is perpetually spiraling and can not contribute to any cause beyond his own most basic, instinctive, grab what you can and drive off in a van survival. It’s a sad time to be alive. Others have local bands they feel real popular in, have dismissed me as a vital lyricist/vocalist/ frontman cause they now work with the pay to play people who can finance shit. You know how it gets in old age. Some ex peers feel like they’ve achieved some kinda second hand association to some older marquee namebrand headliner’s former fame, and others feel like they married into wealth and can now only associate with people in their class or la-di-da higher ups, others I used to jam with just up and croaked these past couple years-it’s harder finding people to make a ruckous with as we get older. So yeah, not a lotta movement in the struggle to make new music. Mostly stay busy doing odd jobs and or trying to entertain a restless, home schooled, bored teenager without any suitable peers currently. We just came inside from some morning track and field exercise. He naturally wants to buy some arcade video games, monkeys, Gucci clothing, and a karate dojo in time for Halloween. Rank N File nobodies I used to know seem to sincerely believe that quoting the pig-media propaganda of the day is gonna somehow get them some type of trickle down privileges from the powerful who hate them, it’s a crazy time here in this end times batshittery.
I NEVER GOT HOW SHITLIBS CAN WAX OUTRAGED OVER MEREST SUGGESTION BIDEN ELECTION WAS RIGGED, EVEN THOUGH NO ONE EVER LIKED CRIME ACT BIDEN, HE HAS ALWAYS BLURTED RACIST HATE SPEECH, BEEN GROSS WITH KIDS, INSULTED A FACTORY WORKER ON CAMERA AND THE REST OF HIS CAMPAIGN WAS HIM WEARING A MASK IN HIS BASEMENT, BEING HANDLED BY HIS WIFE. PIG-MEDIA IS POTENT.
“Literally the absolute worst people. Think of some rich asshole who pours their wealth into manipulating human civilization in a profoundly unhealthy direction, and they’re probably on the Carnegie Endowment donor list.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless… and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people.” (-John Trudell)
I TOOK THE KID OUT FOR DONUTS THIS MORNING NOW I AM PACKING MY BELONGINGS AND PREPARING FOR THE NEXT BIG MOVE
My fifteen year old and his mom just left for his part time job-some creepy candy salesman is supposed to meet them at his workplace to sell him some candy cigarettes. I’m always suspicious of old men selling candy to kids-ya know? He used to run an actual candy shop but now just finds customers obn a Facebook page and meets them in public places because the rent became too expensive at his former storefront, which is somewhat believable. He showed up with his own kid in the car which gives a bit more cred to his cause. Everybody’s got a hard hustle now if they didn’t go to college or inherit money or marry up. People like Bill gates kep buying up the farmland and Vanguard and Blackrock these monolithic monopolies are buying up EVERYTHING-media, pharma, weapons, real estate. Sheesh, what a world we live in. I aint got nothing to do today so I’m watching a documentary about Jimmy Hoffa, the mob, and the Kennedys, and the countless covert attempted secret police hits on Fidel Castro. Check out “The Smoking Gun” and also, “Killing Hoffa”. my teen’s listening to some Marty Robbins, my wife has to work tonight, I’m bored as fuck and wish there was somewhere to go. Most of the mom n pop shops closed during the Covid shutdowns, including my favorites second hand shop, a bookstore, two affordable greasy spoon restaurants and the bowling alley. Some yuppie scumbags are gentrifying the two streets downtown but aside from a ripoff boutique and a ripoff beer joint and a coffee shop only open about 16 hours a week, those fake gallery businesses are only open like one Friday night a month. I can’t wait to get out of this trailer, the city hallers who sicced the code enforcers on the hermits to please the creepy fly by night developers only succeeded in driving the hermits to crazy behaviors like stealing our fucking outdoor cat. Meanwhile the fat pampered indoor cats here keep puking on the floor all morning and my kid has moved on with his demands for dogs and goats, monkeys, and alpacas.
“It doesn’t matter who exposed the secrets, it matters what the secrets are. Our government spies on us illegally.” (-Matt Taibbi)
“U.S. intelligence warned Germany of possible attack on pipelines in the summer like it called the dates for the new phase of the war in Ukraine for Feb. Brilliant intelligence or something else? This is same intelligence service that predicted a “slam-dunk” for WMDs in Iraq.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Money is freedom. So when you have tiny number of people (the 1%) with most of the money, the resources, & the freedom, the only way they can continue to rule over such an expansive group of people — the bottom 80 to 90% of the country — is to have us all HATE each other.” (-Lee Camp)
“I think it’s the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person… it’s the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.” John Trudell
“On its Douma “investigation”, btw,
Evan Hill’s NYT unit collaborated with Bellingcat, without disclosing that it’s funded by Western states and spook firms involved in the Syria dirty war. Even Bellingcat’s UK funders have privately admitted that it spreads disinformation.” (-Aaron Mate’)
today about funding Neo-Nazis in Ukraine. His Bio reads “Fighting for jobs and education, not bombs & incarceration” yet he votes to give the racist Azov battalion billions of dollars.” (-Jose Vega)
“Wikipedia is by design an instrument of online discourse suppression and cognitive control of Western populations. Marketed as a consensus driven encyclopedia, it empowers intel agencies and regime change fanatics to digitally assassinate their critics.” (-Max Blumenthal)
JOHN TRUDELL, LEONARD PELTIER, AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT, JESSIE ED DAVIS
I’ve been studying the American Indian Movement since I was a young kid getting thrown into the classroom closet by the wrestling coach/history teacher for challenging his racist whitewash bullshit.
“Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.” (-John Trudell)
“Neoliberal fascism is given a pass because because neoliberals control the state & social & corporate media. If that sounds like talking points from the right it is only because the liberal/left is aligned with neoliberal totalitarianism & stop raising principled criticisms.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
Hustling Hustling on down hustling street Rag man rag woman paper bags full Street age alerts in tenant child eyes Sidewalk playgrounds got to beware Junk man’s in the shadows Dealing his junk Beautiful sisters Deal themselves around Beautiful brothers Not so beautiful anymore So much older than the day before
“Following the sabotaging of the Nord Stream pipelines, there should surely be more interest in Britain’s arming of Ukraine with under-water drones last month. Training for use of these drones was delivered by The British Diving & Threat Exploitation Group and the US Navy Sixth Fleet.” (-Lowkey host of the Watchdog at Mint Press News)
“We must be morally & politically consistent. I condemned & still condemn Ukrainian state forcefully conscripting men to fight who are opposed to war. I also condemn all efforts to force Russians who opposed war to be compelled to take up arms. Conscientious objection is real.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Isn’t it strange that entirely made up rumors about China go viral but the daily, verifiable chaos, illegitimacy, and war criminality of the United States rarely gets attention? That’s your brain on propaganda.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“In addition to its longtime CIA ties, media corporation Axel Springer (which owns Politico, Business Insider, and top German newspapers) requires employees to support capitalism, the neoliberal European Union, and apartheid Israel or they’ll lose their job.” (-Ben Norton)
“The attacks on both Nord Stream pipelines is an obvious act of sabotage, no matter what the United States says. Winter is coming, and the U.S. is using its proxy war on Russia to sink Europe deeper into full privatization and subservience to U.S. imperial dictates.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban – those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.” (-Sibel Edmonds)
“FDA advisor and vaccine maker Paul Offit: “A healthy young person is unlikely to benefit from a booster dose… If there’s not clear evidence of benefit, then it’s not fair to ask people to take a risk.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“This is the face of authoritarianism – even though it looks different than you were taught to expect. And it’s the mindset of tyrants everywhere: This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow: ” (-Glenn Greenwald)
My friend The Rev. has a new EP coming out, I’ve loved all three songs I’ve heard off it, he has steadily become one of my favorite contemporary singer/songwriters. He is smart and gutsy and when he sings about the grit and the pain and the wind and the rain, let me tell ya, you can hear how he’s lived all those blusey lyrics first hand, he might look like a blonde haired Captain Jack Sparrow, but he is no Dizney pirate, he is a true pirate, an outlaw brother of the darkness, related not just to biker rock Bastards like me, Nasty Bastard, and Circus Of Power, but also to very sophisticated songwriting poet motherfuckers like Kris Kristofferson and Tom Waits. If you loved Guns N Roses but thought they just lost the plot, at Farm Aid, and think they’ve been absurd ever since, this hard skool throwback might be your guy. If you liked Junkyard, or Rock City Angels, that sweet spot where blooze metal meets outlaw country and sleaze punk in the moonlit empty bottles blackout A:M, you will likely also become a fan of Rev. Paul’s. He’s one of us independent D.I.Y. motherfuckers. Tell your friends about him. He is so good. He has excess heart and lyrics on fire with the truth.
I LOVE THIS COMEDIAN! A STANDUP COMIC’S JOB IS TO PUNCH UP AND TO ALWAYS CHALLENGE THE NARRATIVE OF KNOWN LIARS. THESE SHITLIBS ON SOCIAL MEDIA WHO ARE OFFENDED BY THE TRUTH SHOULD GO FUCK THEMSELVES. FOR SCIENCE AND DIVERSITY AND EATING BUGS CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING. FOR SAFESPACE CORRECTNESS.
“Cenk just called the Grayzone and everyone pushing back on NATO proxy war in Ukraine “Putin puppets” This dude is such an imperialist shitlib it’s unreal.” (-Revolutionary Blackout Media)
BOLAN & BOWIE’S GLAM MASTERPIECE MADMAN
If you been feeling somewhat crazy, confused, frayed or even outright unhinged about half the time, ya know that is perfectly natural in fictitious times such as these, when the regulatory agencies have all been captured and controlled by one or two people, and every once trusted media source, bought off platform, or ancient authority figure is gaslighting the fuck out of us with their bad cop/good cop fixed and unchanging duopoly bullshit, doing their best to escalate from tiredass guns and abortion culture wars wedge issues into fullout “order from chaos” manufactured civil wars or martial law. Everytime I read their bullshit mockingbird consolidated press, I know I feel crazy. Like Black In The Empire said on Twitter recently, that Cenk guy who used to be progressive took 20 million from a Clinton megadonor and now all he does is attack real anti war leftists and help the DNC whitewash McCain and Bush/Cheney crimes, while single-mindedly vilifying Trump like he’s some rare and unprecedented anomaly rather than a run of the mill, typical oaf, fat country club member of the Murkkkan ruling class. “Cenk pretends to fight the people who gave him the twenty million dollars”. Yep, their bogus narrative is always such a ridiculous sham, like when CNN insists there’s no inflation, no recession and everybody just LOVES Biden and Kamala. It’s never any legit reflection of what’s goin’ on out here in the fields. They talkin’ bout building bigger mega yachts and mega mansions and rockets to Mars, while we struggling to pay for groceries or the fuckedup electric bills or jackedup rents while Tv swears there’s no recession, our only problem is that mean ole bad wolf TRUMP. He’s not woke, and is a manspreader sexist Russian spy!!! They keep pushing the Bill Gates clone meat, and as a person who has not ate animal meat in about twenty or maybe twenty one years, since my longlost daughter befriended a pig at a petting zoo in the Midwest, whatever the Davos fuckers suggest we poors do, from giving up our property, to getting many more mandatory “safe and effective” monkeypox warped-speed shots for the public good, to giving up all privacy, or ownership, or cash, or “Our Bodies, Ourselves” medical autonomy, I sense that they, THEMselves, the fascist fucks who own the politicians, and plan your future in secret, are doing quite the opposite. Kim Kardashian would not even take a real bite from her synthetic Bill Gates burger, her sister and his pop/punk illuminati sacrifice boyfriend that goony drummer are all batshit crazy if you ask me, but we’ve established I think most everybody’s crazy, suffering from collective delusions, fanatical nationalist ginned up “pride”, and Stockholm Syndrome, psychotic greed: it’s the only thing that’s trickled down from those sick fucks at the top. I don’t trust any billionaires. Billionaires are not good people. I have to wonder about millionaires, too, quite honestly.
JEFF DRAKE BOOK COMING SOON!
My teenage band used to do “She’s So Filthy” and one of my old roommates recorded that version on the 45 of “Pillbox”. Love The Joneses, and also, The Humpers and The Vice Principals. Co Starring Long Beach Salon Pop SUPER HERO, my man, Billy Burke. Can’t wait to read Drake’s autobiography. He’s the guy half o’ Hollywood modeled themselves after-all those Izzy Stradlin types. The West Coast Thunders. Marvelous!
Aw, man, you ever hear these guys? Maverick lone wolf/lone star rocknroll renegade, Neen Youkhana is an underrated punknroll superstar! Unless you live in Canada, chances are you may not have heard of them, because he really has always ran an authentic indie operation. In my eyes, he’s a Real Rocknroll underground cult hero! Righteous cat, too. Check ’em out and remember what real hard drivin’ rocknroll sounds like. Nothin’ but FUCK YEAH! In addition to being a first class crooner and guitar player, whenever I hear his music, it always reminds me of being on the highway. It is late night travel music, it has a great sense of movement in all of it, mobility, the road and the night sky. He’s kinda like Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy rolled into one. ‘Little Vintage Aerosmith in there also, Theater Of Hate, and Four Horsemen, and for me, even a little Jim Morrison in some of his growls.
WHAT? YOU CALL THAT AN INSURRECTION????! WHILE BIG 5 PAIDOFF WHORE PIGMEDIA MOAN ON AND ON AND ON ABOUT OAF TRUMP AND MAGA PROTEST QSHAMAN…REAL JOURNALISTS ARE KIDNAPPED AND TORTURED BY THE EMPIRE!
People like me, who’ve seen too much real life violence, and carry the lifelong lasting effects of fuckedup trauma don’t really care to watch any of that splatter film casual violence occult shit that’s all over Netflix and Hulu now, on days when it’s way too hot to be outdoors for long, I have succumbed to indulging in one of those really, really dumb models dating on the bikini beach shows. I’m not proud of it. I’m kicked offa social media by deep state censorbots for anti war posts and think it’s been detrimental to most people’s mental health anyways. I never believe any of the media headlines owned by Bezos or Gates, Vanguard or Blackrock. It’s all pro war, pro “Gates Reset” all the time now, just flat-out horseshit. He’s buying up all the farmlands and sniveling suckers think it’s cause he loves the cuddly animals and wants us poors to be “healthy”. I don’t personally wanna hear anymore bullshit from the Cheney/Bush bunch, or the sold-out shitlib, pro war DNC about Capital Hill protests of Trump supporters. I want them to fix the water supply and house all the people. I want them to negotiate an end to wars based on lies, proxy armies, coups and Nato expansionism. I want them to demilitarize the police and defund the alphabet gangs. Trump is a threat for sure in that he wants to continue these insane Biden wars, escalate conflict with China which started under Obama cause his Goldman Sachs bosses owe the Chinese money they don’t wanna pay. Trump wants to put homeless people in tent cities and dissolve the department of education and replace it all with Betsy Des Vos white power charter “Christian” schools-they hate poor people so much, the opposite of what Christianity is supposed to be. Sadly, the Dems are almost exactly the same but with some gratuitous tokenism and two oopsy daisy rotating villains-and a ridiculous emphasis on theatrical support for traditionally oppressed cultures but they still keep all the same systems in place-the drug war, the forever wars, children in cages at border gulags, Gitmo, the surveillance panopticon. The low wages. The poisoned water in Flint, the jackedup rents. The Slippery Slope. Both parties are in cahoots, just do the bidding of billionaires. I want them to fulfill the Bernie Sanders mandate that was used to sheepdog stadiums full of people back into the might as well be Republikkkans DNC. Universal housing, real healthcare not just crazy fuckedup snatch n grab big pharma racketeering, free higher education for all, like they have in sanctioned socialist democracies like Venezuela and Cuba and had in Libya before Hillary killed Gaddafi with her neo-con mercenaries. After they do that, maybe we can talk about AOC’s feelings some more. Anybody else noticing all the coordinated messaging, high level celebs like Angelina Jolie and Nichole Kidman and the Kardashians pushing the Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates “Let them Eat Bugs” bullshit in like, “Vanity Fair”? Thing about the nutty so called great reset and Bill Gates frankenfood bugs and fake lab meat and secreted geoengineering and spraying of barium to blockout the sun shit is these exact same rich elites who openly say they want to depopulate, the psychotic evil sociopaths, who profit from disastrous wars that cause the overwhelming majority of harm to the ecosystems though Greta Thunberg never mentions that, and who fly around damaging the atmosphere in their private planes are gonna say we have to give up all our rights for nature and puppydogs and keep planting stories and assigning celebrities in the controlled press, to advance their globalist bullshit NWO tyranny agendas. Their insanely evil cult leader says you will eat the bugs and own nothing and be happy.
But you really worried about Qshaman protesting some more? Furry hats and facepaint, oh my! They mighta took down the Georgia Guidestones, but that techslavery advocate Harari dude who is Kooky Klaus and depopulation agenda Bill’s closest Isareali advisor gets giddy talking about depopulating. Meanwhile they silence the truth tellers in cruel Dick Cheney torture gulags. Shitlibs fret about AOC’s feelings some more. Rightwing pigmedia propagandists keep calling Schwab and Davos “progressives” and “socialists”. They are fascists and tyrants, actually. I see why the Qanaons are so confused, all the rightwing media calls Biden and Obama socialists and progressives which is some kinda horrible joke, until Capital Hill protest, those gullible patsies on the right-they’d never really received the Cointelpro treatment like this, but the billionaire Reset whackjobs don’t care how you self identify. They gonna try ‘n’ control everybody. From The Thank Obamas and the Thank a Kkkops. The NWO is not your friend.
@TwitterSupport has placed a deceptive warning label on the link to our republication of a factual report on the tied or Rolling Stone’s editor in chief to the military-intelligence apparatus (-Max Blumenthal)
even the Thank A KKKOP Love A Uniform Patriotic Flag Waving Right is getting the cointelpro infiltration and incitement agent provocateur business nowadays. Unprecedented.
But Shitlibs love Bush/Cheney!!!!??? And John McCain. And his moderate rebels with the Toyota motorcades, all the masked men in Syria. Proxy wars still suck. They lied about white helmets, they lied about WMD’s, they lied about everything. But here’s a gay talkshow celebrity to tell you that Mike Pompeo, Dick Cheney, W Bush, Obama and Zelensky are “NICE”.
IF YOU’VE BEEN SUCCESSFULLY REINDOCTRIANTED TO HATE AND FEAR FREE SPEECH WHISTLEBLOWER JOURNALISTS AND WORSHIP AND TRUST WEF PUPPETS AND DAVOS BILLIONAIRES YOU MIGHT ALREADY BE A FASCIST PIG.
“Democrats are mad at Bernie because he is telling the truth about their bill that will not reduce inflation, but will expand fossil fuels and we are mad at Bernie for continuing to caucus with and enable a corrupt corporate party that hates him and every social policy he ran on.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Pretending the US government has been taken by Marxists lets the “populist right” feel like shrieking about communism is fighting the power when really they’re just facilitating longstanding neocon agendas against China and longstanding CIA/FBI agendas against western socialists.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“We don’t care about employment, we don’t care about the law…” (-Paul K. And The Weathermen)
ANDY McCOY FOREVER
Mondays suck in the dead end desert ghost towns cause everything is still closed, it’s like a Double Sunday. I end up roaming restlessly on the deer trails by the river and foothills of the big mountain, trying to avoid rattle snakes and meth heads and bullshit propaganda on all the hypnoscreens. All my thoughts always seem to stray back to rocknroll. Andy McCoy‘s the original architect/songwriter/genius of Hanoi Rocks, and he’s got a new record out. “JUKEBOX JUNKIE”. Ya know Mike’s current touring gang is a slick, professional, well oiled machine, but Andy is still an elegantly wasted fulltime gypsy songwriting, big hat, larger than life, swashbucklingly debaucherous, one-off pirate outlaw, artist bohemian, visionary. A dear, sweet, most honorable, and faithful friend of mine memorably called him a burning wreckage and I smiled at the apt description cause I get what he means. Poor ole Andy slurs his words and stumbles around in a perpetually intoxicated honky tonk haze, his halo is always a bit crooked. Reminds me of somebody somehow, almost….familiar. By that I mean myself. Ha ha. I know he is frequently slagged by people online, in the ever annoying youtube comments, for his defiantly stubborn rocknroll lifestyle, cause people like the Crue ponce around gloating about how they got away with so much gross and mean spirited, unkind, unremorsefully insensitive, ballsout predator bullshit, because they make a lot of money, and tediously lecturing people about the 12 steps to sobriety which is not that impressive coming guys who flagrantly call their boxset “Music To Crash Your Car To” parts one and two and continue to get busted drunk driving, and getting more plastic surgeries, and doing big capitalist stadium tours, and tacky automythologizing made for tv movies ,and cashing unremorsefully in on their destructive car crashings, and hooker punchings, and ticket sales, and surgically enhanced Baywatch beauties from long ago, but they honestly peaked with “Too Fast For Love”. The online Crueheads are just ignorant metal goons and fame hags and wealth worshippers. Andy is a staggering, swaggering, prolific composer, painter, and libertine outsider remnant of another time, a one man Red Light District, an abandoned amusement park on legs, a throwback to Exile On Main Street in winklepickers, who still writes great songs sometimes, and no one really holds a candle to him as a performer or all around romantic rocknroll genius, in my book, at least. He might not make as much money as the Crue or Keith or Joe Perry or whoever, but I don’t care about money or power, and his electrifying contributions to our punkroll glammy subculture are timelessly immortalized and irrefutable. As I told my friend, “Tooting Bec Wreck to Eternity”! Those rich guys might have made more moolah, but Andy McCoy has made better art. I mean, sometimes, “Into The Valley Of The Dolls” is my favorite album, or “Love” by The Cult, but most frequently, in my lifetime, it’s been predominantly “Back To Mystery City” that has inspired me and my ouvre of under recorded songs, and entire way of life the most. “Everywhere you goin’ baybeh, you know I will follow…” That “WASTED YEARS” video is still the best concert I’ve probably ever seen.
(RIP) TIMO
“This time the collapse will be global. It will not be possible, as in ancient societies, to migrate to new ecosystems rich in natural resources. The steady rise in heat will devastate crop yields and make much of the planet uninhabitable. Climate scientists warn that once temperatures rise by 4℃, the earth, at best, will be able to sustain a billion people.
The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.
The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit.” (-Chris Hedges)
‘They want your land, they want your gold and they want your kids. These are the real assets they are after.’ (- Catherine Austin Fitts)
As Democrats continue to gaslight the public about their ‘big win’ here is what Brett Hartl, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity, is saying: “This is a climate suicide pact. It’s self-defeating to handcuff renewable energy to massive new oil and gas extraction.” (-Ryan Knight)
“This new bill is genocide, there is no other way to put it. This is a life or death situation & the longer we act as though the world isn’t on fire around us, the worse our burns will be.” – Siqiniq Maupin, Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic. (Guardian 8/9/22)
“Never forget that right after Hurricane Katrina, Cuba offered to send the US aid in the form of 1,586 doctors and 37 tons of medical supplies. “Others have sent money. We are offering to save lives,” Castro said. The offer was rejected by the Bush administration.” (-Radio Free Amanda)
“When you are an internal colony denied self-determination, the colonial master can determine your fate. I was organizing in the gulf when this happened & it was a brutal reminder of our status as captives.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
WHAT’S LEFT
What passes for the Left in this country is a bunch of rank and file suckers and cowardly followers pledging unconditional allegiance to rightwing corporate, pro war, Wall Street motherfuckers like Obama’s Eric Holder and Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and AOC. Dumbfuck celebrity shmucks still drunk on Trump Derangement Syndrome, who have mad, media fed, partisan blind love for Hunter, Zelensky and Gropey Joe cause they have no real principles aside from feelgoodist Thank Obama partisan bullshit and idenity politricks partisan hate. They all work for bankers and inside trade and strictly obey big pharma and military weapons manufacturers and proxy army contractors. AOC and her bosom buddy Lyn Cheney, can both empty justice-tweet all day long that “Trump” is bad, but that only serves to distract from all the unforgivably stupid and appallingly evil shit the Gropey Joe admin is up to. I never liked one thing about Golden Toilet Donald Trump, but pigmedia still focusing exclusively on him all day everyday, as all purpose boogeyman scapegoat blamehound has gotten mighty old. Nobody gets up that early. Shitlibs refuse to stand for any leftist principle beyond performative red carpet bullshit-tax the rich dresses at the creepy Meta Gala with the Eyes Wide Shut crowd, or watching RuPaul. Ho hum, big deal-when you gonna do something to stop the wars or house the people? Never, ’cause the government, like the media, is owned and operated for and by the private plane Bloomberg/Pelosi super rich, and the ruling class megabillionaire donors love war and fascism, they got so much wealth and power they can force all kinds of undemocratic, inhumane, nefarious bullshit on us peasants just for their own sadistic glee, and we, the people will obediently snipe back n forth about some nickel and dime culture wars bullshit, rather than ever correctly identify and seek to overthrow our common oppressors-the Davos billionaires with the evil sci-fi agendas and social currency ratings, cashless society bullshit, and dick rockets. Klaus Schwab brags about how his tech-fascist minions have infiltrated every government on earth. I heard his talk with the Pfizer CEO and they got diabolical shit in store for you, but pigmedia keeps everybody hypnotically focused on Orange Man Bad and forgetting all about and whitewashing the warcrimes of the Bush/Cheneys and Obama and Pelosis. Hillary overthrew Libya, had their leader brutally killed by proxies and went on tv and laughed about it. The Cheneys brought you Gitmo and waterboarding and indefinite detention of righteous whistle blower journalists like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale. Podesta said they need to “make an example of” leakers. Somebody killed Seth Rich. They killed Michael Hastings in a fiery ball of fire. They paid off TYT to become warpig script reciters though they used to do news from a left perspective-but no longer.
Dems never stop complaining about Trump bragging to Billy Bush, “if you’re famous they’ll even let you grab their expletive deleted”, but somehow manage to ignore all the Clinton/Biden accusers. Hillary and Warren keep hammering on about Sanders being sexist while Gropey Joe never stops awkwardly touching women and children and sniffing their hair and shaking hands with people who aren’t there, all on camera, and gives his son a super decadent lux lifestyle, with his white nationalist cronies in the Ukraine, full of backroom bargaining, hookers, crack, and oil company vice presidencies, and all the shitlibs see the Azov insignias and just shrug and look the other way. It’s really beyond scandalous, that this congress will give another 8 billion in weapons, every three or four days to slow bleed Russia over there in their sacrifice zone with the coup government Obama installed, but we got millions of people homeless in the streets and the justice-tweeters would rather fund wars and police state militarization than house the people. Let alone provide a clean water supply to Flint, or universal healthcare or education. Legacy TV is still All Trump All The Time. Hard to find anything on Netflix or Hulu except creepy occult programming horror bullshit, and the ongoing glorification of idle heiress, model jet set, mk ultra beta kitten, influencer brandings. They brand them like cows.
You can’t really describe someone as a sellout, if they never had any principles to begin with. I had an ex girlfriend tell me she didn’t live by her principles. Huh? What? That I had more integrity than anyone she ever met and we were not compatible. What? Huh? Yeah looking back, summa the people I was most devastatingly disappointed by, never promised to be beside me throwing Molotov’s at the barricades, anyways, ya know-they were always sucking up to rich people, consolidating their own private landowner passive income streams, groveling stand for nothing mediocrities who only ever cared about their own comforts, luxury lifestyles and fitting in with the upper class. AOC, like Obama, is just a marketing campaign, an empty rebrand, a hoax in a pants suit. Same as all those people I can still get sucked in to feeling bad about, who were just never who I imagined they should be, to begin with. They’d rather sit at the bar with the posers and liars than do anything that might seem controversial or risk losing some kinda brownie points, extra credit, apple polisher asskiss GPA scores with their booj inlaws by ever straying faintly off script. All that, while wearing a leather jacket with the Clash logo painted on the back. Everybody seems so zombified. They’re all on the Government Pills, social media crack, and propaganda tv, waiting for UPS to deliver their Amazon boxes for Science and Pinkhats White Women Educated Diversity and War On Russia and China because it was “Her Turn”. Orange Man Bad, you know?! So boring and trite and insultingly transparent, all these so called official narrative reciters are like teleprompter readers. AI obedient praising lady fascists and the FBI.
“There is a disturbing trend where the politicians (both Democrat and Republican) who sold out our communities at every turn are criminalizing homelessness instead of providing public housing & healthcare. They’re criminalizing the problems that their corporatist policies created.” (-Ryan Knight)
WARPIG KISSINGER SAYS EMPIRE HAS GOTTEN TOO FAR OUTTA POCKET WHILE PIG MEDIA REBRANDS DUMB FRATBOY BUSH W AS SOME KINDA FOLSKY LEADERSHIP HERO. LIZ CHENEY’S HUSBAND IS HUNTER BIDEN’S LAWYER? SECRET POLICE SICCED ON TRUMP BY GROPEY JOE ADMIN.
In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, immortal Hague fugitive Henry Kissinger says the US is acting in a crazy and irrational way that has brought it to the edge of war with Russia and China:
Mr. Kissinger sees today’s world as verging on a dangerous disequilibrium. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” he says. Could the U.S. manage the two adversaries by triangulating between them, as during the Nixon years? He offers no simple prescription. “You can’t just now say we’re going to split them off and turn them against each other. All you can do is not to accelerate the tensions and to create options, and for that you have to have some purpose.”
On the question of Taiwan, Mr. Kissinger worries that the U.S. and China are maneuvering toward a crisis, and he counsels steadiness on Washington’s part. “The policy that was carried out by both parties has produced and allowed the progress of Taiwan into an autonomous democratic entity and has preserved peace between China and the U.S. for 50 years,” he says. “One should be very careful, therefore, in measures that seem to change the basic structure.”
Mr. Kissinger courted controversy earlier this year by suggesting that incautious policies on the part of the U.S. and NATO may have touched off the crisis in Ukraine. He sees no choice but to take Vladimir Putin’s stated security concerns seriously and believes that it was a mistake for NATO to signal to Ukraine that it might eventually join the alliance: “I thought that Poland—all the traditional Western countries that have been part of Western history—were logical members of NATO,” he says. But Ukraine, in his view, is a collection of territories once appended to Russia, which Russians see as their own, even though “some Ukrainians” do not. Stability would be better served by its acting as a buffer between Russia and the West: “I was in favor of the full independence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was something like Finland.”
Kissinger: “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.” https://t.co/mytxSajU6Q
I don’t know about you, but to me this warning is much, much more ominous coming from a bloodsoaked swamp monster than it would be from some anti-imperialist peace activist who was speaking from outside the belly of the imperial machine. This man is a literal war criminal who, as a leading empire manager, helped to unleash unfathomable horrors all around the world the consequences of which are still being felt today.
And as far as you can tell from his own comments, he remains completely unreformed.
“Looking back over his long and often controversial career, however, he is not given to self-criticism,” The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Secor writes.
“I do not torture myself with things we might have done differently,” Kissinger tells her.
So Kissinger remains an unapologetic warmongering psychopath. But if he hasn’t changed as a person, what has? Why is he now cautioning against US aggression and warning that the empire has taken things too far?
Well, if Kissinger hasn’t changed, we can only surmise that it is the US empire itself that has changed. Its behavior is now so insane and illogical that it is making a 99 year-old Henry Kissinger nervous.
Which, if you really think about it, is one of the scariest things you could possibly imagine.
The empire’s departure from the Henry Kissinger iteration of murderous madness to its new form of insanity appears to have begun around the turn of the century, when the influx of neoconservatives into the White House combined with the jingoism which followed 9/11 to usher in an era of interventionism and military expansionism of such brazenness and recklessness that many from the old guard balked.
Kissinger was supportive of the 2003 Iraq invasion, but well before it began he was already saying that he had serious misgivings about the lack of clear thinking and forward planning he was seeing on that front. The neoconservative goal of US planetary hegemony at any cost which led to that invasion (and the planning of many more) has since become the mainstream Beltway consensus perspective on US foreign policy, and it is responsible for the escalations that Kissinger is now warning about.
“The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world,” wrote Michael Parenti in his 2004 book Superpatriotism. “The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.”
By “PNAC plan” Parenti means the plans of the neoconservatives behind the notorious Project for the New American Century think tank, whose unipolarist militaristic agendas they explicitly advocated.
Henry Kissinger is warning about the dangers of US warmongering not because he has gotten saner, but because the US war machine has gotten crazier. That we are now hurtling toward confrontations that don’t appear rational to someone who has spent the majority of his life watching the mechanics of empire from inside its inner chambers should concern us all. When you are talking about brinkmanship between major world powers, especially nuclear brinkmanship, the last thing you need is for one of the parties involved to be acting erratically and nonsensically.
We need de-escalation and detente, and we need it yesterday. If you’re too hawkish for Henry Kissinger, you’re too motherfucking hawkish.(-Caitlin Johnstone)
FROM THE BELLEY OF THE BEASTS
Sleazegrinder gave me my first Beast disc. Their songs spoke to my very heart, they had obviously had very similar experiences and lifestyles as I did back in my teens and twenties because all their songs reminded me of myself and many of my booze soaked fringe dancing former intimates. Spencer’s solo albums, as well. Tex reminded me of my ferocious partying old friends, Tap (RIP) and Mike L. (RIP) and Mark B. (RIP), he was a raunchy blues beltin’ hard livin’ soulman, probably the best of who’s still left. The Beasts, The Horseheads, and The Comatones were the primary influences of the sleazy bluespunk pregentrified dirty old Boston underground band, The Original Suffering Bastards, even though the magazine critics all compared us to American Heartbreak, D-Generation and The Hangmen. We were deadend kids, we never had no money and all our wouldbe benefactors were just hustling us to get near our desirable old girlfriends or famous friends-they were careerist social climbers wasting my time and lying to my face. It’s so impossibly sad and fuckedup and hard to believe summa the Beasts are already gone and summa my old bandmates, too. It really does all go by in a blurry blaze after you reach a certain age, it seems to accelerate.
“Remember when the FBI raided the Clinton residence to confiscate Hillary ‘s server with top secret documents illegally stored and how the media Alleged that she violated espionage laws?” (-Garland Nixon)
“There is also the professional left element which reacts with open glee as the security state runs wild on MAGA, the same way many of them celebrated deaths of unvaccinated right-wing septuagenarians with Covid. The culture wars define their shared identity & trump any principle.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“A shocking new poll finds that 90% of Americans have little to no trust in the mainstream media. I’m not sure why that is but perhaps it’s because they lied us into: Iraq Afghanistan Syria Libya Vietnam Korea Somalia Haiti Guatemala Honduras Chile Ukraine..” (-Lee Camp)
“Today, is the anniversary of President Truman’s obliteration of Hiroshima, a civilian city. The dropping of the atomic bomb was experimental and meant to show the world who was boss. What has changed?” (-John Pilger)
GRAVEYARD OF EMPTY BOTTLES: REMEMBERING THE CLASSIC DOGS D’AMOUR LINEUP
Man I’ll never forget the day my old pal, Cowboy Bobby Cloyd (RIP) showed up at my purple apartment with that Mother Love Bone “Shine” cassette-he later had a Columbus band he called Shine, and also, one called the Healers, but so far, no record of their live or studio performances has washed up on youtube. Bobby gifted me with a really nice black cowboy hat that I wore for years and totally wish I still had! He also brought over a bottle of Jack almost every night when I was still too young to buy my own, and The Dogs D’Amour “Dynomite Jet Saloon” on “putrid green vinyl” and wowee we were all so enamored with their songwriting, artwork, clothing, and lyrics, they had the whole thing down, just a raggedy lot of old school rocknroll troubadours a bit like The Faces. The Stones, Hanoi Rocks. My little garagebands covered their songs for years. All our early efforts to write originals were like far less clever imitations of The Dogs! By the time I got out to Hollywood, every blackhaired no hoper from all the smalltowns had already migrated there and formed their own Dogs D’Amour ripoff bands. My ex girlfriend was cohabitating with about ten of ’em. They all mighta dressed and drank like Tyla, but none of ’em had his songwriting ability, nor the musicianship of the Dogs. They were all like boxes of Loreal blue black hair dye and Aqua Net in Lip Service clothing teasing their hair up like Nikki Sixx but their songs were like gangster rap stupid, cause everybody’s hooker/stripper/phone sex operator girlfriends were into NWA and summa those popular on the Sunset Strip one sick posse, metal head, last call hair dudes offered me crack my first night in town. Jo Dog is such a special guitar player, everything he does is brilliant, his artwork is amazing, so is Bam’s. I remember feeling all disgruntled by Tyla’s heavy merchandising back in my teens and twenties because I could never afford his prices or keep up with the onslaught of Dogs goodies. I gave up on collecting his discography when I was about 26-there was just too much and I’m a pauper and once the other Dogs left, I lost all interest, honestly. I don’t know why they all fell out, but it would appear that Tyla kinda likes to keep a tight reign on all his operations, to most of us old Dogs D’Amour diehard fans, the Jet Saloon lineup will always be the one. You know I gotta say, sometimes in my own journeys, I’ve been capable of having too much to drink and sortof injuring myself but I can’t help but have some of that euphoric recall when I think back on the old days that have long since passed. The Dogs D’Amour were always a big part of that. Much more fun. Much more fun. My town cemetery has big signs everywhere, “Alcoholic Beverages Prohibited”.
I’ve been out walking in the hot burning sun, my hair’s wet, clothes are, too, had to take the shirt off and put it in the laundry room. It’s hot. Part of the reason so many people get weird and freakout in these desert no man’s lands is because there are so few distractions, you end up back in your own tapes, your old buried trauma, your dog vomit anxieties and bad memories. I am trying to learn how to just let all that pass, burn off in the heat. I was outside last night to photograph the sunset and a poor old geezer from the old folks veterans home on the hill was having a very clearly audible nervous breakdown/standoff with the nurses or jailers or white coats or whatever you wanna call the staff up these. Negligent protocols resulted in a whole shit ton of his former peers dying off in the death plague of two years ago and me, I keep listening to what those dudes at Pfizer and the WEF have to say in their youtube discussions, and am not entirely convinced it ain’t all intentional. I can’t believe the corporate media is really pushing this all day everyday image makeover of the Bush/Cheneys and people are falling for it. Even rightwing Breitbart “news” has made note of how they’ve gone from admitting Dick Cheney was an unfathomable evil ala Darth Vader during the Obama Feelgood Rebrand, but now, they’re trotting all these old generals, spooks, bureaucrats and war criminals back out and giving them airtime to blame it all on fuckin’ Trump. I don’t know why all these deep state goons and spooks would be mad at him-he is all for private plane ownership, inside trading, taking megadonor bribes from Israeli billionaires and the KSA, wars on Russia, China, Iran, and an ever expanding dystopian police state, men in uniform indiscriminately gunning down minorities, feeling up the poor, criminalizing homelessness, stopping and frisking, spying on our emails and dictating our personal choices. Same as Pelosi and company.
Campaign Against Antisemitism on Twitter: “Russell Brand @rustyrockets and Aaron Mate believe that allegations of antisemitism in @UKLabour were merely “insults used to undermine criticism of Israel or destroy Jeremy Corbyn.” https://t.co/Cjwp2yJyCI” / Twitter
“Mike “we lie, we cheat, we steal” Pompeo is being sued for having the CIA spy on Julian Assange and his visitors in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The CIA is a criminal organization of the highest order.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Expect a swift public rehabilitation of the Espionage Act, previously known as one of the most pernicious laws on the books: used to prosecute Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Ellsberg and others. Now it’ll become a benevolent tool of Preserving Democracy™” (-Michael Tracey)
“Liberals spent the entire Trump administration shrieking about the looming threat of fascism only to wind up cheerleading for the fucking Espionage Act.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“GREAT NEWS! Matt Hoh is back on the NC ballot, giving working people a chance to vote for what our lives depend on – M4A, housing as a human right, an end to endless war & an economy for working families. It’s outrageous Dems tried to deny voters a people-powered choice!” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Socialists: “We need healthcare and housing for all in this country.” Liberals: “No, we need the FBI to dig up Trump’s ex-wife because he hid documents in her casket.” If you think Democrats & liberals want to do both you’re not paying attention. It’s Trump, Trump, Trump all the time. And in 10 years when they’ve exhausted that they’ll find a new villain to obfuscate the public with. They will do everything except fight for the change we need.” (-Ryan Knight)
“I’m glad Trump lost because otherwise immigrants would still be mistreated and the Iran deal and Roe v Wade would be dead and he’d probably be driving us toward WW3 by now. That damn fascist would’ve probably even started prosecuting his political enemies under the Espionage Act.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“No they’re not “ leftists”, they’re Democrats. Big difference. Democrats are a right wing , conservative, pro war, pro wall st, anti-worker party that serves the same corporations & billionaires as the Republicans.” (-Jimmy Dore)
By the time I relocated with half my band and a couple girls and my oldest kid to the hardscrabble, blue collar working class big city Dorchester ghetto, times were changing, last real rockstar Andy Wood had died and all that grunge bullshit and gangster rap was coming in. We met a real cool chick who shared our love for the NY Dolls and Dogs Damour and Nick Cave and stuff at a record store where we were consigning a dozen copies of my old fanzine, which was our version of pre internet social networking, how we looked for replacement musicians, met other groups, bitched about the metalheads we thought were fake or stupid, and waxed enthusiastic about the ones we loved. A whole lot like what we do here. I ended up becoming roommates for about four and a half years with the record store chick and she turned me on to so much stuff like those raggle taggle gypsy Waterboys and Snatches Of Pink and New Model Army, Rowland S. Howard and Dylan and beat poets and Kusworth and Sudden. She is always in my heart. Long after I’d fallen out with her boyfriend baby daddy who’d moved in to our apartment, I kept showing up on her front step with a bottle, three sheets to the wind, lookin’ for a home in every face I saw. Once or twice a year on a social occasion to break the ice. I could never completely let go of any of the good ones, she was like my soul sister. I heard she works at a bakery. God bless her. God love her. I sure do. I will always feel like forever in her debt for teaching me about all the bands I just mentioned, The Waterboys “Fisherman’s Blues” and “This Is The Sea” became two of the most important records of my life, and she protected me from her P.C. college chick roommates, and I leaned on her quite a bit when one of my old exes started giving me grief. We stayed up all night talking and drinking these special coffee drinks and listening to “The Big Store.” Those were the days, man!
Another band of quite debonaire scarf wearers that deserved way more fame and fortune than they received were The Hollywood Brats, some of whom later became the Boys. Me and my old crew of rowdy all night wildboy carousers were all quite keen on the champagne and whiskey and always related strongly to them and their dashing dandified peacocking and hilarious good time all the time lyrics. I’m sure you’ve read the book. They were kings of protopunk kings. People always tell me this kinda rocknroll is outta style and that I should start experimenting with A.I. hut two computer muzak, but really this is the only stuff for me. Johnny Thunders used to say, ‘it’s hard to get a guy off Wall Street”, yeah, I can dig that. You should see how hard it is trying to get a guy off Central Park West. Everybody’s hooked to the rah rah war machine propaganda, I can’t live in the Tv world. I really like to get it on, put on a big rock show for the kids. This is really how it’s done, if you ask me. Our way of life.
ROGUE JOURNALIST CAIT JOHNSTONE
There’s a scene in The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey tells the fable of the mysterious Keyser Soze and how he became a crime lord.
“One story the guys told me, the story I believe, was from his days in Turkey,” he says. “There was a gang of Hungarians that wanted their own mob. They realized that to be in power, you didn’t need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.”
Spacey’s character describes the way the Hungarians came after Soze and his family to take over his drug dealing business, but the viciousness with which they did so was no match for the viciousness they are met with.
“Then he showed these men of will what will really was,” Spacey says, describing the way Soze kills his own family and then wipes out the families and friends of the entire Hungarian gang.
And what’s funny is if you carefully watch the way power moves in the world, you will see that this is pretty much how it works. The most vicious among us are elevated to the top, because all our systems are built in a way which elevates viciousness.
The US empire is able to dominate the world exactly because it has “the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.” Whenever I lay out my evidence that the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth, I’ll get someone conceding that this is true but arguing that the US only behaves that way because it is the most powerful. Any other government with the power of the United States would behave with the same amount of viciousness or worse, they argue.
And I always tell them that they’ve got it exactly backwards. The US isn’t uniquely vicious because it is the world’s most powerful government, the US is the world’s most powerful government because it is uniquely vicious.
The United States put an exclamation point at the end of the second world war by dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan, not because it needed to (it didn’t), but because it wanted to intimidate the Soviet Union. It then immediately launched into a succession of new wars and strategic operations of astonishingviciousness with the goal of eventually becoming the global dominator. It achieved this at the fall of the USSR, after which it immediately instituted a policy of working to ensure that no rival superpowers ever develop and began working toward “full spectrum dominance” of the land, sea, air, and space. All of the major international conflicts of our day are the direct result of these policies.
None of the people driving the imperial power structure which rules over us are in their positions because of their wisdom or kindness. Oligarchs get to the top of their corporate and financial ladders by being willing to step on whoever they need to step on to get ahead. Military strategists get to their positions by demonstrating an aptitude for military domination. Intelligence officials get to their positions because they understand how to facilitate the interests of the oligarchic empire. Politicians get to the top by displaying a willingness to serve imperial power.
And this principle tracks from the top down through the rest of our entire society. The only valuing system we have for human behavior is money, but what human behavior does money value? Competitiveness makes money. War and militarism make money. Ecocide makes money. Sickness makes money. Finite commodities make money. The entanglement of corporate and state power makes money. Propagandizing people into believing they need more than they have makes money.
What doesn’t make money? Kindness. Collaboration. Peace. A thriving biosphere. Health. Psychological well being. Political transparency and integrity. Decisions made to benefit the whole. Sources of energy that can’t be controlled by the powerful. Abundance. People being content with what they have.
Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ https://t.co/My7QSINDHc
Money has no wisdom. The “invisible hand” of the free market will never value the better angels of humanity.
Pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in the valuing of treatments over preventions and cures. The arms industry has a vested interest in inflaming hostilities between nations. Ecocidal industries have a vested interest in ensuring that they remain able to rape and pillage our planet without legal intervention while offloading the cost of the consequences to the public. Monopolistic corporations have a vested interest in intertwining themselves with government power to protect themselves from antitrust cases.
Everything we ache for our world to be — the way we know it ought to be deep down in our heart of hearts — is subverted by the systems we have in place, which are all geared toward taking it in the exact opposite direction.
The world will never know peace as long as war is profitable. The world will never know health as long as sickness is profitable. The ecosystem will never thrive as long as ecocide is profitable. We will remain ruled by tyrants for as long as our systems elevate tyranny.
To have a healthy world, we’re going to need systems in place which elevate health instead of viciousness. Until then the gravitational pull of those systems will continually steer us toward dysfunction. Hoping we can move toward peace and harmony without changing those systems is like stepping off a cliff and hoping you don’t fall.
We need to move from competition-based models to collaboration-based models. Systems which value working in collaboration toward the greater good, both in collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem. Until we do, we’ll fall every time.(-Caitlin Johnstone)
This is being marketed as the last Nikki Sudden disc, but I highly doubt it’s the Last Of The Last. The homemade sound is pretty great-he was pullin’ from all eras-eighties new wave, sixties girl groups, and of course, his beloved seventies glam rock. I’m only three songs in, and already moved to pick up pen to spread the good word on Brother Nikki’s swan song cd. This album rocks like a Spencer P. Jones, or Ian Hunter album. I always preferred his sidekick, Dave Kusworth’s bratty battle cry, and the alley cat harmonies of the Jacobites, and Bounty Hunters, to many of Sudden’s solo outings. He’d really started concentrating alot more on his lyrics in recent years, which really enriched his writing on these latter-day albums. Much of his early work suffered a bit from lazy, throwaway Hallmark declarations of love-like he was yellin’ for Rapunzel to let down her golden hair. You can tell he’d been listening to more Dylan, than Thunders, as he aged. I know he’d nearly completed an epic book on the Rolling Stones entitled, “Bring Back Ian McLagen” before he died, and I hope his estate finds a way to still hustle it into print.
There’s plenty of good music here, that’ll appeal to the core Nikki Sudden fanbase of old Faces/Mott fans, but some of it reminds me of other artists as well-“Hunky Dory”-era Bowie, Stephen Merritt from Magnetic Fields, and Steven “Tin Tin” Duffy-the original Duran Duran singer, who worked with Kusworth back in the old days. There’s a big hole where Nikki Sudden’s supposed to be, that ain’t likely to get filled—esp. not by any of the screaming dude-metal jock-kids with the dyed hair on the corporate labels. If you’re a fan of TYLA and have yet to be properly introduced to Mister Sudden, or if yer an old fan, debating if you should shell out your girlfriend’s hard-earned money on the new Snatches Of Pink, Chamber Strings, Dave Kusworth & The Tenderhooks, or for still another LP’s worth of Nikki Sudden’s Stonesy, soulful, self-mythologizing trash-folk, get this immediately. Who else but Nikki rhymes “manuscripts” with “fish ‘n’ chips”?? It’s a far-worthier investment than the new Ronnie Wood autobiography, and sincerely, the best over-all album I’ve heard since the NY DOLLS comeback album. If you can imagine Soho Roses, or Hollywood Brats, covering a vintage Rod Stewart song with a quality lyric, yer at the right hootenanny. Olde Saint Nick used to sign all his letters to me, “Stay Bruised”, and I’d always think, “No Worries, Man!” We miss you, Nikki! God Bless the Prince Of Rags!
Veglam 