“Propagandists argue that there are 1,000 derailments per year to demean the Ohio disaster. It’s not the derailment that caused the crisis. It was the purposeful decision to line the derailed poison-filled cars w/ explosives & consciously bomb the village to save a few bucks.” (-Jeremy Loffredo)
“How do you go into journalism, know anything about the history of the US, and not look around and ask:
“Why is it that our ostensible news network employs huge numbers of former operatives of the FBI, CIA, DOJ, Pentagon and NSA to report the ‘news'”?” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Ninety percent of the American people believe there was a conspiracy involved in the assassination of the president. The other 10 percent work for the media or the government, probably.” (- Richard Belzer 1944-2023)
“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.” (-Hunter S. Thompson)
“Nobody who imperial narrative managers label “isolationists” are ever actually isolationists; Hawley is a virulent warmonger only opposes the Ukraine proxy war because he wants the US to focus on preparing for war with China. It’s so trippy how Democrats and both MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans all play along with this narrative that MAGA Republicans are rolling back US militarism, when in reality they’re just in favor of shifting the focus of the US war machine.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“If you are wondering why several countries ban certain U.S. foods it’s because there are 3,000 untested chemicals that appear in our food. Yes, our own government is allowing these big corporations to put untested chemicals in our food and it’s not even the top story on the news.” (-Ryan Knight)
They are not only allowing it, they are knowingly making us sick and then offering us their harsh drugs with side effects to fix it for profit.” (-Jory Micha)
“The trauma of just getting by financially is something we need to talk more about. The stress and fear is chronic.” (-Dr. Nicole LePera)
“More money for Ukraine. $10 billion! When does it end?” (-Sabby Sabs)
“I’ve seen a ton of snickering aimed at those suggesting that perhaps Biden should be visiting East Palestine where Americans are suffering rather than plopping into Ukraine, a foreign country, but I don’t understand the basis for the snickering. Could someone explain it to me?” (-Glenn Greenwald)”Gentrified Safespace Shitlibs hate poor people.” (-General Labor) RANIA ROCKS! THE REAL LEFT WANT PEACE!
are still part of my life, my lifestyle, my way of doing things. When I hear that music, I never feel old. They invented the future. “Love n Rockets, pink guitars….!”
Awww, man, all my smallish dead trees blew down in the extreme winds wich kinda sucks cause they helped provide us with cover from the nosy neighbors. I’ve never been like the landscapin’ man but here since we got a yard, I’m kinda feelin’ my way into it. Gardening was my grandfather’s respite and refuge. Me and him loved each other but never understood each other. He was a hardass farmer with shrapnel in his forearms and I was like into comic books and David Bowie and punk rock and shit.
I particularly related to the Adam Ant song, “Feeding Me To The Lions” as a kid cause that’s just exactly what it was like, being weird in a hickoid sports state. I still feel that way now with my bad back and ongoing alienation from the pig-media manufactured culture wars horseshit, all the pack-rat Borg-Bots still trying to make up comply and obey and goose step our way to Armaggeddon or sudden death, all the age old heartaches and disappointments, being targeted and misunderstood by the middle managers and tobacco spitters, the anguish, grief, sorrow, and useless nicotine cravings.
Just so grateful I did not growup with all the sniveling safespace college people always finding something to be offended about like that is some accomplishment or invention or contribution, forever wanting to silence or demonetize anyone they deem as insufficiently fauxwoke, or snivelingly safe and cuddly and polite enough for their special classer fragility worldviews, we had Eddie Murphy movies and laughed like pirates, he said all kinds of shit that offended Tipper Gore and made the rest of us laugh. Richard Pryor, too. We had writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski who told the truth with great humor and compassion and observational analysis. That was the stuff of real inspiration to some of us as young people, but also, all the punk rock and new wave bands, we were so fortunate to inhabit that splendidly enchanted era with all the energizing pulsating dancefloor drums of Blondie, Depeche Mode and Duran Duran and Dead Or Alive, and all the bad ass guitar heroes like Neal X and Marco Pirroni, Steve Stevens and Paul Reynolds, Elliot Easton, Will Sergeant, and Johnny Marr. I may not have had siblings or support at home when shit went bad at the bullying white power suburban sports school, but I did have a love and grand passion for all that magical, fantastic eighties music, like Prince and Depeche Mode, Billy Idol, and Adam & The Ants. Fuck man, it was all so glorious and beautiful and heartfelt and true. Even the most preposterous cartoon characters like Pete Burns and Dirty Deg, Boy George and Nina Hafen, they were all so wonderfully colorful and entertaining, and yeah a big part of me is still back there making collages out of old “Smash Hits” and “Creem”, playing stacks of records by Smiths and Bow Wow Wow and all the Prince produced groups and even older 70’s bands like Slade and the Sweet. There were still fascists and privilege Karens trying to make us obey, or impose their private trauma, beliefs, or preferences on others-like the P.M.R.C.. All those bad guys from the John Hughes movies were in fact more humane than the jock dickheads I went to school with. Ollie North was running guns and the deep state was fucking over Jimmy Carter, there were bigots and assholes and “Greed Is Good” mass media programming…but we had so much real music with soulpower and real emotions that nourished and nurtured us, I’m an old man now and still drawing power, love, and inspiration from those old songs. All the new wave singles and MTV videos were totally pop art! Adam Ant was part Robin Hood, part Captain Hook, part Peter Pan, part Roy Rogers, it was perfect. Henry Rollins said Black Flag Kills Ants Dead, but to me, Adam and lots of the new wave bands, even Michael Jackson and Rick James were 1000% times more entertaining than any of those shirtless jock, mob mentality, stupid gray shorts hardcore dicks with all their testosterone crazy male bonding and DC private school complaining and trying to pimpose their beliefs on others. I’d had enough of jock dickheads way back in the sixth or seventh grade, really. I was looking for escapism and futuristic pirate realms. Adam still tours in the UK! VIVE LE JOLA!
Are you ready, gents? (We are) Steve? (I’m okay) Clemmy? (OK) Alright, fellas, let’s go!
Of course, Bowie, Sweet, Slade and T Rex paved the way for all our fave eighties new wave and glam, post punk hitmakers. And THE RAMONES! And Sputnik and Celebrity Skin! They were the best, had the best singles! “Six Teens” is my favorite! Last night, my old lady was flipping through the youtubes and when she heard Depeche Mode’s cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes”, she finally saw it. Shew as like, “that could be you-why don’t you do THAT?” I’m like, “Right? Yeah, should’ve thought of that sooner!”
are sometimes my fave band, Peter Crowley has said the correct answer to Beatles Vs. Stones is SLADE! Ya know I have to agree with that. They are still the right medicine, the elusive healing tonic when you’re jonesing for a coffin nail and suffering from all the punishing lies and fictitious whitewashings the mockingbird platforms of the Gates Reset and Technocratic Tyrannical WEF folks are subjecting us all to! Nothing ever made as much sense to me as the lyrics of “Come On Feel The Noise!” It is THE TRUTH!
“The USA, the only country in the world that murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, author of Operation Condor, of assassinations, interventions and coups d’état throughout the world, has no morals to accuse Russia of ‘crimes against humanity’. The free peoples of the world denounce that the US lies and politically accuses countries that do not submit to its policies of plundering natural resources, in order to justify its armament interventionism with NATO.” (-Evo Morales)
“Funny how Fiona Hill forgets about the CIA’s bombing of the USSR’s Siberian pipeline – the topic of Tony Blinken’s senior thesis – in her ahistorical attempt to deflect US responsibility for sabotaging Nord Stream.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Joe Biden has likened Zelensky and his government to democracy itself.
This is the same government that integrated Nazis into its military and banned every single opposition party in the country. Biden’s version of democracy is more like fascism.” (-Danny Haiphong)
BORDERTOWN BADLANDS ARE STEADILY CRUMBLING WHILE BILLIONAIRES BUY UP ALL THE LAND Man my little town was efficiently killedoff by the Covid clampdowns and all the elderly people still died, they refuse to invest in repairing the infrastructure, so there are non stop floods from burst water pipes, the streets are like Detroit, all potholes, the electricity and phones were out for like two hours today-my kid got sent home early from his alternative learning program and there is no working restroom there, retail shops keep having to shutdown because of floods and not everybody can afford that like these airbandb owners and rich people tourist gallery holes. Whenever I think we got it bad out here with the cold and the wind emergencies, I think of people in Palestine. Or East Palestine. Or Yemen, or Flint, ya know? Rich people do not like us, it’s worse than they just don’t care about us. They seem to be actively seeking to harm the poor of the world on a mass scale. These wars are for Empire and Wall Street/banker hegemony. I absolutely do not understand how the empire just trots out a hand full of token black women or trans-humans, and that empty rebranding supposedly legitimizes all the plunder, carnage, ripoffs, abusive gaslighting, and wars of the one percent, in the eyes of all the fauxwoke, fauxgressive college safespace middleclass haves. All they seem to do, or care about, is repeat these meangingless slogans about how woke and inclusive they are, while poor people drop dead, and the empire eats all those kids abroad for nothing but war machine profits. Gropey Joe is doing all this horrible shit-he’s got superinflation pleasing all his bankster buddies, quadrupled rents and no significant minimum wage raises, three to seven citizens dead a day hypermilitarized and bipartisan overfunded jackbooted fascist killer kkkops, baiting wars with Russia, China, Iran and Haiti, betraying the unions, neglecting to protect even your most basic rights. Shitlibs just keep “identifying” with his double down deluxe Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor wife, or smooth, dashing droner buddy with the first executive kill list who broke all his campaign promises about putting his comfortable shoes on and joining the picketline and closing the torture and kidnap gulags; or think it’s just so extra super special sensitive scientific if a Trans Surgeon General says nothing about the dangerous toxic effects of poisoned air and water and does nothing to help the poor people poisoned in Pennsylvania or Flint. It’s cute and charming and adorable if a gay Transporation Secretary ignores the poor because when he does it, it’s better than when some old white cys born Cheney or Lindsey Graham fuck over the poor. Most middle class people at this point really do not care about poor people, only their own got-mine vainglory and red carpet celebrity worship. They’d rather praise their token figurehead idle idols than advocate for anything that benefits “the others”. Which is us. The majority who can’t pay the bills. That P.C. identity politics shit is STILL blinding the shitlib fakeass synthetic left into supporting bad spook Mike Pompeo Cointelpro shit, Rachel Maddow McCarthyist cold war phony baloney, hideous oppression of Palestinians, coups in socilaist democracies and needless pissing contests with other nucleur powers. As long as they have some 31 flavors of future fascists to idolize on tv, some Amazon boxes on the sidewalk, a mimosa in their hand and an I-Phone to signal their virtue on, they are content with the corruption and mass murder. Bread and circuses, Netflix and Trader Joe’s , legal reefer and AOC, that’s all they care about. As Hunter S. Thompson who they tried a million ways to cancel and Cointepro until he committed suicide most likely, said so many years ago, during the beginning of the Bush/Cheney proxy war reign, “
We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.The downward spiral of Dumbness in America is about to hit a new low.The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy – then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight – assuming it was straight in the first place.”
“Phoniest, most PR-intensive proxy war of all time.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
But there’s nothing really happening And the place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night And my very close companion Gets me fumbling gets me laughing She’s a hundred but she’s wearing Something tight And I lift my glass to the Awful Truth Which you can’t reveal to the Ears of Youth Except to say it isn’t worth a dime
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice And it’s once for the devil and once for Christ But the Boss don’t like these dizzy heights We’re busted in the blinding lights Of Closing Time
The whole damn place goes crazy twice And it’s once for the devil and once for Christ But the Boss don’t like these dizzy heights We’re busted in the blinding lights Busted in the blinding lights Of Closing Time
Oh the women tear their blouses off And the men they dance on the polka-dots It’s Closing Time And it’s partner found, it’s partner lost And it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops It’s Closing Time I swear it happened just like this: A sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss It’s Closing Time The Gates of Love they budged an inch I can’t say much has happened since But Closing Time I loved you when our love was blessed I love you now there’s nothing left But Closing Time” (-Leonard Cohen)
“Well a person can work up a mean, mean thirst after a hard day of nothing much at all….” (-Replacements)
SMACK is the answer to summa my problems this morning. Not the substance specifically, but those longhaired Finnish asskickers in all the silver bracelets from so long ago.
This is what we considered real cool rocknroll in my generation. Surprisingly, even Corndog Cobain covered “Run Rabbit Run”, and before they became super famous playing the same 12 songs in stadiums for Events people who don’t really care that much about real rocknroll, Guns N Roses very obviously, emulated them, too. 69 Eyes made no secret of their appreciation for Claude and cohorts. A couple of Smacks moved out to Hollywood and jammed with all the Sunset Strip royals from Decry, Jetboy, Hangmen, etc. Claude formed another cool band called the Fishheads, and much like with the Beasts Of Bourbon, pretty much anything Smack affiliated is gonna be pretty fantastic. When I need to blast away the blues, the lies for empire, the billionaire agenda, the brainwashed culture, the toxic bullshit pop garbage, the phony and transparent propaganda headlines of the day,I play myself some SMACK and it all comes back to me. The loud laughs, howling kicks, full moon, spooky girlfriends, flickering candles, and memories of being untamed and feral and singing our dumb gutsy hearts out, in rosaries and open shirts, swingin’ the bottle flagrantly, struttin’ down the greasy boulevards in mirrored sunglasses. I saw this movie the other night about a working class bar in a remote backwater desolate town, all the hard working people who go to the bar every day after work and spend all their money and go home alone to lives of empty yearning and lost children, after endless hours of abusively ogling long suffering, way underpaid strangers–all the hard up horny miners hitting on the captive transient barmaids, it was very stark and poignant, some of the barflies reminded me of people I knew in prior lives, it was not like the usual unreality tv programming we are so inundated with nowadays that’s always so obviously scripted by slick L.A. hucksters from behind the scenes, this was more like, cameras were were rolling while people did their bit, there is some embarrassing confession, scary stalkers, lighthearted frivolity, some reckless old lady abandon, ballsout bastard bosses, goofy morons, and the heroine ends up heartbreakingly hurt in the end, but it really captures the unbridled joys and stinking desperation of the dead ender drinking classes. I think my buddy Dan Denton the poet wrote a book about it-the old school, blue collar divebars we used to know-the human drama, the casual sexism, the belligerent behaviors, bad dancing, late night revelry, cigarette machines, bad jukeboxes are like bad pizza, and vintage Pabst beer lights. Another round for all my friends. Ya know my wife reminds me sometimes, how even in the four or five semi charmed and golden eras of my life, there was still treachery and subterfuge, stupidity and selfishness, accidents and obliviousness and fuckups and rejection and heartbreak and deaths and unexpected mutinies, cause that’s how life is. You know that Andy McCoy lyric, “I sit and count them shot by shot…”? That’s kinda how I am with cigarettes. Like, I know they’re no good for me, but when I’m suffering or stressed out, always anxious or in grief, ya know, they kinda gimee something to do. This is my Day 2 cigarette free after smoking three packs this year, they weren’t nowhere as good as I remember, so probably nothing else is, either. Smack still works, though.
“Btw, does anyone remember how CIA compatible scribe David Corn wrote in The Nation about how ANSWER coalition was very very bad so everyone should avoid their anti-Iraq War rally? A very interesting antecedent.” (-Aaron Good)
“Now that participants in the oppression Olympics have spent weeks attacking an anti-war rally because it didn’t fit their (tunnel) vision for the movement, gloves are off. Good luck winning over “the people” with your message. Gender ideology has created a dynamic in which a bunch of men can come into organizing circles, play victim, & assert control over what it is acceptable for others, especially women, to say & think. Most people know it’s just misogyny tied up in a frilly bow but are too afraid to say it. The same people who believed workers should be mandated to take an experimental injection that did not “stop the spread” cried “my body, my choice” when Roe was overturned. Yet they’re the same people who do not even believe biological women exist. Total incoherence!” (-Anya Parampil)
“If Norfolk Southern paid every household in East Palestine $50,000, it would cost them $94.4 million.
They took in $12 billion in revenue last year. Shitlib scumbags using right-wing talking points to justify FEMA’s inaction in East Palestine. This isn’t surprising – there are no depths to which these people won’t sink, and there’s no overestimating the stuidity of their followers.” (-Due Dissidence)
STAY WILD! STAY FREE! THINK FOR YOURSELF! BE ORIGINAL! NOT A DRONE OR COPYCAT CLONE! GO WILD IN THE COUNTRY! FREE ASSANGE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE, RIGHT ON!
“In a mind-blowingly hypocritical speech at the UN, Biden (a strong supporter of the Iraq War) declared: “If nations can pursue imperial ambitions without consequences, we put at risk everything this institution stands for” I fact-checked his absurd lies.” (-Ben Norton)
“Despite Russia’s clear RED lines, the West has been blaming Russia & painting Putin as the villain, saying his intervention was “unprovoked.” But recently NATO admitted that it DID have plans to expand along the eastern flank YEARS ago longer before 2022.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“The puppet on the right shares my beliefs, the puppet on the left is more to my liking. Hey…there’s one guy holding up both!”
“This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.”
I’m getting ready to move, but it’s like hurry up and wait cause so much has to be done, boots on the ground wise and via other people before I can start packing up the truck, Beverly Hillbillies style, as is my custom, and lightin’ out for greener pastures. ‘Had a hard time sleeping last night, got too much to worry about between all the gouging by the corporations at the grocery store, a family member’s medical crisis, a sometime employer’s many health problem delays, always some kinda unexpected setbacks and bureaucracy red tape, malfunctioning appliances, renegotiated terms, all kindsa shit goin’ on, that makes it hard for an impatient, right now kinda action man like me who would much rather do it, than talk about it some more. You ever notice how the richer motherfuckers are, the more they like to philosophically weigh every option in the catalog, consult their horoscope, double check the weather, visit their massage therapist, and listen to themselves talk about every option on the menu, and when the food comes, they’re always mad they didn’t order what the table next to them are having, and usually end up somehow finding a way to blame the waitress to justify their callous mistreatment of workers and still ’em on the tip? Me and the wife have been working as light landscapers, ranch hands, assistants, gardeners, housecleaners and shit movers, for a couple of different AirBandB owners and other employers. Main thing all these different people have in common is they aint really interested in getting shit done, finding solutions, or paying the least money out to contractors and shit as they are in feeling like visionaries having important William Blake like visions about where to put their stuff. I have not been around rich people in about twenty years, I’ve been avoiding them on purpose because they all seem so flakey unreliable, delusional, narcissistic and entitled. I always get hurt or burned by them so I kinda believe it is better not to be very involved with very many of these crazy fucking people. One dude I made the mistake of interacting with promptly pivoted straight to how can he monetize my creative works and exploit my shit for money. That’s how these nutty capitalists think: how can they liquidate and commodify your existence for their own personal profit or vanity brands? I’ve never been good at taking shit and pretending it feels good, and that is the only actual relationship being offered by the wealthy ranchers in the big compounds overflowing with unused stuff and long neglected weeds and shit. Even when I was a small kid, accompanying my car dealer grandfather to the Country Club. on Thursday nights, I never liked the way middle class people talk down to The Help. Same thing at the smalltown morning donut shop where all the businessman gathered for coffee each day. I knew as a kid, my solidarity was with the waitresses and dishwashers and not the big wheel stuffed shirt showoffs stiffing them. I would not want to be rich at this point. I would like to see my kids more often and I’d like to make records with a band, but I do not want to become one of those assholes I see treating humans badly and waiting for other people to die, so they can sell their property and spend their money. That’s so gross to me. I do not worship rich people or mistake property for virtue. That’s the real standoff between me and society, me and any kinda participants in the pay to pay modern music scenes. I’d say the biggest difference between me and my ex friends is I don’t suck up to rich people. I don’t believe in it. Also won’t hang my head down low and grovel in shame for being poor. I love poor people-some of the best people I’ve ever known have been poor. Just because you inherit some shit from your criminal bloodsucking capitalist millionaire parents don’t make you smarter or cooler, or sexier or groovier, or morally superior to anyone else. People I used to be friends with lost the fuckin plot and sadly gave up the ghost and dedicated their lives to eatin’ shit for the privileges of sorority membership: so long as they could keep soft jobs and high five joiner privilege. I’m not like that, and never will be. I got an old song that goes, “I’ll never live like the other half”.
A close friend of mine similarly works for a rich lady who owns all kindsa shit she got from her excessively well to do parents-she might think she’s a lot more highbrow, scientific, harder working, more virtuous, arty, intellectual, or bitchen than we are, cause she has all that stuff, and is accustomed to controlling people with her parent’s moolah, and buying their silence in her luxurious egomaniacal orbit, a whole lot like a long gone ex girlfriend of mine, funny thing is, both she and I are bohemian eighth grade dropouts, who went gypsying around and living by our wits from a young age. Only difference is, I never had no fuckin’ credit card or safety net to dip into, when things went bad. Once or twice, in the Bowery and on the Sunset Strip, I asked a relative for emergency money, we’re talkin two hundred dollars, and they still seem to hold it against me, over thirty years later-like that once needing ground support at sixteen or twenty somehow narrowly, one dimensionally defines me as a flawed and insufficient person–people just aint that cool in this me, first , I Me Mine, ratrace culture. That ex girlfriend of mine I mentioned earlier who hoarded all her surplus wealth and $1000 a night salary, just never learned to share-not without some guaranteed quid pro quo bigass profit motive. It’s the same with soldout/got old musicians, they don’t wanna help make cool music or create lasting memories, so much as they wanna make money. It’s all about the filthy lucre, aint it? I think it was Gore Vidal who said that Murkkkans cared more about seeing other people lose than mere winning. I see how the winners can’t even taste the booze of victory-they are all insatiable hungry ghosts with piles and piles of objects but no real serenity or satisfaction.
So anyways, the rich old lady my friend used to care for’s in an old folks home with dementia and incontinence, and her other relatives want nothing to do with her trustee, since she showed her hand, only wanting control of the big shitpile of inheritance money, and now, her other former longtime cowboy handyman employee is dying of the Bad C, so yeah I guess me and her are sorta begrudgingly bartering some. I don’t mind pitching in and helping her, cause she is disabled, and can’t move or lift heavy shit but really, I just ain’t so good at role playing that flattering asskiss suckup script she’s accustomed to, from her blue collar helpers; so I dunno how it’s gonna go, from here. She never stops talking, interrupts all my responses, and it’s all a crazy narrative about how academic and wise and wonderful and enlightened she is, also how stupid and incompetent all her workers are and how hard it is to get good help these days, “nobody wants to work”, they all say, some shit they were programmed with on the tv-all these different bosses with the never ending yapping, holy shit, man, that’s just like my kid with the Autism. I’m already kinda bitchy about being talked down to, or insultingly micromanaged by someone who aint probably any smarter than I am, really. Remember when McDonna started speaking with the hoity toity fake British accent? Just like that. Money people are nuts. I get why they never like me for long. I did have a love for my ex girlfriend the heiress’s more genuine and vulnerable side, she was one of those people who were born with a perfect face, but by age fifty, the meanness is starting to show, she really only loved power and control, prestige and comfort and ultimately, money. Lately I’ve been laboring for one of those people who puts you in high risk situations like with poisonous spiders and shit that’s really too heavy for one person to move. The ownership society capitalist hierarchy people just suck so bad. “Stakeholders”, they call themselves. “Investors”. This one’s my favorite: “Job Creators”.
I’m up early, as is my habit in my old age, listening to the rooster crow, having some coffee, still missing cigarettes, thinking about how to retell old stories with new rhymes and melodies, wishing I had some alcohol, “some weird sin just to relax with”, convenience store does not even open for another half hour here. There’s always gonna be ten scheming, get rich quick business owners all covered with body tattoos, talking about how they’re gonna turn some sleepy, depressing, faded graveyard into NEON LIT HOLY SHIT HIPSTER CHIC BROOKLYN OVERNIGHT! Women here seem to belong to witchy UFO new age cults and predominantly live behind big silver fences with their hot tubs and packs of dogs, there aint that many of ’em. So whenever dudes are talkin’ to me, they’re lookin’ at my old lady-even the American Indian Movement dude I really, really liked. Men here, drive like fools, do not bathe or shave, or wash their clothes, except I guess, when they get in the stinky river for their own reasons. Some of ’em embrace the sleeps with the dogs life also, but I ended up next door to the guy who hates animals. Keeps stealing my cats. It still beats honky suburbia. Or three grand a month, douchey, hipster-hip big city rents.
A long time ago, I lived in the dreadful, loathsome, depressing Midwest where they manufacture the Ken & Barbies, it was some kinda hut-two flag waver cargo shorts hell. Like war, all the time. One of many ways they tortured us, was with bad music-even in the 80’s, with all that beautiful stuff to choose from, the concentration camp speakers crackled non stop with fucking Sussudio and Lionel Richie, Rick Astley and that overplayed Animotion song. They loved to take a song and play it to death like that fucking John Waite tune, “I Aint Missin You”. They played that motherfucker so many times, your mom knows about it. I liked his other song from back then, “Change”, ‘tried to get my black clad, hairsprayed, hate drunken, surly punk band to let me cover it, but they were all too macho I think, to really hear what the song was alla bout. Even now, still to this day. Sometimes, I think they missed the whole point of punk. They think it has something to do with joining ’em if you can’t beat ’em and hazings and initiations and diplomas and sports competition-tackling your opponent, following rules for pat on the hed good doggie treats, or doing stupid human tricks to compliantly please more popular people’s conservative sports moms by bragging about property, or talking about your collections of records and plastic bagged ancient magazines stuffed into multiple art book spare rooms that no one is allowed to touch. I talk to people in the desert nowadays and it’s always about their possessions, if they are male-the jeep, the ranch, the truck, the RV, the fucking cattle they inheried with their big belt buckles. Or their Double Stuffed, Special Secret Magic, intuitive, Reincarnated Cleopatra comin’ at ya, new age psychic ESP powers and hot springs astrology AirBand rental properties, if they are female. Or voting Democrat, cause she loves the Clintons, for feminism. I don’t fit in with ’em, I’m usually there just nodding along but in my head, I’m thinking about Assata Shakur and Fred Hampton and Leonard Peltier and John Trudell, or my dead friends, long lost former bandmates, legendary children, and Echo & The Bunnymen. Ya know?
WORLD AT A GLANCE
One supremely cool, heartfelt 80’s pop band who never got enough credit or airplay in my book was a band called World At A Glance I remember from seeing on MTV’s 120 Minutes Sunday Might Tv Show. I thought their song was sensational and they had a brilliant frontman named David Ilku, a real edgy guitarist named Michael Lawrence, on drums, Dougie Brown and on bass Thaddeus Castanis. They reminded me variously of the Front, the Furs, Duran, Lions & Ghosts, Japan, Simple Minds, U2, Inxs. Why aren’t there any good original bands like that anymore? I dunno, man, but this song “Burning Out”‘s still great in my book! Maybe it’s just cause that was my era, ya know the kinda music that was popularized when I was young and head over heels in love and hoping to become a cult band like the Cult, but I sincerely love everything about that band, WORLD AT A GLANCE. Slick production by Chris Lord-Alge gave it that collegerock/electropop feel like early Inxs records-the new wave ones, before they broke into Murkkka top forty with stadium funk and sappy ballads. I’ll probably look for a hard copy of their album or cassette online if I ever get some money. This is the kindof music I imagined my old bassplayer Bobby, the James Dean lookalike wouldbe major label rockstar frontman was making in Columbus with his bands, the Healers and Shine. I keep hoping someone will post his performances or demos to youtube, but almost nothing has surfaced since his death thusfar. I lost touch with the guy for twenty years-they said he had become a bartender at Andy’s Treehouse and then, worked at a factory and played golf and drank with 9-5 people from his old high school. Damn, this life really has become like a fast forwarded VHS video tape. In my mind I can see Me, Mitch and Bobby in my mom’s kitchen, wearing spiked bracelets and leather crosses, gang-singing “Nights Are So Long” like it was yesterday, or up in the corny preppie nightclub DJ booth, Bobby spinning MTV eighties college rock for the mainstream Barbies and baseball cap smalltown paying regulars. We had set out to create our own new wave and post punk together as youngsters. He went away to sing covers with a band called Who’s Drivin’, I stupidly moved to Boston and continued to write sorta catchy original gutter punk with my scroungy, empty pocketed hoodlum friends. I really miss this kindof pop music and will probably die trying to resume making my own versions of it. Hard to find suitable collaborators in the old age-nobody remembers the old new wave. I’m still koo koo for 39 Steps and the Bolshoi and Gene Loves Jezebel and Duran Duran-ya know what I mean? I saw a heavily tattooed, muscle car driving, Carnie Danzig lookalike in the checkout line wearing sunglasses at eight in the morning but he’s a Masonic capitalist gentrification land baron, so even if he can play guitar or knows about the Sex Pistols or whatever, we really aint got much in common. Kinda on opposite sides of the culture war. Met a real butch Sunday matinee moshpit dude from Jersey named Thomas who had Clash and Motorhead tattoos and an Agnostic Front t shirt but he does not play an instrument, we are both former punk band vocalists. God bless ‘im. It’s hard cause I got all this mowing and planting and moving and weeding to do, but in my heart of hearts, all I wanna do is sing for a trashy, in your face confrontational, full contact revolution-punk band and record more original songs from the heart. It shouldn’t be so hard, but all the surviving ex punks joined some fuckedup status quo wannabe popular belonger hierarchy.
39 STEPS
I LOVE this Canadian new wave band-they were kinda like Iggy Pop and the Cult! They had that Billy Duffy gothic psychedelic guitar sound! Chris Barry’s seventies kid punk band the 222’s opened for Teenage Head at max’s Kansas City and stuff like that. Reminded me of my outcast high school friends. I mean before I introduced them to my other friends and they became sports bar honcho, frat rock celebrities.
FLAMING LIPS VS CHAINSAW KITTENS
I liked the first couple of Flaming Lips records back when they were a scuzzy psychedelic Charlie Manson and Alice Cooper influenced, van travelling little band from Norman Oklahoma, I liked their lyrics, their acidhead image-later on in the 90210 era they got too Lollapalooza rich and overproduced mainstream joke band for me and I’m not into that dead dog Miley Cyrus shit at all, but when they were a little nowhere band, they did like dry ice and strobe lights and bad heavy metal covers to piss off the ROTC generic jock pseudo punks, I thought that was kool. I remember all the camo clad suburbans in the combat boots and flight jackets LEFT THE CLUB in protest of the Flaming Lips having long hair and being too earsplittingly loud rocknroll. My friends and I were also into sorta shakin’ up the status quo so we kinda enjoyed all their loud, noisy hellraising. We made friends with them that night and they invited us to open for ’em in their hometown. We never did do that-everybody in my group was really nailed down to their deadend dayjobs and high school shit back then, and about half the band were just really not ready to leave town. So I stayed there with ’em as long as I could, trying unsuccessfully to motivate them into moving to Hollywood or NYC to pursue music in a bigger way. I think only two of us regularly did acid back then.
Everybody knows I hated grunge. Just not my scene at all. Did not like the look, the nasally singing, the macho bluster and buzzkill bad vibes, the formulaic going through the motions of imitating bands like Happy Flowers, Killdozer and the Pixies who’d been around for years only impressing know nothing jocks who never heard any genuine punk rock with their so called “originality”. I was not into the hesher-metal Ethyl Merman Alice In Chains and Stone Temple Pilots corporate headbanger “Spooky Tarzan” posturing, Eddie Vedder’s wounded beagle voice, or any of the generic fratboy college cows who infiltrated the underground scene with their awful parents fucking money. One Norman Oklahoma band that arrived late in the fake-indie alternative era that was still almost begrudgingly semi weirdo new wave enough for me was the Chainsaw Kittens. They made some pretty decent records that were like, at least, making an effort to be entertaining, ala the Dandy Warhols, Smashing Pumpkins, Brainiac, any of the poppier Alt bands that weren’t just all shirtless Christ posing in workboots and suicide note smack lyrics and swampy gloom.
But really I’m not into any “Alternative”. I still like punk rock mostly.
and some sleazy glam:
SPORTS DESK
“When Mike Bloomberg sings your praises, there might be a problem with your brand of leftism” (-Whitney Webb)
“The mainstream media carefully never mentions the “shadow bank” that owns much of the world. It’s no coincidence that this asset management firm is one of the top stake holders in every large mainstream media corporation & every large social media platform.” (-Lee Camp)
“A Princeton study revealed the bottom 90% of earners in U.S.—which is the vast majority of the people—have zero impact on policy. Remember this when either ruling class party begs for your vote or money. Don’t give it to them. They don’t represent anyone except their rich donors.” (-Ryan Knight)
“I’d like to formally request that this month’s stipend for Ukraine goes to Puerto Rico and also to the American Houseless population.” (-Just Maureen)
“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” (- Franklin D. Roosevelt)
“Someone tell Hillary Clinton that no matter how many photo ops she does with celebrities, she will always be hated for being a war criminal and known as the joke who lost to Donald Trump.” (Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“Russia’s mobilization is based on the fact that NATO has from the outset sought a permanent proxy war in Ukraine. Those who cheered for NATO belligerence will reap what they sow.” (-Danny Haiphong)
But if you’re a natural man You got to ball and have a good time
And that’s what I call chooglin’” (-Fogerty)
I’m retreating farther away from capitalists and the cut throats cause I just can’t stand their bullshit culture of backstabbing and mutiny and ratrace competition, fuck those people. Always stressful starting new jobs, moving to new locations, saying goodbye to devils you know. I have no illusions of being free-I am still stuck on the plantation workin’ for the boss every night and day. At least I have less pig-media programmed crazies to fuck with nowadays than I once did. I know some of the haves on the hill with the surplus property, the gallery, the airbandb, the wall sized blown up billboard photos of their own fat faces, the constant juggernaut of vanity merchandise, the fancy oversized touring vehicles, and they aint even happy. At all. Aint that a bitch? Fought their way into the tall tower only to find out, that owning the Most Stuff aint it. I remember when I was a kid, I mostly heard of Creedence Clearwater Revival, because they were selling their greatest hits album on the tv all the time. I was never into “Proud Mary”, but I do otherwise love me some old school Ike & Tina Turner. Anyways, it was the Hanoi Rocks cover of “Up Around The Bend” that really first ignited my interest in Fogerty’s songs, cause I vibed with the lyrics and thought they were at a Chuck Berry level of pure poetry. Next thing ya know, my favorite band, LORDS OF THE NEW CHURCH did “Hey Tonight”. Cherry Bombz did “Traveling Band”. “Fortunate Son” was one of the great anti war protest songs-I’d gone to school with so many meathead dumbfuck rich kids and no matter what fuckedup shit they did, they were always falling up and being rewarded. Us poorer kids were all corralled into learning disability classrooms, or herded into military service, bootcamped and probationed for wearing leather jackets or having crazy haircuts, or wearing a bit of black eye smudge, so I really deeply resonated with that one! If the Grateful Dead or any hippie jamband rocked as hard as “Down On The Corner”, I mighta liked that shit, but other than Canned Heat, I was just never into much of the reeferhead jam bands. Cats like Chris Isaak only wish they wrote “Born On The Bayou”, or that just me? Then, I started seeing “Old Man Down The Road” on MTV and wow, I dug that whole thing, too. I guess somewhere, deep inside, I always kinda knew I was gonna probably end up a hermit in the woods, if my rocknroll dream did not come true, and the problem with the rocknroll dream, is it was reliant on so many different moving parts, and then, you add in the pay to play culture, rehearsal space rental costs, ridiculous recording studio costs, the media monopoly bullshit agenda, and the Antirock Conspiracy, and here we are.
Really enjoying that documentary about CCR. They were one of this country’s greatest bands, for sure. I’m pretty sure the Seattle band Green River took their name from the CCR song and certainly the fucking flannel shirts. I remember reading about how Fogerty would not play his own hits for years, because he felt so fucked over by his just out for themselves former bandmates, and some creepy hustler publisher who stole the monetized value of his songs. I got old and summa the same exact shit happened to me. Hard to do old songs, once other people kinda poison ’em, or cheapen ’em, or try to monetize ’em, or steal the copyrights. I get it. Hell, I’ll write better ones. It does take it outta ya though, when the people you thought were your friends were just hanging around waitin’ for a chance to steal your suitcase. Just so weird seein’ other people peddling the tunes you lived and wrote like they aint never even heard of you. Funny, ’cause when I google myself, to see if any video of my old bands has washed up on youtube or whatever, my name was appropriated, ALL MY OLD BANDS names have been copied by younger bands now, all of ’em. The tv show my friends and I did on cable access, somebody stole the name of that, on youtube too, AND like dozens of old tunes get performed by people who try to pass ’em off as their own, though it should be more than obvious that some rich gentrified yuppie deskjob dude did not write those songs about being heartbroken on the street or their friends all croaking from dope. I kind got this newish job as a part time ranch hand, ya know, whatever they need me to do, so I kinda just gotta wait around on call, and can’t get too involved with any of my own projects because I might have to work later today-usually moving stuff around really. Move this stack of wood from here to there, roll these heavy cement planters into the barn, move this fifties heavyass washing machine, weed whack that acre-paint this room–that kinda shit, but the money’s okay and I got a lot of expenses now, preparing to relocate. Gotta lotta packing done this morning, but you know how it is, the work is never ending. I always swing between dark depression and intense PTSD anxiety. One of my part time Bossladies called and said I gotta go tear down a bunch of rotten cardboard boxes covered with brown recluse and black widow spiders and remove some yard debris during my usual dinnertime. Me and the employer keep opposite hours but she gets to make the schedule. At least she’s into like, gardening, she’s gonna teach us how to grow our own food. We need to start gardening more caue the grocery is such a ripoff withh the post Covid Great Reset inflation bullshit. A ninety nine scent bottle of water is now a dollar seventy post plague and my idiot former peers just CHEER for more wra in the Ukraine, with China, with Iran, they are warpigs in pink wigs My kid’s going through a crazy med change and played hooky from his part time job, so he’s here talking non stop about karate, fireworks, ordering Chinese replicas of hype beast namebrand shoes. No mail came today, I’m crabby, wanna drink.
“Wondering how many funerals that I will attend of Black people close to me dying prematurely before so-called leftists in the U.S. will realize that racism is inseparable from the class struggle. I am on number five.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Every election Democrats tell us “democracy and basic human rights are on the ballot”—but when they have power they don’t actually fight for democracy or human rights. They fight for Big Business, the ruling class, and the military industrial complex just like the Republicans do.” (-Ryan Knight)
“BREAKING: Mass media still totally silent two weeks after UN Secretary General says world’s biggest carbon emitters (like the US military, for example) must drastically cut emissions starting now in 2022 if global climate catastrophe is to be averted.” (-CGoustin)
“I find it kind of funny I find it kind of sad. The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.” (-Tears For Fears)
It’s with a bit of heavy heart that me and my peeps have realized it is time to mosey on down the road. Shady developers, psycho neighbors, city hall corruption, gentrifier delusions, all kinds of unwanted new traffic and a bridge being built on my deadend street against the wishes of every home owner on the block, are just some of the reasons we’ll be moving on, but this old trailer has been mostly good to us these past five years, other than one traumatizing incident involving a middle class predator we had the misfortune of interacting with. I just see lots of work ahead. I was listening to that sensational band, THE BOYS, this morning, and thinking about time and the aging process and the ongoing desire I have to put my tunes on tape. I did the roll call of former bandmates last week-you got the unemployable cat who relies on the kindness of strangers on permanent couch tour who I can not provide for with my dishwasher salary; the busy uptown millionaire with his personal assistants who aint really into music no more and has no time for me cause we aint into the same shit at all, he’s on his own solo trip now; about three guys who play in big fish in small pond local bands with well to do hipsters who bankroll all their shit who are already kinda spoken for; a lovable old writer who is a fine bassist but works for The Man; and a couple of hired gun salaried mercenary types who only showup for big money name bands. Couple other guys from Boston who used to play music with my group are just too rich to wanna rock with us antisocial glamarchist types, any longer-they might like the Pogues or Tom Waits, but they got yachts and recording studios and rolling plantations, so they don’t really get where we’re coming from no more, if they ever faintly did-they mostly seem to exclusively socialize with their wives and parents. Cloistered country club people-a shame they choose to no longer consort with the permanently exiled poor white trash likes of myself now they are past their college slumming phase, though, cause they could actually play their instruments very well and were very capable producer-arranger-collaborators, high harmony background singers, they gave my sleazy ghetto trash punk rock some Beach Boys appeal. WE used to have a lotta laughs til the wives made ’em get serious about you know-real estate. I’m probably gonna resort to buying some drums and a bass and getting busy doing it myself, in the new garage, Mary Chain style. Everybody gets in to music for different reasons, ya know? Some for the girls, some for the money, some to fit in with rich people in the expensive imported leather clothes at the fat actor bar, the pretentious assholes who collected more Johnny Thunders picture discs than thou, some for the wild expression of human emotion. I would be in that final category. I’m still trying to tell my side of the story before it’s too late, organize and archive the pictures we took on the trip for my absentee children and the generations to come. Sometimes, you mistakenly think people love you, if they model themselves after you, fraternize with all your former associates, cover your songs, befriend your exes on the False-Books, but they are just kinda using your shit to be seen on the scene, ya know? In this lifetime, not everybody that we loved will be capable of really loving us back, or giving a real sincere flying fuck about what happens to us. There are a lot of opportunistic, self important, narcissistic, one upping, fake motherfuckers out there in this bullshit society-they program ’em to be like that. Tiktok celebrities, brand building influencers, terminal wannabes and remorseless plagiarists. Ladder climbers. Backstabbing whores for fame. Snakes in the grass. Crazy new neighbor has the obligatory oversized growling dogs and the “Let’s Go Brandon” sign in his front yard, plays Kid Rock real loud. I dropped a postcard on an old hombre and former collaborator but he has become too garage band famous with his collegetown frat rock band to bother writing me back. I hate this capitalist ratrace popularity contest bullshit all the middle class people are so sucked into. It is exactly like middle school forever. They all just wanna sit at the table with the fat jocks and Republikkkan oafs. Bummer. It is what it is. Makes me wanna go ever deeper into desert obscurity. Disappear. It’s strange imagining all the people I used to know in their boxes staring at little boxes. Sitting alone sober in a room feels like a prison sometimes, ya know, but everytime I made the foolish mistake of calling someone from the old days, I’m always so disappointed by how brainwashed they are. They all seem like commercials. Advertising slogans. Obeyers obeying the evil empire. Not my thing, man. I’m still rocknroll. I’ll tell you what is hard for me-being sober, doing nothing, staring at a hypnoscreen, the passivity of it all. Feels like punishment. And people you love who just aint the same no more, who have been assimilated into the herd mentality. Look at me, look at my namebrand designer object. The popularity chasers. Lames. Meanwhile, all the cool people I admired and took so much consolation from continue dropping like flies. I still aint “over” the sad deaths of my record store guru, Dave A., or former bass player Bobby C., or songwriting mentor PK, or Prince or Bowie or Nick Marsh. I struggle to accept this whole death thing. Helpless Mystery.
Last conversation I remember having with Nick was about HATS. One time decades ago, I got a hold of Marsh online inquiring about Rocco Barker’s wheareabouts hoping to draft him into one of my own illfated new wave crash and burn short lived super groups, and Nick, ever the charmer said, “I’LL play!” He was up for it. “What do you need Rocco for, when ya got me?” Cheetah Chrome had once said the same thing to me when my old pal the World Famous Mister Ratboy replaced me with my dear friend, Chris Barry. True story! Of course, even if I lived in London or wherever, I could not imagine asking one of my alltime fave frontmen to play second fiddle to me, but he was like that, a team player, gabba gabba hey. He was just all about rocknroll and having a good laugh. Nick Marsh was the one who casually suggested my halfass basement glam gang open up for him and Gigantic but the lead guitar shredder in my band turned it down instinctively cause he felt he’d been somehow unfairly put out by a NY Doll he arranged some miniature tour on behalf of, that was one of the big cracks between me and that dude. Sabotaging that little band when so many people wanted to see it fly. I still live for Flesh For Lulu, ya know? One of my all time favorite bands. “Seven Hail Marys”, “Roman Candle”, “Decline & Fall”, “Time & Space”, “I May Have Said You’re Beautiful”, “Postcards From Paradise”. I still listen to them all the time. Always thought that was the perfect model for a band. Dirty goth-part pop, part new wave, cool threads and influenced by the Stooges, Damned, and Bauhaus. “..Subterraneans, Hey where’ya going now – underground – everything happens after dark..” I’ll never know why people would rather be in all those Gotham City karaoke night so-so mediocre coverbands. I just don’t get that shit at all. Long Live The New Flesh!
“I talk about narrative all the time partly because narrative control is the source and foundation of the power of the US-centralized empire. The ability to control the way people think, act and vote with mass-scale psychological manipulation allows our rulers to dominate us more pervasively than we could ever be dominated by brute totalitarian force, which is why so much energy goes into keeping the people from controlling their own narratives. That’s all the current mainstream panic about “disinformation” is, for example. If narrative control were fully decentralized, our rulers couldn’t rule.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“A liberal democracy, in the eyes of the West, is a country in the Global South that opens itself up to interventionism and allows its resources to be looted by Western monopolies and oligopolies whilst its citizens wallow in poverty. That’s no democracy at all.” (-Mukoma J Asani)
“The World Council of Churches passed a resolution calling for Cuba to be removed from the U.S. list of countries sponsoring terrorism. Biden should listen and do this NOW! #letCubalive” (-Medea Benajmin)
“Joe Biden has openly said that the goal of its proxy war in Ukraine is to destroy Russia. He has openly floated the possibility of war with China over Taiwan. There truly is not a war in existence that Biden and the Democrats oppose.” (-Danny Haiphong)
ONLY ONES
If you try to follow me home tonight You will find everything that you’ve heard is right You’ll never return to the home you knew Leave it all behind, it’s up to you
Only Ones were, in my estimation, one of the greatest bands of all time-as I type this, my teenage son is telling me the neighbor’s goat, Jay Jay is missing. Anyways, one time my children’s mother was dumping me and it was mostly due to ya know me not having lots of money and my band breaking up-I had gained weight staying home, not drinking, changing diapers ya know and it seemed less and less likely I was gonna make it big in show business with the sidemen ditching me to go play in glorified fucking richkid zipcode coverbands, so I was spiralling and my old pen pal Nina Antonia was empathizing, she wrote me some beautiful letters I kept pinned to my wall for the longest time: “the human heart can only take so many mauling’s”. She totally got me. I used to exchange a lotta info on social media with my songwriting idol Perrett. He was a goodfella. That band were like the fucking Pretenders-all virtuosos. If I ever do get to make music at this point, the recordings need to be at that level. I love them so much. Peter seemed to share my love and respect for the Cuban Revolution.
You find it tempting to give up the ghost You always sell to the one who bids the most You get paid for your loyalty Waiting for someone to come along and set you free Can’t you hear me?
I want to die in the same place I was born Miles from nowhere I used to reach for the stars but now I’ve reformed She’s out there somewhere If you ever start thinking what you’re doing to me Maybe you will set me free From this sorrow From this sorrow From this sorrow
All the defendants have been condemned When you were sentenced it covered all of them Give me justice you scream and scream I ain’t done nothing, it’s all a crazy dream Can’t you hear me?
I want to die in the same place I was born Miles from nowhere I used to reach for the stars but now I’ve reformed She’s out there somewhere If you ever start thinking what you’re doing to me Maybe you will set me free From this sorrow From this sorrow From this sorrow
THE PIGS OF WAR ACCUSE CUBA OF SPONSORING TERROR BUT NOT SAUDI ARABIA OR ISRAEL. THE EMPIRE ARE THE TERRORISTS.
I made friends with those garage guys at the food truck way back when I worked at Rounder/Ryko records with a buncha music people, Kudgel, Elevator Drops, Corazon Higgins who I loved from Sugarbitch, a famous kid with a goatee named King Velveeduh who made naughty underground comix. I saw the Cheater Slicks play to empty rooms. Always loved Dave’s artwork. Tom and I were close friends for years. Used to try to get ’em to be my Birthday Party, but we ended up drinking instead. I remember a couple hard partier dudes who always used to hang around their house drinking and smoking with us, Jerry Wick and Jack Taylor, are both dead now, and also their friend Alpo from the Real Kids who Tom once told me their song, “My Friends” was partly about, in addition to myself. (RIP) They’ve done some unbelievably good work over the years. We always had a good time together. Their new lp with Bill Gage will probably go down in history as another sonic landmark from their psycho garage. They even toured with Andre Williams and the Muffs, appeared on my tv show and had Pussy Galore’s Jon Spencer (“BLUES EXPLOSION!!”) produce one of their records. Both him and his guitarist Judah were really nice to me but the abrasive, Yoko Ono knowing drummer was a fratboy oaf who coulda been an Afghan Whig.
“When it comes to imperialism, Democrats and Republicans are indistinguishable bloodthirsty anti-communists and racists Nicaragua has some of the lowest migration levels in Central America Most migrants are from Honduras (after a US-backed far-right coup), El Salvador, Guatemala. DHS data on undocumented immigrants detained in 2020: 318,516 Mexicans 61,382 Guatemalans 51,011 Hondurans 23,051 Salvadorans 13,028 Ecuadorians 11,227 Cubans 7917 Brazilians 2739 Nicaraguans 2220 Dominicans 1639 Venezuelans Blaming “communism” is insane.” (-Ben Norton)
“You already know some devious shit about to go down when the likes of Pelosi suddenly show up at another country’s doorstep.” (-Richard Medhurst)
Nineteen members of the US House of Representatives have written a letter [PDF] to President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin cautioning that the partial cancellation of student debts can have the unintended consequence of reducing military recruitment in the United States.The letter reads as follows:Dear President Biden,We write to you to share our concerns about the unintended consequences of your decision to cancel up to $20,000 of student loan debt per borrower. We are particularly concerned about the negative impact this will surely have on our nation’s military and their ability to recruit and retain top talent.As you know, some of the most successful recruiting incentives for the military are the GI Bill and student loan forgiveness programs. The idea that the military will pay for schooling during or after completion of a service obligation is a driving factor in many individuals’ decision to join one of the services. A recent estimate showed that as many as 178,000 servicemembers were eligible for some type of forgiveness.By forgiving such a wide swath of loans for borrowers, you are removing any leverage the Department of Defense maintained as one of the fastest and easiest ways to pay for higher education. We recognize the loan forgiveness programs have issues of their own, but this remains a top recruiting incentive.Currently, a mere 23 percent of the population is eligible to serve in the military. Even fewer of those have a propensity to serve. At the end of last month, the Army had only reached 66 percent of its recruiting goal for the year. The Navy, only 89 percent. It is no secret that each of the services continues to battle hardships in recruiting and now these problems will be exacerbated by removing the uniqueness of this benefit.As the services try to adopt unique approaches to tackle their recruiting challenges, including historic bonuses, it feels like their legs are being cut out from underneath them. With this in mind, we ask for you to provide us answers to the following questions:1. Was the effect on military service considered in the development of the recent student loan forgiveness decision?2. What is the administration’s plan to develop incentives to augment the loss of those who might join the military to help pay off student loans?3. What improvements are being made to ensure timely payments to those currently enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs for both active duty and reserve components?Thank you for your attention to this matter.My House colleagues and I are very concerned that the deeply flawed and unfair policy of blanket student loan forgiveness will also weaken our most powerful recruiting tool at the precise moment we are experiencing a crisis in military recruiting. https://t.co/vGEfKq0PRC— Rep. Don Bacon (@RepDonBacon) September 19, 2022So they’re just coming right out and admitting it. One of the reasons the US government doesn’t offer the same kinds of social support systems that people have in all other wealthy nations is because otherwise there’d be no economic pressure on young Americans to sign up for service in the US war machine.This is no secret, but it’s generally considered taboo for government officials to actually say so. People have been talking about the poverty draft for many years — about the established fact that a majority of US military recruits come from neighborhoods with below median income levels and that those neighborhoods are targeted for recruitment because impoverished communities often see military service as their only chance at upward mobility.But the term “poverty draft” can create a bit of confusion, because when most Americans hear “poverty” they think homeless people and those who can barely afford to eat or keep a roof over their heads. In reality the US is a nation where a majority of the population would be unable to pay for a $1,000 emergency expense from their savings, and the level at which economic pressure is felt to join the military is much higher than the very poorest of the poor.Those economic pressures are why US Army officials have explicitly said that the student loan crisis is to thank for their success in meeting recruitment goals.How did the Army exceed its recruiting goals this year? It was the student loan crisis, not the wars, service leaders say. https://t.co/cGquM88Lhipic.twitter.com/eDx73KCetz— Military Times (@MilitaryTimes) September 17, 2019So the US empire has a huge incentive to maintain a very large population of Americans who are economically uncomfortable, and this plays a significant role in the domestic policymaking decisions of that nation’s government. The US empire is held together by constant violence and the threat thereof, and its ability to apply that violence would be crippled without a steady supply of warm teenage bodies to feed into its war machine. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the US empire would collapse without the economic pressures which coerce teens to sign up to kill and be killed over things like oil reserves and Raytheon profit margins.It’s one of those things that looks more ghoulish the more you think about it. In the wealthiest nation in the world, economic justice is actively suppressed in part to ensure that young Americans will feel financially squeezed into killing foreigners who are far more impoverished than they are. They are keeping people poor so that they will commit mass murder. It’s actually hard to think of anything more depraved than that.But such is the nature of the capitalist empire. You’re either a useful gear-turner of the machine or you are liquidated and turned into fuel for its engine. If you’re not a successful capitalist you can be used to defend the empire with pricey weaponry. If you’re not helping the empire you can be used to drive up profits for the military-industrial complex as a target for war machinery whose costly munitions will need to be replaced. If you’re not a good gear-turner you can be sent to become a prison slave or incarcerated in a private for-profit prison. There’s a use for everyone in the empire.The globe-spanning power structure that is centralized around the United States is the most evil, soulless and destructive force on this planet. The young people who are duped, manipulated and financially coerced into joining its war machine come back horrifically traumatized by the experiences they have in the situations they are placed in. Something better is needed. This cannot continue.______________(cAITLIN jOHNSTONE) Michael Parenti: How To Think About Class – Dandelion Salad (wordpress.com)
“U.S. propaganda is so sophisticated that it convinces people that we’re bringing democracy to the world when we haven’t even brought anything that resembles a democracy to our own shores. The U.S. brings capitalism, militarism, and oligarchy to the world and calls it “democracy.” (-Ryan Knight)
ME I’M JUST A ROCKNROLL SINGER
Besides the so called new normal everyday hardships of parenting in deepest poverty, struggling to even just get by in a nosediving recession with jackedup prices on every. fucking. thing., my main problem is like, a cosmic sense of total dislocation, of being outta time, cause some of us discarded old exiles were Born To Rock. But like Iggy Pop told David Letterman about Andy McCoy, and David Lee Roth said about meeting Steve Vai in a police lineup after a bust at the after hours club he once owned, CLUB ZERO, you know, you really always, always, always, have to go to the Big Cities to find the capable sleazy guitarslingers who can provide for themselves and who have even HEARD OF all my biggest influences and nowadays, you know, there’s just no way for us working class paupers to ever pay the $5000 a month rents in NYC and L.A., or Seattle or Portland, ya know? I’m even struggling in the dead end faded ghost town. One of my biggest influences as a lead vocalist, along with Joe Strummer (RIP), Gio Vitanza (RIP), Tex Perkins, Stiv (RIP), and Texacala, was, of course, CLAUDE from SMACK. Man, I just love that cat, but of course, nobody’s ever heard of ’em outside of London, Helsinki, NY and L.A., and I never understood why their brand of cool as fuck untamed rocknroll never caught fire with a bigger audience, it kinda just makes me think that people are fucking stupid. I honestly have had multiple conversations with grown adults these past twenty years who wanna look me straight in the eye and dare tell me how great the new Green Day or Foo Fighters or Miley Cyrus or Beyonce album is. I can’t stand that garbage. Give me Claude, everytime. Make mine Claude and the 69’s! If you ask me, this is what rocknroll sounds like-not that namby pamby trustfund bullshit tribute rock they all dish out nowadays. The last band I heard that had even like a glint of the raw soul and desperate animal magnetism of Smack was SILVER from Norway and even they were like twenty years ago. But yeah, they had some real magic, too! I was never quite so wild about 69 Eyes vampire-metal but I definitely did love their early Mr. Sleazy 45 they sent me to review in my fanzine when I was I dunno, 22? I liked their earlier raunchy first record sleazepunk dive bar stuff far better than their latter day epic productions that sound more like money and less like street. But anyways…yeah. SMACK. And SILVER.
SILVER had something special, man, a perfect vocalist, exceptional lyrics, near perfect music, they were like a swirl of the Lords, the Ultras, the Original Suffering Bastards, and Smack all rolled into one! Man, I love that band! In the immortal words of our beloved forefather, Chuck Berry, “it’s gotta be rocknroll music if you wanna dance with me…”
THE WHOLE SHEBANG IS FALLING APART FOR ALL US EVERYDAY PEOPLE WHILE YOUR JETSETTING, WHITE PANTS SUITED, INSIDE TRADING, CROOKED AS FUCK BIPARTISAN MILLIONAIRE POLITICIANS BAIT WW3!
“It’s all falling apart in the States. The economy, the narratives and the political lies. All of it. And they’re trying so hard to pretend everything is fine but it’s clear even to those in denial, that it isn’t.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“The IRA is another give away to fossil fuel industry & sells out the interests of indigenous and Black communities no matter how many uncle tom Black and indigenous folks you push out there to sing its praises. Hey Progressive Caucus talk about the side deal with Manchin!” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Evil warmonger and DNC icon Liz Cheney lost.” (-Garland Nixon)
“Kudos to the people’s legal defense that stopped fat cat party bosses from illegally throwing Hoh off the ballot. One of many victories won by the Center for Competitive Democracy (CCD), @voterchoice
“The Bush-era neocons are ready to support Ron DeSantis if he runs for president. Like them, DeSantis wants war with China, hates Venezuela and Cuba, and loves apartheid Israel. The so-called “poPuLiSt riGhT” is just a rebranding of neoconservativism 2.0″ (-Benjamin Norton)
“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)
“Putin on U.S actions toward Russia & China: “It is evident that Western, globalist elites are attempting to distract their own citizens from very dire socio-economic problems; falling living standards, unemployment, poverty & de-industrialization.” (-Fiorella Isabel from Convo Couch)
“The process of setting up Zelensky as fall guy for the conscious policy of the U.S. to make Ukraine a de-facto member of NATO & bait Russia into a war in Donbas has started in earnest. There was going to be a war, with or without Zelensky.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“The bosses and shareholders of the British water monopolies are announcing record profits whilst our seas are polluted with sewage. We must bring water companies into public ownership, invest in infrastructure and pay workers fairly.” (-Jeremy Corbyn)
“Democrats don’t believe in democracy when they sue to kick third parties off ballots and suppress voters from having a real choice on election day. They believe in oligarchy. So stop being bamboozled by this corrupt anti-democratic party that fights against the progress we need.” (-Ryan Knight)
IT’S THE BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES VERSUS THE REST OF US. STOP “IDENTIFYING” WITH YOUR OPPRESSORS.
Man, ya see so many unwell human beings walkin’ around talking just mad UFO jibberish to themselves nowadays. Sure, some of them are on the crystal meth or newfangled zombies of death drugs, but so, so many more of ’em are suffering from mental illness and there is no help for them. The establishment has designed this slippery slope, so people who are mentally ill are most often mass incarcerated in abusive, sadistic prisons, or left outside in the elements to rot and die. I even see some property owners getting The Business from a corrupt smalltown city hall that’s in bed with like ten rich people, so they have decided to sic these code enforcers on all the poor people, to make them sell their property, drive ’em out, or bleed their resources fighting the gentrifiers. It’s sad. I know a couple of sad and lonely old single people who dwell inside these rickety little metal boxes who have to listen to the builder’s insanely loud Mexican music all day, big machines moving dirt, and bam bam bam hammering, and when they complained to city hall, the soccer mom figureheads they seat behind some table to give the illusion that “educated women” are calling the shots, they sent in the code enforcers and kkkops to fuck with the hermits. and hassle the kindly old new age painter lady for having an artful frontyard with blue bottles and wire and found object decorations on her fence frowned upon by fatcat real estate assholes. It’s fucking sad to see the stress all these poor retirees have been put under by the crooked Mister Burns people from the golf club and their know nothing shitlib winebox shitfaced sock puppets, who just rubber stamp anything that some moneybags developer calls “progress”, even if it makes no sense. I hadda take a job as a mover and almost got bit by a black widow spider that was hiding among the boxes with three inches of dirt I was relocating from one lady’s spare house to another of her spare houses. It’s deep puddles rainy today, I’m kinda dreading going back to work later this afternoon. More spiders, cobwebs, perilously HEAVY antique furniture, heavy boxes of expensive art books. Woman telling me how she shitcanned seven trucks full of her parent’s belongings. My girlfriend got bit up by like a half dozen fire ants. We do what we gotta do for our kids.
MOTHERFUCKERS ALL WORSHIP THE WHITE COATS LIKE UNCLE JUNE ON THE SOPRANOES
The medical mafia in this country is so fuckedup now, you can’t even see a real doctor. Our primary physician had a stroke and became half paralyzed and is on permanent leave now, and if you talk about how or why it happened, in his forties, “just suddenly” people wanna silence and punish you, so now, you can only see nurse practitioners at the overbooked hicktown hospital, if you wanna loiter round for hours in rooms full of coughing old people, some of whom are not even able to prescribe, cause they aint got the credentials of the paralyzed guy. One of my family members needs new prescriptions because of their adolescent growth surge but his prescribing doctor moved his office to three hours away and our vehicle won’t make it, we made an appointment with a new physician and when the child was taken to an early morning appointment, which is a hardship for someone with his particular disability, they were told the doctor had arbitrarily cancelled the appointment, so meanwhile, the poor kid is having all kinds of erratic behavioral eruptions as a result of his medications being so inadequate and some of the resulting violent outbursts can be dangerous to his and his family’s safety and wellbeing. Dumb fucking middle class people believe that pills are the answer to everything, pils, pills, some shots, more pills, more pills, always more pills, some boosters, an “I VOTED TODAY” sticker, a pinkhat mach, some more pain pills, big medicine cabinets overflowing already with mama’s little helpers, cause they’ve seen ten billion commercials for every drug in the world on MSNBC and CNN but then when proper dosages are denied to patients by a clusterfuck smalltown hospital, it’s just tough luck. That’s all you will ever hear from the quack quack quacking petit booj on the hill. How YOU shoulda done this, or you shoulda done that. Shoulda gotten better health insurance, or shoulda owned a more reliable vehicle, should have married up or inherited privilege from their families the hard way, shoulda sued the school system, shoulda sued the doctors, shoulda gotten a fourth booster for science like DOCTOR JILL BIDEN who is sick with the plague, or blah blah, whatever. This conventional wisdom held by all the haves on the hills sometimes results in real tragic consequences like with our poor doctor, who took his medicine, did what he was told, and now he can’t perform his job, or move half his body. That’s fuckedup, and he can’t sue nobody. Tough shit. Same with my dead friend in the midwest, he took a nap after a second shot and never woke up again, too bad, tough titties-guess he shoulda bought bitcoin or shoulda volunteered to go to war with Russia, always something that he did wrong, according to the quack quack quacking tv watcher know it alls who think the Democrats are real. So ya gotta wonder what doctor worshipping shitlibs have to say to that guy, who can’t move half his body now, even though (!!!) he spent all those years in med school and his student loans probably still aint even paid off-what he shoulda done different. He was already complying with their preferred narrative, hut two hut two, and yes sir to Super Scientific Higher Up Expert Dr. Bill Gates and wee wee wee wee all the way home, every bit of it, went to med school, bought a big house, learned to golf, paid for insurance, obeyed The Man for science. Only one industry exists with a total immunity shield. He can’t sue the supposedly benevolent makers of certain warp speed “immunizations”. Tough shit, doctor, fuck you. Poor guy! Now we aint got no family doctor, but so long as somebody who was already obscenely rich, is getting super duper extra rich, somewhere, and having smirking conversations with Emperor Klaus, about how they’re gonna have all kinds of new business opportunities in the near future, and laughing like twin Bond villains, that’s all the army ant tv watchers care about. They’re all strung out on the government pills.
So yeah it’s becoming a bit frightening as a pedestrian, just walking around this deadbroke town, you got all the angry, drunk driving, vroom vroom flatulent, big white truck pitbull cowboys driving 100 miles per hour on these winding river roads, their vicious dogs snarling out the passenger seat window. The Lake People in the golfcarts and three wheelers also speeding about as fast as they can, picking up ice for their beer coolers from the downtown ice machines, but it’s not quite so fast really. The embittered women who married their pitbulls and don’t believe in leash laws and think they can control their animals with their Georgia O’Keefe extra deluxe psychic fortune teller intuitive E.S.P. powers, the ninety pound fentanyl crazies who look like world war two victims, the toothless people with the shaven heads and broken window shields driving in lazy half lidded circles and trying to mad dog menace the peaceful passerby. You got the pink and red clad woman from TAOS who insults strangers on the sidewalk for existing. The pissed off oversized biker bearded dude who screams loudly to one of my neighbors about “revenge” all day. The hermit down the block in conflict with the kkkops over his rock garden landscaping choices and brokedown car ownership. The middleclass woman who was trying to sue to stop a bridge being built on her deadend street now becoming a target of kkkode enforcers but she already has a really perfectly neat and Iowa orderly yard, is ex military with money in the bank, so it’s harder for them to fuck with her. The suckup obedience yuppies of city hall are all helping pass fascistic Gates-Reset ordinances saying it is now legal for them to employ a private drone company to inspect homeowner’s private backyards and determine who can, or can not park R/V’s or cars behind high fences on their own properties. Some liberty. They have plans to confiscate people’s stuff if they don’t like it. That is insane to me. Even the most patriotic flag waving gung ho, military lovin’ Thank A Kkkop Republikkan KKKowboys gotta start seeing that’s something’s rotten with this particular city government. There are crazy, unhappy people yelling obscenities everywhere you roam. Some dickhead yuppie pricks banned an old lady with dementia from dancing with her elderly friends at the jackedup tourist trap bar here. They sortof say hi to me sometimes, mistaking me for some gentrification hipster, but I find it difficult to be civil to money grubbing gentrifiers with no compassion for the sick or the poor or the old or disabled. Fuck you, prick. Go back to Hipster City, this is a dead end desert ghost town full of predominantly poor widowers. Maybe you money whore, city slicker, get rich quick people are the ones who should be banned. Leave us alone. Here come the tech-tyrants and deep state faux woke, shady spook social engineers and thought police and squidgame mk ultra hip-pop bullshitters.
“Imagine thinking Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi are on the side of the people when they have spent their entire political careers being on the side of corporations. That’s how brainwashed and propagandized Democrat party voters are. #BlueMAGA” (-Ryan Knight)
MOONCHASERS ARE ONE OF THE ONLY GOOD UNDERGROUND BANDS LEFT IN THIS COUNTRY, ALL EVAD’S BANDS ARE GOOD. HOPEFULLY, I’LL HAVE A WINTER KILLS FEATURE INTERVIEW WITH TOM SANFORD FOR YOU SOON!
“Democrats just passed a bill which massively expands new fossil fuel extraction and handcuffs renewable energy to fossil fuels yet they are on TV waging the propaganda campaign of the century by declaring they saved the planet when they actually just accelerated its destruction.” (-Ryan Knight)
LET THE COWBOYS RIDE
This is what the fanatical sports moms, preppie jocks and elitist admin thought me and my friends were like, but really, we were just lonely latchkey kids who were really, really into like, Cyndi Lauper, Psychedelic Furs, Billy Idol, and Echo & The Bunnymen, you dig? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb0MXivyeuA A lotta eyeliner and hair gel. I think my dream, that I harangued a couple of my scrappy friends into believing in, for at least a few years, until eating canned beans and mostly living on beer in rundown ghetto, rodent infested apartments started losing it’s appeal and the parents were pressuring ’em all to go to go to school and shit, I wanted to be like, you know, The Clash, The Alarm, The Lords Of The New Church– a big haired bandido rebel gang fighting the power with poetry and sincerity and singalong choruses and big hollow body guitars, three chords and the truth. I was not fucking around, I’m still that, and I’ll be 53 in December. Steve Stevens guitar heroes, Pete Farndon bassists, Clem Burke style drummers apply within. Songwriting motherfucker wants to front dangerous outlaw punk band. Last of the Last of the Last of the Last.
Aint it a bitch how music imprints on you forever, even the cornier stuff you don’t necessarily like? Journey, for instance? “Send Her My Love…memories remain, send her my love…roses never fade…” There’s a video somewhere, of two of my craziest dead drinking companions, Mark and Adam, all dolled up like me in the feathers and furs, with one of my bombshell, crazy good times all the time, loudly yelling, yeehaw, hoarse voiced screaming wild stripper ex girlfriends singing “Separate Ways”. I look for it somedays cause lord I miss those brothers. Dead forever. Ugh! Ya know? In the sad, horrid, painful mornings, when I was in the fourth to eighth grades, I was forced to go to this dreadful, bullying, miserable, torturously mean, middle school in fuckedup fucking Ohio, radio DJ Ed Goble from WKKI “Ohio’s Best Rock, Broadcasting From The Western Ohio Branch Campus In Celina” would play Madonna‘s “Crazy For You” from the “Vision Quest” soundtrack and “Only The Young” by Journey, every morning before I had to go wait in the frontyard for the #24 bus in the snow with Tracey D. from across the street who hated me. I always got stuck sitting next to notorious booger picker, Musto. “You again, Musto”. Then, it was a three flights of stairs climb to the third floor music room in the 100 year old fucking dusty old building, assholes elbowing me on my way up, struggling to carry a big snaredrum case, I was just a scrawny pipsqueak like in those comicbook fifties Charles Atlas ads.
At Baptist boarding school, in deep Appalachia, Fat Jerry had a tiny A.M. radio we had to keep hidden from the older boy’s dorm snitch-patrol, cause all secular music was forbidden, and I’d hear another fucking syrupy Journey song, in my metal bunkbed at night, the horrible sap of “Faithfully”, and think of this older girl I had a crush on named Carol Harlowe. I hated depressing Bob Seger songs about being a perpetually down on your luck, twice divorced, nowhere loser loitering around some stinky pool hall down on Main Street and John Cougar songs growing up, because I did not want to hear that authority always wins, I thought rocknroll songs should give people optimism that they COULD triumph over the corrupt powers that be, and back then, I absolutely could not “be myself” in those tank building “smalltowns” I grew up in. I wanted escapism, back then. Van halen, Adam Ant and Duran and Bowie and Prince. I like a lot of stuff other people seem to hate, like the Thompson Twins and even some Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw. It all reminds me of when my first real friends and I were just meeting each other out there in eighties Swatch Watch suburbia. As I got older, of course, I changed my mind about all those melancholy Amerikkkana balladeers from classic rock radio, the John Cougars and Tom Pettys, because my life had turned into one of those fucking battered and bruised, bad luck songs. “Runnin’ against the wind…”
“Wherever you are tonight, I wish you the best of everything in this world and honey I hope you find whatever you were lookin’ For…”
“She calls me baby, she calls everybody baby…it’s a lonely old night, but aint they all?”
“stay on the streets of this town and they’ll be carvin’ you up, alright”
“big town’s got it’s losers, small town’s got it’s vices…”
Me and my ole lady talk sometimes about needing to become the stable and reliable presence for my children like you know my grandparents were for us. The people who stay together through the hard knock times and don’t change their phone number or chase any fadgadget latest thang bandwagons or move all the time. My smalltown grandfolks mostly raised me. They disapproved of my makeup, my nose ring, my early jailhouse tattoos, my dropping out, my many girlfriends, my underage drinking, all that kinda stuff, but the fridge was always full and I was always welcome, they had a bed in the basement and heat in the winter, hot showers and A/C in the summers. They always had a big garden that fed many neighbors and a deep freeze and many basement shelves full of stuff to feed a family of ten or twenty whenever my aunts or cousins, or kids and me felt like visiting. My grandfather would always take me on long car rides to look at cows and white buffalo and lecture me about how I needed to “learn computers” because the monopolies were going to destroy the mom and pops. Of course, he was right. He wanted me to become a car dealer and my compliant country clubbin’ golf lovin’ cousins who took over the business rather than me cause I could literally just not “play ball” drove it into the ground in just a couple of years. He died in a veteran’s home when my ex wife was breaking up with me and taking my kids across country without my permission, but she was rich and I was poor, plus she had the gender card which is better than any backstage pass. “Membership has it’s privileges” and as a member of the ruling class-she has The Master Card. All I got’s a hand fulla jokers. My protective WW2 vet grandfather’s sad passing was followed soon by my grandmother, broken hearted, hard drinking, much beloved aunt, many uncles, all their neighbors who I’d known all my life. My ex did not even bother to give me the message my mom left about the neighbor’s funeral I was expected to be a pallbearer at, too busy shopping for new properties with a crunchy granola, khaki clad, bachelor #2. I was sadder than I can express when their other daughters sold the house I grew up in, after their deaths and shitcanned so much of my grandparent’s lifetime of cherished objects in their rush to go on vacations and spend the inheritance on new properties and my cousin’s rich wife’s desire for More Stuff. Her dad was a doctor so even though my cousin was a car dealer, it’ll likely never be Good Enough. What kinda madness is this bullshit? Everywhere you look it is sourfaced sisters competing for the old people’s inheritance. My grandma died while my spouse was pregnant. Smalltown hospital almost killed my spouse with doctor refusing to see her forcing her to drive two hours to a better emergency room where they immediately performed an emergency appendectomy saving her and our baby, and the crooked smalltown hospital that had already sewn 13 bandages inside my grandmother during a botched surgery, they still send creditors after us, for our showing up, even though no service was provided other than some unqualified nurse telling us her ’bout to burst appendectomy as “probably just gas”, these capitalist pigs want us to PAY THEM $5000 for jeopardizing my wife and child’s lives. Thoroughly indoctrinated suckass suckups just wanna praise these evil tv doctors and Merck and Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson some more. I had to leave the Midwest, it was preposterously, insufferably, punishingly oppressive, if you aint some preppie golf playing motherfucker, which I am not. The Midwest is all about keeping us slaves in the itchy polyester uniforms and the wet aprons for minimum wage forty hours a week forever. Or mass incarcerated for non violent reefer offenses and once they get you in the system, you’ll be getting probation violated, fined, frisked, piss tested, spied on, and kept under heavy manners for the rest of your days, smalltown screws hounded several of my old friends into the grave. If you’re poor, all you get’s a hairnet, a timesheet, and a fuck you punch in the eye, just cause. You shoulda been a preppie golf playing motherfucker.
I LIVE BY THE RIVER…SOMEDAY A REAL RAIN’S GONNA FALL
The perpetually alarmist crazy hermit down the block is running around like Chicken Little or Noah, warning everybody we all need to rush down to the fairground in the nearby town to retrieve some emergency sandbags because they say there is gonna be seven inches of rain falling on the town this weekend and my part of town always floods, which is why is is sortof laughably extra ridiculous that the kkkops and kkkode enforcement spend so much time and town resources on badgering old hermits for having too many cars or rocks or old metal signs on their properties, cause this creepy local developer’s master plan to gentrify the field by the waste treatment center is a fool’s errand. I live in a 53 year old disintegrating leaky trailer a couple blocks from the river and the garage out back where I’ve stashed my few remaining souvenirs and possessions of sentimental value is doubtlessly gonna get soaking wet later today so I threw a tarp over the clothes rack and positioned some buckets underneath the holes in the ceiling from the sun warped wood. High winds blew off the shingles, the elements are becoming ever more brutal. Media fearmongers endlessly about carbon emissions while simultaneously propagandizing for the War Machine causing the harm and the exact same One Percent Shady Asshole Billionaires who fly around on private jets all day, fucking up the environment some more. So whenever these same evil fuckheads say they’re gonna somehow fix it, with their geoengineering, and mutated mosquitoes, and cloned lab meats, and GMO vegetables, and microchipped cashless society “FOR SCIENCE”, I kinda don’t believe them. We might be having to relocate in the near future and that seems fraught with a lot of work and worry, risk, and uncertainty, especially in immobilizing, high gas prices, jackedup groceries and preposterous rent, perilous times such as these, where every last tv programmed selfish propertarian asshole feels just not only entitled but almost obliged to overcharge the lowly slaves for ripoff rents like their higherup Vanguard and BlackRock Davos monopolist fascist techlords do. Mainstream headlines have just admitted that Bill Gates wrote much of the latest Biden administration legislature and while his corporate media, P.R. puppets praise him and Biden all day, that can’t be real good news for any of us poor people at the bottom.
JOE BIDEN I.R.S.
What d’ya think about Gropey Joe adding a million IRS agents, you know they said during their big profits Covid snatch n grab they wanted to be able to spy on all your transactions as a way of ushering in their cashless society Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab fascist reset bullshit, but a lot of people still think Pelosi and Schumer are some kinda proper and polite social justice champions since they did a photo op with the Kenta cloth, even though, they just relentlessly continue fucking over poor people and coup-ing whoever they want, in the words of Oligarchy hipster Elon Musk.
Way back when we discovered Steve Earle, I used to think he’d discover me cause we had some shit in common. Ha. Did not work out that way at all. Even the motherfuckers who KNOW pretend they don’t know.
“The years long Russiagate investigation is responsible for ordinarily sensible people losing their minds. Hardly anyone recalls that the charge of collusion was actually disproven, that Robert Mueller only indicted for process crimes, such as those which occur when people let down their guard and talk to the FBI. Most Americans who know the name Paul Manafort think he was a Russian spy but don’t know that he went to jail for tax and bank fraud. Propaganda works very well when it is repeated over and over again.
Worse than the silly Trump inspired derangement is the way that those who call themselves left or progressive have chosen to defend federal law enforcement and bad legislation like the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is a relic from the earliest days of the cold war, and Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Palmer Raids which targeted the left for persecution and prosecution. Barack Obama used it more than all previous presidents combined in order to prosecute journalists who published what the state didn’t want us to know. As for the FBI, its Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, created dissension in the liberation movement, targeted individuals for prosecution, spied on Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide, and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark among others. The FBI continues to use informants to entrap Black people in phony terror cases.” (-Margaret Kimberly at Black Agenda Report)
“I’m supposed to believe that a government currently flirting with global nuclear extinction was trying to “keep us safe” from covid…really?” (-Garland Nixon)
“What is amazing is that there are still people out there who really believe the U.S. is supporter of democracy & that democrats are somehow different than republicans on these issues.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“What is the ‘noble cause’ for which you sent our country to war? (-Cindy Sheehan)
“I spend so much time Believing all the lies To keep the dream alive
Now it makes me sad It makes me mad at truth For loving what was you”
(-Billy Idol)
DEATH IS EVERYWHERE
Man, two of my old goth girlfriends are appearing in a movie someone is making about the midwestern punk scene in the 1980’s. When I think of Depeche Mode and New Order and The Cure and Peter Murphy, Einstürzende Neubauten logos painted in silver on black, dry ice, and all that eighties new wave music from 120 Minutes, I think of them. We were pen pals for years, our envelopes decorated with Morrissey and Martin Gore lyrics and Black Sharpie Spider Illustrations, and me and my other rocker dude friends we’d try to travel to Ft. Wayne in our extra shitty vehicles to visit them every Sunday night we could at a goth bar called Seventh Level to see bands like Die Kreuzen or Defenestration. “I’ve got to get to you first…before they do, it’s just a question of time, before they get their hands on you, and make you just like the rest, I’ve got to get to you first…” Always a real cool time, a dozen rosaries and fishnet and safety pins, underage booze in the parking lot, leather jackets, cigarettes, too much eye makeup and shyly holding hands. Dancing to a Robert Smith lookalike named Terry who spun like 12 inch dance remixes off Ministry and Specimen and shit. One of those chicks used to get drunk on vodka and cry a lot about her dead friends and loved ones, end up vomiting…JUST LIKE ME. I used to think we were soul mates. Vomit wet kiss! Hoo hoo! Me and those punk girls were were all bonded by our grief related depressions and mutual appreciations of hard liquor. One loved Blixa Bargeld, the Thompson Twins, and anything black, androgynous or rebellious and defiant. The other one loved Prince and Iggy and Arcadia and became my dearest most trusted advisor and confidante for years and lovingly made me beautiful handsewn new romantic clothes for the stage that I’d always end up vomiting on from pre show jitters. Lotta vomiting back then cause those girls and their frenzied, combat booted Ft. Wayne punk crew were hardcore partiers, and me and the lads we kept like a full bar on the front porch of my band house until the hellion motorcycle cowboy moved in and initially sorta became our road manager, before eventually being promoted to Future Cobalt Stargazer In Training. Those two chicks were the twin queens of the scene the movie is about. I can’t wait to see it-one of ’em’s flying back into Indiana tonight to get filmed for the documentary and the other one’s already filmed her part. I wonder whatever happened to black leather Vickie, another fishnet legged ultra vixen who I can still see so brightly in my mind…I can see her hairdo, her vivid smile, red lipstick, pack of Dunhills, maybe the scent of cloves…I seem to remember I had a series of these fast forwarding, fleeting intimacies with various Ft. Wayne punkers-all us outsider kids would connect on the sidewalk and get close like almost instantly only to never see each other again, just a fading memory of the briefest of vodka blurry goth parking lot deeply cherished moments in the car while quoting Ian Curtis, immediate soul baring kinda friendships. Those were better times. I got along smashingly with Hope Nichols from Fetchin’ Bones-she had a real Janis Joplin heartfelt soul singer appeal, we were like peas in a pod. We saw so many good and exceptionally entertaining bands play there. Pixies first album, Flaming Lips first album. Trash Brats first cassette. Primitive Baptist Church playing Modern Lovers covers. Elvis Hitler, Chainsaw Kittens, on and on and on and on, which side are you on?
I was supposed to be in a couple of movies that never came out. One was about the English rock group Thee Hypnotics who I met their first night in the USA, USA! Where I live now, there are almost no women and very few young people-some nutty supposedly psychic new age pitbull widows, and Miner Fortyniner Ok Corral lookin’ old ranchers, grizzled cowboys, weird hermits, rightwing survivalist militias. You know the weirdest part is how these old crazies give me a LOT less shit than any of the safespace shitlibs of the Pacific Northwest, or ignorant middle class fratboy fauxhipsters of the flyover states. Mostly, people don’t even see me, I’m almost invisible here. I carry a stick on the trails, cowboy hat, nobody is trying to really make me shut the fuck up, like they always did in privileged gentrification enclaves where the local gentry all inherited rental properties and hipster popularity businesses, so they become real fanatical about guarding their turf, making sure no lowlife outsiders cast a shadow on their Fauntleroy Limelite, Suck-Pop derivative, Parents Paid-For Fame Thrones.
People I knew are always dyin’ now. Feels like a graveyard. I wanted to get stamps to send you a postcard, but the post office closes at noon. A rainy Thursday, ya know since I got lockedout of social media by the pro war deep state, I don’t really hear much from nobody. Most mornings I don’t even get an email except from like the Sunglasses Hut. I worry about my wife and kids, my teeth, my mom, my friends, and the future. Noooo future for me. Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon and Joe Biden’s weapon making friends are havin’ a ball, though. A creepy Eyes Wide Shut ball, where the servants all have to wear covid masks, and the zillionaires roll around naked in their filthy lucre. The media still do stories everyday pretending like somebody is still investigating the Jeffrey Epstein island but only the Maxwell chick is lockedup-none of the ruling class jet set predator male millionaires.
The concept of “wealth hoarding” has gained traction in the wake of the Occupy movement and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, the idea being that billionaires are amassing treasure like mythical dragons in the same way someone with a hoarding disorder amasses newspapers or clothes.
It’s an understandable way of looking at the problem. The capitalist class is indeed grabbing up a greater and greater percentage of the wealth that’s being generated by the working class, and it just doesn’t make sense that someone would need billions of dollars when you can only drive one car at a time, wear one pair of pants at a time, eat one meal at a time, etc.
For normal people, the idea of wealth is associated with security, so once your family’s needs are met and their future is secure it’s hard to understand the impulse to keep amassing wealth far beyond that point without it being driven by some kind of compulsive neurosis. The fact that they pour so much money and energy into manipulating political systems to ensure they aren’t forced by taxation to share more of their wealth with the public makes them look even more like compulsive hoarders.
But this notion of vast wealth as a hoarding behavior misses the mark. And no, it isn’t because billionaires are awesome beneficent job creators whose wealth is being used by banks to grant people loans for homes and businesses and making the world a wonderful place to live.
It doesn’t work to think of the very rich as wealth hoarders because what they are doing has very little in common with the behavior of a compulsive hoarder. A compulsive hoarder gains nothing from their behavior, which generally ends up being self-destructive and socially alienating. It costs them everything, and gives them nothing. Their behavior is born of neurosis, and is entirely irrational.
The so-called wealth hoarders are not amassing wealth at the expense of others out of neurosis, and the motives driving their behavior are perfectly rational. They’re just a lot more depraved and a lot more uncomfortable to think about.
The ruling class continually extracts wealth from the public not so that they can become wealthier than they already are, but to keep the public from having that wealth. They’re not worried that they’ll be unable to support their needs in the future if they don’t extract another billion dollars, they just understand that the wealthier everyone else gets, the less their own wealth matters. They’re not wealth-hoarding, they’re wealth-obstructing.
Wealth is a zero-sum game, as is its good friend power. The more power everyone else has, the less power our current rulers would have over us. This is why so much energy goes into ensuring that votes have as little effect as possible on the operations of the state and making sure everything stays the same no matter what the public wants.
Imagine if ordinary people started having as much influence over the direction human civilization will take as war profiteers, oil tycoons, globalized wage slavers and Silicon Valley plutocrats. Imagine if the working class had enough disposable income to begin funding grassroots political campaigns, building their own media networks, or even funding think tanks and NGOs to advance their own interests like plutocrats do today. Imagine if everyone could afford to work less and relax more, and finally start learning about what’s really going on in the world.
Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The kings of our day have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is king, then no one is king.
This is why our status quo systems work the way they work, and this is why you see a convergence of interests from such groups as corporate plutocrats, plutocrat-owned politicians and media, the arms industry, and military and intelligence agencies. These groups all have a vested interest in preserving the status quo and the ability to put that agenda in place, so they’ve fallen into a natural, de facto alliance with each other toward that end.
Workers around the world: lost $3.7 trillion in the pandemic Billionaires around the world: gained $3.9 trillion in the pandemic
It’s the biggest one-year wealth transfer in history, yet somehow barely anyone is talking about it.
It’s why we’ve seen a historic upward transfer of wealth during the Covid pandemic, with billionaires raking in trillions while ordinary people struggle with unemployment and soaring prices. And it’s why that transfer of wealth has been happening for decades since long before Covid. In a system where money is power and power is relative, a ruling class naturally emerges which needs to suppress the wealth and power of its subjects in order to continue to rule.
Rulers do not historically give up their rule voluntarily, so we can expect this continual pattern of wealth obstruction via wealth extraction to continue until people get tired of being kept poor and powerless by those who benefit from their poverty and disempowerment and use the strength of their numbers to force the emergence of a more equitable system. We can also expect our rulers to do everything in their power to prevent this from happening, including propagandizing the public into accepting the status quo and believing that anything better is impossible.
Drastic change in the not-too-distant future does seem to be inevitable, though, if only because we’re headed toward environmental collapse or nuclear winter if we don’t rise to the revolutionary occasion first. Humanity’s self-destructive patterning is in a race with our better angels, and right now it’s anybody’s race.(-Caitlin Johnstone)
THE GOOD OLE FLAME
Growing up in this crazy world, me and a few of my lifetime’s closest friends and much loved allies had so much fuckedup shit happen to us, it affected us all differently, but we were all altered, permanently impacted by those shared experiences. Some of ’em are on different paths, different trips, different realities, different frequencies, now. I spoke to one of my most loved friends on the phone about a week ago. He’s real serious now. Has a lot of responsibility. I could still hear some faint traces of the person I remember, though. Another old favorite, he’s still the same like in the Bob Seger song, “Still The Same”-just looks a lot older, not quite beyond recognition, just ravaged by all the decades of improbably rough livin’ and the road years take their toll on one’s appearance, but no other discernible change is present, whatsoever. Might as well be 1987. His primary source of joy was always louder music, harder highs, faster car speeds, more women, his drug of choice was always just more. I probably relate to him the most. We can’t really collaborate or work together like we used to, because even though he is still a wild wolf, full blast and never surrender all night ramblin’ man, footloose and fancy free, never settled down at all, not even for a day, I have had to put my children’s welfare and well-being first, for a long time, there’s not been that space or surplus for late night moon howlin’ like there used to be. I can’t just be lightin’ off for the horizon no more, like we used to when he remembers, me n him on a single bicycle, in the snow, fleeing some ragingl, irrationally drunk woman who was throwing bottles at us like Carrie Fisher in the Blues Brothers or some shit…and man, oh man, did we ever have some times together. I ain’t seen him in about fifteen, maybe even sixteen years, since my old lady was pregnant with our teenage kid. Had to tell ‘im we’re too broke and hardup to have any visitors nowadays. We’re in the hard struggle. Barely gettin’ by, our cupboard is bare, no free beer party here. We can hardly afford toilet paper or razors, all my socks have holes in ’em. Some of the others, ya know I carry ’em all around with me, everyday, year in and year out, like a bag of bricks burdensome heavy weight from the past, but I can not really relate to them at all anymore, and my endeavor is to sortof emotionally release them, not need nuthin’ from ’em, not look for some kinda “everybody loves a happy ending” reunion with ’em, no more. Sometimes, I can’t really help it, though. I’m always dreamin’, always was a dreamer, always tried to make it all happen for everybody. Rocknroll and the good times, you know what I mean. “and you’re still tryin a have fun…”
Life is too short, as Peggy Lee sang, “might as well break out the booze and have a ball”. The ruling class billionaires who wrecked the environment, and economy, and any hope for a decent standard of living or quality of life here, who do these richman for profit wars for no noble reason, they have all the bioweapons labs and pharmaceutical company stock and manufacture more fuckin hightech weapons and surveillance tech to control us all, if not kill us outright, they don’t have to do any of that, they choose to do all that because they are sociopathic tyrants. I noticed that some of my other online columns are being blocked somehow. For us it’s a big fuck you, for the self congratulating greedhead Fauntleroys podcasting live from their oversized white mama mansions high on the hills, for them,
He was one of my nearest and dearest soul brothers.
DAN DENTON BLUE COLLAR GOSPEL HOUR
Up early on a rainy day, spazzy cats are annoying me by loudly and recklessly running around all crazy and knocking stuff offa counters like they got some sugar spike from their food. Nothing really goin’ on with me. I hear all the neighbor’s dogs barking because some registered sex offender McMansion building fly by night developer, his ten dollar an hour minions, plus big shiny vehicle code enforcement and the kkkops and surveyors keep creeping around in our back alleyway every morning and will not tell the home owners why, all we know is they’ve been targeting some older hermit hoarder for having too much found object art on his property and stacks of rocks and cactus and old vintage metal signs and shit. The McMansion builder creepster and his real estate cronies imagine they can gentrify the waste treatment floodzone area. That’s all the excitement we got here in the dead dull desert. Rich people keep displacing the poor, while the middle class shrug and look the other way and read happy headlines about how Bill Gates is writing their puppet politician’s big business benefitting shitty policies that they hawk as some kinda “BFD” victory for the environment or the poor, but it’s always all fucking total bullshit-you will always know it’s an extra heap of bad bullshit, whenever they think they should bring classy droner Obama back outta his plantation mansion to help sell some fuckedup shit. Like he did when the professional athletes wanted to go on strike to protest kkkops killin’ all the black people everyday, or when the politicians of Michigan helped poison Flint, or when they wanted to rebrand Bush/Cheney fabricated, imperialist “war on terror” as hip and progressive, or when BP dumped all that oil into the Gulf. Shit’s real bad when they call in their secret weapon phony baloney Obama to make all those dense NPR listening, middle class people feel good. Mostly the masses we call the shitlibs stay exclusively focused on consumerism, acquisition, vanity brand building, and boring and tedious old reignited culture war diversions.
My teenager was so super stoked and excited about the finale of “Better Call Saul” and the trailer for the new season of “Cobra Kai” all day yesterday, he stayed up all night in nervous anticipation. I got some kinda digital microphone with a good echo on it and am hoping to get my old lady to help me rerecord an old song I rewrote with it. Can’t do anything like that when the kid is awake, though. Still astounds me how so many piss pond music scenesters are always so willing and able to divert so many funds and resources to propping up all the same old/same old, say nothing, so what, imitator franchise clone, trust fund suburbanite, middle class hipsters who don’t even really care about music or have anything to say, they just throw their having a fake band and some bullshit cd’s somebody else paid for, on to their already toppling towers, their special privilege, prestige and property piles, stackedup in the spare rooms of their mama mansions, I find them worse than appalling, they’re like these insatiable Narcissistic Little Jared Kushner/Hunter Biden motherfuckers, but with Nirvana t shirts. So yeah, fuck yeah, man. I’m still depressed about all that shit, trying not to go back to cigarette smoking. I looked in on my buddy Dan the blue collar poet from Toledo, who I don’t get to interact with as much, since being purged from social media by Zuckbot censorers. Aint he somethin’? Not only is he a fantastic writer and kindred spirit, but he’s a right the fuck on, working class hero, courageous union man, been working in factories in the Midwest for decades. I really feel for him, cause those fucked up, dehumanizing factories really wore out and killed summa my old homeboys. I lasted less than a day(!!!) when my stepdad pulled strings with one of his golf buddies to get me a job at the rubber plant, the one where the guitarist of the local Metallica coverband lost his hand. I could not drive the forklift which was the cherry, sought-after, prestigious spot the other workers preferred, and they all wanted to kill me already, cause just walking up the mile long sidewalk from the parking lot, the hillbillies had mistaken me for a chick and embarrassed themselves with some misplaced catcalls and wolf whistles, cause way back then, I was about 27 I guess, I still had my last good Johnny Thunders shag haircut with the razor cut bangs and shit and a chick had broken up with me for some popular dude and I was so depressed about it I dropped like thirty pounds instantly, almost overnight, so I suppose from far away, I would have appeared significantly less butch hetero-masculine than all the old workers. So yeah I got truck loads of compassion for Dan Denton, we lived in some of the same kinda dead end, no hope, dream killin’, white trash hell holes. If you love Bukowski, check out Dan’s books. He’s on Punk Hostage Press. And Oh Yeah, If you see Iris, tell her I said hello.
“The “Bernie bros” was some creative propaganda that played right into the race pimps in the democrat party & diverted people away from the issues that needed to be debated. People forget that me and Jill ran on a Green New Deal platform that was stolen & gutted by AOC.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“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)
“FYI—Liz Cheney opposed the Voting Rights Act, min wage increase, Equality Act, Equal Rights Amendment, George Floyd Act, BBB, Infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act, $35 Insulin bill, Women’s Health Protection Act, anti-gas price gouging bill—& voted w/Trump 93% of the time.”
(-Qasim Rashid, Esq.)
BEER FOR BREAKFAST
Man I always thought this was a startlingly cool blog. All the coolest shit. And that fanzine from Australia.
Vicious Kitten RecordsAfter a hiatus of 18 years, Australia’s Vicious Kitten Records has been relaunched. The first release is a 7″ single by NYC punk legend Kevin K – who has teamed up with Ricky Rat (Trash Brats / Dead Boys) on a hard hitting Ramones-like anthem called ‘Identity Crisis’.www.australianrockshow.com
The I-94 Bar – Real Rock Action from Sydney, Australia, via The Bowery and The Motor CityGetting ripped, and not ripped off, in Ocean County. Written by The Barman on 04 August 2022.. Wasteland Blues – O.C. Rippers (Ruined Records). Ocean County, New Jersey, is a 40-minute drive from the Ashbury Park foreshore of Bruce Springsteen and a million miles from his $5000 concert tickets.The same goes for the music of O.C. Rippers, whose 16-song “Wasteland Blues” album is a million …www.i94bar.com
They talk about the year that punk broke but it was really the year they broke punk. I do not consider corporate Alternative or Mickey Mouse lapdancers punk, at all. Fuck that Foo Fighters phony fucking unlistenable bullshit. Yungblud, Avril Lavigne, Machine Gun Kelly, Lil Nas X, that’s some fuckin toxic manufactured bullshit from the pit. It’s been proven how Rolling Stone and Spin are controlled opposition operated by the usual assortment of Langley spooks and pissedoff ex/fake/bullshit depopulation and police atate agenda-promoting shitlib mouthpieces of the Davos ruling kkklass. Got Mines and Airbandb owners don’t wanna know what’s really happening out here where the wild winds blow, they just love the comforting, soothing tones of fucking NPR and Democracy Now, even though it’s all been hijacked, infiltrated and weaponized by the donor class and billionaire secret society oligarchs. There really aint that much Real Rocknroll to really write about in USA, USA, nowadays. Think about it-there’s no real underground anymore, it costs too much, only people making music that aint controlled are the same old dogshit rich people. Of course I yearn ever so fondly for my long lost eighties when there was so much good new music being made, the news stands had like twenty different print magazines about rocknroll every month and that aint even counting like the teenybopper mags of black music mags. Fuck Rolling Stone. I like Matt Taibbi but they never even stood up for Michael Hastings, their own writer who was assassinated by the secret police for embarrassing a Democrat and a general. (RIP) Research Vault 7. So sad.
“Biden barely campaigned at all, made a bunch a promises, hasn’t kept one, shuffles around spouting threats that could trigger world war, and has Americans circling the drain. His oligarchy donors are doing great, however. He’s a constant embarrassment to hardworking Americans.”
(-Richard Caugh1 on Twitter)
“Imagine wanting to be a cop as a kid, wanting to grow up and get into the police academy so you can fight crime and bad guys, and then you get there and you find out the whole job is writing tickets and destroying homeless encampments.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The US gov has been working to declare anyone who speaks the truth about the proxy war in Ukraine an “information terrorist” and possibly even prosecute them as war criminals!” (-Lee Camp)
“You have to give Democrats a little credit here for conditioning their followers to think they’re actually fighting “fascism” while kicking third parties off ballots, taking even more corporate money than the GOP, and passing the highest military budget in history. You delivered for the military industrial complex, Big Oil companies, Wall Street, and the ruling class. U.S. under Biden & Democrat-led Congress: Passed biggest military budget in history of $840 billion/year Passed a fake Climate Bill that expands fossil fuels Provoking war with China & Russia The party is a well-oiled propaganda machine for capitalism & imperialism.” (-Ryan Knight)
“When Kissinger, a criminal, is to the left of neoliberals & even substantial numbers of leftists on issue of Ukaine, it graphically demonstrates how far to the right the U.S. has moved.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“At 99, Kissinger makes more sense on Ukraine than octogenarian US lawmakers, who push weapons not diplomacy. He says we are at the edge of war with Russia “without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.” (-Medea Benjamin)
“The US military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and it’s destroying our islands in Hawaiʻi. Visiting Maunakea yesterday, I heard explosions at Pohakuloa Training Area. They likely started this fire, which burned 700+ acres last night. We need demilitarization now.” (-Uahikea Maile)
“If you are a male & not supportive of the NATO war, not only are you subject to forced conscription but you can not even travel outside of the country legally now. I know this is falling on deaf ears in the West – but when are you going to call for an end to this war?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Nancy Pelosi lives lavishly while her San Francisco district is plagued with homelessness that she criminalizes. She is wicked.” (-Jory Michah; M.A. Christian Doctrine & History)
SADLY, THIS IS WHAT HE GETS FOR SHEEPDOGGING FOR THE CORRUPT WALL STREET DNC SERVICES CORPORATION. NO ONE EVER WANTED GROPEY JOE.
Deborah Hrbek, #Assange US lawsuit: “I have the right to assume that the U.S. government is not listening to my private & privileged conversations with my clients, & that info about other clients & cases I may have on my phone or laptop is secure from illegal govt. intrusion”
WHEN I WAS A KID & THE PMRC FANATICS & CROOKED JUVIE JUDGES WERE BOOTCAMPING KIDS FOR HAIRSPRAY & BLACK T SHIRTS
At least we had the Cutting Edge Happy Hour and Headbanger’s Ball-ya know? The director of the CIA’s kid Miles Copeland managed his brother’s band, the Police and ran our favorite record label, I.R.S. Records who somewhat suspiciously signed all our favorite bands-The Go-Go’s, The Alarm, The Fleshtones, Bangles, Three O’Clock, etc etc Weren’t The Cramps and Concrete Blonde and Wall Of Voodoo even on that label? My memory aint what it should be, we used to party quite a bit back in the 80’s. The great and wonderful PETER ZAREMBA memorably hosted the Sunday night show that introduced a lot of Midwesterners to The Replacements and Mary Chain and Love & Rockets and REM and Alex Chilton, it was so glorious watching Peter’s improv skits filmed at Boardner’s on Cherokee my old street, I think, and showing us all these whacky interviews with people like Lone Justice, Zodiac Mindwarp and The Pogues and shit. What do kids today get? A lotta bullshit. Nikki Minaj and Taylor Swift. When we had a cable access tv show in Boston in the early 90’s, the director may have been thinking about camp horror movies and robot toys and sexy vampire girls, but me, I was channeling “The Young Ones” and Peter Zaremba’s after hours, blue whale guzzlin’, fun lovin’ hijinks on the Happy Hour! Long Live The FLESHTONES! Long Live the Go Gos! Long Live The Alarm!
AS STOKELY CARMICHAEL TAUGHT US, “ORGANIZE! ORGANIZE! ORGANIZE!” …..BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE REVOLUTION, NOW IS THE TIME TO BOYCOTT PIG-MEDIA AND PLANT YOUR GARDENS, TRADE SEEDS, STOCK YOUR BASEMENTS, PREPARE FOR THE WORST, ORGANIZE YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, AND EDUCATE YOUR PEOPLE! STAY WILD! STAY FREE! GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ShDbp3YlZw
“The Story is old, I know, but still it goes on…” (-The Smiths)
“We’re not allowed to know who’s calling what shots behind the veils of secrecy. All we’re allowed to see is our governments continually advancing the same imperial policies over and over again regardless of who’s in office. They never let us see who’s actually making those calls.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The Democratic Party rehabilitated George W. Bush. The Democratic Party rehabilitated Dick Cheney. The Democratic Party rehabilitated the FBI and the CIA. The Democratic Party has used Trump as an excuse to bury the anti-war movement after Obama killed it.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“The US regime continues to show its blatant neocolonialist practices, ordering sovereign countries in Africa not to trade with Russia. Imagine being this arrogant. The US empire truly thinks the entire world is its property.” (-Benjamin Norton)
“Starting when it investigated Trump for a fictitious conspiracy with Russia, the FBI has given media outlets a lot of free content, and profit. I don’t understand why FBI brass don’t just cut out the middle man and launch their own news network.” (-Aaron Mate)
“Your US tax dollars are paying to flood Europe with heavy weapons and one of America’s top networks regrets investigating the issue. With special apologies to Raytheon and the Ghost of Kiev. Look how desperate neocons are to enforce silence on the Ukrainian military’s copious crimes, including dumping petal mines on Donetsk civilians Zero attempt to debunk our entirely factual report on the many opposition activists kidnapped and/or murdered under Zelensky’s watch Many Americans were upset that $90 million of their money was spent on Pelosi’s reckless junket to Taiwan, which deliberately escalated conflict with China and accelerated the process of unification, but consider this: that’s $90 million that won’t be spent on Ukrainian neo-Nazis.” (-Max Blumenthal)
TRAGEDY! TEENAGE HEAD WERE ONE OF MY TOP 5 CANADIAN BANDS! (RIP)
MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF PEOPLE BELIEVE DICK CHENEY HELPED FIX THE BUSH SELECTION, BUILT GITMO, HIRED BLACKWATER REGIME CHANGE MERCENARIES, AND STARTED ENDLESS WAR BASED ON LIES AND FALSE FLAGS, HE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES HIS DAUGHTER SAYS TRUMP IS BAD!
“Following a coordinated freakout by the Ukraine lobby, CBS self-censors a report stating the obvious. Amnesty International has also issued a bizarre half-apology for issuing a single report (out of 40+) on well-documented abuses of civilians by the Ukrainian army.” (-Max Blumenthal)
President Barack Obama weaponized the Espionage Act to prosecute those who provided classified information to the press. The Obama White House, whose assault on civil liberties was worse than those of the Bush administration, used the 1917 Act, designed to prosecute spies, against eight people who leaked information to the media including — Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake,Chelsea Manning,Jeffrey Sterling and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites.
Also under The Espionage Act, Joshua Schulte, a former CIA software engineer, was convicted on July 13 of the so-called Vault 7 leak, published by WikiLeaks in 2017, which revealed how the C.I.A. hacked Apple and Android smartphones and turned internet-connected televisions into listening devices. He faces up to 80 years in prison. Assange — although he is a publisher and not a U.S. citizen, and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication, was indicted by the Trump administration under the Act
Obama used the Espionage Act against those who provided information to the media more than all previous administrations combined.
My first imaginary band consisted of me, and about four other middle school heavy metal hoodlums I met in the special needs behavioral classroom named Deke, Dustin, his older brother “Don’t Fuck With…” Danny who was like my main protector back then; J.R. who was also sometimes known as “The Rat”-not because he snitched on anybody but he had one of those halfassed Joe Dirt mustaches and wore a satin jacket from Spencer Gifts in the mall with the RATT logo on the back of it, him n Deke were inseparable chainsmoker metalheads, like Bill N Ted-twin Spicolis talking about the Michael Schenker Group and Gary Moore, Carlos Cavazo and Warren Dimartini. They were both like deedle deedle guitar heroes in training. I was mostly into like Adam Ant, Culture Club, Prince and Duran Duran who they thought were gay, and I wore glasses which were a real no-no in the Future Villain Bands of young Amurkkka. Also, Deke probably wanted a better looking blonde haired guy with a Robert Plant or Bruce Dickinson vocal range. There was some older guy in town like that, I think he wanted to join like, the older rich kid dickhead bully cover band who played like KISS and Zeppelin and stuff, I think they were called Attack? Anyways, it was us, and sometimes, a kid in a Member’s Only jacket named Chris, who was the school psychiatrist’s son but his dad refused to buy him drums, Dustin was forbidden from hanging out with me or Dekan and used to have to change his clothes on the bus-he wanted to wear rebellious spiked bracelets and checkered Vans and parachute pants and black concert t shirts like the rest of us, but was forced to wear the preppie pink Izods that were the unofficial school uniform at the rich white suburbia school we went to. Mostly we walked around on the dirt trails, went to Music Land to look at records, loitered in front of the arcade, smoked Marlboros, sneered a lot. Dekan impressed everybody with learning “Eruption” and “Crazy Train” before the older rich and popular kids did. We played covers mostly, like “Livin’ After Midnight” and “Round And Round” and “Aint Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” out there at the Ross family, ranch style home when the parents were gone. Oh yeah, then we brought in Dave, cause Dustin and Dan were not allowed to come around that often and always got in some kinda trouble if they did. Dan had to sneak his guitar out of the house, he ran a stolen BMX chop shop in my basement. Those guys came from these strict military families that wanted them to hunt, and gave ’em guns and crossbows, but did not like them making music, cutting and pasting together homemade xerox art, anti-school fanzines with grotesque caricatures of admin and coaches and wrestling team dickheads, or painting crazy logos on t shirts. I wore feather earrings, string ties, homemade punk shirts, painted on jeans, was always like crazy gluing broken bits of mirror onto my suitjacket lapels, you know like an even lower budget Duckie from “Pretty In Pink”. Total new wave loser with the paisley suspenders and old man dress shoes. You probably already heard the one about how I told the army recruiter my career goal was the become the male Patti Smith. You shoulda seen the horror and dismay on the faces of the army guys when they saw my big Pegasus Trapper Keeper overflowing with pinups from Smash Hits magazine of Iggy and Ziggy and Flesh for Lulu and Pete Burns and Marilyn and Boy George and all that New Romantic Blitz Club & Batcave shit. I was always being after school detained, paddled, Saturday Schooled, or suspended, or having to get pink notes signed by my parents for dress code infractions, it was really the eyeliner they were mostly just nuts over. You know that’s when I discovered “Scary Monsters & Super Creeps” and “Hunky Dory” and “Ziggy Stardust” and had less and less patience for those fucking authoritarians who worked so hard to belittle me and mock all my creative endeavors and hassle me all the time. I got in trouble for drawing Flesh for Lulu and Cure logos in my textbooks, they sent me to bible school, detention all, juvenile probation, diversion, curfews, special extra dresscodes, haircuts, the whole nightmare, just Dr. Phil’d me for years on fucking end. When I got contacts, that’s when it ALL CHANGED. Girls. More than a couple, more than a few. Girls galore. Deke looked like a cross between Billy Idol and Colin from GBH, as we got older-his mom gave him some kinda flash sports car and he started dating a goth chick named Diane, who’s only friend was my goth girlfriend, Steffani. We were already drifting apart. They were almost all recruited into the military at 18. We never even got anything really off the ground, but that was where it all starts, guys in jean jackets with little Billy Idol and Van Halen and Guns N Roses and Hanoi Rocks buttons and black leather jackets hanging around each other, listening to Ozzy and Van Halen and saying they’re a band.
Me and Dave stuck together and eventually found some other guys. First we got this popular kid who was older-him and me were like the town’s token new wavers-but he was a star for being a DJ and was really good looking, whereas I was like a punching bag for being strange and really not so good looking. That guy showed up at my apartment one day with a scarf on and a Dogs D’Amour record and a big bottle of Jack Daniels and he was in. He loved INXS and Duran Duran and Prince and Circus Of Power and Mother Love Bone and played with us for about a year and a half, but then he left the band to play with all these guitar teacher, mainstream Journey type guys, who had real equipment, and he became the singer of Who’s Drivin’, a lame top 40 cover band that played at a pizza place called Parrason’s in the mall. So we had to find a replacement for him. The unlikely next bassist was sortof a jock, but not really, he played sports but did not have the same dumbfuck sensibility the others did-he hung around some guys who weren’t really rednecks and weren’t really jocks, they were like the John Goodman character on that sit-com, LARGE men who drank beer and played poker. Bowling team type of personalities. He became our bassplayer. We drank a lot of beer together and I got him into the Deadboys and Iggy. Kid from Catholic school marching band came in on drums, an older guy from a nearby town was the second guitar player and he knew all about old music so we started sponging up all kindsa diverse new influences from his elaborate closet filled with records. Bands we’d never heard of back then, like Theater Of Hate and The Fast. I had become obsessed with Hanoi Rocks and Generation X by then. Those characters really imprinted on my damaged teen psyche. I kinda never got over any of ’em. Some of ’em are dead now, it’s really heartbreaking.
MORE ON DEADEND BANDS IN NOWHERE TOWNS
I had these metalhead friends named Ron n Kelly, they were troubled youth. They were both really into horror movies, combat boots, dead cats, serial killers, the occult, anything offensive or shocking to squares and prudes. Remember that cat from “Bloom County” comic strips-Bill the Cat? We all used to draw him on our school folders and shit. We used to ride around in Kelly’s shitty hatchback car with all the stupid bumper stickers on the back, playing WASP, really loud. I remember them liking Dangerous Toys and Alice Cooper, too. They were super psyched when they got a copy of that old Charles Manson record, “Lie” from a record store in Columbus. You know those really dumb looking, whole forearm spiked leather bracelets some death rockers used to wear? That was Kelly, and the River’s Edge trailer park vermin obligatory army surplus coat with heavy metal pins on it and pentagrams drawn with black sharpie that reeked of cigarettes and reefer from across the street. Ron was a bit more sensitive cause his mom was gone, he was a painter, painted big portraits, my mom still has one he did of me in a graveyard. Ron also got a guitar and dyed his hair black like ours and attempted to join one of our many punkroll garage ruckus beer bands. We were both really into that first L.A. Guns record back then and I remember very vividly jamming to “One More Reason” and “Electric Gypsy” with him up in my infamous purple apartment while drinking 12 packs of Budweiser, back in the day. We had a big poster of the Hendrix experience in one room, a big poster of Bowie‘s “Aladdin Sane” in the other, a vintage mirror with pink flamingos from my grandmother’s basement that sadly got broken, a zebra print chair, a stinky couch and a boombox and a record player. We also had that first White Zombie lp borrowed from a grumpy older dude down the hall. They were a little bit like Beavis and Butthead, like Kelly always sorta picked on Ron, and for some reason, Ron being a sweet natured, good egg, he just kinda took it. I think Kelly later ended up goin’ out with my witchy death rock girlfriend for awhile. He eventually had a mohawk after graduation and a pet rat and was actually pretty fuckin’ radical for that town, back then. Poor Ron, he got better and better as an artist and guitarist, but like so many of our blue collar brothers raised by one parent in the deadend Midwest, he was fed into the military by the system. He was one of the few who joined the army who did not seem to regret it, he learned some technical photography skills and now, he has his own thriving adult-world, commercial photography business with his wife, God bless him.
Penelope Spheeris mighta intended her “Decline” movies as cautionary tales, but when me and my friends watched them, it just made us wanna relocate to Hollywood. We could all identify with Guns N Roses and Faster Pussycat, esp. “Out To Get Me, they were just like us. Burntout little Hanoi Rocks fans. We were all a little bit punk and a little bit metal, there really was no punk scene where we came from, just some misfit kids who liked Suicidal Tendencies and The Dils and New Order and those first two Motley Crue records. I don’t know what happened to Kelly but it usually went bad for anybody who stayed in that town. Several of my teenage new wave friends killed themselves, or were murdered there. The town screws really went out of their way to bootcamp and humiliate me until I had no real choice but to flee that part of the country-they just never let up, once they get you on their list. It was the anti-rock PMRC era, and the rich suburbanite sports moms were hysterical about my corrupting, corrosive new wave influence upon their lily-white children. I gave everybody books and records and shit. At least one friend who made in big in straight society has said I was a crucial part of that. When I stupidly returned to that part of the country years later, it was the same exact shit, all over again. You can not change that fortunate son ruling class sports hierarchy in the flyover states. The Kendoll rich boys in their big white mama mansions will always be above the law celebrities, and the working-class weirdos will always be targets of the screws. Of course, the ones who got the hall pass from the ruling class, or who were assimilated into the corrupt sham never even wanna know the truth of how things are for their “uneducated” or “dysfunctional” former peers, but I saw how that injustice system broke more than a few of my allies. The ones who weren’t herded into the marines or married into wealth went through a never ending gauntlet of multi-generational alcoholism and depression, factory life hell, probation, piss tests, DUI’s, 12 steps, psych ward, holy roller churches, back to the assembly line, sixteen hour days, meltdowns, pressure, judgement, evictions, crackpipe, freakout, suicide. Of what survivors remain, I’m not really in touch with any of ’em. I think a couple might still have some kinda Louie Louie Wild Thing Animal House garage band. None of ’em seem at all activated or radicalized. Probably one or two of ’em say they Dislike Trump, that’s as punk as they get, but are conspicuously silent when Biden does all the exact same shit, caging kids, sucking up to Israel and the Saudis, drug war, gutting social safety nets and just blaming it on rotating villains. Censoring the internet, escalating the warpig provocations. I’m still anti war, anti racist, anti fascist, pro free speech, pro working class, pro creativity, pro human rights. I get a sad pang inside when I think about my lost lads who are dead now.
They were basically hounded into the grave by the same system everybody pretends is so fair and peachy keen, s’long as they get to keep their own special-class privileges.
I know the college safespace shitlibs cancelled Dr. Seuss, like they do everything in their cloistered elitist shitlib feelings, special preference gentrification world, but he got it all right on the money with the Starbellied Sneetches. The same exact people who retroactively disapproved his racist WW2 era cartoons, they are all jumpin’ up n down like drunk Buckeyes fans cheering for Zelensky, blaming all their personal shit and inflation on “RUSSIANS!” The Republikkkans been similarly trained to Blame China. They keep saying China took our money or China took our jobs, when in fact, Wall Street stuffed shirts gleefully sent all the manufacturing to Chinese sweat shops and Murkkka never even paid ’em what they are owed, so now the Murkkkans want war on everybody-even their own people Twitter cop accused of pre crime or Wrongthink. All madness, all the time, and Israel wants to steal Iran. End the wars. Rich people suck.
I’m on a different schedule than my family so I’m probably spending too many hours alone everyday which always kinda causes me to drift back into the past since any kind of groovy future was stolen by the billionaires and neo-cons. Had a friend named Mike Mindless, he sadly is dead (RIP) but anyways he was really into alot of the same stuff as me-Misfits, Deadboys, NY Dolls, Mexican wrestling and comic books and thrift store retro black velvet painting type garbage and like Godzilla flea market subculture. He was also kindof a progressive activist, maybe not as radical leftist as I was, but he understood how we were all being played by the good cop/bad cop bullshit culture war duopoly. Mike had so many good stories about kinda roadieing for the Deadboys and shit. He had a band called The Skulls and my older guitarplayer, BAM, friend used to buy all the $1 vinyl from the cutout bins and we played that record to death and also, “Keeping Up With The Joneses” and the Little Kings. Man, the eighties had such a cool underground scene, you know? NYC was still like a bombed out Mad Max counterculture anarchist paradise! You could just hangout in the park all day and meet cool people. Hollywood had that whole goth and cowpunk scene with The Gun Club and Horseheads and we used to read all those punk magazines from the coasts and dream of relocating there and signing to Slash records. Many of my local pals from that horrible town were less hated and maligned than I was, like a couple of my friends had brothers who were jocks, or mainstream popular status quo catholic school girlfriends, or just fit in, more than I did because they did not wear black leather pants or makeup and shit. It took them longer to wanna leave that place. We did road trips whenever we could in these rundown, unreliable vehicles we bought cheap from Little Ceasers delivery guys from small farm towns who all went to this mechanic trade school. Also, one of my heavy metal girlfriends, the female bassist of a Metallica covers band, her mom’s boyfriend ran the speed parts shop. I remember when we got that Smack cassette from an Indianapolis record store. That really was a major moment that totally electrified me. That singer and that sound, was at once urgent and haunting-kinda goth, kinda glam, little bit punk and as Viv on “The Young Ones” jacket said, “very metal”. I knew that was what I wanted to do. Like I said, summa my collaborators were more orthodox, one guy was into like, the Chili Peppers, one guy was into Minor Threat and Fugazi. I think my best pal Dave was still really into Steve Vai and just discovering that first Peter Murphy record, “Love Hysteria”, which we all thought was pretty fantastic. The older geezer down the hall was digging Big Black and the Amphetamine records bands. All I knew was I wanted to get the fuck outta that place. Groups of older jocks would follow me outta the mall, ya know, and knock the Icee outta my hand, knock me on the pavement, “fag! fag!” It was old hat by then, I’d been sorta traumatized by these same suburban assholes since the fourth grade. I was really getting sick of it. Some of those other guys liked to talk about being some kinda hooligan street gang tough guys, but some of ’em RAN anytime they saw my usual wouldbe assailants. Anytime I set foot out in the public eye, these brainless karate kid fuckers in the rising sun muscle shirts and big boofy Bon Jovi hair would stop their Transmaros and get out to chase me around or insult or assault or otherwise slander, smear and intimidate me, it was becoming real psychologically torturous, but my more popular friends with like the pretty relatives and shit, just did not get it, the desiore I had to escape, cause they weren’t really sharing the same experience. I hated those fratboys. I did not want to win their acceptance or learn how to fit in with them, which was the main diff between me and summa my former bandmates. I wanted to runaway to California and meet The Ringling Sisters. I wrote letters to people I found in the classifieds of “Maximum Rocknroll” and “Flipside” magazine. I had a lotta pen pals from outta state-we’d write each other pained letters about our outcast status as weirdo punks from nowhere places, all us no ones making crazy xerox art and trading heartfelt compilation tapes. “Psychocandy” was a real big influence. Then, “Darklands” came out and made us want to write better songs that were more introspective and melodic instead of just loud fast complaining about the juvenile authorities, dummy sports people, Reagan, the malls, and Tipper Gore.
JOHN DISSED
If you aint already hip to his stuff, you need to checkout this guy, John Dissed, he’s sort of a modern day Billy Bragg.
“Zelensky’s immaturity & fascist tendencies are once again on display with his irrational call for stigmatizing all Russians. But this is the morality of the “collective West.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“If Trump broke the law then he should face the consequences but I am so tired of one man being a bigger story than the corrupt capitalist system that we live under which puts the endless greed of corporations and billionaires over the basic needs of the people and planet.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Westerners think they are free because they can criticize their president or PM, when a small amount of research quickly reveals that those officials aren’t the ones calling the shots on any issue of importance. Westerners aren’t even allowed to know who their real government is.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“There’s no Russian imperialism. There’s no Chinese imperialism. There is only ONE imperialism and it’s led by the United States.” (-Danny Haiphong)
t all just keeps vanishing! Wish I had some whiskey! (RIP)
LOW LIFE
Yeah you know, me and all my friends liked The Smiths and The Cure and Echo and Sisters Of Mercy and all that stuff, but FOR YEARS, this New Order record was such a big part of our teen subculture, it would be difficult to overstate it’s importance, ya know when they threw me into that cold cement solitary confinement closet at J.D.C., it was playing in my mind from start to finish. When I was alone at various older people’s apartments in NYC running up phone bills and eternally missing and mooning and swooning over some beautiful blonde first crush Smiths chick, this was always playing in the background and in our hearts. “Oh how I cannot bear the thought of you…” I’m sentimental about all those kids and all that music.
“Westerners say “In that tyrannical regime over there they’re not even allowed to criticize their government!” Okay, but at least they’re allowed to know who their government IS. They get to know who’s calling the shots in their country. In that sense they’re freer than you are.” (-Cait Johnstone)
JOHNNY THUNDERS MEMORIAL, ENTER THE WORLD FAMOUS MISTER RATBOY
I met Ratboy at the Thunders memorial and we became fast friends, we even had a band for a minute and a half, in some low rent rehearsal space in alphabet city he played, I sang, his Piss Factory ex wife played bass and so did a French guy I think and a drummer who may have been from The Lunachicks. Then he got Chris Barry and I went back to Boston and did the Imitations who became The Bastards. Jim Rinn just found some old basement demotapes of me and The Bastards from back then that were shocking to hear after so many years have passed. But Yeah, both Motorcycle Boy and Pillbox had a huge impact on me and all my closest friends. I loved everything about both of those bands. I learned so much from Chris Barry and Ratboy, they will always have a special place in my heart.
Another band I was really into were The Nymphs, it felt like Inger Lorre was a real kindred spirit, we were both into the same kinda vibes. And hats. and feathers.
This project between Eduardo Martinez (The FLAMING SIDEBURNS) and Joe Klenner (CORAZONES MUERTOS) is a SMACK/The FISHFACES project. First, It was supposed to be just one song, but it ended up as a whole 12 song album on which you’ll hear SMACK classics such as “Good Morning Headache”, “Through The Glass”, or “Skin Alley”, and FISHFACES songs like “So High The Moon”, “Crazy Diamonds”, or “Wide Awake.”
The original spirit of the songs can be found in these covers, this mix of AC/DC hard rock with 70s pychedelic rock like The DOORS.
In 2017, many people still don’t know anything about SMACK, and even less about The FISHFACES, so this could be a good introduction to these fine rock’n’roll bands from Finland. /Laurent C.
It’s good to see that someone finally decided to make a SMACK/Claude tribute album. Surprisingly, this comes from French record label Alive and Kickin’. Honestly, SMACK unfortunately never achieved any success in France (although their “Live Desire” album was also released on French record label High Dragon Records), and I wonder if they ever did outide of their homeland Finland. Nevertheless, the impact and influence they had has been huge and invaluable, from GUNS N’ ROSES to NIRVANA among others.
Californian punk rock’n’rollers MINK DAGGERS open this tribute album with a great version of the STOOGES-esque “Some Fun”, just before The STREET WALKIN’ CHEETAHS show us that they still know how to rock hard with “Criminal.” PLASTIC TEARS‘ version of “Run Rabbit Run” sounds quite similar to the original, but at least it sounds good. LEFTOVERS offer us “Good Morning Headache” while DEAD FURIES rock to “Pass That Bottle.”
One of my favourite SMACK songs, probably their most glam rockin’ one, “Buy This Town” is done with style by HIRED GUNS, a band that was formed especially for this tribute album, with Matt (Alive and Kickin’ records boss on vocals)! Italian folk singer CHRIS covers “Trust On You” in an interesting NIKKI SUDDEN way, while EDUARDO E.MARTINEZ & THE THUNDERCLOUDS lean to the hard rock side of SMACK with “I Want Somebody.” STREET WALKIN’ CHEETAH‘s Frank Meyer and Dino Everett offer us a semi acoustic version of “Little Sister”, creating an atmosphere reminding of The DOORS, Claude probably would have loved this version! ANITA CHELLAMAH AND TIMO KALTIO‘s version of “Mad Animal Shuffle” is an amazing acoustic blues bringing desert images to mind, great to hear the voice of The CHERRY BOMBZ again!
Swedish glam punks TRENCH DOGS teamed up with HIRED GUNS to bring us a cool sleazy cover of “Street Hog Blues.”Argentina is also on this record, with CORAZONES MUERTOS and their high energy street punk version of “Can You Dig it.” EDUARDO MARTINEZ is back with his GANG and a pretty good version of “Time Of Wine and Flowers.” Paris’ beautiful losers GUTTERCATS could only fit on here, with their stripped down version of The FISHFACES‘ “Wide Awake”, and The FLAMING SIDEBURNS also chose the acoustic road with “Zombie Shitheel.”
Whether bands decided to stick to the originals or offer more personal versions of these fantastic songs, you won’t find any bad covers on “Smacked!” Successful gamble! /Laurent C.
“Run Rabbit Run”, the new PLASTIC TEARS video is also the first single of “Smacked!” (A Tribute to SMACK‘s lead singer Claude) that will be out on French record label Alive and Kicking Music.
Los Angeles doesn’t only produce MOTLEY CRUE/GUNS N’ ROSES clones. Look at SMASH FASHION for instance, these guys get most of their influences from the swinging 60s and sparkling 70s. Is it surprising? Not that much when you look at the band line-up: Nigel Mogg (ex-QUIREBOYS), Repo (ex-SMACK), Lloyd Stuart Casson (ex-ROCK CITY ANGELS) and lead singer Roger Deering who probably owns more than one or two SLADE, MOTT THE HOOPLE or FACES records!
Only two songs on this limited edition 7″: “Blame it On The Brandy”, a killer song with a great T.REX/Bowie guitar riff and a pretty catchy chorus, and “Marionette, a track that was previously recorded and which sounds a bit like a mix of STONES and CHEAP TRICK with 70s glitter rock backing vocals!
These rock’n’roll dandies definitely have good tastes and this is rare enough to be underlined these days. Now let’s play the hell out of these songs while waiting for a new album!/Laurent C.http://www.smashfashionmusic.com/news
Passed biggest military budget in history of $840 billion/year 
Veglam 