“They condition us to hate each other because they want you to blame your neighbor who looks different than you so you won’t wake up and realize that we have far more in common with our neighbors than both corporate parties who actively rig the system against us.” (-Ryan Knight)
“In liberal brainworm land, Julian Assange is not a journalist but Joe Biden’s spin doctor is.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Only the most naive or dishonest believe that mass shootings in the U.S. can only be explained by the availability of guns. We all know that violence is endemic to this culture. How else can one explain the absence of opposition to U.S. warmongering?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“I know this is a mystifyingly fringe view in what passes for today’s “intellectuals,” but avoiding a US-Russia conflict (and so nuclear war) is in fact the most important task. It’s not “justice” to gamble with the lives of millions and humanity’s future.” (-Branko Marcetic)
“Our family has been robbed of four years together which we will never get back. He needs to come home. We need him home.” (-Stella Assange)
ANARCHY EVERYWHERE! CORPORATIONS POISON US WITH IMPUNITY & COVER FROM IDENTITARIAN BOUTIQUE SAFESPACE NATO FAUXWOKE FAKE LEFT SHITLIBS! PRO WAR POLITENESS HUSTLERS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS!
You know who’s back in the studio making new music for people who love real old school traditional punknroll is none other than our colleagues and kindred spirits from Australia, the wild and reckless Leftards, if you aint hip to ’em, add ’em to all your social media and follow ’em and shit, you’ll love ’em.
“Democrat-aligned media are allowed to voice some skepticism about war narratives with China while unquestioningly pushing war narratives about Russia. The inverse is true of Republican-aligned media.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Is it a sign of my campaign’s strength that the Elite of DC’s establishment media simultaneously and shamelessly published an orchestrated and baseless lie to smear me, even before I announce my presidential campaign? CBS News’s Bob Costa, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Vanity Fair, and Salon are circulating fake news that the American people have come to expect and despise. Steve Bannon has nothing to do with my presidential campaign. I have never discussed a presidential run with Mr. Bannon. Journalism should be about “investigate and report” not “invent and report.” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
IF I BELIEVED THEY EVER FIXED THE DIEBOLD HACKABLE VOTING MACHINES OR THEY WEREN’T ALLOWED TO CONTROL THE DEBATES & CANCEL DEBATES & FIX THE PRIMARIES & SHIT & ACTUALLY COUNTED THE VOTES, I’D VOTE FOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. FOR SURE! ONLY ONE TALKIN’ BOUT PALESTINE! WHERE ARE YOUR SHITLIB SUPERSTARS? BUSY AT THE RED CARPET CREEPY ILLUMINATI GALA, OH YEAH!
“Avoiding nuclear war is the single most important thing in the world. This would be obvious to everyone if it weren’t for unforgivable levels of mass media malpractice.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
DEPECHE MODE FOREVER
“And I haven’t felt so alive in years…”
R.I.P. Al Jaffee, ya know when I was growing up we did not have the internet or cellphones or any of that shit, so we did alot of reading and drawing and “Mad Magazine” was my world as a youngster, pre New Wave, it was “Mad”, “Saturday Night Live”, the Monkees, Beatles, comicbooks, Houdini, then I discovered The Doors and Stones and “Playboy” and “Penthouse” and then, it was Prince, the Clash, “Creem” and Van Halen, right? Psychedelic Furs and Duran, Thompson Twins, Billy Idol, Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, Nik Kershaw, the Smiths, even U2 and the Police, on my Sony Walkman I’m ashamed to say….Depeche Mode was one of my main bands as a kid, what I listened to with my first love, some other later loves, the goth chcik from california who used to sneak me into her basement and I came to love her warm house but they tore it down to make more parking lots for the hospital-only industries in that town were the tankplant, the hospital, and the jails, ya know “Black Celebration” is more impactful and meaningful now than it even wa s when they wrote it cause you know all the songs are about death, drinking, seeking some kinda sanctuary from all the fear and alienation in some intimacy. Of course “Memento Mori” seems like a bit of a sequal to “Black Celebration”. I wish they woulda paid Alan Wilder and he coulda stayed with the band, you hear the golden era songs and there’s no question that his genius synth contributions enhanced Martin’s songwriting. I got some kinda dread about having to go out in public today, I just don’t like having to fuck with people very often anymore. I am watching that Brooke Shields movie and she is talking about the problem with beauty and objectification and everybody feeling like they somehow own you because of the way you look if you are born beautiful,everybody wants to capture and possess that beauty, no matter what one may be on the inside. Does not even matter, the beauty is there to be worshipped, bought, worshipped, possessed..That same kinda thing probably happened to my original Depeche Mode girlfriend, as her beauty blossomed beyond description, she was offered everything by everybody so it became increasingly impossible for her to stay who she was when we were young and weird, traumatized teenagers in mourning together, clinging to one another, she became accepted by the world, validated, pursued, applauded, all that stuff. I did not. It’s a bit of a comedy, really, the whole ride is definitely a roller coaster, we finally find friends and they have to leave us either in death or in their celebrity or capitulation or assimilation or whatever. I was thinking about my old goth girlfriends and once close friends who became psychiatrists and how they might think I’m crazier than their actual patients now cause I stuck to the code, ya know what I mean? All those lyrics still mean everything to me, Morrissey’s like that, too, ya know he mentions Gen X and X Ray Spex in his “Rebels Without Applause” tune, some of us were just not made to be part of the winning winner’s popularity contest, acquisition oriented, propertarian beauty world, I’m not meant for capitalist society, and even though Mozzer actually did succeed, and became rich and adored, he still was able to kinda stick to his own ways. I did not change my beliefs to marry into wealth or get the college P.C. official narrative makeover like all the former acquaintances who were conditioned to dismiss all corruption and injustice as mere “conspiracy theories” or “coincidences” or like, “human error and accidental oopsy daisy oversight” like with the Blackrock owned Norfolk Southern train wreck resulting somehow in an intentional “controlled burn” toxic fire in Palestine. I dunno, man, I never became inclined to just trust the loving and philanthropic billionaires to be my super scientific spaceman saviors for woke science. I never bought into the idea that the deep state spooks should be allowed to control the internet or be the media, or that the dark organizations that assassinated MLK and Malcolm X, John Lennon (according to former governor and Navy Seal, Jesse Ventura!) and the Kennedys were the good guys for DC Comics heroism and apple pie and marketing diversity.”Black Celebration” remains one of my favorite records even in my fifties. I only wanna hear music that has real heart. Now they are grooming people to have no hearts, it’s fuckedup, man.
sounds pretty much exactly like you’d expect it to-close your eyes, give me your hands, darlin’, and just imagine ageless Susannah’s coy eternal teenager flirtatious eighties new wave popstar radio voice singing the Rolling Stones song, “Under My Thumb.” You can hear her in your head already, if you were a Paisley Revival eighties kid like I was, or probably even if you’re just a casual mainstream radio listener. I always loved pretty much everything by the Bangles EXCEPT “Walk Like An Egyptian”. I always hated that song, the drums were horrible, whole thing was insipid, but man Susaanah is a real cool rocknroll girl ya know she always selects the best covers, like “Hazy Shade Of Winter” or “If She Knw What She Wants”. I dunno if you saw that movie her mom directed back then, “The Allnighter” but me I always had to see and hear anything she was part of, it’s partly because of her eyes I admit it upfront, and partly cause I find her voice really soothing and like I said her taste is always just exquisite and impeccable. Even Prince fell for Susannah. Being famous is a fuckedup headtrip and ruins most people who have it inflicted upon them, but the real cool thing about Susannah Hoffs is how all sources confirm she is still real people relatable, loves music, writes, is a mom, sometimes I just youtube her and always dig all her live stuff cause she is pop perfection, usually. So yeah if you love her half as much as I do, dig into her new album “Deep End”. It’s pretty fab, like all her stuff usually is. I been her fan since “Hero Takes A Fall”. Been workin outside with the hot sun burning up my back, had to take a break here, hydrate, take my leather vest off, definitely one of those wifebeater only days, gonna have some sunburn on my shoulders, muscles still sore from relocating 15 big buckets of gravel yesterday, gotta go back to the DMV with more paperwork today, don’t expect the bureaucrat Angent Screwyou to let me have my I.D. today, either, really, the system’s meant to torture poor people. Too much work to do, had a couple hours off yesterday, then it’s right back to landscaping, yardwork, adolescent caregiving and part time attending to an older sick person’s needs, I ain’t complainin’ really, aside from the DMV and nonstop stress of parenthood, everything’s okay and I got a Susannah Hoffs song in my head. How fun that must be to have a voice like that! She’s sensational, no wonder she’s a big star-remember when stars were talented in some way, either exceptional as writers or musicians or bringing a unique perspective or point of view, or for having a unique sound to their voice? Now it’s just boy band and manufactured slut puppet rich kids make believing they just invented cross dressing and sicko occult ritual bullshit with a drum machine,.Bring back the Bangles. The Go Go’s, Dream Syndicate, Three O’Clock, ya know? People with talent and ideas saying their own thing. I thought Susannah’s frequent collaborator, Matthew Sweet was only so-so ho-hum back in the day, like I dug his song, “Girlfriend” but thought to myself, “he ain’t no Jim Ellison!” Now all that toxic Miley Cyrus hot garbage the industry pushed on us that aint even music man, makes me have more begrudging appreciation for like even Evan Dando who I thought was just some dumb pothead tall rich kid in an army suplus jacket playing slummy drug addict in the grunge years, he used to get on my nerves-now I can hear “Into Your Arms” by the Lemonheads and think, okay, at least there’s a song there, “Great Big No”, “Big Gay Heart”, Rick James Style”, I worked in Harvard Square during the peak of Alternahunk Evanmania so ya know I was just so NOT a Lemonheads enthusiast, but like I say, no real music is allowed on the airwaves anymore, so I end up revisiting the also-rans, even summa the stuff I thought was mediocre in the alternative era, summ that same shite even sounds almost decent, refreshingly melodic and humane, especially in the shadows of all that mass media promoted occult ritual plastic surgery pop, or push button video game post nu metal/pro war rage rawk they got now.
“Neither Party cares about you, their job is to keep you fighting each other while their donors steal everything we have. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about Black people, they care about Black votes, there’s a big difference
As long as they can get enough of our votes without actually doing anything, other than saying the GOP is racist, giving us some caring rhetoric and symbolism, they will. America, the land where 15 million people are about to be kicked off of Medicaid, but the big news is about a former President paying off a porn star. Imagine if we had a media that actually challenged what our Gov’t was telling them? Unfortunately, they are corporate owned stenographers, terrified of getting on the wrong side of the Establishment, whose job is not to inform, but to tell us what we are supposed to believe. Remember when the Biden Administration ended the 20 year occupation of Afghanistan after invading their country and killed an innocent man and his 9 family members with a drone strike on the way out?
Of course not, because reality is you only care about what the TV tells you to. How can you want Putin in jail and sit in America not caring about the fact that our Presidents are free? The US is still illegally occupying Syria while preaching to the world about respecting sovereignty. I get so tired of the US ‘holier than thou’ attitude, no country kills, steals, starves and interferes more than the US with the rest of the world. We recently even had politicians threatening to invade Mexico. Cut the shit please. It seems like it’s almost everyday now that I go on YouTube and see a different African leader talking about how the US murdered their leaders, couped their Gov’ts, stole their resources, and tried to force our values on them It’s almost like not everybody sees us as heroes. I will admit that it has been kind of nice watching countries all over the Global South telling the corrupt, lying, arrogant psychos from the US and their obedient partners in the West to their face about their hypocrisy and to get lost. The most dangerous Americans are the ones that are still convinced we live in a democracy, our Gov’t cares about people around the world, and their Party and corporate news channels are telling them the truth. Macron is having a tough time His country is on fire, countries in Africa have kicked France out, he got embarrassed letting his pals send him to China and he is tied to a sinking ship called the United States. It was inevitable that the US weaponizing the dollar against any country that disobeyed them was gonna result in the forming of alliances to protect themselves. You didn’t need a fancy college degree to figure that one out. No matter how many deaths the United States causes trying to hold on to their hegemony, it’s already too late. China won and they did it without bombing, couping and sanctioning half of the world.
The US likes to talks about the corruption in other countries Meanwhile at the Pentagon “Hey anybody seen that trillion dollars?” China is bringing Peace to the Middle East
The United States is bringing weapons to Ukraine. If you believe the owners are happy about the possibility of some kind of peace and stability coming to the Middle East or anywhere in the Global South, you have been successfully brainwashed. The US Gov’t is watching their rule of the world come to an end, and sadly our Oligarchy will not hesitate to kill or do whatever it takes to try to maintain their power and control. As Russia and China are trying to bring Peace and Stability to the Middle East, don’t think that the US won’t reach into their bag of terrorists to try to stop it. I don’t like Trump, and I don’t like this BS charge against him either. How about the Establishment either at least try to continue to pretend that this is a democracy and let the people decide if they want to vote for Trump, or arrest all of our other Presidents for their war crimes, if nobody is above the law? I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think there’s a “Statute of Limitations’ on murder.
The rulers of the US are terrified that our citizens might figure out that capitalism failed and only benefits them. The US is fighting to remain the rulers of the world and Americans not only see nothing wrong with that, but thinks that any country that refuses to obey us and wants to grow and improve the lives of their citizens is our enemy. Russia standing up to the white supremacist, terrorist organization called NATO has caused the US many problems,
Many in the world have been emboldened to stand up for themselves, and there are now too many countries for the US to sanction, coup and leaders to murder at one time.The great freedom loving, democracy of the United States recently gave a grand funeral to Madeleine Albright who said on National TV “Killing 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it”
That’s the real country we live in. Taibbi “The Gov’t and Social Media were working together to censor accounts and even censored information that they knew was true”
Medhi Hassan “Oh, yeah! Well you got this date wrong” Does anybody notice how little the United States Gov’t talks about the fact that Ukraine is being totally destroyed as a country?
No need to wonder why, it’s not some kind of strategy, it’s because they don’t care. NATO isn’t at war with Russia, they are providing the weapons, cash, training, intelligence, strategy and Ukraine is providing the dead bodies and destroyed country. While they have people focusing on Trump, Wagner has now taken over and is chilling out in Bakhmut’s Police Station. I looked at several pictures and videos of Bakhmut
Holy Shit!
Is that what winning looks like now? The West came together and placed 10 rounds of economic sanctions on Russia designed to destroy their economy for decades
They spent $125 billion in weapons, cash, training and Intelligence to help Ukraine win Russia is still in Ukraine,and they are weak?
Zelensky is like a crackhead neighbor that keeps coming back for more with a story about how they just need a little more money and this time he is gonna use it and get his life together. Is it too much to ask for Americans to get this emotionally involved about the people in the Black and Brown countries around the world being killed and suffering from the sanctions placed by the United States? The West is panicking over the very thought that they have lost their ability to exploit Africa. I will admit that even when the Establishment got away with the Russiagate spy novel shit to try to get rid of Trump, I still never thought they’d stoop to something like trying to prosecute him for this Stormy Daniels nonsense.
We’ve become a bigger joke than I could imagine. Why does our media say that Taiwan is a country that China ‘considers’ part of its territory?
Almost every country in the world, including the US considers Taiwan to be part of China’s territory
The US just plays it both ways because they need to use Taiwan to weaken China. If the US cares about sovereignty why are they illegally in Syria?
If they care about human rights why are they giving $4 billion a year to Israel? If they care about democracy why do they organize coups?
If they care about freedom of speech and press why is Assange in jail?” (-Black In The Empire)
Been thinking about Spike quite a bit since his old bunch mutinied during the Covid Lockdowns and his best mate Guy Bailey passed away-looking forward to hearing that lp he co wrote with Guy Bailey they were workin’ on ya know he’s gonna record it with Chris Johnstone, Nigel Mogg and Rudy Richman later this year. I feel for the guy because I know what it’s like to have the whole pirate ship mutiny ala the Black Pearl also losing your dearest childhood brothers just makes every day feel so thin and fragile. God bless ’em. Myself, I feel like every cliche about growing old is coming true at once-wakeup feeding cats, making coffee, having teeth issues, knees goin’ out, arthiritic, bad back, PTSD, read the morning obituaries, end up liking the birds, cactus embedded in my hand becoming infected and I’m too blind to dig it out, even the total awareness of being an artless codger and sentimental fool forever longing for what is lost and can not be retrieved, complaining about his aches and pains, the ten daily vitamins, can’t remember certain words, shrinking vocabulary, the whole ordeal, the daily litany of lamentations.
“Oh baby what I wouldn’t give to live the way we used to live, hell yeah I prize my juvenelia, realize it’s growin’ up that kills ya” (-“Hey Remember” by the Naked Flames)
DUANE PETERS
I’ve known a lot of people who struggle with mental illnesses, and almost everybody I have ever known is hiding some kind of addiction-most usually that driving compulsion to obtain always more products or attain more status with titles or diplomas, endorsements or showoff sttus symbols, power trips, vanity, but even the prim and proper pretty talkers are usaully night time wine box guzzlers or big pharma middle class prescription pain pill abusers, so I aint gotta lot to say when the temperance league scolding committes and cancel culture nags all turn against somebody, Im not part of the lynchmob bogus culture war identity bubbles, I come from a pre P.C. world where they all told us they did not give a fuck and to get over it and get a haircut and get a real job and you aint a man unless you drive a really, really, really big truck and have a lotta money to buy a woman, like ya do. I’m not part of the fauxwoke world that judges and crucifies people with mental illness or substance issues in tumultuous, hateful, punishing times such as these where the state goes back n forth between glorifying violence when it’s time to steal oil or fuck with other countries sovereignty like in Peru where the Biden administration did their coup, kidnapped their democratically elected leader and have helped their puppet government assassinate reporters and over 75 protestors last I heard; and then wring their hands about how language is violence if they wanna take down some comedian for making too much sense, it’s a fucking crazy planet we’re living on, and just a handfull of billionaire motherfuckers are perpetuating a lot of the needless death and suffering. The way I see it, you aint no punk if comfortable college educated middle class people aint calling you a Russian Troll or Conspiracy Theorist. Ya know it’s all just like one long ongoing nightmarish heartbreak, watching all our loved ones dropoff one by one, my whole crew is dead and gone, I guess a couple survivors went into the deep retirement-rooms of recoverty, watching sports on television, that kinda stuff, or just flatout soldout and became just like their moms, ya know. It’s hard and lonely doing the long walks alone. I still wanna rock, I’m a like a one man landslide. I’ll tell ya who rocked like a motherfucker. Duane Peters, everything he did was rocknroll all the way, red blooded rebel rocker through and through, ya know he did not come to fuck around. One of the real punknroll motherfuckers, power to the people, street rat scavenger, creator of intensely cool clothing and music and songs and I don’t even care about skateboarding, I’m not a skateboarder, never have been, where I came form, that was like jock culture, not really subversive outlaw rebellious stoner culture, it was preppie jock assholes, the bullies and rich kids who skateboarded, so it was never my scene, it was the opposite of punk in Shmoehio, but I get the how it was different in California. I also don’t care at all about any famous ex skateboard pros having rivalries or beefs. Nothing to do with me. You know I’m always askin’ myself where have all the real punks gone? Most of ’em are dead already, only a few of us still living by any kinda real street level punk ethics, most people who call themsleves punques nowadays are just the rules following, propaganda consuming, stand in line eager beaver tv believers with disposable incomes showing off their three thousand dollar spiked jacket at the museum or whatever, I don’t even like those people-the Pink 182’s, I call ’em, the Offspring fans, that aint my scene, the Green Days might as well be Kalltha Kops Karens or Thank Obamas-only pro war when there is a Republikkkan president, they love the kkkops, and worship any and all authority figures but especially the identity politricks of the fauxgressive do nothing fraud squad supermodels-their preassigned, made for tv celebrity figureheads; and even their own behind the scenes string pulling George Soros and Bill Gates oppressors, I think they all have Stockholm Syndrome, ya know what I’m sayin’. Anyways, when I need a good dose of fast fix Alrite! and Fuck Yeah, Duane Peters has always been such a reliable right on go-to source of energetic anarchism and defying the system and flagrantly livin’ by his own instincts and beliefs. I loved that cat’s music even if he’s got a controversial or criminal past and is probably way, way to the right of me politically, I can see clearly how what used to be the left was all hijacked or infiltrated by Cointelpro disruptors and P.C. fauxwokes so ya know I don’t quit liking somebody’s wild rocknroll just cause their politics seem to shift, I think the left verus right arguments are irrelevant really, a big diversion, when both so called sides support tyranny, fascism, censorship, police state, and endless war. I know people online slag him off as Qanon and it’s possible he went crazy for awhile or fucked up here and there when he was grief stricken over the death of his kid, but I get that. I understand what a horrifying and agonizing hurt that must be everyday, I never “got over” any of my friend’s deaths, so ya know I stand with everybody struggling to make sense of this crazy fuckedup world of lies when it’s usually the corporate media and government doing all the real abuse and bullshitting and dividing all the rest of us. Some people say he’s got drug problems or mental health issues, fuck shit man, doesn’t everybody in tortuous times like these? I hope his other kid with Cory Parks is doing okay. We corresponded a little bit, back n forth on social media way back in the day before I got lockedout of social media for antiwar shitposting. I felt devastated with him when he lost his son in a car accident. I miss that guy, all his rocknroll smoked, he’s the personification of a total rocknroll motherfucker. I got a U.S. Bombs. patch on my Dickies jacket. Still carrying a little piece of black flag for Duane Peters! I don’t really care if the safespace shitlibs say he’s crazy, all his rocknroll still rocks L.A.M.F.
“Any psych students seeking a thesis project? Consider the #BlueAnon cult. They believe in a vast Trump-Russia conspiracy — in fact, in any allegation involving a Russian.
Members are affluent, employed by media outlets, and, like this chap, love spreading pro-war propaganda:” (-Aaron Mate)
“The US didn’t want Nord Stream built US threatened sanctions on companies that built it US tried to stop it from being used US said they would end it It gets blown up US celebrates it US says Russia must have done it Millions then believed Russia blew up their pipeline” (- Black In The Empire)
“The Democrats want you to believe that they are ushering in a new generation of leadership by replacing Nancy Pelosi with Hakeem Jeffries, but the only thing they’re doing is replacing one corporate sellout with another corporate sellout. I don’t ever want to hear again that Joe Biden and the Democrats are on the side of the working class after their betrayal of railroad workers who are simply fighting for paid sick leave.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The Democrats are an anti-union party just as much as Republicans, and I’m past ready for people to understand this and move accordingly. None of these politicians are truly fighting for workers. They’ll sell us out every time. Yep, even the squad and y’alls forever president.” (-Ashley Stevens)
JIMMY DORE WAS RIGHT THE WHOLE TIME!
“It’s 2022 and we have railroad workers that can’t get paid sick leave. And it’s not just them. Too many Americans go to work sick because they don’t have paid sick leave. All our government cares about is money.” (-Sabby Sabs)
“This message has to stretch far and wide.
Please directly message and/or call any railway workers you know.Since this is something that could set a precedent in the whole labor movement-
this kind of wildcat strike COULD be one that draws solidarity actions from other unions in the form of physically helping the strike line to keep scabs out, or blocking trains w trucks & buses etc And the strike has to be militant to keep scabs out.” (-Boots Riley)
“In the US, protestors are beaten, arrested, disappeared, and killed routinely.
In the 1960s and 70s, dozens of Black activists in the Black Panther Party were killed or jailed, some for the rest of their life. If China is “authoritarian,” then what is the United States?” (-Danny Haiphong)
“An investigation just came out showing Congress was involved in heavy insider trading with information they got concerning the pandemic. Yet again we see that we live in a Kleptocracy – rule by thieves. Insider trading is illegal when done by regular citizens but not when done by members of Congress. For a moment Congress pretended they were going to fix this problem with the STOCK Act but then they gutted it so that their criminal behavior could continue.” (-Lee Camp)
“Humbly, I have done over a hundred investigations, analysis and reporting on counterintelligence, internal security and HUMINT. I have been following Whitney Webb for over a year. In my opinion, she is one of the most brilliant, thorough and courageous journalists today.” (-Kevin Shipp)
“Good to see someone protesting the NY Times’ festival of war criminals and financial predators.
Netanyahu, Zelensky, Larry Fink and SBF on the same stage. Where is the antiwar movement?” (-Max Blumenthal)
People like me used to be able to congregate in the big cities and collaborate with like minded weirdos, ya know? People like me were even able to succeed in the genrations before ours, a big part of that was in forging communities with other outcast black sheep in locations where there is affordable living space, in pooling resources and sharing rehearsal spaces and shit like that. Everybody was scrapin’ their action togther with like duct tape and some furniture dragged in off the street, we were all just scavengers navigating a bombed out war zone but we had the otther black hole kids and we relied on each other, the rappers influenced the new wavers and vice versa, the clothing designers were helping the film makers and everybody did indie media and improvised their own right now inventions. It was way more alive back then and way more seemed possible. Wendy Wild used to get me in the Pyramid when I was a kid and nobody ever carded anybody at the Wah Wah Hut or Downtown Beirut, or almost anywher in NY until Giuliani started goin’ after Limelite for too many drug dealers, I loved dirty old NY in the 80’s-everybody was cool back then. ya know? Everybody looked like Sigue Sigue Sputnik times Liquid Sky back when I was a runaway and among the old punks there was a long tradition of cooperation and mutual aid. We were all in it together. People were happy to help. The Ramones helped the Deadboys meet their future manager-that’s how it used to be. Now, only rich people can live in the big cities and nobody helps anybody, except for other rich people. So I tried to get away from the evil forces of gentrification but they are always two steps behind me, even in a dead end, wind blown, monsoon faded, river stinks, brutal weather all year round, no hope, remote little graveyard town. All the businesses closed during Covid, but the tiny elite clique of hotel and art gallery and one bar owning millionaires, they fill the downtown retail window spaces up with art junk just to make it look like there are twenty businesses on that street but only about five of them are ever open. The rest are just property hoarders who prefer to not rent any secondary spaces to poor people, they’re just showing off some of their collectible old junk or art collections in retail spaces that are only open at once a month art walks, or oftentimes, never opened, not in the four or five years I’ve been here, anyway. Some smoke n mirror hucksters keep saying the town is booming, on the mend, making a big shitlib cukecumber water slurping, glorious comeback, and becoming a thriving tourist destination overnight, but that’s just wishful thinking hoopla coming from five developers and airbandb owners who are all fly by nights I don’t expect to be here much longer. They’ll do their usual bullshit cashgrabs, and move on. It’s too dead dull for city slickers here, who are used to non stop stimulation, there’s no strip joint here, no Ikea, or Home Depot, or rock concerts or anything, really-lotsa dirt and cactus, three gas stations, two hardware stores, a couple fast food businesses and a ridiculously jackedup and overpriced captive audience Wal Mart.
Wal Mart has us hostage, only place to go. The other local store has lettuce for $5 a head and Cheezit’s are $7. Wal Mart is the only game in town, where kids have to go to be social. That aint entertaining for those landlordly bourgeoise artisinal middle class people who wanna be seen, wanna be celebrities. The truth is the town is full of old broken down properties and going broke, sick and elderly old people. Alot of drugs are coming in and capturing preteens and teenagers. The restaurants keep dying off, one by one, cause nobody has that kindof money anymore-to eat out with. A fucking hamburger’s nine dollars, now. You can’t buy your kid a pack of chips-they’re four bucks. Only thing that’s stayed affordable is the soda pop that makes everybody fat and diabetic. There’s no real jobs, you can’t pay rent with minimum wage. Property owners want $99 a night for a tiny room, two hundred a week at the ninety nine dollar hotel, you dig? Disintegrating shitholes go for between eight hundred and two grand a month, I mean to rent a tiny place, we’re talking mobile homes, trailers in the desert. Ya know where I used to live there was a beautiful old hippie couple, they used to run a hotel until the man had a stroke, now his wife has to help him do everything, walks him, she obviously loves him very much. I always see them carrying bags of groceries because they have no car, someone was killed like right next door to them, so they are in my prayers alot. They have always reminded my wife and I of ourselves, if we are both still alive here, in twenty years. They always give me and my kid the peace sign. Like I said, beautiful. There’s a garage where I live now so I’ve made it my escapist work space. I been creating a little retreat in my spare time, an elder goth book haven, an eighties cassette tapes hideout, where I can get some briefest respite from loud teen media blare and bad trip hypnoscreens, there’s a big scotch tape photograph and old magazine pinups collage of all my saints lookin’ over me, it’s been kinda cold out there, but peace and quiet is nice every once in awhile. I’m pretty stressedout lately, we had to withdraw our kid from the local public school when the disability classoom teacher kept calling the cops on the kid for being disruptive in a disability classroom, nine times she did this, even though he has an IEP plan, an Autism protocol, they are expected to follow by law. The Sports Team there were all caught on video sexually assaulting a male pre teen last year, and all that happened was they fired one assistant coach, like he was the one who did it. Now, there has been a big drug bust at his former school, and fifteen year old females he was on a bad news bears basketball team with three or four years ago, are being taken away in cop cars. They found a 51 year old lady’s dead body in the street of my old neighborhood, maybe two blocks from our old front door, on the street that nice hippie couple live on, and at first there was some concerned citizen eyewitness chat on social media about it, but that thread was all taken down by a tourist industry focused online administrator, who thought it reflected poorly on the town, and no one has been forthcoming about how she died , certainly not in her obitary, in spite of initial second hand chatter about how police suspected foul play or murder could have been involved, there’s no real news paper of any merit here, so you mostly hear gossip from bored old nosey, know it all neighbors, bored attention seekers, who are usually wrong. There is an American Psycho kid in my town, going around and unremorsefully doing harm to his classmates, you know–one of those winning Kendoll predators who goes around doing egregious harm to his peer group, while having all his crimes swept under the carpet by his overindulgent and unconditionally protective and influential upper class winebox yoga mom. So yeah all these kids are having real issues and adverse reactions to his abusing them. Little towns can be as crazy as the big cities, it’s just all better hidden, I guess, kept buried by the image oriented, appearance based people with city council jobs or hotel investments. You shoulda seen all the sports parents making excuses online for their basketball team sexually assaulting a kid on the school bus and in the locker room, repeatedly. All that usual USA USA rah rah go team is some nutty shit, my brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution. Wrong is wrong no matter what uniform someone is wearing. I been sayin’ that my whole life. The peers though are spellbound by Halftime and game day delivery super specials.
Since I was a new wave kid in Adam Ant makeup and a leather jacket, trying to spike my hair up like Billy Idol or Duran Duran or Flock Of Seagulls and Charlie Sexton, I’ve been getting shit from both sides-the dumb, hatepig, talk radio, gun nut rednecks and their bullying, queerbashing, conservative idiot, cannon fodder, future corrections guard, wrestling team sons (I got a song called “Fat Fucks In White Trucks”) and also the Hillary feminist, power seeking administrative, P.M.R.C. etiquette, country club privilege mongers who want to behavior modify me into compliance, the Kall That Kops Karens who watch Oprah and Dr. Phil and think mass incarcerating Kamala Harris is some kinda beacon for civil rights, they might not get out of their oversized vehicle with their tire iron to have a bash when they disapprove of my objectionable presence, but they’ve used all their snitch power to enlist others to do the dirty work for ’em-their football player fratboy sons, or stupidly aggressive men in uniforms, who they always summon to expel, evict, suspend, detain, or otherwise hassle, harrass, harrangue and step on my blue suede shoes. Not sure if Condoleeza Rice or Gina Haspel or Lyn Cheney are really any nicer or more woke or progessive or humane than Mike Pence, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConell or Dick Cheney, at this point. I feel like the Good Ole Boy patriarchy, the permanent ruling class, the One Percent, campaign funding shadow barons and tech-billionaires with all the money and the deep intelligence ties and Ivy League educations. who really control everything are even surprised they are having so much more success by trotting out a token gay CIA spook to fix software bean counts, or a non binary genderfluid anime chick in a pink gluitter unicorn backpack and quirky animal hat to kill the raise the minimum wage under the cover of her being woke and scientific and diverse while she does it. That’s no progress, they are regressive, damaging tools of power, just identity muppets, empty suits, models, brand logos and put into office by that Klaus Schwab Future Leaders School. Keep an eye on Kyrsten Sinema, they are preparing her to do some more badly damaging and dastardly shit under cover of her sexual identity. I don’t care about no one’s sexual preference. Content of character, not the color of your skin, is what is important, your dietary choices or zodiac sign or favorite brand or medication or sexual position aint really nothin’ to do with me. From my little corner of the universe, the body parts and shades of skin tone and bumper stickers and surfaces matter alot less than the character inside, and manners you treat people with. To paraphrase Diamond David Lee Roth, it aint my business what’s on anybody’s breath after midnight, but manners count-how you treat people. The ruling class have weaponized not only the civil rights lexicon against the people, but they’ve totally misused tokenism/identity politricks, propping up some people of color, ushering a hand full of females, and gay people upfront, allowing them to have more visibility than ever, but it’s all just a ruse, a marketing hoax, window dressing, if the visible members of traditionally marginalized classes are now just in-on the jailing and spying and droning and censoring and child caging, that aint progress. They’ve just co signed to knowingly do wrong to their own fellow beings for money and some title. They’re like black cops. As James Baldwin said, “a cop is a cop”. I see ’em as inhumane class traitors, sellouts, frauds, Aunt Mammies and Uncle Toms. Ajamau Baraka of the Black Alliance For Peace calls the darker hued sellouts who say they care about people, but their votes show they just work for The Man, he calls ’em the black misleadership class, like Corey Booker who is just the face of big pharma in Congress-he’s no friend of the black community. I think of all those smiling butch lady soldiers giving the thumbs up next to dead bodies, or piles of naked and dehumanized Muslim men who were tortured at Gitmo and the only person who went to jail was the whistle blower, John Kirakou and the sicko Florida governor they wanna run for president was in on it. At Gitmo, gleeful. Happy cheerleade standing in the frontow with his big titlke and shit eating grin. That’s just sinster if you ask me. Outright evil. Man, who cares if those lady torturers were gay or female or of multiracial ethnicity ? They are torturers. I liked what Jesse Ventura had to say about torturing people (it’s never okay) better than anybody on the fake-left/corporate centrist side who thinks torture is alright and okeydokey, s’long as Lyn Cheney says it is. Justy cause she said “Orange Man Bad” a buncha times on tv. All the fake progressives who campaigned on universal housing and free healthcare and free college and student debt forgiveness and defunding racist police, those same people are now promoting laws against public protests, passing big gigantic inflated budgets for more spying, more censorship, more imperial proxy war based on lies, more black ops, more psy ops, more jails, more cops, more billion dollar giveaways to foreign puppet governments, while old people I know are without heat in the cold, and people are getting kicked out of their trailers by diverse people in uniforms with nightsticks where I live, and Denny’s where the old people used to go and have breakfast and read the newspaper even closed, and no one can afford the groceries which have tripled. Almost everybody seems crazy and dangerous to me. When the honky sports moms wanna come for you, they think it’s for your own good. They’re gonna impose their beliefs on you as a philanthropic act of service. The old racists and ranchers are more easily avoided, I just stay away from the Moose Lodge and VFW Hall. You can usually see ’em comin’ with their big white pointy hats and gowns and torches. I avoid ’em all.This song’s going out to everyone who keeps boastfully voting for election rigging warpigs, torturers, secret police kidnappers, secret police control of all mass media, union busters, and vote blue no matter who Wall Street saboteurs who won’t raise the minimum wage, or stop mas evictions and utilities ripoffs, or trillion dollar giveaways to weapon manufacturers guised as “helping (destroy) Ukraine”.
“Notice that congress and biden are not entertaining the idea of forcing rail companies to accept the railway workers demands in order to avert a strike.” (-Boots Riley) “
Liberal hypocrites now oppose interminable lockdowns in China after supporting them in their home countries and demonizing those who protested them.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Joe Biden will not be running for President in 2024. Republicans & Democrats will pass his bill to strip workers of power, but enough Republicans will oppose it to pretend they support the working class, that they will again strip working class voters from the Democratic Party.” (-Old Woman Seeking Justice)
“Joe Biden is a Ronald Reagan Democrat. This is who the Democratic Party is. They are full-on Republicans who will always side with their rich pals while decimating the working class.
So glad I didn’t vote for this disgusting piece of shit.” (-Leila Charles Leigh)
“THIS is who Joe Biden is. We were screaming this in 2019 & all through 2020 but all we heard was “Orange Man Bad” – Blue MAGA just as bad as Red MAGA” (-Indie Left News) “
Full sellout from the White House for the majority of rail workers who rejected the deal the President brokered, preemptively denying them the right to strike. This was the “which side are you on?” moment, and the White House chose the railroad bosses.” (-Jonah Furman)
“Once again we see how similar Biden is to Trump on a multitude of issues. The difference between the two are near nonexistent. Yet some will say “Biden is slightly better” My question is: ON WHAT?!” (-Jay Befaunt) “
If congress tries 2break railway workers power by trying to legally force them to take a deal they don’t want- Railway workers must disobey congress and strike anyway. Congress and rail companies will cry about it and railway workers will win. It’ll probably have 2b a wildcat.” (-Boots Riley)
“Gee whiz, won’t it be great when the CIA gets to tell us directly what experimental whatever we have to inject into ourselves and our children in order to stay employed and travel?” (-Whitney Webb)
^ “FYI – ex FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb (who wrote this drivel) is on the board of a CIA linked company that is poised to play a major role in any post-Covid biosecurity crisis (whether manufactured or real) -(Whitney Webb)
I wish I could buy you some free Denny’s to thank you for all you gave, but the economy’s so bad in the southwest, even the Denny’s closed down. Of course I mean, saying thank you some more to the B-52’s.
Ya know I ask myself why I keep sewing together these longwinded raving columns here for such a small circle of friends who probably mostly disagree with everything I say in our old age here, I guess because I’m so concerned about almost no real resistance existing to the Billionaire Agenda, and I’m horrified how almost everyone I see, or ever thought I knew, seems to be in some kinda crazy delusional denial. Everybody’s in a dream they were handed by The Man. Most of that shit aint even real. Hard to find new allies as we get old, I think for me at least, I’ve been burned so many times, that even when some people seem to be exceeding my expectations somewhat, apparently even endeavoring to be square and fair, and honorable and keep their word with my little traveling gypsy troupe, I’m still leery, on edge, kinda suspicious, and probably way too quick to judge, I’m guarded and skeptical nowadays, a side effect from being lied to all the time. I’m perpetually expecting some safe or piano to fall on me, always waiting for the other shoe to fall. Like I got these severe prejudices against rich people ya know, especially investment-property owners, or self proclamed woke people or philanthropists, so like when any landlord appears to be acting humanely towards myself and loved ones, I kinda get all my spidey senses tingling, like what? What’s up with that? We got our security deposit back after cleaning the old trailer we spent a long time in and I was SHOCKED. that is UNPRECEDENTED! Like I said, in my tumultuous travels when somebody gives me something with one hand, they’re usually trying to rob me somehow with the other, so I got a high vigilance and a low trust for empire havers and people with all the cards who wield too much power over all of us, ya know? Shitlib college people do not believe in equality-they believe in hierarchy-ranks and titles and special privileges only meant to be enjoyed by their posh Sneetchy selves. Only time ya ever heard the phrase healthy distrust of authority from mean ex liberals is when they were promoting untested and experimental products on behalf of big business. I have that distrust all the time. I found out the hardest way. People tend to abuse power, even and especilly if they were like, no nukes and save the whales sloganeers, way back in college. If I was a rich airbandb owning, collector scum, landlordly shit-lib, I’d be making hotel reservations and flying to Vegas to see the beautiful B-52’s say their fond farewells. To me, the B-52’s personify every good and righteous and right on value of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the era the media manipulators are so keen on revising ala Trial of the Chicago 7 accuracy: fact vs. fiction in Aaron Sorkin’s Netflix movie. (slate.com) or weaponizing or co-opting or erasing. They were just really nice people, friends, who wanted to have fun and entertain each other-they lived in a little place with some real cool retro second hand surplus and they really created a whole spontaneous magic realm that grew out of their sixties go go day-glo fashion choices and appreciation of Flintstones Futurama and Jetsons jetsetting. I mean the most important thing to me about the B52’s is their realness, the down home sincerity. Nice people who believe in getting along, setting an example, being groovy. Not being mean and full of shit and lying all the time. They were about creating community. Bringing outsiders in. I will always love them for that and know in my heart that the whole punk rock tradition that I invested in, aspired to and clumbsily continue trying to fly the flag for all came from their example. There’s another side to punk that has to do with slamdancing and male bonding and Owning The Most Framed Stuff, writing books about beating people up in the parking lot of some club in the seventies, I don’t have very much to do with that side, those guys just seemed like dumb jocks and dudes with socks on their dicks to me, frat row people, gym memebership havers, spray tanners, I’m not much inclined to even go down their streets no more. Frat Row kinda sucks, ya know? But yeah, the old B-52’s stuff, man…! You ever see ’em live? They are still like one big rockin’; house party, same as the Fleshtones. I like fun, personally. This world needs a little more good natured fun lovers and kooky mixed drinks and freaky attire and old time dancing, every once in awhile. They were never stupid, though, ya know? It was all always shot with light, coolness, inclusivity, tolerance, generosity of spirit, full of heart. That’s my kinda scene. I love the B-52’s. When we were teens I think a few of us tried our best to turn the B-52’s kitchey, lampshade on the head, paisley pajama, bigwig kookiness into our whole way of life. We did okay for awhile. Pretty good run, actually. A good ten years of whacky hijinks and zaney escapades. I was one of the few who did not “grow out of it”. It was not my slumming “college phase”, or anything like that. I was not some cultural tourist, just visiting. I’m signed on for life, as Billy Idol once sang. Man I had some new wave friends named Beth W. and Patti B., who shared my love for alla that. Hather and Lisa Thing, Steffani and Jenna. I’d call ’em up, if I could.
Yeah I get it, I know I’m old fashioned. I wrote a song called “Oldies Station”. You should hear, it’s pretty good, really. Another band that means everything to somebody like me is CANDY! I mean, they said it all before I ever could. They toured with Rick Springfield, made a perfect pop record, had a perfect logo, looked cool, they were like my generation’s Beach Boys or Raspberries. That part where they’re singing, “I wanna know! I wanna know!” That still says it all, man. I dunno what happened to the life I recognize-the clothes, the hair, the magazines, the clubs, the music, where has it all gone? I still believe in preserving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What happened to the Delta House I used to know?
“You should’ve know the guy that constantly shits on Socialism will bust up unions.” (-Unholy Rom 3)
“Americans know the most violent, evil murderers in the world very well, because we voted for them. When the US and the EU decide to abandon Ukraine because they don’t need them anymore you’re gonna have a bunch of pissed off Nazis roaming around with billions worth of weapons looking for revenge. Good thing Zelensky is an actor with a production team or we might be able to see the puppet strings when he is on TV. C’mon now it’s 2022 and y’alll still falling for this democracy shit. Is Europe finally starting to figure out that the U.S. is screwing them over too? If you don’t know this war started 8 years ago, then our Gov’t has you right where they want you. If you don’t know this war started 8 years ago, then our Gov’t has you right where they want you.
Totally unaware of what is really happening or why and forced to rely on what they and their media feeds you as the truth, while they get you to fall for the old evil dictator scam. How about the United States stop messing around and causing trouble in other countries and do something crazy like making life better for our citizens? When Russia hits infrastructure it’s a war crime and when the US hits infrastructure it’s strategy. I know everybody wants to bury their heads in the sand now, but let me remind you that your Gov’t and Big Pharma were wrong and constantly lied to us about Covid and those doctors and scientists that they worked so hard to shut up, were right. Will Americans ever get smart enough to not get lied into wars? Over the past decades our Gov’t is even shocked at how easy it has been to lie to and manipulate our citizens into believing and doing whatever they say, in spite of reality obviously being the opposite and to make it worse to get those citizens to attack those telling the truth.”
“Americans are so propagandized they don’t even seem to acknowledge these blatant contradictions made by our media ALL the time! Western media: China is an authoritarian country where dissent is not allowed
Also Western media: omg look at these protests in China Western media: Russia is an authoritarian country where dissent is not allowed Also Western media: omg look at these protests in Russia.” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“One of the biggest ironies surrounding the Ukraine > FTX > Democrat money laundering operation is that FTX’s underlying issues were exposed by the downturn in the economy, which was fueled by NATO’s suicidal sanctions on Russia. Their own policies helped expose their corruption. When they say “disinformation,” they mean “dissent.” I can understand not remembering the Iraq War & War on Terror.
I can understand not following politics closely enough to get NATO expansion, RussiaGate, mass censorship, Hunter Biden’s laptop, etc. But I can’t understand how anyone can believe the government & media after COVID.” (-Primo Radical) “
Wave a magic wand and suddenly anti-lockdown protesters are no longer “COVID deniers” or conspiracy theorists when they happen to be in China” (-Michael Tracey) “
This is a legacy defining moment for Joe Biden. He is going down as one of the biggest disappointments in labor history.” (-RAILROAD WORKERS UNITED) “
I’M FROM KENTUCKY. I NEVER LIKED SPORTS BUT I ALWAYS LOVED ALI. THE GREATEST.
Biden, Pelosi, Obama-notice how they never stop praising Reagan and Bush? You saw when Gropey Joe put that big gold medal on war criminal Bush, right? When I was a little kid, I remember the older white people from my hometown really hated Ali and also Nader and Jane Fonda. That tank plant town in Ohio where I went to school, the older white fanatical hate group people there did not just hate me and Boy George and Annie Lennon, back in the day, but I remember when Spike Lee made that Malcolm X movie a little later on, they were livid, cause they still hate Malcom X. They still hate me and Nader, too. They really, really hated John Lennon. They are some hateful people. I avoid ’em as best as I can. I’ll tell ya what hurts was all the friends and loved ones who went with them, who followed the crowd, and stayed among the people in the bleachers just yelling for the hometeam to win, winning is all that matters in the middle of the Divided States Of Amnesia. Blue Oyster Cult said, “winning makes losers of us all”. Fucking high school sports is still something my old homies all talk about, it’s like half the so called “News” in that horrible, violence soaked tank plant town. I always knew that sports was how they brainwashed all the gullible joiners and belongers into supporting imperialism, systemic racism, class inequality and injustice, all in the name of “USA, USA!” Fuck that shit. I’m a dropout. I don’t worship the wealthy or respect the uniform. Always been anti conformity, anti-fascist, anti censorship, anti-war. Pro free speech, all power to the people. Politicians, enforcers, monopolies and billionaires are not your super special savior science friends for diversity and feminism, okay? You are being lied to. I remember when you were still into like Ten Thousand Maniacs and Edie Brickell and always wore that Cramps t shirt and had all those bumper stickers on your punk rock car. Remember back in the old Black Flag and Dead Kennedys and Husker Du and R.E.M. college radio days, before U2 sold out, pre 9/11 before you got scared the muslims were coming to getcha and they took all the good, real, uplifting and empowering rebel music off the airwaves, remember when you used to identify as a leftist radical? Now you just shill for Hillary and Bush wars with nicer pro nouns, and a few extra visible people of color behind podiums giving pro war speeches, making excuses for racist cops, or otherwise co signing and being involved in torture and drone wars and domestic spying and total spectrum dominance. What happened that changed you so much? You don’t gotta tell me, just look inside-ask yourself. Was it your mother in law? Navel studies? Being ratpacked by multiple pro warbots on twitter? Was it cause “Obama said…” the water of Flint was safe to drink, and we “can’t look back” at 9/11 or Cheney/Bush crimes? It’s so “Twilight Zone”. It’s exactly like that Rowdy Roddy Piper sci fi conspiranoia movie, “THEY LIVE!” Except it all happened just like that in “real life”, everybody got plugged into their I-Phone Microsoft Updates meta-propaganda-Gates-Reset world and just started watching the unreality tv, doing whatever they’re told, up is down, wrong is right, war is peace, freedom is slavery, billionaires are free speech protectors and scientific philanthopists who just want poor people to be healthy and live longer. Democrats are real progressives, the elections are totally real and not fixed at all, we live in a democracy, science means never asking questions or finding anything out, except whatever it says on the commercial. Taylor Swift and Dave Grohl are like SO talented! Etc., etc. I knew “educated feminists” who fought against Jill Stein. Do you know why? Their blind loyalty to big business they thought she somehow threatened. what a fuckin’ horrorshow. I know other motherfuckers who still go ’round calling sadsack Sanders a sexist even though he already acquiesced to their super mega ultra goddess of fauxwoke pro noun WEF capitalism, Hillary, who destroyed Libya. Let’s face it, kids, the whole politics thing is faked and fixed, we gotta do other stuff-grass roots stuff. Like Answer Coalition and Code Pink stuff. When Sanders endorsed Madame Deplorable and Creepy Sniffer, Gropey Joe Biden, he knows he completely betrayed the working class movement, his whole platform was abandoned by the Squad, he started reciting Russiagate talking points and helped censor the left and efficiently dismantled his whole populist movement, all for Hillary and Gropey Joe’s Davos billionaire donor class bosses, and Raytheon and Pfizer and Monsanto/Bayer and Lockheed Martin. All the old punks just wanna be local popular-that’s the religion of the middle class. Local Popular. Michael Moore used to fight the big corporations, now he just fights Trump. How many Spike Lee and Oliver Stone movies did you pay to go see back in the day, before pig-media convinced you it is totally cool if all their work is suppresed or censored now, for asking too many inconvenient, scientific, facts based, real journalism questions about nazis and melted steel and shit. If you are too cowardly to even say FREE ASSANGE, I can’t help you, you are lost, and by you, I mean AOC. “Tax My Nerves”, is more like it. Real socialists don’t support coups in other countries. Real leftists believe in my body/my rights. NOT, “it’s complicated”. Real socialists believe in free speech and the right to assemble in public spaces. They just dropped free healthcare and student loan forgiveness when it was time to pivot to More War based on More Lies. Man it’s a bummer being a real leftist caue all the shitlibs just wanna watch tv and order products online, talk about how obedient they are and “FEEL GOOD”. College told ’em they have the right as self identifying affinity group whatever fill in the blank to never be inconveneinced or offended. These landlords think they should just get money for nothing. Same with the Fraud Squad. Look where they get their mony from and this is just what’s visible on the books. www.opensecrets.org I think AOC is every bit as destructive as faux woke Klaus Scwab puppet, Kyrsten Sinema, who killed the fight for fifteen, which is still nowhere near a living wage, particularly not now in the rent gouge post Covid Gropey Joe and Bezos inflation. AOC is so transparent and controlled-she is both bought and bossed.
AOC can not stand up for even one real leftist/socialist/humanitarian/egalitarian value beyond meangingless, middleclass feelgood, identity politics, or anti Trump tweets. So heartbreaking, she could’ve kept ONE righteous cause, ya know? Like raise the minimum wage or stop the wars. Free the kids in the child cages, maybe, or universal housing, but nope, she was just another marketing hoax like Obama and grunge. Pelosi told her to sit down and she sat down. You know it and I know it. AOC is no ally of the working class poor.
“I’d much rather live in a society where everyone has healthcare, housing, and food than a society where 3 billionaires own more wealth than half the nation.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Julian Assange is a prisoner of conscience. Free the man, and free the press.” (-Edward Snowden)
Isn’t it wild how every single protest in a country we don’t like is always a protest calling for the overthrow of the government?” (-Radio Free Amanda)
“Not only does the US not have any high-speed rail, but it won’t give sick time to rail workers operating the slow and decrepit train system that does exist. And Biden wants to lecture China, which has 35,000 km of high speed rail? LMAO! The US destroyed Iraq with bombs, not democracy. The US destroyed Afghanistan with bombs, not democracy. The US has aided in the subjegation of Palestine, Haiti, and Syria with weapons, not democracy. The US mainstream media has some nerve lecturing China about democracy. There will be no regime change in China. Western mainstream media pundits and color revolutionaries can dream on. I don’t know who needs to hear this but these protests don’t change the fact that 90+ percent of Chinese people support their government. Western attempts to hijack them for color revolution purposes are already failing. Leftists don’t support protests before investigating who is organizing them. Leftists don’t repeat Cold War talking points. Leftists don’t interfere in other countries’ affairs. The vast majority of those in the West celebrating protests in China are doing all three. Color revolution leftists like Naomi Klein never miss an opportunity to repeat Cold War talking points when unrest occurs in countries that the US is targeting for regime change. When protests happen in the West, the Western mainstream media ignores or demonizes them.
When they happen in China, the same media actively promote regime change to the point of *organizing* the protests.
This is what Imperialism on steroids looks like.” (-Danny Haiphong)
They’ve been sending weapons to actual Nazis to help them commit genocide in the Donbas for years, yet spend a week freaking out about a dinner guest Trump got duped into meeting.
It’s all just so remarkably stupid.
How do people actually buy into this nonsense outrage theater? Both big political headlines right now are complete exercises in double-think & amnesia:
• Nick Fuentes is an evil threat to democracy — but the Azov & Aidar battalions are brave heroes / don’t exist • COVID protests in China are heroic — but evil when they happen in the West
Things are never objectively good or evil — they’re only good or evil depending on what their effect is on the Western elite. If Canadian truckers went to China, they would be hailed be heroes — as would Nick Fuentes if we was a Banderite proponent of Ukraine joining NATO.” (-Primo Radical)
“People who’ve shirked or deferred their moral, ethical responsibilities to the state/zeitgeist resent courageous individuality and traditional values of free speech, rightousness, debate, etc. They prefer vague labels, name calling, and race baiting psuedomorality.” (-Ryan Knight)
“You’re not kidding it’s a dangerous precedent. If Assange is indicted, the NYT, Guardian etc. would be next in line for publishing the same secrets. They should fight for his freedom as if it’s their own.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Along with its NATO partners, France destroyed Libya and fueled the advance of Boko Haram and other jihadist bandits on Mali with weapons looted from Libya’s arms depots. France’s NGOs were part and parcel of this destabilizing project.” (-Max Blumenthal) “
The 4th largest city in the United States has been told to boil their water because it’s not safe to drink.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The problem is not simply that capitalism produces too much, but that it produces the wrong stuff: SUVs, fast fashion and planned obsolescence instead of public transit, affordable housing and universal healthcare. It overuses resources and still fails to meet even basic needs.” (-Jason Hickel)
“How dare Syria not comply with the organization that censored its own investigation to falsely accuse the Syrian government of a chemical attack and refuses any accountability for it.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“Ben Shapiro being on constant hair-trigger alert about perceived infractions related to his own identity group would be more defensible if he hadn’t produced 10000000 hours of content trashing Snowflakes who get overly offended by infractions related to every other identity group.” (-Michael Tracey)
“I despise the corporate media that heroizes Chinese protesting interminable lockdowns.
Not because those Chinese citizens are wrong, but because that same media painted the Westerners who defied the Covidian regime as criminals as they bravely defended their basic human rights.NY Times tech pundit Zeynepis enthralled by Chinese citizens protesting 100 day+ Covid lockdowns and relentless testing.
Yet Zeynep Tufekci proudly called the Twitter manager on accounts that loudly condemned school closures and the damage they did to a generation of US youth. Beyond the corporate media, there’s the respectable leftists torn between anti-communism and fealty to the Covidian regime. Naomi Klein celebrates Chinese protesters but branded her fellow Canadians protesting lockdowns and vax mandates as white supremacists in league with PutinThe trophy for liberal hypocrisy goes to Amnesty International, which issued an unusual statement condemning Canadian anti-lockdown protesters as white supremacists & backing Trudeau’s repression while warning Chinese police against arresting citizens protesting harsh lockdowns. “What’s going on in China has little to do with anywhere else,” you say?
Australia built Covid internment camps & arrested citizens for promoting anti-lockdown protests. Canada seized protesters’ bank accounts. US students were locked in their dorms. Insanity reigned in the West. ” (-Max Blumenthal)
FLIES ON THE WINDSCREEN
Had some Depeche Mode girlfriends back then, you know we were all really moved by Martin Gore’s lyrics and Dave Gahan’s singing of soulful, sensitive, vulnerable, soul baring synthpop outsider anthems, dirges, confessions, love letters, come on’s and emotional laments. Now the hours really are slipping by-an old friend’s father in law passed away, he was a country singer. Just reminds me how we aint got as much time left as summa us wanna think we should have, ya know I started aging this last year. Gray hair, loose teeth, got the big fear in me. Some people I only knew from social media died but I’d been interacting with ’em daily, for years so ya know it still felt personal. A poet from California beautiful and genius in the prime of her life with a big house and gogeous kids, poof. Gone, just like that. No one said why or how. Two underground famous guitarists. An old punk rock roadie, photographer flea market collector guy with great stories who made some important records with his tiny homemade cult band who used to like open for the Misfits and the Deadboys, gone too soon, left his wife to mourn. My highschool rapper friend, a true O.G. philosopher, flashpoint figurehad, community leader, activist soulman. So many people just keep dying suddenly, then there were the pulverizing losses of people I’ve loved so much for so long, the ones I still sent postcards and Christmas cards home to, the ones who I called when I felt bad or got in trouble, they’re almost all gone now. I was saying to my friend in an email how I hope a honkytonk heaven really does exist beyond the clouds for so many people who’ve come into my life and dazzled me for awhile and then disappeared from this world for no good reason. The death problem is for sure haunting my days now. I feel like Lydia from “Beetlejuice”. Faster Pussycat put out another song where Taime’s referencing his missing dad and caterwauling about how songs can take you straight back to all those long gone moments with absent loved ones, it’s called “Like A Ghost”, it’s kinda like “House Of Pain” part 2, very Seventies Van type feeling. I always wonder about what happened to Pussycat drummer Mark Michaels cause he was the one in all the magazine pinups we posted on our walls when Guns & Pussycat ruled the airwaves and the nightclubs back then-no body was ever found, no death certificate, he just vanished. Same with Zowie Ackerman from Leeway and Circus Of Power who I knew a little bit, I’ve got his old address on a scrap of paper in the garage, funny pix of him clowning with also gone Ryan from Circus Of Power in dirty nightclub dressing rooms and nobody knows what happened to him, either, he just went missing like Richie Edwards, no body, no death certificate. How do you go from being on bubblegum cards and the covers of magazines and touring Japan with Black Sabbath to just mysteriously no longer around? Nobody knows what happened to him, either. Too many people I know are dying suddenly in their fifties now. Not overdosing or suicide, just died suddenly. The obituaries all say died unexpectedly. What the fuck? I wanted to see so many people I knew in my younger years again. Bands I wanted to see play are vanishing too, they fucked around until it was too late for Michael Anthony to rejoin the brothers and David Lee, I would’ve loved to have seen a real Van Halen reunion, I don’t care about Ed’s kid or his Foo Fighters friends or that awful guy from the Darkness, at all, just not my cuppa artificial corporate stadium rawk. I still hope to see Billy Idol somewhere before I die. I don’t think it looks likely that a Dogs D’Amour reunion is in the cards-I’m wanted of the few who wanted Skid Row to reunite but the songwriters are gung ho happy with the American Idol guy. To me it’s not Skid Row without Sebastian, even if he says stupid things sometimes, I get why he’s so fuckedup-superfame hit him hard when he was just in his twenties. They’re like Guns without Adler/Izzy-pointless now, just rich guys doing victory laps, playing old songs they own for people who don’t care the old gang aint there. My old road dog travler buddy and sometimes songwriting partner Nasty F. Bastard saw the Cult somewhere this year, said they still hammer out the old jams like viking emperors conquering lost kingdoms. Of course, if you’ve ever read anything I ever wrote here, you know how bad I wanted to make records or at least get these songs I’ve written about all of you on tape somehow, we got some stuff archived on cassettes, I dunno if my old lady’s really gonna care that much about letting people hear ’em if I croak anytime soon, ’cause ya know it makes no sense to us why some people I used to jam with sorta sabotoged our whole scene. I got about four books on this computer about the old pre grunge underground D.I.Y. music subculture and all our crummy fanzines and crazy fun non stop racous house parties and $5 at the door boy’s club punk parties and spontaneous road trips in dodgy spraypainted vans and eighties concerts and shows and sulking in the graveyard and drinking big bottles of vodka with all those dames who disappeared. But yeah the ticking of the clock got louder for me, I hear that old “Black Celebration” song in my head alot. “Forgetting all I couldn’t do today…” Ya know at night when I eat my dinner, I’ve been watching a tv show based on the Addam’s Family by Tim Burton called “Wednesday”, it’s really cute, I love it, and it’s not thusfar altogether as ooky as thet “Riverdale” Archie Comics reboot with Mollie Ringwald and Luke Perry (RIP) that just became too creepy cannibal occultic splatter film for me. If you seen too much violence in real life, all the “Fangoria” gore seems senseless and disturbing. I liked the early episodes and fell in love with the actors but the writing was just too dark n dismal for no good purpose, but to normalize gross shit and bum you out. Veronica was irresistable, could not take your eyes off her. Jughead was well cast, it was just all about illuminati ritual sacrifice and murder and senselessly violent and I quit watching it during the third season, so yeah, so far, “Wednesday” is a treat.
“Your optimistic eyes seem like paradise to someone like me.” Ya know when we were kids, the world was way more sincere than it is now. I blame the social engineers top down monopolist propaganda programming.
“The Democrats do not care about you or your basic rights. The only thing they care about is using you for your vote and fundraising off the plight of marginalized people. If you cannot see that by now then it’s time to take the blindfold off. They are as big of a scam as the GOP. The Democrats are organized to protect their corporate donors.” (-Ryan Knight) “
If you’re going to try and smear me by saying I’ve never covered Israeli intelligence or Unit 8200, you’re just hurting your own credibility. I have over a dozen articles on the subject, just do a basic search dumb dumbs.” (-Whitney Webb)
MAKE NO EXCUSES FOR RACIST REGIMES THAT ROUTINELY HARM, KIDNAP, ABUSE OR KILL CHILDREN!
One of those bands I always felt a long distance sense of comaraderie with were Canada’s glammy 63 Monroe-they started off a troublemaker punk band and kinda went through different incarnations as the lineups changed and they had a garagey phase, kinda got influenced by the sleaze of the eighties metal heyday, kept shifting ever so slightly with the times, but always had a mirthful sense of mischief and frivolity and a ceaseless desire for always more good natured rebellious teenage kicks, ala the Dolls, Ramones, Teenage Head, Forgotten Rebels, Celebrity Skin, etc., etc. I loved that about them. Their lp, “STINKIN OUT THE JOINT” was their rowdy must have, hard to find record if you are into collecting all the underground glam stuff, but in more recent years, more stuff seems to have surfaced like an ep of their early material when they were known as No Fucking Good, or NFG and some more sides called “We Have Enjoyed Ourselves”, “Hijack Victim” and “Last Exit To Rocknroll”. I miss this kinda punk rock, ya know, way back in the eighties, the pre hardcore basement punks all really had a cool, good time, stick together, basement show scene, and it was all about dressing up and having some wild times with your friends, it was not yet hijacked by industry, get rich schemers, xerox clones with uniforms and rulebooks showing off their sixties amplifier and echo machine, aggressive jock bully dickheads, Warped fests, Hot Topics, Urban Outfitters, uncool private school temperance leaguers, or any of that garbage.
The scene was hotter than ever and at the heart of it all was ’63 Monroe, whose stage antics began to take on a life of their own – porno broadcasts, platform boots, nudity, coffins, smoke bombs, dry ice. ’63 Monroe was defiantly flaunting raunchy excess as though they were LA hipsters, not London (Ontario) overachievers. But overachievers they were, contently inventing new ways to tear up their hometown instead of going after the tainted allure of fame and fortune.” – Jeff Warren, Sleazegrinder.com
“Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because profit-seeking competition-based systems reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. That’s why we are ruled by sociopaths, and it’s why looking to “philanthropy” as a solution to our problems is a ridiculous joke. If you want to make more of something (money, material goods), then capitalism can be a good way to do that. But if you need to make less of something (pollution, inequality, exploitation, sickness, homelessness, etc) it’s worthless, and other systems must be looked to.The “Maybe the very rich will feel charitable and fix our problems for us” solution assumes that the very same people who are wired to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply about everyone they stepped on to get there. Find me a capitalist business plan for leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist business plan for keeping someone free of illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing gets what they need, for giving resources to a struggling parent. You can’t. Capitalism can’t do this. These are the most important things in the world, and no possible iteration of capitalism has any solutions for any of them whatsoever, apart from “Well hopefully rich people will feel very charitable and fix those problems.” And how is that solution working out? It’s a joke.”
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Anyway, to quote what I always heard from liberal censorship advocates: Twitter is a private company. If you don’t like how they censor, go start your own social media company (and hope AOC doesn’t get Google/Apple to destroy it), or go figure out how to join a Mastadon instance. When Musk announced his intent to buy Twitter, many warned that every government and corporate weapon would be used to destroy him if he attempted any restoration of free speech. Online censorship is the most valuable tool of Dems, media corporations and the US Security State.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Democrats turn on rail workers right after the midterms
I told you vote blue idiots that voting for the Democratic Party is essentially giving them permission to screw you. When you vote for them they shift to the right after The true dumb dumb left refuse to acknowledge this.” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“How many other government officials, news outlets & celebrities have been bought off in schemes like the FTX operation?
How much of the “aspirations for democracy” (i.e. destabilization of nations opposed to Washington hegemony) can be traced back to money laundering & bribery? The plot for Ukraine to join NATO is demonstrably part of the PNAC neocon worldview. When Bernie & AOC talk in terms of “democracy vs authoritarianism,” they are basically quoting Cheney & Rumsfeld. They might as well be ranting about “Islamofascism.” The conflict in Ukraine can be traced directly back to George W. Bush. After tearing up the ABM treaty in 2002 and backing the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, Bush pressures NATO to announce aspirations for Ukraine and Georgia to joint the alliance.” (-Primo Radical)
I could swear being anti-monopolist was a prerequisite for political liberals in the not-so-distant past. Now it’s encouraged, to facilitate de-platforming. I’m the one who hasn’t switched belief systems. I was against monopolies before and still am. I supported free speech before and still do. Hilarious to call it progressivism when you cheer for giant monopolistic corporations like Apple and Google to control information flow. Even the concept of being proud to think in step with a group is new. Having your own idiosyncratic set of beliefs was considered healthy until pretty recently. Now individualism is often just seen as a stalking-horse for wrong-think.” (-Matt Taibbi)
“The USA is the world’s “wealthiest” country (although only the rich benefit). Yet its public services are so bad that its 4th-largest city is warning residents to boil their water.
Many formally colonized, developing countries have much cleaner water than the ultra-capitalist US” (-Ben Norton)
“Wave a magic wand and suddenly anti-lockdown protesters are no longer “COVID deniers” or conspiracy theorists when they happen to be in China.” (-Michael Tracey)
Even the US empire’s top economists are now saying this is no ‘normal’ recession but instead a massive economic shift. They won’t admit it, but we’re witnessing the great splitting of the world’s economies combined with environmental destruction.” (Lee Camp)
Leaving aside the fact that a nation which bans political parties, shuts down opposition media, imprisons opposition leaders, and is vastly more accountable to Washington than to its own people is in no way a “democracy”, that’s just a profoundly disturbed way of looking at life.
It’s disturbing how many people I encounter who claim Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worse than America’s invasion of Iraq because Ukraine is a “democracy”. How fucked up do you have to be inside to believe human lives are worth less because of their nation’s political system? A mother holding the remains of a child whose body has been ripped apart by military explosives does not care whether her country is considered a “democracy” by the western governments who are invested in that country’s military outcomes. I do think this is basically what many of them are saying. They can’t say “It’s worse because Ukraine is a white civilized European nation,” so they say “It’s worse because Ukraine is a democracy.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
MAX BLUMENTHAL, WHITNEY WEBB, KATIE HALPER, AND SOME OTHER REAL REPORTERS DOING JOURNALISM RATHER THAN PENTAGON OR PHARMA P.R.
“Jimmy Dore went on Fox News to talk about how both parties are corrupt and put corporations and billionaires over everyday people. Telling the truth about the U.S. oligarchy to millions of people is good actually. What’s weird is thinking this is bad.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Amazing things are happening in Mexico: Left-wing President AMLO just held a historic rally and march featuring 1.2 MILLION supporters, celebrating 4 years in government.
Basically the entire corporate media is against AMLO, but he’s one of the most popular leaders in the world.” (-Ben Norton)
IT’S COOL TO HAVE INFLUENCES BUT YA GOTTA PUT YOUR OWN STANK ON IT
“One beer aint gonna kill ya…” (-Mike L.)
November 2022
Desert ghost town. Sunday. One of the town’s two hardware stores is closed, as my wife rightly says, that’s why people never stay here. They roll the sidewalks up at like eight o clock. Most all the stores close down on Sunday AND Monday. The big hipster main drag tourist hive is only open maybe four days a week, six hours on those days…maybe. No record store, no train depot, no bus station. Just rundown trailer homes and miles of dead earth. Open hardware store cashier asks if you are “Moose or veteran”, cause if you vote Reublikkan, they give you a ten percent discount, but like all their shit is jackedup stupidly high. Eighty dollar axe, one hundred fifty dollar wheel barrel. Ten dollar margarita salt, ten dollar spice for your grilled meat. It’s cowboy country and they expect their clientele to be rich, like them. We’re in there looking for drill bits that work on masonry ya know for some nails to go into adobe walls, and this worker is coughing and sneezing and appears to have the Covid and I’m thinking about his predicament-to go to work or not to go to work. I wish he would have called in, personally. Bored on long desert days when time stands still, I hate tv, and rummage endlessly through old boxes of stuff I managed to save, came across a VHS video tape of one of my worst band’s worst shows. On it, I’d sharpied the words, “Jeff Dahl’s Copy”, almost like thirty years ago or some shit-sooo glad I never sent it to that fella, it was not worthy of outta town scrutiny. I dunno where I first met Michael L., the guitar player, in all the red scarves, but it was probably in a bar, might have been through a local grunge photographer who he slept with. He was the Kentucky approximation of a Dogs D’Amour dandy. Gregarious, got loud alot. Played “Too Fast For Live” on cassette in his hatchback. A very lively and flamboyant presence. He was a big all day drinker, much like myself in those years, but even less apologetic. He had a sloppy, primitive, Flat Duo Jets kinda rootsy noise band with a married couple who he sometime had sex with, he was a genuine exhibitionist, I guess you don’t get your penis pierced if you aint planning on showing it around. You remember that band from Sioux City, the Chickenhawks? That was what Mike’s band with the swinger couple reminded me of, or the Fireworks. I liked ‘im cause he was like a more extroverted Izzy Stradlin guy, an Andy McCoy wannabe with a baby fat Elvis kinda face and a boisterous guffaw, and just so flagrantly wore these L.A. Guns and Cinderella black t shirts under his leather Starsky & Hutch jackets, right when that was real frowned upon by all the Just Gone Grunge mainstreamers. I thought that was real cool, cause it was his not so subtle way of saying he was his own man. Or so I thought. Some smartass slacker types might sarcastically, tongue in cheek-wear an Iron Maiden shirt, ya know, disingenuously to be clever or ironic, back then, but Michael L. was not kidding about liking Cinderella, or Guns N Roses. The whole idea for the band we had started together was supposed to be “Hanoi Rocks meets the Replacements”. He was aready hip to both of those bands, which was real rare in that part of the country, in those days. We would empty a case of beer and a black bottle while listening to “Self Destruction Blues” and “Tim” and “Pleased To Meet Me” and maybe some Mother Love Bone for good measure. I hated grunge but thought that Mark Lanegan solo record “Whiskey For The Holy Ghost” was okay and his “Nearly Lost You” radio hit. Mike and The Kid bassplayer both liked Cobain and company more than I did but understood the band we were gonna do was supposed to be an up band, not a downer. I think Mike felt somewhat liberated by my appearance cause he started dressing more like me, cowboy hats and leather pants and concho straps and shit-ya know he’d drive us in his shitty fuckedup car across the bridge to the hayseed thrift stores, pre E-Bay, when they were still good, you could still find quality stuff on the cheap, and we’d look for bolo ties and cowboy shit-After Six tuxedo shirts, and old velvet suitjackets. He was always being asked to leave retail shops and malls and most all public spaces, by rent a cops or nice old ladies, because his favorite thing was to bring an open bottle of Jack with him and take big theatrical sips out of it, wherever we went. Like Slash, I guess. He loved to make a scene, start some shit, create a disturbance, he was all about the ruckous when we first met. He craved not only attention but high drama. He’d see some showoff Republikkkan CEO son, capitalist dude in his vintage car and give ‘em a big loudmouthed barrage of belligerent insults. You had to either love or hate the guy, and I naturally loved him. His only real flaw was his crazy need to become famous overnight. I mean we were both into hedonistic rocknroll decadence and hard all the time partying, but for Michael, it was never enough to “party like a rockstar”. He wanted the fame. Ideally, with the money. Stardom was calling. I was a bit more leisurely, like, let it come or not. Who cares about fame, I was gonna do my own thing my own way, with or without any smalltime fanfare or bigtime papparazzi. Mostly I just liked music and clothes, photography and art, and girls and drinking. We’d sneak liquor into the hillbilly bowling alley in the burbs, and found that was a good place to hangout and be ourselves where we were not drawing too much attention or aggravation from the stern and judgmental, uptight, nine to five Midwesterners, but he could still approach girls with his great bravado and ridiculous jailhouse tattoos and tell ’em how he was about to become famous in his charming southern drawl.
The conservative town we unfortunately lived in was notorious for a buncha insufferably generic, bought n paid for, textbook-mediocrity-copycat impressions of each famous band-they had the Chili Peppers impersonators, the Pearl Jam imitators, the fake Sonic Youths, and so on and so forth. The too loud jukebox at the main bar just blared fucking Nirvana nonstop and that Stone Temple Pilots “Sex Type Thing” song, all day. I started to really hate that shit, cause I’d already suffered through it for like two years at Tower Records, where I’d worked in a bleery haze against my will and better judgement in the Last City I’d eaten through. Now I was in the most uncool, racist, violent, depressing place I’d ever been and the people on the scene were not my tribe at all. There was one local honchos band who just kinda sucked fucking something awful, in my opinion, but they ruled that shithole town-they had big balls and a shit ton of money. Best thing about ‘em was their lead guitar player, who had quit. He was the one with talent, but who needs talent if you have local honcho big balls and shit tons of money? So yeah, they got signed on the strength of their obscure covers to a major label, and all these idiots in slick “Alternative” magazines would all pretend like they were any good, like obedient automotons, yeah they had access to drugs and owned shit, but they were really not very good, at all, it was pure shtick–totally like, the Emperor’s New Clothes. I was the only one who was not afraid to shrug and say, “meh”. They were a glorified cover band. And predators, got off on causing harm-not my kinda people. Some other, older guys from the eighties punk rock days, had started a heavy reverb impersonation of Boss Hog and Royal Trux, and they had all the connections from booking shows over the years, and elaborate collections of vintage gear, and they were releasing a steady stream of recorded output on multiple international Hot Rod Labels. I thought they were cool, if shamelessly derivative. I got what they were doing, they just never liked me, AT ALL, cause it was their turf, their hometown, I was an outsider, showing up talkin’ about the Stooges and the Dolls and they never liked that. That was their gig. Could only be one blackhaired dude who liked Nick Cave per zipcode or some shit. I’ll tell you the odd part is I still begrudgingly like their music even though they treated me terribly, I still kinda like the band. So did my guitarist Michael L., who’d obsessively started clocking their progress, rmodeling himself on their vocalist, they were on the covers of magazines and shit, and he figured his next best shortcut to fame would be to sorta approximate what had been working for them, so he started talking about how I should work on becoming “more like Pussy Galore”, which to me, at that time, just meant-what? Stones covers played badly with a chick bassplayer? I didn’t know what he was talking about, “be more like Pussy Galore”. He was suggesting I write lyrics in character-like imagine I’m a serial killer, he’d say. Or a wisecrackin’ gum shoe, we needed to be more like indie film makers. Him and the bassplayer used to get in these all too serious, abrupt fistfights in the rehearsal room over very rudimentary songs I’d written in my prior bands and was having them learn. We’re talkin’ three chord, Dictators or Romantics type shit-Replacements for beginners, and they were going to the matresses over three chords-straight to sudden fiery fisticuffs over it, and if they crashed into the drums, the wealthy suburbanite metal guy would lose his shit and pile into the fracas punching people randomly-all three of ’em on the floor spilling ashtrays and beers cans and knocking over cymbols, cause our drummer was a total heavy metal guy and he had like professional Tommy Lee quality drumsets and a drum tech who followed him around, his own personal roadie who lit his cigarettes and shit for him, named Cheese. You can’t make this shit up. I was the singer, I wrote the words and you know, I write about my life, not some opaque fantasy of being a faroff “Blade Runner” character or Jim Jarmusch quirky eccentric, it was a zero irony zone that I composed from. I was more like an old school outlaw singer-I told stories, mostly about my friends, maybe wrote some protest lyrics from time to time, but there was nothing that fictionalized or “Twin Peak”s mysterious about it-almost none of it was like, me trying to be an indie film auteur. I was not being abstract or pseudo highbrow, no desire to be-Michael was taking some college writing classes and I think that was where the rather more professorial approach was coming from. He wanted me to be “Blue Velvet” but I was already too “River’s Edge”.
So anyways, Michael L., met a hot little number, and she was always lookin’ fine and wearin’ like the short shorts-had a real dynamite pair of gams on her and impressed the fuck out of him by knowing every word on “Exile On Main Street”. It seemed like we were gradually seeing less and less of him for awhile and he kept all his different little sets of friends all separate. So yeah he’d showup wasted to band practice with increasing frequency but we all drank heavily and it was not at all unusual back then for one of us to pass out somewhere, but he was clearly doing some dope and speed, cause his personality was bouncing all over the place. I had a moodswinging girlfriend who was also having her own personality changes, and alcohol induced blackouts, where she really would not remember anything about what happened last night, even and especially if it involved her breaking glass and screaming abuse, and the neighbors leaving us notes about the noise, or rent a cops showing up to our door and playing cards with me and my bandmates after we tucked her back into bed. It was a weird time. We did not sound anything like “the Replacements meets Hanoi Rocks”. We sounded like the Cramps minus the humor, if they were miserable, and really could not play. The Action Swingers remind me of us back then and the local greasy kid punk fanzine compared us to GG & The Jabbers. Not my idea of a fun time and the buzzkill and gloom of the grunge hierarchy was even seeping in to us. Our publicity pictures taken by that girl photographer I mentioned were way better than what we’d achieved sonically, in spite of some good songs, we needed a better guitar player, and Michael L. felt what we were missing was a better vocalist, you know one who could write film noir lyrics about big city serial killers and act “more like Pussy Galore”. I didn’t get where he was coming from “creatively”, at the time, but then, he hooked up with this very busy math metal drummer who was into like, Helmet. Then, they found a guitarist, who sortof played with all these different effects pedals and he started singing in a cartoon Elvis Presley voice, and while I got distracted by that chick I lived with breaking up with me to concentrate more on becoming local popularity grunge famous, and I was bohomeless again, needing a new place to live, he went away with his new band to San Francisco and were becoming-yep, Overnight Famous, by acting “more like Pussy Galore”. It fucking worked like a charm! Sheesh, farout. I finally saw it-it crystalized-his master plan was actually fucking working. He was branding himself as like, Jon Spencer Jr and people in the big city seemed to really go for that. I was not into the music or lyrics he was co creating at all, I could never connect to any of it, EXCEPT his aw, shucks hell yeah, charming as fuck hillbilly, punk rock Jethro Bodean personality. I love the guy, we were like two peas in a pod, EXCEPT I was not at all interested in any of the fad music of the day and next thing I know, the bassplayer calls and tells me they found him dead. Dead! What the fucking fuck. Some kinda mixture of booze and drugs or prescription medications. Dead, though! Ya know the whole time I knew the kid, he was alll about the merry making and the celebrating youth. Ya know he’d take handfulls of pills, swagger around. Stagger around. This whole operation had taken another dark turn and I was having trouble processing it. My high school friend had also overdosed that year. Other former intimates I’d grown close to were hanging around the town’s superstar popular drug dealers. A local overdosed. Too much. Then another, and another, and it became common to hear that somebody you sat on a barstool next to the night before ws found dead on some filthy bathroom floor. Almost routine. All too fucking common, so many people we knew and loved are dead and gone. All my bartenders, all my ex drinking buddies, some of those girls I met and fell in love with at that disgusting dirtyy dive bar where people overdosed in the bathroom. Michael L. was a beloved rogue. I read all these articles and obituaries penned by adoring big city music people who were really, really enthusiastic about his band, and swooning over his personal style and red velvet jackets. I still miss that guy Michael L., and he’s been gone a long time now. I still hear from people who I’ve never met cause they know I knew him. A famous bassplayer I like in a famous band, her husband was a friend of his, somebody else who was in one of my music groups on line was a drummer of his secondary West Coast band. His main man math metal drummer showed back up in my life, said he wanted me to sing for their band, doing the exact music I was never into. I tried to gently convey that the last thing that appealed to me was fronting a cover band of my dead buddy’s attempt to be more like Pussy Galore. Everybody I was meeting back then seemed to only wanna have a cover band of a cover band of a cover band, like chasing bandwagons that had already left town. Just not my bag at all. It’s okay to start off like, “we wanna be so and so meets so and so”, but then, you’re supposed to revitalize the whole genre, make it your own. I felt for the math metal drummer, cause I know he accrued a lot of grief and guilt over the death of our mutual homeboy, but I could never bring myself to sing those lyrics about film noir serial killers, or whatever it was supposed to be. The math metal drummer assured me we could become overnight famous with his grunge connections doing the refried tribute act, but I was rather more dedicated to my own ouvre, my own scene. I had my own get down. whether it ws appreciated by grunge/”Alternative” locals or not. I had my own songs. The bassist got his suburban Weiland wannabe pot dealer friend to start performing my tunes at open mic nights when the sit on a stool MTV “unplugged thing” was in. Wow, brother-those are MY SONGS. That started happening with alarming frequency. No one wnated to help me record but six different acts were doing my tunes in different towns. You can’t make this shit up. People I met in nowhere places were becoming Overnight Famous. Not me, man, I was working in a kitchen, washing dishes and picking fucking chicken all day for minimumwage in a hairnet and bloody apron. Goin’ home alone and hittin’ the bottle hard. I had my own red leather jacket and songs galore, but admittedly no grunge connections to local major label fame people, or fancy studio owners, or well to do patrons of the arts, or any of that shit. I am not gonna kiss somebody’s ass ass just because their dad bought them an old car or sports bar or recording studio. As The Kid, our bratty Bastard bassplayer used to say, “Fuck Those People”. When my leather barbarian ex guitar player from smalltown Flag City, USA via Allston and Colarado got out of jail, I summoned him to my side, and we resumed making our own brand of young, loud, n snotty punknroll that was never properly recorded and probably still sounded nothing like the “Replacements meets Hanoi Rocks”-it was muddier, swampier-more like the Crybabies probably, meets the Hangmen and Comatones and Beasts Of Bourbon-ya see, he was into like, AC/DC, Motorhead, and heartland Americana-Soul Asylum and Seger, Petty, shit like that, and I was pretty new wave, ya know. New wave and torch songs. We had kinda mastered the art of tear it up and take the waitress home, though. Whenever we played in public, people went wild. We weren’t shy, we came to party with the people. We took our inspiration from the Fleshtones. As he liked to say, I kept him from becoming a full fledged AC/DC tribute band, and he kept me from becoming an uglier Duran Duran. My only real regret about all of it was just never having any prolonged access to recording facilities. Now, I’m almost 53, it’s getting colder, I got a teenager in the home, three grown kids who don’t want much to do with their disreputable hoodlum old man, and I never stopped thinking about making more bad seed rocknroll. My wife’s on the phone with her old dad and I’m rootin’ for the geezer. It’s a nothing to do Sunday, I already fucked around in the yard, did the dishes and vaccumed, and folded the laundry. I’d love to have a drink right now but the kid’s gonna be waking up any minute and require all my positive life force. (RIP) MICHAEL L.
“A lot of people seem to believe that capitalism is the only way to arrange society & therefore we must stick with it as it destroys our world. That’s like believing burning your house down with you inside is the only way to keep warm in the winter.” (-Lee Camp)
CATCH MY FALL
“What happened to Zeke? He’s dead on Jones, man How about Dave? O.D’d on alcohol Oh, what’s Rock doing? Oh, he’s living with his mother What about James? He’s gone straight…” (-Iggy)
Sports people in the burbs are weird, I’ll give you an example. Me and my drummer drinking beer together on the stoop was characterized by the sports moms and employers as me corrupting the good boy from the good home, right? Him and his brother’s bully sports team friends getting drunk together, that was All American red blooded rites of passage and blue eyed innocent campus hijinks. Class privilege was a thing back there. So was all that bizarre hometown zipcode overzealous sports patriotism. My wrestling team, wrong or right. Football players can do no wrong. Or kung fu predators, if their dads owned big houses. It was always fucked up beyond belief or repair back there, that school to prison pipeline can not be reformed: the really awful, cruel, spiteful, ballsout mean people were celebrated, rewarded, promoted. Nice kids, good kids, loving, creative kids were abused, incarcerated, bootcamped, punished, beaten, and railroaded into jails, institutions, or military service to make more space for the dickheads and the sadists. That still goes on today in my kid’s generation, the I-Phone tiktok social media culture of kids telling kids to kill themselves, it seems like it may have even gotten worse, since we were young. You know the scene in “Some Kind Of Wonderful” where hapless dork Keith is befriended by all the hoods and skins and big metalheads in detention? I had that same exeperience, of being embraced and accepted by the big tough guys, the few who weren’t assholes, in my high school years, and the one guy who jumped in and ended up taking some punches on my behalf, in front of the downtown nightclub when I was getting pummeled by a whole mob of rednecks, you know I became sortof very attached to him, had him on a bit of a pedestel for years, he always has a space in my heart. I thought it was just so heroic and courageous, when him and a black dude named Bohickey involved themselves with saving me from furthur pounding. I thought we’d always be like Robin Hood and Little John, Morris & Jerome, Laurel & Hardy. Jake & Elwood, ya know what I mean? A dynamic duo. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Vaudeville comedians, Catskills comics. A Dabba Doo Time. He was a popular kid at the city school and hung around some hillbilly poker players who liked eighties rap music and he was even into like Prince and the Cure. He was big ole redheaded white kid but he could dance. Just pure charisma. He could funk. I thought he was a better bassist than the Jane’s Addiction guy. At first, we still had another bass guy-the local teen heart throb star DJ, but old Bobby was about to move on to a solo career as a frontman. So we needed a new bassist and I knew who I had in mind. The guy who’d been hanging around our band practices and drinking beer with us already, back when we were still doing like Alice, Deadboys, Misfits, Stones and Dogs D’Amour covers. Over time, we’d become regular drinking buddies, we had so much fun together singing, “HEY! HEY! HEY!” from Tom Petty’s “Rebels” at the top of our lungs in the echoy apartment, so I decided he should become a full fledged member of my band. He resisted the idea initially because in the hairband era, tv programming made it seem almost like you should look like Brett Michaels and Ricki Rocket to play rocknroll, this guy was a big giant musclebound dude, so he was not sure he’d fit in with the rest of us scrawny scuzzy black leather Ramones, but I insisted, I started teaching him about Hanoi Rocks, Generation X and Johnny Thunders and the Fleshtones and he started coming to band practice. Real punk rock, rocknroll in it’s purest form, does not require anybody look a certain way. He had a big heart and a sense of right and wrong, a conscience, the impulse to be cool and do the next right thing even if that don’t please the popular consesus or always get the dummy vote. That was the criteria for being in my gang. Side by side, we’d faced all kindsa different challenges and adversaries and again and again we rose to the moment, sometimes just barely lived to tell the tale, there were some near riots at crazy biker jamborees in the woods and the like, but othertimes we fucking almost…excelled. I was already a scarfy bottle swingin’ yo ho ho Jack Sparrow back before Johnny Depp was on Jump Street, so I don’t think it’s a big secret that I was perceived as a controversial figure among some of the parents in the plantation states. The beautiful big rascal bassist had been a real life boy scout and role model for the kids YMCA coach before he started consorting with my lot of damaged wastrels and punks, and it is not an infrequent occurance in my life when various associates have suggested that perhaps I jeopardized their reputations among the straights. Not only did we come up together, though, but as ROTH sang on the long awaited reunion lp with Van Halen, “we came through blood and fire…” True story. Closest I ever got to figuring out what went wrong between us was the guitarist murmuring about how the local popular Catholic school Vespa riding drummer had decided I “was not happening.” And a little quote in a fanzine where they alluded to the ex vocalist being a bit too much. That would be me, of course. Okay so ya know, my loss, really cause personally I always loved all those guys, even as I saw ’em going through different stages in life. The straight edge phase, the gym membership phase, the frathouse phase, the sports bar phase, the respectable businessman, and on and on. Hell the guy he replaced, the ORIGINAL bassplayer had become a GOLFER. We had a ball as kids though, a grand ole time, playing little pissy nowhere shows in nothing places, parties, bonfires, basements, me and the other lads hipping him to all our weirdo subculture. I made him these very diverse mixed tapes all the time-everything from the Misfits and Concrete Blonde to the Standells and Warrior Soul and Little Richard and the MC5, Redd Kross and Kris Kristofferson. The Jesus & Mary Chain and the Stooges and Alice Cooper and all the stuff I write about here-right? You know-Japan, Dream Academy, Theater Of Hate, Skinny Puppy, PIL, Depeche Mode, Age Of Chance, Big Audio Dynamite, Kid Creole-you name it. I remember he got me into EARLY Soul Asylum and shared my love of the Replacements. We also both loved early hiphop and old school funk. He was a big Chili Peppers and old seventies P-Funk and like, Rick James fan. Even after he joined a different band with a guy who’d really gone out of his way to fuck me over, I kept in touch and still made him the traditional play loud all hits mixtapes every Christmas for decades, ya know? Expected to kinda raise our kids together, go on vacations, have more kicks and collaborations, but he took his own path, like in Star Wars, when Han splits cause he says he did not come to fight the empire. I totally did, though! Now we’re old, I’m a hermit, last Jedi in bearded exiled on some lonely planet, he’s a fucking collegetown superhero, living legend frat rock garage punk celebrity, and I have not seen him in years and we don’t even talk on the phone. Sad, ya know? Turned out dude was not infallible, he may have even made some dubious choices and wrong moves himself, but prefers to socialize with people who only see the boy scout image, I guess, but I don’t even know. It’s all just blind speculation on my part, totally, a shot in the dark really, cause like I said, I don’t know this grown up version of my former friend, I don’t know any of those guys anymore. I just carry our memories around like a heavy Santa Claus bag of bricks. I called him up when my girlfriend was pregnant and we were looking for an apartment with some urgency in his collegetown but he was kinda making himself scarce right then and I thought maybe it was cause he felt awkward about being in a band with my old sax player roommate from the coast, and a normie gone punk, squeaky clean from the honky burbs, rich kid I’d kinda mentored when he was loitering around my record store his senior year of college. Like I said, I was a little salty for a couple of years cause he played in some other bands with some backstabber guys I don’t get along with, who took my good trust and misused it, and that kinda came between us, I suppose. When you are as talented and personable and charming and fun as that guy, you become a soughtafter hot commodity, epecially in a middle class collge town. Also, I was friends with his wife in high school, back when she was sortof one of the 120 Minutes watchers, an early REM and Depeche Mode fan, but her preppie girls sports and real estate clique never liked me, so yeah, who knows really, maybe that has something to do with it. I was considered a real bad influence on everybody in that hometown, by the Catholic school sports coaches and influential country club moms. I always say I’ve been “Cancelled Since ’83”! I put that on a tshirt. We did finally manage to exchange the briefest of emails when one of our mutual friends died suddenly, me and the now famous bassplayer, but that was it. From my perspective, we should have stayed together and made some records that shoulda coulda woulda been legendary, me and the guys from that original band, but we did not, and that is that. What do ya do when people you love just kinda ditch you, leave you behind? You just cope, right, learn to live without them. I’m like the glaring answer to the musical question “what’s wrong with this picture” in the eyes of like the sports bar celebs, boojass collector scum and showbiz hustle contingents and I get that. They went with the more midwestern acceptable choice, when they replaced me-a generic baseball cap dude. I stuck with the black sheep, the dive bar crazies, the dropout anarchists, the principled antiwar activists, and loudmouthed free speech advocates and fuck you Last Call rebel alliance. They got like a proper pitch Kendoll kid who fit in with fratboys, but did he have any message, vision, integrity or actual songs? I never saw anything that worthwhile come outta that Catholic school moved to nearby collegetown clique. Aside from some generic white t shirt blonde dude wanting to “pass” among the baseball cap people. I could never even understand the lyrics. Something about him wanting money, staus, and materialism. Drums were still white hot though. I guess they fit in great with the college people, the bankers, the secretaries, the day job people, barowners, the whole gentrification brunching ownership society. That aint the stuff of rocknroll rebellion though. Not so much. Anyways, no explanation came, I was out, other dude was in. Then they moved on to some other bands that played like garage covers on super vintage, extra nice classic antique instruments, in suits, in trendy hipster barber shops and in trendy hipster party town exotic locales and shit. I kept annually, foolishly, stupidly and repeatedly offering my services as a rabble rouser/singer/songwriter/people’s champion but they kept blowing me off completely. I shoulda moved on and got over it but I never learned how. I got their pictures on my wall here but they don’t even write me back most of the time. Drummer got sick so I walked to the store in the rain to buy him a card, he just never responded, I guess he told the guitar player I was “not happening”. Bummer. Yeah? “I just drink and drink and drink…”
I wrote about four books, stored on this computer-they’re all about our wild times back in the ancient days. Never published ’em when I had the chance as not to offend any of thes people’s parents, or fancy wives, ya know? Discretion being the better part of valor, I thought it was always “too soon” and figure some people who are parents now don’t want their kids knowing how wild we were. We were a little bit wild, I guess. I thought we were the boys next door, just the ones in silver pants. I honestly never found out what came between us, maybe the onery bassist was embarrassed by my farout appearance back when wearing pink and purple, and yellow feathers and glitter band sequins, or having big oversized Steve Stevens Aqua Net black haystack hair, was not all hunky dory in the flyover states, I was always really despised by the art police, homophobes, and zero tolerance, authoritarian forces of sports-conformity in the flyover states. It was a real shame to me when him and the rest of that band decided to replace me. We were not only extremely entertaining together as a band, like anything can happen day bring the house down entertaining but me and the guitarist wrote way better than average songs back then. Still bums me out. I waited half my life away, hoping for a reunion record. One of my main struggles in this lifetime has been loving motherfuckers who are just incapable of loving me back. Lemmy says “win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me”, but I got hungup on the people I grew up with, they imprinted on my little psyche somehow. It’s just how it is. To me, all those laughs we shared were way more important and valuable than any sortof social hierarchy vip room rewards of membership or crediot in the daytime world, or whatever. I never wanted to be anything like the people on the hill. No big house or glass coffeetable stacked with expensive art books or glossy catalogs can replace having real friends. Not to me, anyways. “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette til your last dyin’ day”. Whether you’re having a beer on the extravagant wraparound sundeck, or in the dirty alley, what differnce does it make? They watch high definition tv on movie sized, thin screens, I watch old vhs tapes of 120 Minutes on shitty thrift store tv’s, you say potato, I say SUSAN SARANDON. Call me sentimental. I am what I am. Somedays I am proud almost everybody I brushed with from back then still has some kinda band in a different zipcode and are still making music, even if it’s without me. I know I had some small effect on all those blokes. They were all good lads, I guess, I just was not made to fit in to that midwestern world. I’m still like the throwaway kids in that eighties punk movie. TR. “The Rejected”. It’s alright, now.
“When capitalism proponents say “you don’t understand economics”, what they really mean is “you don’t understand that unregulated capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But that IS understood; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient. The “invisible hand of the market” gets treated as an actual deity that actually exists, with all the wisdom necessary to solve the world’s problems. In reality the pursuit of money lacks any wisdom; it can’t solve our major problems, it can only make more stuff and more profits. When capitalism proponents say “you don’t understand economics”, what they really mean is “you don’t understand that unregulated capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But that IS understood; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient. Capitalism has no real answers for problems like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and caring for the needful. Yes “let the markets decide” will generate lots of profits for those set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking cannot address those very serious problems. In fact many of our problems come from the fact that capitalism is TOO good at turning the gears of industry; our biosphere is dying largely because capitalism values making lots of things but not un-making things. We’re choking our ecosystem to death because it’s profitable. The claim that capitalism is the best system for generating profits is basically correct; it’s hard to beat greed and starvation as a carrot and stick to get the gears of industry whirring. The issue here is that merely generating profits won’t solve most of the world’s problems.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Are y’all that dense to not see it’s 2 sides of the same coin, a never ending cycle of sameness, 2 headed beast, DIVIDE AND CONQUER, there will never be an anti war candidate on either side. Some of us actually have a revolutionary mindset and see beyond an illusion of choice.” (-Marisa)
NEWS SPORTS & WEATHER DESK:
“A lot of things have brought on these dire times, but two important factors are that 1) capitalism pushes the sociopaths to the top & they ultimately rule the systems 2) capitalism is the belief in infinite growth on a limited planet. It can only end in collapse if not stopped.” (-Lee Camp)
STAY WILD ! STAY FREE! BROTHERS & SISTERS & FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION, AS STOKELY CARMICHAEL USED TO SAY, “ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE!” FREE ASSANGE!
Yes, yes, I am well aware that Amerikkka’s uptight, think-tank engineered, consensus manufacturing, safe space college culture abhors the use of even deliberately offensive sarcasm-even if it’s the feminist magazine “B Word”, and even the most righteous black radical hip hop artists use of the taboo n word, in the context of self empowerment, and not everybody’s gonna “get”, or like, the name of this crazy Sydney Australia gang of gutter punk mischief makers. Lilly white college people who’ve embraced the Comics Code Authority, and PMRC Temperance League finger waggers, and scolding committees who always show up hoping to make a bust, every time some punks or everyday people wanna express some blue collar rage that ain’t P.C., and properly photo shopped and white washed. That’s why most of us walked away from the hipster hell-holes where everyone is rich and fake and holier than thou with their Mimosas and bullshit poses. We’re all incessantly hassled and reprimanded and sent to the back of the bus if we ain’t had the Sensitivity Studies crunchy granola makeovers, and I kinda get why we are discouraged from ever using the hurtful lingo of our mean-spirited rightwing hate speech oppressors, even if we earnestly believe we are just doing our job, by turning the tables on our rightwing rulers and mocking them, mocking us, but I also get how these radical leftist boot boy provocateurs are wearing the rightwing putdown proudly, and triumphantly, like a badge of honor. They also hate the Dickies and the Three Stooges in the cloistered faux liberal Hillarybot Rachel Redscare college towns. The tone police in the ivory towers have no desire to confront real power, like the evil sons a bitches overthrowing Venezuela and kidnapping indigenous children at the border, so they just wanna wring their hands some more about how they frown upon you liking taboo and forbidden free speech whipping dogs like Richard Pryor, or the Dead Kennedys, or Wasp, or El Duce, or whatever. I avoid the people from the ivory towers. They were never gonna like me, anyway. They are all just like, prudish, modern-day Tipper Gores.
The anniversary of Sid Vicious’s death seems like the perfect day to crank up this defiantly rebellious, punk as fuck, 45 that spins at 33, from the Dark Clouds now legendary Dee Dee Ramone figure, turned furious truth telling front man, Ronnie Wreckless, and company. Man, how I wish Tim Yo from Maximum Rocknroll was still around to dig this shit. Loud, fast rules, forty ounce in a brown bag on the filthy street corner, abrasive rocknroll street dog madness from the endlessly enchanting land of the Powder Monkeys, Hard Ons, Beasts Of Bourbon, and Rose Tattoo! This stuff will take you back to your own golden moments, before society divided up your friends by class and “identity”, when the kids were still united and could never be divided. When BEING was still every bit as important as HAVING. When motherfuckers still REBELLED and READ BOOKS and THOUGHT FOR THEMSELVES! “Privileged White Guy Blues” reminds me of Billy Bragg or some other righteous testifiers from the real punk rock days when we could all sit as equals on milk crates in the wet basement and come to consensus, before all this bull shit about whoever has the money has the credibility and final say in all matters, forever and ever, Amen. Before the capitalist, corporate con-job of “Alternative” duped everyone with goateed grunge moaning, baby dresses, and rich kid ukuleles, and all those loathsome, buzzkillin’ floods of college wankers came in and stole the scene with their parents fucking money and high school sports team competition social hierarchies, and delivered us collectively into two decades of unlistenably twee and detached hipster rich kid mediocrity and manufactured dance muzak that has reigned over our corporate owned airwaves since ’96. “Useless Generation” reminds me of the last wave of underground punk I felt any connection to-the heyday of Libertine, Moral Crux, Dimestore Haloes, and U.S. Bombs. After that final hour, of Hit-List magazine punk rock, I fell between the cracks, went broke, and never again had spare money to buy records. Their proletariat everyman ideology and smartass sense of humor will immediately appeal to fans of the Spent Idols or Humpers. “Don’t Call ‘ Em Hipster” made me smile, right away-my kinda parody, I’m not a big fan of gentrification brunchers, myself. “Subculture” is bratty, juvie gang, punk right out of the eighties Indiana punk scene, where I grew up. Makes me think of combat boots and brainy goth girls galore. “50 Plus Degrees” and “Cock N Balls” remind me of hard years spent living in shitty vans “that smell like balls, dog, and broken dreams”, in the immortal words of my former travelling companion, shivering in cold rehearsal spaces, drinking malt liquor, and drunken all night sing-alongs, before the rich people stripped us of our joy and freedom, and strong-armed us out of the old neighborhood, before the con-job of “Alternative” where you had to be a kissass Counting Crows, furrowed brow and trust funded, rich person from a fancy college, to even participate in music, in any meaningful way. The Leftards are a welcome clarion call from deepest Garage Land, urging all the sincere punks to get back to where you once belonged! Right the fuck on!
Veglam 