my chuck taylors weigh a ton.

we don't go for that flip-in, flip-out gimmicky crap.

Monday, April 16, 2007

more fun with guns!

whoa-kay. who heard about the ugly shit that went down over at virginia tech this morning?

so far, thirty three dead. that's a little outta fucking control.

go ahead, look up. i bet you can't see thirty-three people in front of you. i'll bet you can't walk out onto the sidewalk and see thirty-three people out there. i've been awake for seven hours, and on capitol hill for five, i'll bet that if i shot at every person i've seen so far today, i couldn't have killed thirty-three people with my rookie aim.

thirty-three. not only is that dedication, that's efficiency. it's also a sort of record, for things here in the US.

so, how many d'ya spose have to fall in an incident before the NRA members/gun-luvahs/useless death apologists say... OK. this is gone beyond reason. double today's count? triple? the century mark?

it's true. you can't put the poop back in the horse. you can't unlearn people on how to make a gun (or a bomb, or a crossbow, or a... or a...), you can't bring back the innocent bystanders, and sadly... especially in this country where any affront to [insert random thing that you love so damn much you are blinded by it's uselessness] is an affront to your freedom, you can't make an argument strong enough that guns are fucked up, and there are too many of them out there, and they are too easy to get.

i fear my government. i have a legitimate worry that martial law will be declared near the election... i've got enough belief in conspiracy to almost expect some sort of "terrorist catastrophe" near election time, especially if the current administration doesn't like the way the wind is blowing. boy howdy, we've seen some strange things in the last number of years, and i wouldn't put anything past them. and dammit, if the tanks start rolling through the streets to quell the "insurgents", then yeah, i'd rather have a gun than no gun. but i don't have a gun. and i certainly don't have a gun big enough to defend myself against the national guard. and if i did... well, it's a certainty that i'd be dead in less time then it would take to load said weapon. so... what's the point anyway?

in other words, the right to keep and bear arms is basically useless. handguns are especially useless. unless you find yourself defending the rights of psychos to go and shoot up fucking high school and college campuses, town diners, post offices, and afterparty crash-shacks, you honestly gotta concede that while, yeah, it's a pie-in-the-sky dream, this country would be way better off if they had never figured out a way to make a gun that was any shorter than your arm. and doubly better off if the only way to kill someone was with a blunt object, a sharp object, or a clever ruse on getting them to jump off something really, really high up.

sorry. i do this everytime some poor sap gets gunned down for no fucking reason at all. carry on.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

so it goes.

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.


so long and thank you to the best author i knew.

"Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again."

they say amazing things happen when the brain shuts down. i hope his old, bonked head of his gave him one good last feeling of home before he expired.

i want to say that i learned about life through KV, though i would rather say he was confirming what i was experiencing.

"everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt"

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

fuck you, lawrence alloway.

dork around long enough on the internet, and you'll be damned if it isn't just like television. the possibilities are endless, and yet we all end up looking at the same shit.

being that mtv quit doing it's job fifteen years ago, it's up to youtube and the like to actually distribute videos. this week, half of america seems to have caught onto a video of alanis morrisette doing a painfully (but predictably) cathartic version of that ol' black eyed peas classic "my humps". played at a glacier's pace and sung in sickening earnest, alanis robs schtick that seems possibly funny to anyone the first time they see it, but increasingly less funny if you have seen it done by other, better acts. let's be honest: steve allen probably ripped it off from someone else. recontextualizing bad music does not often make bad music better, or wittier. it's just stupid.

also making the rounds this week is a video homage/cover/parody of nine inch nail's "hurt", probably made more famous via johnny cash's cover. well, this time around, it's a version as sung by kermit the frog. and yeah, it's got a pretty poor kermit imitation, plus you get to see kermit emote over an acoustic guitar, shoot up, jerk off to pictures of miss piggy, and even fellate rolf the pianist/dog. hm.

now, "my humps" is a bad song, and i think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to argue that. "hurt" is a pretty bad song too, but that's mostly because trent reznor is a tool, and most times i question his ability to identify a natural emotion. alanis bobs and weaves between self-righteousness and irrelevance, and kermit and his acoustic guitar? well, i suppose the lesson here anyway is pop-culture juxtopositions are increasingly tiresome. post-modernist mash-up directives feel old before they've even been created, mostly because the brain can predict the outcome without actually having to see the result. look around long enough, and everything seems interchangeable. thanks to tools that can manipulate modern media, reinterpreting is a goddamn cinch. and if it's so easy, why bother?

our boy george carlin said it, many years ago: "nail two pieces of shit together that have never been nailed together before, and some asshole will buy it".

Monday, April 09, 2007

it's the bees knees.

i went a good fifteen years without a worry about bees. last year, yellow jackets infested a dead log in my backyard, and i got stung at least eight times, pretty much every time i mowed the lawn. hurty.

the bubblemen were a side project of love & rockets, they had a bad song called "the bubblemen rap" in which they donned bee costumes and well, rapped. the chorus was "don't rock... wobble". twas crap.

everybody seems to think that love and rockets' best album was "earth sun moon", and i'd have to disagree, i think it's the worst. too much god. i heard "mirror people" on KEXP today, it didn't age all that well. "no new tale to tell" is a catchy tune, but it's a juvenile pile of shit. i heard it described as "psychedelic existentialism", to which i had to add "performed with the wit of a fourteen year old".

me, i liked "express", especially "yin and yang the flowerpot man" and "life in laralay". no, they didn't have a firmer grasp on their lyricism on that album, but i thought the songs didn't sound nearly as dehydrated. at the time, i didn't have much of a perspective on their debt to glam... i only really knew glam as a bowie-stage, and a few poor examples of it like the new york dolls or roxy music. lately, i've been listening to a lot of t. rex, which entertains me to no end.

i've also developed a bit of an obsession with an awesome mountain of one edit of ian hunter (from mott the hoople) song called "bastard". (it can be found here, for a little while anyway) listened to it every morning for the last week. reminds me of billy squier's queenie disco-rock. helluva riff.

billy squier. gayer than a bag o' dicks. i just read that ian brown (best known from stone roses) is teaming up with steve and paul from the sex pistols, and heading into the studio. don't know where that could lead to. it stands to reason that johnny rotton/lydon/mr. filthy lucre was the carnival act tacked on to serious bands. sheesh, bill laswell, steve vai and ginger baker played on pil's "album"... and let's face it, jah wobble, keith levene and martin atkins were no slouches either.

enough. more later.