Newsweek, 9/20/10

Only an arrogant, obtuse, dogmatic egotist like George Will could mock (once again) the seriousness of global warming and then, in the same piece, glibly point out that, in fact, "extinctions result mostly from human population pressures - habitat destruction, pesticides, etc" without batting an eyelid. 

Quoting physicist Robert Laughlin - "slowing man-made extinctions in a meaningful way would require drastically reducing the world's population" - Will points out, simply, with a shrug, that population control "will not happen." 

Amazing what you can get away with when you get paid to be pompous, judgmental creep. Why bother trying to concoct a sustainable energy strategy, folks? Some scientists say global warming is bogus. And anyway, overpopulation is the real boogeyman, so don't sweat it. 

At any rate, George, thank you for finally putting the word "population" into print in a mainstream American publication. So: when do we start the conversation about overpopulation? 

The answer is: never. There isn't a politician in the United States, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, crude or eloquent who will touch the issue of overpopulation. You can't say - hell, you cannot even in some roundabout vaguely esoteric way politely suggest - that perhaps the thousands upon thousands of voting constituents in your district who are thoughtlessly, ignorantly, even unhappily pumping out baby after baby after baby are behaving like losers of the world, permanently mucking up the works. That definitely ain't a recipe for re-election. Calm down, tea-baggers: I don't think Washington is broken. I'm not bagging on politicians for being obsequious cowards who are only interested in their own jobs (and anyways, you idiots are largely responsible for the laughably misguided notion that babies are special). No, I think we are broken. Humans. We are simply, by our nature, selfish, thoughtless, greedy and ignorant. 

Before you write me off as the stereotypical old curmudgeon who longs for the days of yore, and wonders what's wrong with the youth nowadays, rest assured: I don't think this is a recent occurrence. I don't think the years I grew up in were better than the present lot. There isn't a century in our species' existence that isn't marked by greed, war, and a thirst for power. Same old shit with this crowd. What I find insulting is that the same people who write off global warming as a hoax, and dodge the issue of overpopulation as unworthy of our attention are the same people preaching love and happiness in the name of christianity and capitalism - two forces with as much destruction and bloodshed in their wake as islam and socialism. Their complete lack of responsible thinking, and intolerance to other points of view, betrays a hypocrisy that I can't even fathom.

So, a couple of points to ponder for the first time in your life:

1) Babies aren't special.

2) Your baby definitely ain't special.

3) The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis is, at best, patently absurd. There's nothing remotely divine about it. It smacks of human convention.

4) It isn't written anywhere that you must procreate. Try doing something more creative with your time. 

5) "The miracle of life" is one of the biggest lies perpetrated on humanity, and ought to be abolished as a phrase. A "miracle" is something that rarely happens, that is, in fact, supernatural and divine by nature. 74 million people are born every year. How exactly is this "miraculous?" It's the most common occurrence on the planet.

6) If you spend time on facebook informing people that you have a headache, or are eating out tonight, you are taking advantage of about .001% of what life has to offer. Go travel or read a book, but for God's sake, stop being so shallow.

Ghosts of Los Angeles I

History’s randomness is what haunts; the way two unrelated stories immersed in shadow and question marks collide in some tangible way, totally unexpectedly, thrusting pathos upon the ordinary and the mundane, somehow leaving you with no answers even after the curtains of shadows are opened, often only momentarily, affording a glance of something you thought you’d never see.

More and more I feel like Los Angeles is America’s great undiscovered city. The conventional wisdom is that there’s no there there (Gertrude Stein’s famous quote, often erroneously attributed to Los Angeles, when in fact she was referring to her hometown of Oakland), a state of mind prevalent among even those who grew up there. Yet, the city’s shadowy history is enough to suck in thousands who have a hard time explaining – even coming to grips with – its relentless pull. Bunker Hill. Skid Row. The Black Dahlia. Ed Wood, Jr. The Manson murders. George Reeves. Film Noir. Robert Kennedy. Richard Ramirez. Even East Hollywood and Charles Bukowski.

At 5533 Hollywood Boulevard stands the Gershwin Hotel, formerly the St. Francis Hotel, built in 1926 near Western Ave. It’s the kind of pre-Depression throwback that adds so much character to a city –bricks, outdoor fire escapes, arched doorways, old windows. A prime candidate – if there ever was one in this city that cares so little for its history that you get the feeling it actually hates it – for the wrecking ball. I’ve snapped many a photo of it myself for no other reason than it’s a great old building, and I worry on every trip to L.A. that it may not be there the next time I come back.

The hotel, however, boasts a couple of celebrity guests. Although this hasn’t been verified, a woman working at the Gershwin in 2003 told author Matt Dukes Jordan that Bukowski stayed there a couple of times while he still lived in East Hollywood.

What has been verified is the presence of James Earl Ray, who arrived in Los Angeles in his white Mustang on November 19^th, 1967, with a spare tire full of Mexican cannabis and dreams of producing pornography. In less than five months, the spectre-like Ray would assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. from the bathroom window of a Memphis flophouse, but in late ’67, the 40 year-old southern racist was a character straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel: an awkward, angry, hypochondriac speed-freak who had spent as much time in jail as in the real world, comfortable only with prostitutes and down-and-outs, drinking and shooting pool in seedy dive bars. During his stay in the City of Angels, Ray got into a bar room brawl on Hollywood Boulevard, graduated from bartending school, took dance lessons in Long Beach, and had his nose altered by a plastic surgeon. For half his stay he lived in room 403 of the St. Francis Hotel. He checked out on March 18^th, 1968, and drove into history.

Strangely, Ray is exactly the kind of man Bukowski crossed paths with every week. It’s enticing to think that perhaps the two men bumped into each other during those four months in late ‘67/early ’68. Bukowski was living in his bungalow at 5124 DeLongpre at the time, and occasionally visited Le Sex Shoppe at 5507 Hollywood Blvd – just a few doors down from the St. Francis. At any rate, it’s the kind of fascinating historical footnote that most people visiting Los Angeles are utterly oblivious to, preferring instead to spend their time and money at Hollywood and Highland, an area where all history and heritage has recently been obliterated in the name of mega entertainment complexes and chain stores. I suppose you can’t force people to see the stuff that's genuinely interesting. And probably the story of the St. Francis Hotel wouldn’t interest them anyway. It’s a bum rap Los Angeles is stuck with – an ignorant, shallow population of locals and tourists, caught up in the tragic notion that L.A. is all about the Chinese Theater, and the Walk of Fame. And little else.

Sometimes life throws you a hard curve.

            I never wanted a dog.

            It’s got nothing to do with not loving dogs. Truthfully, I find animals infinitely more interesting, beautiful, graceful, intelligent and dignified than the whole of humanity. You can throw insects in there, too. I always find it much sadder when an animal dies than a human, and I find it particularly pathetic that selfish, thoughtless, greedy humans continue obliterating their habitats and wiping out entire species of wildlife, all in the name of sprawling forever outwards, blading everything in sight so that greedy developers and contractors can build ugly, cookie-cutter, pre-fab homes and strip malls and support their decadent lifestyles.

            But I never wanted a dog. My girlfriend worked on me for years, but I wouldn’t allow dog one into our house. Simple reason, too – I despise responsibility.

            And so does everyone else, if he or she is being honest about it. Personal space and a lack of stress in your life are important, but no one gives any thought to this. Instead, the vast majority of men and women have decided by their teens that they must 1) get married, 2) get a job, 3) buy a house, and 4) raise children. They do this because TV and religion – two of the most vapid, shallow, unenlightened forces on planet Earth – tell them that they’re losers if they don’t. A few years later, with screaming, out of control kids running amok, a 30-year mortgage, and a nagging spouse – and how can there not be nagging? You see each other every damn day of your life – they’ve had it. Enough shouting matches, and enough working a job you hate but have to fucking stick with because if you quit and try and enjoy life, your house is foreclosed upon, and your kids have no money for clothes and school. It’s just TOO MUCH RESPONSIBILITY to actually enjoy life on Earth, so lawyers are paid to handle the inevitable divorce. That’s why the divorce rate is so high in this country. Religious leaders, shoveling their special brand of total horseshit down everyone’s throats, insist that it’s because America has lost its moral center, and if we’d all just worship the invisible man in the clouds every Sunday, everything would be hunky dory. This is, of course, complete hogwash; humans simply aren’t built for precisely the kinds of lives that our lying religions foist upon us. No one, and I mean NO ONE is ready to settle down into a monogamous relationship in his or her 20s, and I’ll go one further: no one is ready for monogamy in his or her 30s, either. There are exceptions to this rule, but why do you think people who’ve been together for ten years argue so much? Why is there less and less sex and intimacy in long term relationships? Why do so many people get divorced? Simple, folks: because you’re young and have many, many wild oats to sow, and being with the same damn person year after year is friggin’ boring. It’s too much responsibility for a species that is inherently selfish. We crave spontaneity in our lives, and that’s the first thing to go out the window for good when you’re married with kids.

            So I never wanted a dog. I now have two. This is not because I finally sold out, caving in after years of browbeating from my battle-axe girlfriend. She’s not a battle-axe, and I’m never browbeaten. It happened because, on a cold, overcast day in November 2008, while suffering from a mild case of the flu, what appeared to be a four week-old puppy ran in front of my car in Peach Springs, AZ.

I was on my way to Los Angeles, taking some detours along the way. The main attraction was driving the old Route 66 from Seligman AZ to Kingman AZ. Peach Springs is on the old Route 66, part of the Hualapai Indian Reservation. It’s tiny and poor. Old, derelict buildings always follow a nonexistent economy, so I got out and snapped some shots of the buildings on the main drag. I walked around for 20 minutes or so, and noticed that Diamond Creek Road left the highway to the north, going up a gentle hill. I got into my car, turned onto Diamond Creek, and a Haulapai police car followed me. Naturally paranoid, I assumed he was keeping tabs on this white dude who was skulking around their turf, taking pictures of buildings that they would certainly fix up if they had any money. I felt like a fuckin’ idiot. What the hell was I doing, taking pictures of the plight? These people lived here, for fuck’s sake. I slowed and went 24 mph, and he slowed with me. Shit, I thought, he’s going to pull me over…

            About twenty yards ahead, running in my direction along the shoulder of the road on my right, was a tiny little puppy. It was running hard, saw me, and changed course, heading straight into the road. It was still running full-boar, so I slowed to a crawl, and still the little thing came at me. I stopped the car; it disappeared underneath. I turned the engine off, got out, and heard the puppy crying. It emerged from under the car, looking up at me, still crying. The cop pulled up on my right as I scooped the thing up. Still crying, it sucked on one of my fingers, looking for milk. It was cold, shaking the whole time. And it was pretty damn cute.

            “It ran under my car,” I said to the officer.
            “I saw it,” he said. “Is it ok?”
            “Yeah. Very cold, though.”
            Walking towards us, from the direction I had been driving, was a 40-ish woman. There was a lot of mileage in the wrinkles on her face. Must be the owner, I thought. Why would she let it get so far ahead of her? And why would she be walking a four week-old puppy?
            “Is this your pup?” I asked her.
            “No,” she smiled, petting the puppy. “I saw it running down the road. I don’t know who it belongs to.”
            We stood there. The puppy whimpered and I scratched its tiny ears.
            “What do you think?” I asked the officer.
            “The pound is down the road,” he said. “I can take it there for you. Unless you want to keep it.”
            “Will it get adopted at the pound?”
            “With all the strays around here,” he said, matter-of-factly, “it’ll probably get put down in a week.”

            I didn’t take the bait ignorantly. I figured this guy was probably pulling my chain, just wanting me to take the dog and be done with it. But in a moment of spontaneous, why-the-fuck-not? impetuousness – or idiocy, take your pick – I thought about my girlfriend and figured, fuck me. She’s always wanted a dog. I couldn’t live with myself leaving this creature here and never knowing its fate.
            “Look,” I said, “I’ll take it, but I’m on my way to Los Angeles, with nowhere to keep it. I’ll be back this way in five days, on Saturday.”
            “I’ll drive it to the shelter,” the officer said. “Give me your number, and I’ll have them call you. If they know you’re coming back for it, they’ll keep it for you until you get back. Just let them know what day you’ll pick it up.”
            I gave the officer my name and number, and handed the puppy to him.
            “Thanks,” I said. “No, wait!” I got my camera out of my back seat. “I want my girlfriend to see what we’re getting in to.”
            The officer held the tiny thing up, and I quickly snapped a photo that’s become iconic amongst my family: a down-and-out puppy in the hand of a kindly police officer in Peach Springs, AZ, wanting a home. The skin on its underside was wrinkled and unhealthy looking – this little guy had obviously been dumped when he should’ve still been suckling at his mother’s teat – but it appeared to have a penis. It also smelled bad, like it had stepped in shit. Not surprising for a stray. I looked at him and didn’t see poop anywhere on his body.
            “Where are you from?” the 40-ish woman asked me.
            “New Mexico,” I said.
            “New Mexico…” she smiled. The officer drove away, the woman walked on, and I got in my car and headed west on the old route 66.

            There was no cell coverage in Peach Springs, and for some time after that. Finally, on approach to Kingman, a couple of bars showed up on my trackphone. There was already a message.
            “Hello,” the voice said, “this is John at the Peach Springs Animal Shelter. We have the puppy you found, and if no one claims him, we’ll hang on to him until you pick it up on Saturday.”
            He gave me their number and told me to call him to confirm. I called him, then called my girlfriend at work.
            “What’s up?” she said.
            “Listen, do you still want a dog?”
            “DID YOU FIND A DOG?” she asked. Just the mention of it made her nearly lose her head; she sounded like she was freaking out.
            “A little puppy – he didn’t look to be more than four weeks old to me – ran in front of my car in Peach Springs Arizona.”
            “BRING HOME THE PUPPY.”
            “I don’t have him now, but the local shelter said they’d hang on to him until Saturday.”
            “BRING HOME THE PUPPY,” she repeated.
            “What if the cats don’t like him?”
            “THEN WE’LL FIND A HOME FOR HIM. BRING HOME THE PUPPY.”
            I didn’t feel like she was really listening to me.
            “Alright, I’ll pick him up on my way back. I snapped a shot of him – I’ll email it to you when I get to L.A. But this is going to be a big change.”
            “I DON’T CARE. I’LL BUY WHATEVER WE NEED. BRING HOME THE PUPPY.” And that was that.

Whatever I had got way worse in L.A. The coughing would not stop and my head was killing me. I decamped from my good friend’s downtown loft to the Highland Gardens on Franklin for 24 hours, just lying in bed. I was in a hallucinogenic state, somewhere in between consciousness and unconsciousness. My whole body ached. It was a fucked up scene: I had gone on a week-long vacation to L.A. for mental health purposes, to hunt for books and CDs, and couldn’t even think straight. After a little over three days of not even having the energy to walk 100 feet, I apologized to my friend and started back to New Mexico a day early. I left on Friday afternoon, and stayed that night at a Super 8 in Kingman. The next morning was an improvement – I didn’t feel like death. The girl at the counter directed me to a locally owned pet store in the northern part of town. Not the cool, historic part of Kingman, but the unending sprawl you see from the interstate. I bought a good-sized cage, a tube of treat-stuff they told me was high-calorie, a can of wet food, and a towel for the bottom of the cage. At noon sharp I met the gents from the pound in Peach Springs, took the puppy, and headed east.

After many naps, barking, peeing in the cage, and pit stops off of interstate exit ramps, we made it home. It was nighttime. I walked in the door, put the cage on the floor, and opened it up. Our three cats were not at all impressed (or happy), but the puppy jumped out, huge smile on its face, and ran all over the house. I swear it was as though this had been home all along, and he was simply returning from a long trip. He was instantaneously right at home. And my girlfriend hadn’t been blowing smoke out her ass when she said she’d buy “whatever we need;” there was hundreds of dollars of food, bowls, collars, etc waiting for the new pup. He also had a name: Angus, after AC/DC’s Angus Young. Angus was so tiny he struggled to get up the step and into our house from the backyard.

            On Monday we took him to the vet. He still smelled, and the claws on his right front paw were dark red; they looked like they had filled up with blood.
            “We think he’s got something…” we told the vet tech, showing him the claws. “THE ONLY THINGS HE’S GOT IS A TERMINAL CASE OF CUTENESS!” he said, and called all the other employees in to see the puppy.

            The claws had red nail polish on them. We never figured that out. There were other issues: a belly button hernia, worms (this is where the mysterious smell came from; it was his breath), and an infection. The infection was, in fact, vaginitus. Angus was a she. Her vagina was so swollen we mistook her for a boy. "Ok," My girlfriend said. “So we name her Agnes.”

***

The vet fixed her up, and thus commenced exactly the sort of headache that I worked so hard avoiding in life: the house training and obedience training of a puppy. Every Saturday to the puppy training classes. Frantic winter nights trying to get her to poop and pee when it was bed time, and we were exhausted, out of our brains. Getting the cats used to her. We took turns the first few months on puppy duty: from six to eight my girlfriend watched her, and I took over from eight until bedtime. It was like having a child. More than once I found myself wondering what the hell I had gotten into, not unlike a first-time father. But never once did I regret it; there was no way I was leaving a puppy that ran in front of my car in Arizona to an uncertain fate. Agnes was a member of the family now, and nothing was ever going to change that. Like so many dumbass accidental first-time fathers, I quickly fell in love with the girl. Life certainly wouldn't be a complete picture without her.

***

POSTSCRIPT

During week days, Agnes tore up anything we left out in the backyard. She needed a playmate. This time it didn’t faze me. We already had one dog; what difference did a second make? (I quickly found the answer to this question: checking account balance. Two dogs eat a lot of damn food, and have big medical bills when they have to go see the vet.) We took Agnes to the Animal Shelter and she played with five different dogs. The fifth, a sad, sad six month-old Shepard/Lab/Chow mix, hit it off famously with her, and we brought him home the next day. A Shelter employee named him Bomber, and it stuck.

This is it, though; no more damn dogs.

Everything You Know is Wrong

In the wake of all the fawning, sycophantic reviews and accolades surrounding the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street reissue (one of the brown-nosing reviews I chose at random – Mark Morgenstein’s 5/18/10 review at cnn.com – says: “…To millions of music fans, since 1972 you only need four words to define rock 'n' roll: ‘Exile on Main Street.’"), I will finally, at last, say what everyone else is somehow afraid to say:

Exile is not the Rolling Stones’ best album. It’s not their second best album. It is not, in fact, their third or fourth best album. A list of the Stones’ top-5 albums looks like this:

1) Beggars Banquet

2) Aftermath

3) Get Yer Ya Yas Out

4) Let it Bleed

5) Sticky Fingers

5) England’s Newest Hitmakers

You may throw in Exile wherever you like after that. It doesn't matter, really. There are, of course, a slew of singles that are as integral a part of the Stones' oeuvre as the above albums (Jumpin' Jack Flash, Paint It Black, et al), but the above albums are their Statement of Intent. These, and a good singles collection, are the foundation of the band's legacy.

A friend of mine once defined a truly great album as having two, three or four A-List Songs, and a bunch of great filler. “Filler” wasn’t a pejorative in this instance; it was an acknowledgement that even the best bands aren’t capable writing an entire album’s worth of A Day in the Lifes, so they come up with a handful of gold nuggets, and then some great second-tier songs to glue it all together. As a short definition, it works.

This album is good.

The problem with Exile: there simply are no A-List songs. At best, you can argue that it’s comprised of great filler. This, however, is also wishful thinking, as any self-respecting Stones fan would cop to, were the wave of revisionist theory surrounding Exile not at a fever pitch.

Pipe down, now, pipe down, all you Stones apologists – I KNOW, I KNOW: Exile isn’t about A-list songs vs. filler; it’s about the relentless, oozing vibe you’re imbued with when you listen to it from beginning to end. As Morgenstein writes, “The album isn't so much about individual songs -- it's about a cumulative feeling.”

Right on, man.

I’ve been told repeatedly by Exile lovers over the years that this is the case. I’ve also been told by the same people that Rocks Off is one of the great album openers, as it single-handedly and comprehensively captures this era of the sleazy, grungy, dark, drug-addled Stones in under five minutes.

This album is not.

Two things. One: totally wrong. As someone who absolutely loves the Stones – their impact on my life is profound – Rocks Off has never been anything more than standard Stones filler. And certainly Rip This Joint, the supposedly exhilarating rocker that follows Rocks Off, is the Stones on autopilot, simply playing a standard blues riff faster than usual and dressing it up as balls-to-the-wall rock’n’roll, but only feigning genuine energy.

Two: any song single-handedly capturing the Stones during this era of their history is nothing to brag about. What most Stones apologists refuse to admit is the fact that by 1972, the band was well into their Decadent Era, an era which found Richards oftentimes in a heroin-induced stupor (check out the scene in Cocksucker Blues where he falls prostrate as a girl thinks she’s helping him out by stroking his head), and Jagger proudly strutting around stage in heavy make-up, perfecting his impossibly idiotic limp-wristed, mega-stadium cock-rock mannerisms. The ’69 tour was the last time the Stones truly were the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. Sticky Fingers was the Stones opening the doorway into decadence, and Exile was the final nail in the coffin. This wasn’t the Stones of ’66, exploring the nether reaches of their formidable creativity and getting everything that was spilling out of their heads down on tape. This was a bunch of fatigued rock stars, stinking up the air with rock’n’roll carbon monoxide from their own idling, realizing that The Beatles were gone, and they had nothing left to prove. It was five guys giving about 60%.

The most aggravating thing about being a Stones fan was watching the transformation, from 1968 to 1972, of a bunch of kids with nothing to lose behaving as obnoxiously as possible, into rich megastars with all the drugs and groupies you could ever dream about effortlessly at their disposal. This isn’t a bad thing unless you let it go to your head. And that, the Stones certainly did. They got soft. They lost their edge. John Adams always feared the trappings of decadence, and you need look no further than The Rolling Stones of the early 1970s to see what he was talking about. Even Jagger’s vocal inflections changed around this time, often assuming an annoyingly smug, east coast accent.

These guys rock.

Listening to it again, I was struck by the palpable ennui creeping through Exile’s grooves. It’s one thing when an artist converts feelings of lethargy and languor into incendiary art, but in Exile’s case, the music itself is just literally boring. Casino Boogie, Loving Cup, and Soul Survivor – which can’t be considered anything other than filler by the Stones’ standards – are all dull filler. In fact, the whole of side four is dullsville; Stop Breaking Down is a sterile, soulless Robert Johnson cover (surprising considering their brilliant reworking of Love in Vain on Let It Bleed and Ya Yas), and Soul Survivor sounds like an outtake.

And herein lies the rub of Exile, and so many other double albums (Tommy, anyone?)- had it been pared down to a single album, it might have been a force to be reckoned with. At the very least it would’ve been strong.

These guys don't.

Truthfully, the first 40 seconds of the non-song/dirge I Just Want to See His Face capture some of the Stones’ darkness way more effectively than anything else on the album. Of course, the cult of personality exhibited by so many Stones fans won’t stand for this kind of blasphemy, or the assertion that Aftermath – in its British or American format – is light years ahead of Exile, or that Exile itself simply doesn’t measure up to everything that came before it. But such is the way of it. The initial critical reaction back in ’72 was dead-on, in retrospect: the Stones had come down a notch. Two, even. And with the aid of hindsight – Goats Head Soup, It’s Only Rock’n’Roll, Black and Blue, Some Girls – the band would never regain their footing.

Humans are Lovely

On cnn.com this morning is a story headlined "Blimp to help track Gulf Oil," relating how "a 178-foot-long U.S. Navy blimp will be used to detect oil, direct skimming ships and look for wildlife that may be threatened by the disaster in the Gulf." We can't stop millions upon millions of barrels of oil from spewing into the Gulf, obliterating an entire ecosystem, but we can keep tabs on it from a 178-foot-long blimp. What a world we live in.

Reason is for Pussies

Polish Trade-Union Organizer Lech Walesa appeared in my room last night.

To be precise, he appeared in my bathroom. Even more precisely, his face appeared in my towel. It's one of those really shaggy towels, and something resembling the old rebel's distinctive face and moustache appeared smack in the middle of it. I saw this while pissing.

What was going on, I thought? What did it mean, standing there in the bathroom at 10:20pm, on an otherwise mundane evening? Was this a sign? Was some nefarious trap about to be sprung on Lech Walesa? Or perhaps this was proof that the Battle of Armageddon is to be fought in Warsaw? Was this a sign the aliens – THE GREYS – would start their final push for global domination with the Polish government? Was there enough time to warn all relevant government entities??

Too frequently I do the stupid thing and bash on the crazy people of the world who believe in conspiracies. The General Conspiracy Nut: the Illuminati, in association with the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers, secretly manipulates all events behind closed doors in shadowy meetings; the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, with an assist from Israel; aliens traveled extraordinary distances across the galaxy and crashed their fancy spacecraft near Roswell, NM; a who’s who of villains – including the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Castro, Dallas Police, and evil homosexuals from New Orleans – plotted the assassination of JFK; the USS Eldridge, as part of a Navy military experiment gone awry, was teleported from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard to Norfolk, VA, with some sailors grotesquely materializing inside of bulkheads; the greys are in cahoots with our own Joint Chiefs of Staff, exchanging technology in an underground base near Dulce, NM; etc.

I bash on them because some idiotic human interest story appears on cnn.com, or in one of our local rags here in northern NM. Case in point: in the June 3^rd Santa Fe New Mexican, an article headlined ET Touchdown? takes us to Angel Fire, where a circle of dead grass in a Moreno Valley pasture has been labeled an “authentic landing site” by New Mexico MUFON assistant director Dee Gragg.

Gragg is also a professor at NMSU, something I find slightly terrifying for a guy whose initial reaction to a circle of dead grass is that, clearly folks, we’re dealing with an extraterrestrial spacecraft landing site. How is it that guys like this are allowed to teach? At any rate, there are two reasons why this story is a textbook case of the asinine, and they are so obvious that no more time ever need be wasted on them, and yet in the face of such relentless idiocy, they’re worth repeating:

1) No conspiracy theory regarding UFOs has a single, solitary scrap of physical evidence to back it up. Any UFO case you can name – The Roswell Incident, Travis Walton, Betty and Barney Hill, Kenneth Arnold, the Phoenix Lights, Rendlesham Forest – has no physical evidence to prove it. Period. None, nowhere. Sure as shit a circle of dead grass in a Morena Valley pasture is not physical evidence of a UFO landing site. It is, in fact, physical evidence of dead grass.

2) Everyone finds a way to believe what he wants to believe. As Michael Shermer points out, “Psychologically we are superstitious creatures. We are pattern-seeking animals that find patterns in random noise. That’s a very human, natural thing to do.” Shermer is taking the high road by excusing – or at least, explaining – people who see dead circles of grass and deduce in the next 1.5 seconds with no empirical evidence whatsoever that it’s a UFO landing pad. However, I shan’t be joining him on the high road. I’ll stampede onto the low road and say what Shermer meant to say: people are fuckin’ idiots. I understand that we’re forever seeking patterns in randomness, but there comes a time when you stop fucking around, get at least a high school education, and realize: oh hell, we’re wired to seek patterns in randomness. Maybe seeing Lech Walesa in my towel doesn’t mean shit. Maybe, in fact, I made it up; Lech wasn’t actually in my towel, but it just appeared that way, because there are so many little fibers on the towel that, by chance, sometimes it appears to form a pattern and resemble a person or thing.

But Gragg is the counterpart to the dude who sees Christ’s face in a fucking tortilla, of all fucking places, and announces to the world that Christ is reaching out to us through a tortilla. Cue hordes of ignorant losers who make the pilgrimage to the house of the guy with Christ in his tortilla. You would think, given the big deal they make out of it, that this is some sort of sign, that something important, even IMMINENT is afoot – yet, nothing EVER happens after Jesus is sighted in a tortilla or on the side of a building. Christ doesn’t appear in the flesh, triggering the Battle of Armageddon, and humans don’t start magically treating each other with dignity and respect. People line up to view the Christ tortilla, and then they go back to their lives, no more or less illuminated than they were that morning. And it's all over, as suddenly as it began. Back to the same old prejudices, the same old bullshit. Same as it ever was.

Think on this: this sort of crap has been going on for centuries. Surely we – as a species – have at last arrived at a clue, that, say, maybe there really is something to the scientific method. You know - maybe if there is a Christ, and he's trying to send a message, there are about a bazillion better, more easily understood ways of doing so, than depositing his likeness in a tortilla. But people don’t get a clue. Ever. A lot of people I know rail against organized religion, then turn around and talk about the merits of the Roswell Incident. It’s a curious double standard; conspiracy nuts slagging off fundamentalist christians. Had the conspiracy nuts lived in Italy in 1633, they would have been the same zealots who censured Galileo for suggesting that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. Because both of these groups – religious fundamentalists and conspiracy buffs – have a belief system grounded in superstition, not science. They’re far more alike than they’d ever care to admit. In fact, it’s only because of people like Galileo, and Newton, and Einstein, and Gould, that our self-imposed shackles of ignorance are every now and again loosened, and we perceive a little truth in our lives.

But fighting that kind of ignorance and insanity – the insanity of conspiracy nuts – is a losing battle. You’ll never convince them otherwise, because they need no evidence, and have disposed of critical and analytical thinking. Getting worked up over the Angel Fire article is only proof that I still suffer from arrested development. I should be able to laugh at it and move on. But every now and again the frustration at the idiocy reaches critical mass… Can't we do any goddamn better at this stage?

La Flor de Mal

There are differing opinions on the definition of true art (Jello Biafra once said words to the effect that anyone not using art as a weapon is not an artist), but speaking as someone who is reasonably well-rounded – I count Beethoven, Bach, Howlin’ Wolf, and Captain Sensible amongst my Gods – I can tell you that Reel Ten by The Plugz, the song played during the final moments of Alex Cox’ Repo Man, is one of the finest three minutes of music in the history of humankind.

You got that – HUMANKIND. In the history of THE WHOLE EARTH. Yup yup, all arrogant, holier-than-thou classical snobs and music nerds of the rock'n'roll variety are rolling their eyes, lamenting the day that the interweb gave everyone – even twits like I – a forum for spewing forth ignorant, clueless drivel. Good; we've had hundreds of years of only having you creeps to listen to, so dig this: it ain’t Beethoven’s 7^th, but it moves me as much as Beethoven’s 7^th, so what’s the diff? Reel Ten is a benevolent force of nature; it stops evil in its tracks, causing it to wither and die. It cuts the feet off the myriad mundane headaches of everyday life as effectively as it crushes the larger problems into fine dust. It’s a clear, achingly beautiful day with a full moon at dusk, a starlit night full of possibilities; it’s heroin without the addiction, a grand, grand buzz without the hangover or dehydration. It gives me faith in humanity, a giddy sense of I Can Do Anything, a love of men and women, not as conniving demagogues, but as creative teachers helping us understand and appreciate life for the gift it is. It makes me marvel at my good luck that I was born at all, on the one beautiful planet in a solar system otherwise devoid of life. It’s enough to bring me back. In a world where the great ignorant masses accuse the president of being a socialist, where muslim clerics find cause and effect between promiscuity and earthquakes, where wackjobs shriek hysterically for their right to carry loaded guns into restaurants, where the unspeakable horror and carnage of war are simply a means to an end, or sometimes an end themselves-

This song, every time its haunting opening notes ooze through my speakers, rescues me from the darkness, a giant hand from Los Angeles pulling me back from that dark place where the darkness gets so thick that, finally, you may not be able to find your way out.

If you aren’t hip to The Plugz, or Steve Medina Hufsteter, or The Quick, or Tito Larriva, or Tito and Tarantula, you ain’t doing yourself any favors. Tito and Steve had their fingers in multiple pies back in the halcyon days of the L.A. punk scene, and their talent was so huge they quickly grew out of that scene and fused traditional Mexican sounds with their rock’n’roll roots.  But it was their collaboration on Reel Ten for Repo Man that – for me, anyway – will forever be the most brilliant thing they ever did; a once-in-a-lifetime shot where they delivered beyond all expectations, with such conviction and grace that they’ll always have at least one chump out there who is grateful. And thankful.

All the Things I Never Asked For

Like the French, I believe that if an artist only manages to connect once in his or her life time - a painter with one good painting, a writer with one good novel - it was still worth it. It still means something. There is no shame in it, no need for excuses from the artist, or rancor from the critics. Achieving true beauty only once in your lifetime is a hell of a lot more than the vast majority of half-wits populating the planet can lay claim to.

At a dark time in life around 1990, I was walking along the boardwalk at Venice Beach, CA, wondering what the hell it was all for, anyway; the water, the birds, the people, the stars at night... It all seemed pretty cheap. The usual booths with overpriced towels, shirts, nick-nacks, etc approached and disappeared as I walked, but then something caught my ear. It came from a booth where a british woman sold overpriced jackets and pants. It was a song with only three chords, and it seemed like it was over inside of two minutes. There was a lot of feedback, a wall-of-sound production job, and a soothing female voice that made me forget what I was even brooding about. I asked the British woman who it was, and she told me it was The Primitives. "What album are you listening to...?" She didn't even know. She grabbed it from a stack of CDs near her boom box, and read straight from the cover: "The name of this album is Lovely."

I went back to the house where I lived in Northridge, scraped some cash together, and bought Lovely by The Primitives at Aaron's, then on Melrose. I remembered the song I heard on the beach: a sped-up 1-4-5 progression, sort of like Blitzkrieg Bop on speed. I listened to the first track, Crash. Cute, but not it. I listened to ten seconds of the next track, Spacehead; crappy song. Not it. Ten seconds of the third song, Carry Me Home. Nothing. The sixth song, Dreamwalk Baby, sounded somewhat similar, but still not it. Finally I got to the tenth song, starting with a four-count that sounded more like the drummer was hitting the stick on the side of a tom tom, than hitting the sticks together. It started full-throttle in G flat, jumped to C flat, and then the verse kicked in in D flat; pretty unorthodox stuff for a band that sounded, for the first nine songs, like a bubblegum outfit. Here it was - THE SONG I HEARD ON THE BEACH. It was the darkest song on an album of poppy stuff, called Stop Killing Me. It clocked in at 2.05, lived up to the band's name, and had the singer telling her unnamed antagonist to "keep away from me, cuz your KILLING me..." I listened to it over and over for weeks.

The Primitives were part of the fortunately short-lived "Blonde" movement in the late 80s/early 90s, that also gave us the forgettable Darling Buds and Transvision Vamp. It was the kind of thing that could only have come from England; a series of poppy bands fronted by cute, dyed-blonde singers who were backed by black-haired, skinny English dudes. If this kind of thing wasn't your cup of tea, I don't blame you. The Blondes didn't change or shape the face of popular music, and there wasn't much to differentiate one band from the next. It was, at its best, pretty lightweight stuff. And it all started sounding the same very, very quickly.

Lovely, however, was different. The Primitives went on to release two more studio albums, Pure and Galore, and both were boring, two-dimensional affairs. But with Lovely they connected, and for one glorious moment in their existence, left everyone else in the dust: 15 songs, seven of which are A-list, four of which are decent filler. Only four fall flat. Not a bad ratio, I reckon. You can compare such output with that of The Kinks or The Beatles and be arrogantly unimpressed, but it's an inherently unfair comparison. Maybe 2% of all the bands there ever were had runs like Face to Face through Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround. Guys like Ray Davies make the rounds once every 30 years.

The truth of the matter is, most bands can't even muster an EP's worth of good music, much less an entire album or a fucking career. Stop Killing Me is one for the ages, tho; a statement of intent, a signature that will survive most of the truly drab, monotonous bullshit music that has been diminishing my soul for the last 15 years. If it had been the only cool thing The Primitives ever did, I would happily defend them. As it is, Lovely stands up all these years later, a solid batch of songs by a band that rose above their station for one year in 1988 and left their mark. Its beauty is enough. I don't need anything more from them, and they don't owe us anything else.

Some Thoughts on a Saturday with Shinerbock

The commentaries John Carpenter tapes for his DVDs are object lessons in how commentaries should always go. He always tells you where a certain scene was filmed – very cool shit for obsessives like me who live for location shots in Los Angeles – and he always talks about the actors onscreen, how they got the part, and what happened with them while filming. You know, interesting stuff. For truly appallingly awful DVD commentaries, check out Top Secret or any of the Star Trek movies. Holy FUCK. John Carpenter hasn’t made a decent film in over 20 years, but god bless ‘em for his commentaries.





Coleen Gray is one of the most beautiful actresses of all time. Like Jean Harlow, she had that innocent, girl-next-door quality, but her incandescent beauty makes any film she's in worth your time. I pride myself on my independence, but Christ, if Coleen Gray told me to jump, my only question would be, how high? Hence my regularly placing Nightmare Alley in my DVD player. The Phantom Planet should be one of those pieces of crap where you think, shit, I’ll never get those 80 minutes back, but instead, because of Coleen Gray, you wish it was 240 more minutes. And despite what judgemental, snobbish movie critics everywhere say, The Leech Woman friggin’ rules, baby. Get with the program, folks.


I was driving the 900 miles back from Los Angeles lately, having finally achieved some calm, listening to a Who mix I’d made. Despite its heavy-handedness, I had thrown Imagine a Man into the mix for shits and giggles. It's pretty far from what I consider top-notch Who, but when you’re driving through the desert on a clear day, the guitar hooks you in, and that second verse shines blindingly, poetically, and profoundly. (“Imagine events,
 that occur everyday, 
like a shooting or raping, or a simple act of deceit... 

Imagine a past 
that you wish you had lived,
 full of heroes and villains and fools”). Thanks, Pete.



Lester Bangs on the albums that turned him onto music as a boy: “All these were milestones, each one fried my brain a little further, especially the experience of the first few listenings to a record so total, so mind-twisting, that you authentically can say you’ll never be quite the same again… They’re events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it’s not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record. Because the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.” The entire Bible doesn’t make as much sense to me as those 116 words.

Keeping It Interesting

A little less than seven years before he found himself standing in front of a burning barn in Virginia, fatally shooting John Wilkes Booth in the neck, Boston Corbett cut his own balls off with a pair of scissors in Boston, Massachusetts.

Corbett's real name was Thomas, and he moved from New York to Boston after his wife died in childbirth. After finding Jesus in Boston, he changed his first name in honor of his newfound fundamentalist hysteria.

On the 16th of July, 1858, in order to resist the daily temptations of Boston's ladies of the night, Corbett sliced the bottom of his scrotum open, pulled his testicles down, and snipped them off. He got this very logical idea after reading chapters 18 and 19 of Matthew ("And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire"). Apparently none the worse for wear, Boston Corbett then attended a prayer meeting, ate a big dinner, and went to see a doctor, in that order.

Corbett floated around after the war, living in Boston, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Striving to emulate Jesus Christ, he grew his hair long and moved to Concordia, KS In 1878. Or rather, he moved outside of Concordia; in a field near town, he dug a hole in the ground (euphemistically referred to as a "dugout" by Corbett's supporters) and lived therein, occasionally brandishing a gun when anyone got too close.

Not content to merely live off the land, Corbett secured employment as Assistant Doorkeeper in the Kansas House of Representatives. He lost the job in 1887 after threatening members of a mock-legislature at gunpoint who made fun of the chamber's opening prayer.

On May 26, 1888, Boston Corbett escaped from the Topeka Asylum for the Insane, and vanished into the mists of time and history. it's possible he died in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, but nothing ever surfaced to prove it; no body was never recovered, and no sign of his existence ever surfaced. Just rumors and shadows about the last years of the man who killed Lincoln's assassin.

****

Boy Scout Troop 31 of Concordia erected a plaque in 1958, marking the spot where Corbett lived in a hole.

Stewart Udall

1920 - 2010

YOU’RE GOING TO REAP JUST WHAT YOU SOW

For the first time since they re-formed in 2005, I watched 60 minutes of a “Queen + Paul Rodgers” concert last week. Half of a great band that broke up 19 years ago, joined by one member of a lame band that broke up 28 years ago, all of whom are in their 60s, attempting to belt out songs that were written 35 years ago. It inevitably dredged up the old argument, once again, that makes everyone role their eyes: should old men be allowed to play rock’n’roll?

Music nerds can debate this topic endlessly, and the rest of the population can’t believe how seriously music nerds take themselves: why are you so judgmental? What’s wrong with The Rolling Stones, or anyone else, playing the music they love into their 50s, 60s, and 70s? It’s ok for blues artists, so why not rock’n’roll musicians?

Despite the incredulous eye-rolling, it’s a valid argument, and one I’m never able to resolve. At best, I walk away from this argument feeling rotten – rotten that perhaps my heroes never took any of it seriously; rotten than I can’t accept them for what they are; rotten that it’s even an issue.

I am one of those who always felt rock’n’roll is – was – a young person’s language. It was started by young people playing for young people, and inspired horror in their parents.  Very simple and straightforward. Even the musicians who weren’t revolutionaries – who may have been, even, conservative – were leading a revolution anyway, by virtue of their playing a new kind of music that drove kids into a frenzy, convincing their hapless parents that society itself was coming apart at the seams.

It was at the heart of what dour, un-hip old losers like Spiro Agnew referred to, disingenuously, as the “generation gap.” Such was the power of this music for all of us who heard it as kids. Only we understood it; our parents could make a gracious attempt to try and understand it, but by the time you had cashed out and had kids, your brainwaves were irrevocably altered and unable to translate this stuff. Not only did parents not get it, they couldn’t get it.

Rock’n’roll was brand new in 1955, and no one had any idea what it would look like 10, 20, 50 years later. Pondering the face of rock’n’roll 50 years down the line was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. The kids were living in the now, and Townsend hit the nail square on the head with “hope I die before I get old,” which was a safe lyric to sing in 1965. Pete was only 25.

The problem is, life doesn’t exist in a vacuum. No one imagined Rock’n’roll aging, but that’s what inevitably happens to everything in this universe that doesn’t drop dead in its youth. So, here we are, 55 years after Chuck Berry and Bill Haley. And rock’n’roll looks mighty damn old. I love this stuff – it has been my lifeblood since I was five years old - but even I have to say: everything rock’n’roll was capable of was done within 15 years of its birth. As an art form, it ceased evolving around 1970. By that point we had Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Bo Diddley, the British Invasion, The Velvet Underground, the American garage movement, Hendrix, and Iggy and the Stooges. Even though some truly great rock’n’roll was played after that, there was nothing new about it. We’re left with this conundrum after 1970-ish, where a new generation comes of age every 20 years, producing some great music here and there music, but everyone’s simply dialing in bands that played before they were even born.  (The punk bands from London in 1976/1977 had more in common with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley than they’d ever care to admit.)

In fact, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s just wrong for bloated, geriatric Englishmen like Queen’s Roger Taylor to put on oversized shirts (in a sad attempt to hide their paunches) and exploit everyone’s sense of nostalgia to the tune of $100/ticket.

It’s unfair for me to think this way, of course. Who the hell am I to say geezers like Roger Taylor and Paul Rodgers shouldn’t be up on a ginormous football stadium stage, running around as tho they’re 35 years younger?  Why didn’t I have a problem with John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters playing into their declining years, but I find “Queen + Paul Rodgers” a depressing spectacle?

It’s somewhat of a paradox for me – I do consider it a young person’s language, but now that the decades have worn on, we’re finally seeing what Rock looks like as an old man. Jonathan Richmond always looked forward to the aging process, insisting we’d be Old and Dignified. Would I have been happier if it had died out as an art form, no longer written or played? Of course not. By the time I was in a band in 1986, there was nothing new under the sun. And yet, bands like The Damned, The Beatles, Ramones, Bo Diddley, and Black Flag guided me through life’s darkest moments. I literally wouldn’t have made it without them.

The answer is simple enough, even though it didn’t dawn on me until last week. Really, I have no problem with old men playing rock’n’roll. Link Wray and Dick Dale are two examples of old men playing rock’n’roll, kicking severe ass as hard in their 60s as in their 20s. Nay; when it becomes offensive is when bands form, record great music, break up when the marriage goes sour, go their separate ways, and then reunite 20 years later when some money (maybe not even all that much) is dangled in their faces. It’s such a cynical, shameless move. What bigger let down is there than watching a band that saved your life as a kid – that wrote a song like Bodies, or Sheer Heart Attack – reunite as fat old men and tour the world to cash in on your old feelings of I’m-not-alone-in-this-world;-someone-actually-understands-out-there? It’s like being kicked square in the stomach with a steel-tipped Doc Martin. You realize: these guys were completely full of shit. It wasn’t ever an inside language that I got; it was just more of the same bullshit that I thought these guys helped me escape, in my room in the middle of the night, headphones on to keep my parents off my back, away from school, away from my fucking job, away from, as Bukowski would say, the things that claw and tear. Back then they were saviors, Gods who refused to compromise with a status quo that was so obviously full of shit. Now they’re just average losers, willing to do whatever it takes to make a buck.

Put it this way: here’s a lyric by Bon Scott, the one true AC/DC frontman, written for the band’s second album in 1975:

You can stick your 9 to 5 living

And your collar and your tie

You can stick your moral standards

Because it’s all a dirty lie

You can stick your golden handshake

And you can stick your silly rules

And all the other SHIT

That they teach to kids in school

‘cause I ain’t no fool…

That is potent, powerful stuff. It sums up, in my humble opinion, the very essence of rock’n’roll: It’s Us against Them, and I will never be broken.

Can you imagine the man who wrote these words – literally a life preserver for me as a fourteen-year-old – happily touring the casino circuit as an old, gray man, kow-towing to the promoters and businessmen and suits, all for a paycheck?

It hurts me just thinking about that question. If Bon was like 98% of the human population, yeah, he probably would have toured the casinos. We’ll never know; Bon died in 1980 at the age of 33. Maybe that really is the only thing stopping our heroes from destroying our trust.