Allow Page To Load & Discover Mp3 Musique du Jour Patronizingly Posted By A Demented Denizen Of The Left Coast
Stay To Soak Up Sordid Stories, Tawdry Tales, Libelous Lies & Egregious Exaggerations that'll burst yer broadband bubble.
Including an excerpt from Palast's latest audiobook & Ed Asner reading this prescient excerpt from the script of Paddy Chayefsky's 1970's masterpiece Network:
“The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. … It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity…. There are no nations, there are no peoples. There is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars. … There is no America. There is no ‘democracy.’ The world is a business, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work.”
I also just spent a good chunk of lasterday considering the meaning of "community justice" here in San Francis-fiasco. The mayor's minions have cooked up a new plan they think that could help rid the city of the drug addicted waystrels, and homeless nuisances. We'll see I supppose...
As much as I'd like to hear something innovative in the works, I wasn't real impressed, but at least they were trying to impress I suppose.
I doubt anyone in ol' Vladimir Putin's Russia, or say in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran or in the Myanmar of Than Shwe's Junta would even bother to try...
Which i guess makes me at least resigned to appreciate the good ol' USA.
In fact here in the good ol' USA, your gov't starts with the constitution.
Which leaves you to figuring out what's important, and what you like and might want to preserve.
Perhaps consider what you want to continue to like about living in the good ol' USA...
And what you don't want others to f*k around with...
But before you get ahead of yourself, a good place to start is reading the constitution...
I suppose that's out of the question for most of y'all...
The fact you even stopped by some lowly lil' blog is nice enuf I suppose...
So here's an idea...
Some friends of mine recently recorded the whole archaic Constituition thang, all it's preambles and amendments etc...
Even the OG stuff about people that only own a small percentage of their freedoms and whatnot...
We'll be paying as a country for lil' Bush's ill-timed folly turned endless bloodbath in Iraq for a long time.
Not only are the bills going to be financial & political weights around the necks of future generations, but the unintentional socio-emotional prices will be high as well.
Look at this sad, likely leftover human detritus from our war in Vietnam.
Meet Lam Luong, he's a 37 year old immigrant from Vietnam whose been here since 1984.
A quick glance at his features though, and my bet is that his daddy was a G.I drafted and serving in Vietnam circa 1971 at the time he was conceived. I'm guessing that this messed up multi-cultural moron possibly never met his G.I Joe daddy...he certainly didn't get rights to his Pop's last name.
If our bloated bully nation had never spent so much time while shedding so much blood in Vietnam, this guy never would have been conceived.
Which in turn means he also never would
a.) have ended up in the U.S working for low wages as a shrimper,
b.) become a loser crackhead
or best of all possible worlds:
c.) never thrown his own kids off a bridge in Alabama.
It's as easy as A - B - C my friends:
Anyhow...
The American dream has been pretty much a nightmare for many years ...
Growing up in the post Vietnam , Cold War Era shaped my warped perspectives...
And I became a nasty lil' psychedelicized punk rock rebel dropout... which seemed like a fitting idea at the time...
Not so great for the ol' bank account, credit rating or your slick social standing... but at least ya save money on all those golf lessons & country club memberships...
Plus the perks are plentiful... no job to waste your time at, and plenty shows & substances to keep ya spinnin' for years until ya realize ya only have a fraction of yer hearing & liver left.
Here's some of that good ol' rebel music that got me through the sickening haze of watching my country turn fat, stupid & lazy...
These are simple songs that say more in their attitude than they do in their production value...
We'll start with one of my all time fave political pranksters...
He levitated the Pentagon, created a panic on Wall Street when he threw money on the trading floor, riled up Daley's pigs in Chicago, fled the Feds & lived on the lam, grabbed protest headlines with former first daughter Amy Carter and is now 20 years gone after dying in a far too sad fashion for such a feisty figure...
I was of course a big fan of DEVO, and a lot of folks of my generation were duly impressed with their approach.
Formed in the wake of Kent State in the industrially f*cked environs of the once pastoral rubber city of Akron Ohio, these guys ascended to an unlikely artistic greatness, and are really not to be ignored. They were a near perfect execution of a late 20th century pop cultural statement. Everything from the quirky tunes, to the costumes, production, merchandising, videos and the whole shebang were amazingly well constructed purposeful parodies in an age that was beyond my teenage comprehension...
(They are still chiseling away at the youth culture, with Mark Mothersbaugh working behind the scenes on children's music projects for clients like Nickelodeon & Disney.)
My pals in Lagwagon were apparently also in the same camp, and along with our mutual love for the ponderous pomp & satanic sword play of vintage Iron Maiden, they also had time for Devo...
You can look up Devo in yer own time I suppose... Here are Lagwagon doing the title cut from a 1981 Devo LP
I saw an interview with our next draft dodging contestant, who mentioned how important it was for his bandmates to avoid the draft. Imagine if the Stooges hadn't perfected their 4F status and the world was forced to endure another decade of crap like The Association and Dino, Desi & Billy.
Thank gawd that this peanut butter & blood smearing freak lived through Vietnam, and can continue to entertain us all today...
Gawd forbid, he had gone to 'Nam and started making babies...
Where would aging boomer targeted companies like Cadillac and Carnival Cruiselines get music for their wack tv commercial ad campaigns ?
In the wake of Vietnam, with the petrol addicted 1st world empires in repose, we ended up with Britain huffing a whiff of the Stooges & NY Dolls. Soon bands like The Clash, Ian Dury & the Blockheads and Eddie & The Hot Rods arose out of the pubs & shook up the scene.
Ian Dury wrote an enduring punky 70's sort of anthem, that still holds plenty resonance today with a certain fringe devout following...
Here's a midwestern U.S based band known as Soul Asylum doing a live Eddie & the Hot Rods cover a decade or two later, showing that the wasted U.K pub pop scene had legs, if not a legacy. (At the end you can hear Dan Murphy dedicate the track to Articles of Faith singer Vic Bondi, a fixture on the 80's hardcore scene in Chicago and featured in the documentary "American Hardcore".)
In the late 70's UK trend spotter Malcolm McLaren smelled blood & lots of bloody money, and suddenly we had the Sex Pistols, and even solo Sid Vicious attempting his best Eddie Cochran impersonation before stabbing the shit out of some whiny junkie broad from New Jersey. Sid Vicious "Something Else" ( recorded live Sept 28th '78 ) from the recent dbl CD release "Sid Lives".
Incidentally, this track was recorded live with with itinerant scenster Steve Dior on guitar backed by Jerry Nolan and Arthur "Killer" Kane of the NY Dolls as the rhythm section upstairs at Max's Kansas City.
On 9/28/1978 these junkie bashers in NYC banged away two sets ruthlessly in oblivion, while their 70's contemporaries like prog rockers Yes performed in the round at the Checkerdome in St.Louis. Hee Haw banjo man Roy Clark guested on the Muppet Show, and in Austin TX, at Armadillo World HQ, future American Idol judge Randy Jackson played jazz fusion as part of Billy Cobham's band, the same venue where months earlier an ill-fated Sex Pistols performance had been held.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the Vatican, it was announced that Pope John Paul the 1st died mysteriously 33 days after he was named Pope. It was also just 2 weeks before Sid would reportedly find himself covered in blood at the Chelsea hotel and be charged with Nancy Spungen's murder.
Eventually, like in any good war, the Canadians get involved and one of the greatest hardcore punk bands of all time would have to be Vancouver's D.O.A, whose War on 45 record is amongst the best punk releases ever...
Joey Shithead & Co.'s take on Edwin Starr's hit War written by Norman Whitfield is the definitive version if ya ask me...
Here's a couple more from that classic, and links to get it yer bad self...
That song was recorded one cold January day in 1968, and not released until just a few years ago.
Now 40 years later ... a concert will be held this weekend at Folsom Prison again, this time featuring the lone surviving member of the Tennessee Three, drummer Fluke Holland.
Oddly enough, in a punitive country now going broke supporting a bloated prison industrial complex, The Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison album still is a brisk seller. Busted is from a German import version. The entire album has caught the imagination of a nation for decades, and continues to be one of Cash's best known works.
People obviously want to pay tribute and still cash in on that homegrown honest success, including ex-Beau Brummels frontman Sal Valentino.
His voice was heard on 60's hits like Laugh, Laugh, or Wolf of Velvet Fortune... and now in the new millennium he's even done some time in an Austin TX studio recording Johnny Cash's quintessential prison song...
It's been a few weeks since I dropped by to update the site...and fer some reason
the world keep son churning...
One interesting story to hit my radar this week was the sentencing saga & law suits of one Jose Padilla ( not a latin musician but a guy aka Abdullah al-Muhajir)
A court room thousands of miles away in Miami on Tuesday hosts the sentencing hearings for convicted "terrorist plotter" Jose Padilla, but he and his mother, with the help of Yale legal scholar Jonathon Friedman have also started legal proceedings right here in San Francisco.
San Francisco's Federal Court became part of an intriguing and intertwining legal legacy last Friday, when a suit was filed against a Berkeley Law Professor. Padilla ( one of the few "evil doers" ever convicted in the wake of the Bush Admin's post-9/11 Homeland Security craze that swept the US), is angry at Boalt Hall's John Yoo... and wants a symbolic dollar in damages ( although his lawyers want their full fees of course).
Padilla, a U.S Citizen who was born in Brooklyn and once claimed membership in Chicago's "Maniac Latin Disciples" street gang was later termed an "illegal enemy combatant" after the government announced a "dirty bomb" plot in 2002. Thus began a long & winding legal odyssey in which precedents were few and far between, many challenges were filed, some initial charges were dropped, then reinstated, and evidence seldom matched allegations. All along, Padilla's rotating cast of legal representatives claimed the case was an overblown example of overdue process, in which torture was employed on US soil "as part of a systematic program" that "intended to break down Mr. Padilla's humanity and will to live". Eventually, Padilla was convicted by the Feds last August.
But the story doesn't stop there...
(more after the jump)
Yoo is being sued because while working for the The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel , he wrote the memoranda and legal opinions that supposedly formed the basis for Padilla's detention. According to the plaintiff, Yoo's actions directly violated Padilla's constitutional and statutory rights, and they cite as evidence Yoo's own book "War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror". In it they claim direct evidence of Yoo's personal responsibility for the series of recommendations and OLC opinions that Yoo made on the Government's behalf.
Yoo, one of the chief architects of the Patriot act, isn't your typical Berkeley campus liberal. He earned his keep in D.C as a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, and has vigorously argued against Congress restricting the President's options in regards to torture. "
They can't prevent the President from ordering torture
" adding that '
It's the core of the Commander-in-Chief function"
The suit was filed here in San Francisco for jurisdictional reasons, as a similar complaint from Padilla filed in South Carolina was tossed out. Cynical legal observers suggest it is still a frivolous claim, even in nutty San Francisco, and without solid legal grounds, the Federal judiciary is likely to toss it out again.
Padilla's sentencing hearing, which begins Tuesday, because of numerous disputes regarding the legalities of his lengthy detention could last several days .
The desperate attempts to build a case against the gov't, the appeals process, various precedents set, and legal bickering on the other hand, will continue for years I imagine...
Anyhow, I as I was mentioning up top, I'm sorta busted currently, and likely gotta get my financials in order
Seems this whole holiday end of year party party party... gift giving & traveling thang has tapped me out.
How am I gonna get me a terabyte, if I can't afford a simple bite to eat eh?
Especially if I keep getting lead into death trap little dives all over town with jacked prices & lousy grub.
Take this joint I was dragged into across from the Makeout Room.
Looks innocent enough, then ya notice the sign... or lack there of.
No Sign = Bad Sign
Yer supposed to know about the place before you go or something, and you'd only know it was there if you are already a trendy asshole.
Nothing like a super "hip" restaurant ... a place where y'know people talk about the tapestries and wooden shit hanging on the walls because the food is tiny, and a rip off.
Apparently the specialty is keeping people out, ala Spago or some crap like that...
However, unlike Spago, this ain't Hollywood and this is the Mission, where one of the earth's better taco's can be had within a 2-3 minute wait for less than $2-$4 at almost any conceivable hour of the day until like 3 am.
Why would I wait outside for 30 minutes for your multi dollar faux Turkish-Taco Fusion ?
I guess they want to appear exclusive, then really just overcharge my cold humiliated ass for corn smut.
Yep... that's one of the specialty dishes, Huitalacoche...
(aka as that black mold you cut off the tops of corn ears. Stupid white people are gladly paying phat checks to eat that here...)
Anyhow if you really want to try corn smut, I suggest you save yer dough and head across the bay via Bart to Fruitvale to the magically homey & friendly environs of El Huarache Azteca ( located at 3842 International Blvd. betwixt 38th and 39th aves).
The guy who runs that place is a true gentleman, he'll get someone to hand make you tortillas to go, even after he's technically closed.
Plus the whole tab, with numerous drinks is like way less $20 for 2 people.
but, L*l* or whatever they call it, on the other hand, is simply a centrifuge for the cliche'd type of carpet bagging cash hungry dickwads that have been ruining the Mission for the last 20 years...
Not only were the pretentious staff pretending to be busy when they weren't...
But it was a scam...
So that leads me to this next dive that opened up on 16th in the Mission recently
They have this beer called Allagash that's quite good...
It's hard to find in Northern California, or on the west coast for that matter...
But I'm used to drinking it for $3 - $4 a pint in LA.
The owners must have thought it was cute, by naming their joint after a religious order that generally takes a vow of poverty.
Then selling goes about selling a bottle of Allagash beer for $22...
That's like at least 2 or 3 x what anyone would ever pay for such a thing ...
Here's some things I think are sorta exciting right about now:
Last year, the Orpheum was abuzz as a certain late night Tv host brought his shtick to town for a solid week of shows. Currently the writers strike has been sapping the comedy out of late night television, it was nice to note that David Letterman's "Worldwide Pants" outfit did their own deal with the writers to get 'em back doing what they do best.
I refuse in my couch potato moments to watch any scab t.v, and hope you'll do the same...
Which is why I whole heartedly recommend y'all tune in to Mr. Letterman's program this week while the competitors languish in their writer-less arrogance. In fact to sweeten the pot, on Wednesday January 9th, Letterman has one of SF's lesser known entertainment assets on hand as a musical guest, that being the mighty guitarzan Chuck Prophet.
He started somewhere outside of Danville with a teenage rapscallion act known as Bad Attitude, who were fixtures at joints like The Berkeley Square and Ruthies Inn.
Somehow, after a lot of broken strings and hearts and contracts, he made his roundabout way to the Ed Sullivan theater, only 45 or so years behind the Beatles & The Stones...
Mr. Prophet and his bandmates are chugging off in various directions away from their beloved and high rent Bay Area abodes until around springtime.
Wherever he goes though, he'll steal your show, whether yer Ann & Nancy of Heart draggin' him into a casino gig, Aimee Mann bringing him up onstage at Bimbo's last month, or a sloppy Xmess cover band combo including the Parker Bros, Tippy Canoe & Spiral Stairs, Chris Von Sneidern & plenty o' pals all jammin' on behalf of the SF Food Bank at the Makeout Room a few weeks later.
Watch out folks ...
He's a real rambling storytellin' troubadour from the mystical old school that never was and a perpetual stoner teenager making adult rock for the young at heart. He's done the sideman thang backing up folks like Warren Zevon, Cake, Penelope Houston and even Jewel, but he's best when left to his own devices.
His latest album Soap & Water has been getting some airplay here and there, from Innsbruck to Indiana, Belgium to Brooklyn, Santa Rosa to Satellite Radio.
The road is long & winding, and that ain't nothing new.
In fact it's been so long, I believe he played on the David Letterman show before...
it was back in the hazy 1980's...
When Green on Red, Chuck's prior band that eventually put out numerous nefarious albums was picking up steam...
I'm not sure about all the details, and likely neither is Chuck. He's since gone all what they call "Clean & Sober", but that just means there musta been a lotta dirt to dig out from under...
The episode was vaguely recounted in a Dream Syndicate track in which Steve Wynn recounted tale of Prophet's then bandmate Dan Stuart:
"Well, he lost a lot of friends in San Francisco
made a fool of himself on the Letterman show
in Dallas, Texas, he was thrown for a loss
when he passed out face-first in the barbeque sauce
This one is a bit late this year, but hey there's always next year, it was recorded at an acoustic songwriter showcase Chuck did some years back. The original studio version appears on his album Homemade Blood, but here it is all live and shit, from a link I found at Soft Communication...
Brian Dykstra
"They're Killing Us" (mp3)
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