cheese it, the cops!

you know what i hate more than anything? it's the volatility of the earth's climate. there's exactly one species of monkey which has an unnatural effect: us. christ. where's the inevitable continuous exactly the sameness we've come to expect over the last twenty minutes?

i'm really sad that they're executing strongmen. who, who will tell me what the fuck to do? what to believe? who to kill?

i think in the long run you'll find that john edwards is a very gifted and formidable politician. were i predicting, i'd predict that he will be the democratic nominee and the next president of the united states.

before watergate and vietnam, the american people had total implicit faith in their leaders and in their government. perhaps in some abstract sense power could have been abused, but it never had been up until, i think, 1967. but after the naive idealistic youth of america got a gander at, perhaps, spiro agnew, we sank into cynicism, disillusionment, and disco. thank god for jerry ford, who restored america's traditional, completely uncritical enthusiasm for state power. ah, it was a difficult time. but it was a time that has receded into a few crisp, though idiotic, sentences.

call me a dreamer. but i kind of wish that james brown had been the president that followed richard nixon, and that gerald ford had been serving at the time as the godfather of soul. then brown could have pardoned bootsy collins, while nixon could have worn huge funny sunglasses and gigantic platform heels. also, i wish henry kissinger had never existed at all. brown could have healed our nation after the deep wounds of watergate, vietnam, and the mandrell sisters (or whatever the fuck was happening back then), while ford could have brought some restraint, honesty, decency, and moderation to the exploding funk scene.

well, just for the hell of it, i'm going to have a little go at barack obama and the audacity of hope. if your hope was truly audacious, i think you'd aspire to do more than perch atop a trillion dollar bureaucracy that rests exclusively on coercion, confiscation, and corruption. the most audaciously hopeful and profoundly inspiring moments in the history of the us senate were when they were caning each other on the floor, or when the phrase "us senator" (along with manly good looks and extreme infusions of pure cash) was helping john kennedy fuck aspiring models. in all seriousness, if one were truly called to public service, one would be working out how to implode the us capitol, much less sitting there dealing out the pork. if you are ever tempted to be inspired by the visionary leadership  of an american president, i suggest that you remind yourself that the dreamy authority of said president rests on the largest, most annihilating force of violence this planet can ever know.

once upon a time i had 3 brothers. now i'm an only child. tribute to my brother jim: vala cupp , "don't touch me" (he had such a crush) (she's fucking dead too; she hung herself). ok what happened was: we just had dinner w/ my "late" brother's wife judy. i scored a big bag of amazing blues cds: jim was a fanatic. so i reached in at random and pulled out vala's album, and remembered jim loving her, raving about her. i played the cd. got off. and then i googled, and found out she was...gone.

look. i want to be able to tell you that things will be ok. i want to write, like barak, about the audacity of hope. i want not to think that's fucking bullshit. but i do, and i can't.

 

the major texts of the josiah warren project are now complete in preliminary versions, with the addition of the narrative of practical experiments.

i love a good hanging, and in honor of saddam's, here's an old column declaring his innocence.

james brown was a great, churchy r&b ("night train") and soul ("a man's world") shouter. obviously, an amazing stage presence. but it's pretty easy to state his fundamental contribution to american music: he took up-tempo sixties soul and stripped it down to the rhythm, cutting out everything else - melody, lyric content - as extraneous. this not only made for these amazing modular works that could begin and end anywhere ("sex machine"), it opened music up in a profound way. now you could re-build from  the ground up in a radically open structure, using bricks instead of timber, a structure of repetition that was implicitly infinite. this made funk and hip hop conceptually possible. (the other elements of hip hop were provided by jamaica: recycling bass lines from recording to recording (as a cost-cutting measure) and recording dj's "toasting" over popular records.) since then black pop has been a series of deletions, re-buildings, and then new deletions: an open spiral or circular history always returning to the fundamental to build again on top of the basics. indeed, in a way sampling is inherent in the idea: it implies the collage, built on top of the big thump. you no longer think in terms of a song, but in terms of what we can make again from these elements.

this is actually an admirable use of military force, to save people from torture and execution. it is revealing that it was an operation of the british, who, unlike the u.s., don't seem to have a taste for torture in their own right. indeed, the "rogue" police etc whom the brits attacked were just doing what the u.s. has done all over the world. understand, however, that it is state power that makes such activities possible, though of course we immediately start hearing about the "infiltration" of the police by "militias and organized crime." it doesn't really occur to anyone that the police, the militias, and organized crime are simply identical, a mistake which keeps us funding and urging the iraqi state entities forward, even while we define the enemy as precisely the people running the government at every level.

tomorrow's #: "what if eminem did jingle bells?" bob rivers

 

today's #: "back door santa," by clarence carter (famously sampled by run dmc in "christmas in hollis")

 

today's #: "misirlou," by dick dale and the del-tones

 

nothing is funnier than totalitarianism. or even just political power in general. i loved yesterday's top headline: bush admits war not going as well as he'd hoped. on the other hand, outlawing opera makes sense.

Known as Turkmenbashi, or Father of all Turkmens, Niyazov was renowned for such peculiar acts as ordering citizens to get gold teeth extracted, outlawing opera and banning men from listening to car radios.

During a 21-year rule he turned his country into a hymn of praise to himself: kindergartens, towns, factories and a month of the year (January) were named Turkmenbashi. He erected a revolving gold statue of himself in the capital Ashgabat and giant billboards of the leader hung all over the country.

He often feigned embarrassment at the adulation. "I'm personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets - but it's what the people want," he once said.

But the pressure to worship the leader was relentless. Children in the gas-rich state were forced to learn his book of poetry, the Ruhnama, at school, and a copy of the book was sent into space for good measure.

i was going to rag on joseph barbera, but martin rowson does it for me, in the exact terms i would have used.

today's #: "satisfied?" by j-live (sampling augustus pablo, the great reggae artist):

 

allen iverson is the most electrifying basketball player i've ever seen, and i have watched a shitload of basketball since before i was born. seriously: the answer's probably my alltime hoops hero, with the possible exception of buck williams, who was an undergrad at maryland when i was. (buck should be in the hall: take this on board: he had 13,017 rebounds in the nba.) still, the sixers got an amazing deal for him: andre miller, (md great) joe smith, the electrifying julius hodge (?) and two first-round draft picks for a player who is pretty late in his career. here's what i think: maybe people think he's a ball hog etc. i think he desperately wants to win, and that he will actually be relieved to complement carmelo anthony, which i believe he will do beautifully. even with what they gave up, i think the nuggets might be championship material. they will no doubt score a lot of points. but iverson will commit to defense too, even as a skinny sixfooter. at least they didn't give up littleman earl boykins.

today's #: "ive got a feeling i'm falling," by mel torme:

 

today's #: "the old south," a beautiful slow minor-key bluegrass by the karl shiflett and big country show:

ok, serrach i am adding amazon links. this is a great album, and they do extremely oldtimey bluegrass: one vintage mic, around which they all gather to harmonize in the studio. i would say, however, that "the old south" is very atypical of the album, in being a slow instrumental. but if you like, say the stanley brothers, you'd dig this.

 

as i've said before, the sheer fact that we tortured you makes you an enemy combatant, even if you were pure as the driven snow before your entirely aconstitutional detainment. now you know state secrets, namely what we did to you and do to people like you. in fact, your innocence itself threatens the war on terror and is thus a justification for having you re-arrested and re-tortured.

were i the american military, i'd concentrate all my efforts on wars in space. sure as hell can't deal with them on earth.

today's #: "midnight hour" by nick curran and the nitelifes (no not the wilson pickett song):

 

this is a great, great blues album, radically underappreciated:

it may be that weakness is provocative. so is arrogance. so is the wildly unjust and unjustfied use of power. so is gigantism, sluggishness, willful ignorance of reality. in fact, no matter how heavily you're armed, ineffectiveness is itself weakness.

anti-depressants drive you to suicide. if i do say so, i'm the only one who has offered an adequate scientific explanation of this depressing fact.

i'm so touched by the fact that harry reed is attending tim johnson on his deathbed. i figure that he will be at my side when i fucking croak. when i do, anyway, i'll be turning control of the senate over to the anarchist freak front.

today's #: audrey auld: "i'd leave me too."

 

i'm announcing my intelligence plans. i'm gonna try to stop being so fucking stupid.

Hunt has been inducted into eight halls of fame, including ones for soccer and tennis as well as the Texas Business Hall of Fame and the Kansas City Business Hall of Fame.

damn, dude. and here i didn't even know there was a KCBHF. how many halls of fame have you been inducted into? me, i'm in the assmonkey hof, the dumbfuck hof, the rocknroll hof, and the dc teenagers who sucked hof, etc.

today's #: "the world didn't give it to me," by shirley caesar