cheese it, the cops!

Hotter than a bored out, 400 CC 57 Chevy with Dual Carbs and a HEMI! And Headers...

 

In which Crusader AXE muses on the positive aspects of moonshining, rumrunning, beer brewing , and marijauna over Chrystal METH and tobacco; and, on being a craft brewer, craft distiller, moonshiner or herbal remedy distributor as opposed to a regular job...and advocates bounties for METH COOKERS and Hookah lounge operators, both on aesthetic grounds. 

 

targets

the theory is that a contractor hit a gas line, but i speculate that we are dealing with temperance terrorists who are bombing wine bars. i can see why.

my life is a country...show

nashville is roughly my favorite tv show ever (well also i'm into justified right now). one of the many great aspects: the attempt really is to make a television equivalent of a country song, or country music in general. this gives the thing a kind of postmodern hyper-self-awareness even as it also works as a sheer soap. now this may surprise you a bit coming from a philosophy professor, but my own life has been filled with many of these themes, as well as basted in country music. i am a devotee of rural america. one character's brother just did 8 for armed robbery; my bro jim only pulled 5, though. the depiction of addiction and recovery (12-step variety) is the best and most real i've seen on television; it's a constant theme. in many ways, addiction has been the theme of my life: my father's, my brothers', my ex-wife marion's, my own. i sobered up (the first time, which lasted for 13 years) in nashville, as it happens, among many musicians, songwriters, and country stars. the more-or-less main male character deacon is right now on a 'dry-drunk', sell-the-house-and-go-live-in-the-cabin moment after 12 years sober. his real problem: he's spent much of his life helplessly loving a terribly wrong person, who's also 'the queen of country music.' i am going to speculate that such a thing is...possible. the relationships are absurdly rocky: the lies, the betrayals, the crazy fights, the d-i-v-o-r-c-e. um, yeah.

i wonder if all this happened to me because i love tammy wynette. well, no. but it has all made me love tammy wynette even more. everyone thinks that the hayden panetierre character is a 'pre-fab pop princess.' but they depict her as being, sort of secretly, an overwhelming songwriting talent. she bought some land out along the cumberland that used to belong to tammy; that's where she wants to build her house. meanwhile she's dealing - again i would say quite realistically - with her mother's meth addiction. (my ma is a non-addict, though. mama tried.) now, the palatial homes in belle meade, the rival divas, etc: that's a bit more outside my experience, but i dig it anyway. and it's a show where people really care about music and are really good at it: that's what actually matters most to these characters. i remember robert altman's unforgivable nashville: a completely ignorant hatchet job in which country musicians and others in the industry are pictured as talentless hicks, buffoons, and con men. perhaps that was the autobiographical element in altman's film, but it had nothing to do with nashville, which has its problems, but where the real talent and commitment are overwhelming. you might just stroll into a bar and hear someone singing like an angel, perhaps someone like the astounding clare bowen, who plays a nashville type: you know, just down from the hills: even she has no idea that she's a transcendent country singer, which is slowly dawning on the cast and the nation. this nashville is a very loving depiction, even as it also explores in its soapy way many problematic dimensions of the entertainment industry.

satan is real

watcha listenin to crispy? i'm obsessed at the moment with the louvin brothers' incomparably beautiful and intense song 'satan's jewel crown.' i'm an atheist, but let's just say i yearn hopelessly for god anyway, or at any rate for redemption. ira louvin, i would say, was your classic addict, and the degradation and infinite longing to which such a thing gives rise are completely expressed in this lyric. maybe i don't believe in god, but i feel that satan is real. or let me put it like this: i sort of have the inner life but not the cosmology of a puritan: the whole deal: sin. self-loathing, desperation, the possibility of redemption but not from within.



here is a link to an especially amazing performance of the song by emmylou harris. this is more or less what she looked and sounded like when i used to see her in coffeehouses and such around dc in the early seventies; how could you not have a transcendent crush? her love could redeem you, even if you didn't want to be redeemed. well i still feel that way about emmylou.

"embedding disabled by request."

 

so there have been some pretty dramatic protests at the college where i work (dickinson in carlisle, pa) concerning sexual assault of students (mostly, of course, by other students, and mostly acquaintance assaults by male on female students, again of course). hundreds of students have occupied the administration building for the last couple of days, and coverage has been kind of amazing: it led all the local newscasts and the local newspapers, and you've seen slices even on huffpost and other national outlets. 

now first of all, it's actually great to see students active in this way; dickinson hasn't really in my time there been a hotbed of activism, and more students seem interested in binge-drinking (which of course you'd have to say plays a large role in this problem, which is serious) than anything that has anything to do with anything. and the demands of the protesters seem by and large reasonable: more transparency in the disciplinary process, expulsions for serious sexual offenders, and so on. but we're also back to the following, which is the kind of thing i've spoken out against at a number of the institutions where i've worked (this is from the list of demands as presented by the protesters this morning):

The college must recognize sexual violence as existing on a spectrum: cat-calling, lewd comments, and homophobic or misogynistic slurs contribute to a culture conducive to sexual assault. This is one sideof the broad spectrum of offenses that we consider sexual violence, with the most extreme end of said spectrum being rape and sexual assault. These behaviors must be dictated in the same policies thatgovern sexual violence and formally punished, though certainly not with the same severity as sexual assault and rape.

the definition of speech as violence, and the banning of certain phonemes, is just completely wrong and counter-productive and counter-educational. i and others have put forward these arguments for so long that it seems almost silly to repeat them, but i will just a bit. it matters who uses the 'slur' and when and why. a gay person throwing around 'faggot' and 'queer' (like a black rapper with 'nigger' or a feminist with 'bitch') is routine and part of the ways that words mutate and get constantly inflected and turned around. i just mentioned or quoted those words, and that is completely different for my money than hurling them at someone as a form of verbal abuse. you actually get the feeling that people are scared of certain sounds, and 'the n word' etc is just pathetic: gutless. they want to ban even talking about what words they want to ban. please.

banning certain words just leads to the spiral of useless euphemisms, and if you think people can't replace 'retarded' with 'special' or whatever you may authorize next, i will demonstrate that you are mistaken. and even if you could get teenage boys actually to stop using 'gay' as an all-around term for anything they don't like, that wouldn't keep them from feeling like they have to continually establish their heterosexuality to each other using whatever terms you might leave at their disposal.

you increase the power of any word that you brand as an act of violence or propose to delete from the language. in fact you attribute to words a literally magical power: like i can literally assault you, damage your body, by sitting here in my little house typing. and i can make you love me by writing your name on a piece of paper and folding it up just so. if it were true, i might be tempted actually to make use of this supernatural ability.

and if you can't hold out some sort of distinction between words and violence, you can't stop censorship anywhere, of anything. etc!