the defeatists!

Someplace, late Boomers are having existential moments while Farah joins Lily

Farah Fawcett has joined Lily in the memory of a lot of men in their forties... as memories of old posters rampage through the cortex. 

And Elizabeth Taylor, Dianna Ross and Lisa Marie have a mass of mixed emotions. But, who's going to worry about the monkey? Ultimately, it was all about money...just money.

Keith Richard has outlived two more people...

Most people hate what they do or most of what they do...

  Quiet desperation, anyone?

"She was this blonde bombshell...great quote from Ayn Rand, "tell me what a man finds sexy and I'll tell you his whole philosophy of life.." ."

"I am inspired by everything. I wish I could narrow it down to a more palatable muse. But the fact is, the shape of a ripped piece of paper, or the edge of a cloud can affect me in the same physical way.

Silk threads, twisted wire, the paper like skin of an iris....the turquoise and gold in the eye of a peacock feather, or in a tube of indigo, haunt me, until only the layering and layering of color, texture and image can erase its echo from my mind."

 

>Yeah  it would be great to like most of what I do...

Why didn't they do Layla together?

However, Clapton and Beck doing Take You Higher is what GuitarTuningGear Heads live for...

Somethings are more insane than others...There is only one Doctor Duke!

I occasionally visit the Southern Poverty Law Center's blogsite because they do an excellent job of tracking the nutcases. There, I happened on this gem...David Duke, aka Dippest Shit in Louisiana, is now contending that he's an artist. Well, as SPLC's editor points out, not quite. He takes purty pictures, and then enhances them with photoshop. His twitship presents among other things a shot of the gorgeous city of Salzburg that he tinted rather oddly...like he was trying for that Obama poster look on a city and just blew it terrible. I've been to Salzburg numerous times -- strongly recommend the Columbusbrau -- and have taken pictures back in the days of 35mm actual film as cutting edge tech of the same view; doesn't make me think Salzburg. It makes me think, I don't know, Zanzabar, only with fir trees and the Salznach river flowing through it. The Festung Salzburg has no salmon hues to it...

Of course, this might be in Duke's mind the sort of thing Hitler might have done had he had Photoshop and a Sony digital camera. 

However, what got my attention was the gall of the asshole. He went to some Ukarainian place, thing, diploma mill, whatever called "Ukrainian Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP)." I'm surprised that this guy, who makes David Vetter look "smoooooooth," can read in English let alone in Ukrainian what with the Cyrilic Alphabet and all. They also hired the dipshit to teach there, which he did for a term. Oh, his thesis was on "Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism" which means he based his doctorate on the empirical truth of the Secret Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Oddly enough, while MAUP is the largest non-governmental university in Ukraine (one of my secretaries is a Ukrainian immigrant. She's married to an African American. She would definitely think this guy is an asshole...) it's diplomas aren't recognized in Poland or pretty much anywhere else. Saudi Arabia, maybe. I guess a degree from this place might get the guy a gig teaching in a Madrassa in Pakistahn or some such place, if it weren't for the whole "the only thing you need to know is the Koran" thing that makes madrassas such dull places for football weekends and panty raids.

Now the degree he got is something called a "Kandidat Nauk" which appears to be a degree created so Russian flunkies hoping to get gigs someplace besides Sverdlosk. It requires a dissertation and a defense, supposedly. I'm sure Duke does really well in Ukrainian or Russian. After all, wasn't the Klan a commie plot anyway?  The degree is sorta, kinda, almost a Ph.D. I guess it's like a DBA or an Ed.D. It's a practical degree -- in the science of racism, in this guy's case.

My problem is that he call's himself Dr. Duke. There is only one Dr Duke, Hunter S. Thompson using his nom de plume in Fear and Loathing Days. Metaphysically, I'm pretty sure that in some metaphysical hinterland, Hunter is filling a briefcase with a fifth of Tequila, a case of Red Stipe Ale, a couple of boxes of amyls and a fucking .50 Desert Eagle loaded with Isreali hotloads to go take care of this idiots geist. Gonna shoot him right in the zeitgeist, and we'll all applaud. Metaphysically...

Now, this is the sort of book they should be reading in English Lit 101

Because, after all, isn't this what all great literature is about? 

And everybody needs one of these...don't they?

Wanted, evil twisted genius for coffee in Barstow

I saw this piece over at IOZ and was immediately amazed. While Parsifal is not my least favorite opera -- anything in Italian trumps it, as well as well, most operas. It's not that I hate opera in general, I hate operas in specifics. Anyway, combining Bye-Bye Birdie with the Aryan nonsense of Wagner is so wonderful as to deserve continuous praise. Seriously, anonymous evil, twisted genius, your imagination and your technical editing skills are absolutely...awful and awesome.

Inherent contradictions and infernal affairs

I'm working tomorrow. Actually, I'm going to go in, take a class on export control that really doesn't have anything to do with me, and fiddle around with some stuff. May hang some new art in the office, possibly bring along a guitar and jam by myself, read crap. Dinner last night was breakfast at Cocos...I find it odd that they have sold more Harvest pies this year than the total pies they sold last year. I had a lobster asparagus omlet, which substituted brocoli for the asparagus...figure that one out. Anyway, they had run out of pumpkin for their pies by 6PM; is it just the Crossroads of Opportunity that decided to splurge on pie this year? Or are people cutting back on heating things like oven? Lots of turkey TV dinners, maybe?

I've been thinking about a lot of nonsense. However, the Hegelian in me is coming out -- the inherent contradictions of whatever you want to call our economic-government-political system are spiraling. Had a long talk with my sister this morning; she said that in Michigan, the autoworkers are going around in tears, and really getting pissed. They watched the entire congressional hearings, and it appears that Carl Levin had a moment or two, as did the President of the UAW going up against Shelby of Alabamdama...seems that Alabama paid over $175K per worker for training for the four foriegn car companies that set up shop in Alabama. Where the hell did that come from? Taxes on Crimson Tide T-shirts? I know a guy who is in Workforce Development in Alabama, and he described the training for the Hyundai plant -- they basically put people on the state rolls and trained them completely so that the day the plant opened, all the workers were already so well trained they knew exactly where to go and what to do...So, to listen to the radicalization of my lifetime Republican sister and brother-in-law is both enraging and interesting. It is not gratifying...being right about how badly the country has been run in this right-center-right way since 1980 doesn't gratify me. Schadenfreude, perhaps, but not a lot...

I then flipped on the TV. Obviously nothing, but I did catch the last half of Standing in the Shadows of Motown. I was really amazed; I knew that the band was hot, but it was a three guitar band, which I had never realized. While I never liked My Girl, I had never been able to play the rif...which is a classic and iconic rif, right up there with Louie Louie and Beethoven's Fifth. Incredibly simple, since the guy who played it showed about three times. His name was Robert White, and he died in 1992. Shortly before his death, he had dinner with another musician, and that rif started playing on the Muzak. He started to tell the waiter that that was him, and then stopped. When asked by the musician why he didn't say that it had been him, he said that he was just an old loser, and the waiter would never have believed him...Sad stories abound in this film...

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Anyway, then I saw this piece.Rioting chinese workers who have been laid off by a nerf toy supplier to Hasbro trash the factory...in Donggan.  This is big. The Chinese don't like to announce this kind of stuff until it's soooo big you can't ignore it. 

The latest violent protest to rock China's export machine was still simmering Wednesday at the massive plant, which makes Nerf toys for the U.S. company Hasbro Inc. ...The volatility underscored the urgency of China's efforts to keep stoking an economy weakened by the global financial crisis...To protect jobs and social stability, the government recently signed off on a multibillion-dollar stimulus plan. Officials have also been urging factories to avoid large layoffs and to try retraining employees to keep them off the streets..."When times are bad economically, a small incident can rapidly become a big one," said local Communist Party official Guo Chenming, who was monitoring the situation Wednesday outside the toy factory in Dongguan.

  It's not like Dongguan is a big tourism site. "Dongguan is a must-pass-by locality from Guangzhou to Hong Kong by road or waterway." It does have a pretty cool bridge and is right on the Pearl River...but, most Americans including probably Hasbro haven't heard of it. Oh, it has 7 fucking million people...

So, oddities abound. I wonder if the rioting workers threw nerf balls at the cops...

Well, again, we do have inherent contradictions here at Defeatist Central...

Fucking hobbits are doing in their own, ehh?

The Church of England, particularly in Bath and Wells, has decided to take on a subject that Jesus was really, really clear on and do the truly Christlike thing--ban gnomes from graveyards in Coventry. ...Gnomes. Obviously they are Priceline afficiandos... I can think of no better example of the irrelevance of Church hierarchy.

Now, I find garden gnomes repulsive. This is not a pro-gnome sort of blog. Look to Shakespeare's Sister and related sites for that. But, this really comes under the heading of "who gives a fuck?" Dad died, and liked gnomes. Actually, this is a great argument for cremation and scattering of ashes. Or, making the ashes into a sculpture. Of a gnome.

Part of their argument is that gnomes are not real, so why depict them in a cemetary? Well, dragons aren't real, but tell that to St George. Angels are pretty interesting; I've seen a lot of them wandering around, wings aflutter? And burning bushes...well, a marvelous thought, but not lately.

One of the many advantages we have over Britian is that we have, despite the best efforts of the Bush administration and allies, no established Church. The idiots worrying about this as opposed to -- I don't know, the poor, hungry, alone, suffering, naked, afflicted, those people -- are civil servants, in fact. Clerical bureaucrats...so, when you go to the UK and buy something and pay their VAT, you are financing this kind of nonsense.

Feel better about the bailout? No? While I think Keith Obermann needs to get on to heroin or something to calm him down, he is probably dead on -- we call it a bailout, but in the future it will be known as "why daddy went to jail!"

Why him? Why now? Utah...Enquiring minds need to know...

I keep trying to find something to care about in the on-going debacle that is going on. Perhaps this is a start.

Odd thoughts for a day off...

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

I have decided that unless that prodigious prestidigitator and pudit, Crispin Dimebox Sartwell writes it, I am through with music criticism. There have been a lot of signs that the people writing that level of journalism are tonedeaf, and probably didn't listen to the stuff or read anything but each other's crap in a masturbatory orgy of self congratualtion. I think the end for me was a review in Slate describing T-Boone Burnette's influence on Robert Plant as bringing out his darker side. Darker side? Really? Owlsley, satanism, withcraft and kabbala aren't dark enough for you?   Exactly where is the sunlight in The Immigrant Song? What's so optimistic about Over the Hill and Far Away? Ramble On? Kashmir? Evermore?I love "Raising Sand," largely because of the contrast between personnas. If all you know of Allison Krause is the stuff that occasionally gets on to country radio, it's possible to think she's just a sweet little fiddle player. Plant, the rake and rambling boy who has experimented with a lot of stuff including types of music as well as other types or recreational things, seems like what Mick Jagger could have been had he a better and more interesting voice and hadn't wanted to be accepted by polite society. In fact, Plant's pretty reflective, well read and visionary, and Allison is talented and introspective talent who has that high lonesome thing going on -- which includes a lot of darkness, tragedy, and despair. I always get the feeling listening to Led Zepplin, the Plant-Page collaborations and some of his other stuff, that Plant is always on the verge of trying to break through to some other side musically and existentially. Allison Krause is similar -- there's always the feeling with her work both in collaboration with her own band, with others or the odd occasional thing she's done, the feeling is one of yearning and grasping and not quite getting there.