"I think they are all homosexual communists in Satan's army...I espect as well they all live together and bathe together every morning and have the anal sex with one another, with the fisting and the guinea pigs." - Manuel Estimulo
"I can never quite tell if the defeatists are conservative satirists poking fun at the left or simply retards. Or both. Retarded satire, perhaps?" - Kyle
"You're an effete fucktard" - Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom
"This is the most pathetic blog ever..." - Ames Tiedeman
"You two [the Rev and el Comandante] make an erudite pair. I guess it beats thinking." - Matt Cunningham (aka Jubal) of OC Blog
"Can someone please explain to me what the point is behind that roving gang of douchebags? I’m being serious here. It’s not funny, and doesn’t really make anything that qualifies as logical argument. Paint huffers? Drunken high school chess geeks?" - rickinstl
You lose your job. Your wife loses her job, you lose the house, the cat gets rabies and bites you, you have to have rabies shots, you have to sell the Ford and get an old pickup truck to move to West Virginia to be a FUCKING MIGRANT FARM WORKER! With rabies. Your wife runs a house of ill repute out of the house trailer you have both moved into in WEST FUCKING VIRGINIA servicing coal miners who are going to vote for Sarah Palin. The rabies eats away at your mind and you end up as the SARAH PALIN REGIONAL COORDINATOR for WEST FUCKING VIRGINIA. And, then you die...
Negative fantasies are just that. Negative and fantasies. There can be a reverse Pygmalion effect, though -- keep acting out the negative fantasy and beware of the wish fulfillment.
About the time of Born in the USA, I kinda lost most of my interest in Bruce Springsteen. The period where he was wandering around, trying different things really resulted in lost interest on my part. The Bruce steroids-Nautilus thing kind of pissed me off. Not sure why...a lot of his performances now are still better than most of the ones you're going to find other places, but the old Bruuuuucccceee mania is not there. I feel the way about a lot of groups that were wonderful and are now just better than the rest but can't quite show the magic.
So, when the Times announced that on November 16, a stack of material related to the Darkness at the Edge of Town album is going to be released, the AXE gets very excited. The Hobbits for some reason have turned off the link toy here, so the Times piece is at http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/back-to-the-badlands-springsteen-finds-more-music-on-edge-of-town/?ref=arts...and, I know what I'm going to do that day or about two weeks prior when I'll be on the Bruce Springsteen Live Nation Page pre-ordering the set with a re-mastered original, two additional CDs of material that didn't make it into the album, and three DVDs. Pre-order, and celebrate...along with a live DVD concert in Houston from 1978. When Bruce was a skinny kid guitarslinger with an incredibly tight band of rock and roll vagrants, a Telecaster, alot of attitude and a tremendous energy that made rock and roll possible, again...
You know, about fifty seven years ago, a cold and sick man in the back seat of a Cadillac died; the driver, who was trying to get the star to a New Year's Day show didn't realize his boss was dead until he stopped in a small town in West Virginia. And yet, people are still affected by this-- At the time, he was bigger than Elvis would have been without television. His wife, Ms. Audrey was his Colonel Parker; his Lisa Marie did get dragged around as a sort of sacred totem or death mask by people like Webb Pierce and Little Jimmy Dickens until he found his own way. His grandson plays either speed metal or authentic hillbilly music.
Could you tell us, please, at which gas station Hank Williams was found dead?
The counter clerk didn’t know, which surprised me. After all, if you
Google “Oak Hill Hank Williams,” you get a lot of hits. She asked a man
who’d come in to buy cigarettes, but he wasn’t sure, either. A
conversation developed. Finally, a woman came in who did know. Down the
street, she said. Just across from the church.
She walked outside with us to point out the right direction. “Used to be
Burdette’s Pure Oil,” she said. “You can’t miss it. There’s nothing
there now. Nothing at all.”
Well, there are lots of concrete slabs lost out there on various lost highways. The universe had used him up, and he died of alcoholism, exhaustion, heart failure...loneliness and pain. Everybody who's strummed a dreadnought style guitar and tried to think country has played one or two of his songs, or at least thought about it.
Now, Rock and Roll has its own death cults and questions...How'd Jim Morrison really die? Was Brian Jones murdered? What was Sam Cooke doing with a hooker in a cheap hotel? Who killed Bobby Fuller? We know how Hank and Elvis went...the universe had used them up and it was time. Hank at least died on the road, with the sad dignity of greatness and sad charm of a destructive drunk
...The Great Annual Southern Gothic Necrophilia Festival in Memphis has just winded down. People wander through the damn faux plantation all the while; in Montgomey , occasionally someone will bring a bottle of JW Dance whiskey or One-W Harper and pour some onto a grave.
I honestly think that without Hank Williams, rock and country lyrics would still be all about love and dove, June and moon, lost and tossed in the night. And, there is a place for that...but Hank Williams made it ok to think when writing lyrics, and to use a 12 bar blues progression in a country song.
If I were ever to start another band, and I probably won't, we'd have to do a lot of Hank Williams stuff and wear Nudie Suits, and have steel guitars, fiddle and a standup bass...
So, lots of people in Memphis in August; not a lot in Oak Hill, West Virginia in December. But there is a link between them...I'm pretty sure Elvis' momma and old Vernon liked to hear Elvis sing one of Hank's songs while the family sipped lemonade and thought about Mississippi...
Gibson. Com has published a list of the 50 greatest rock albums. I will evaluate and comment later...have some Jools Holland reruns to watch. However, in the event that someone besides the robots are reading this and decide to flip through the list, I invite comments. Could be interesting. I know that when I looked at early posts of parts of the list, I thought they were insane. Not insanely good, just insane.
Well, after Teddy Boy Haggard , we already knew about the crack smoking. But, Tim LeHaye of the Right, I Mean, Left Behind series is now crediting a mere human with the ability to bring on the Apocalypse. This is, of course, heresy and blasphemy. God will decide when the end times are, and if Barrack Hussein Obama is preparing for the way of the Lord, then good Evangelical Christians should be voting for him. Seriously, if you want the rapture and you think this way you should be voting Democratic while looking for your a totally pure red hefifer to send to your Ultra-Orthodox Jewish friends clustered in condos on the west bank...LaHaye went on Huckleberry's TV show to spew...
Evangelical Christian minister Tim LaHaye says that the policy
initiatives put forth by the Obama administration are bringing the
country "closer to the apocalypse." LaHaye issued the dire warning in an appearance this week on Mike Huckabee's talk show on Fox News."Our present president doesn't seem to get it," LaHaye explained. "He
doesn't understand that some of the things he's introducing that many
of us call 'raw socialism' -- it's a different name, but it's
essentially government control and government domination of everything."
Well,did you know that Haggard's father was a Veterinarian and founded a charismatic movement? And now he's claiming that he was too contrite for the whole gay hooker/massage/crank thing...For people who claim to be Christian and to spout the bible and trust it verbatim, these guys really are confused.
So, since we missed the Eurovision thing, here's a bit of gratuitous Apocalyptic stuff...Happy End Times, and I hope the gal in the crab suit gets LaHaye...
I'm soooo glad we're confronting Islamo-terrorists 12000 miles away so that we can ignore the Narco-terrorists and soon-to-be-failed state across theRio Bravo ..."We didn't have any incidents on the American side. It's hard for people to understand who don't live here," he added. "They're not Vikings, they're not going to invade us, it doesn't work that way." Nope, just the potential for accidents. A 9mm round will probably be ineffective at a range over the border. However, since these guys are comfortable with spray and shoot weapons like AKs and M16s and the most useless weapon of all, the MAC10, it's probably a good idea to sandbag any windows facing Mexico and stay off the streets in Laredo
...I remember when the worst thing that could happen to an American in Nuevo Laredo was to get drunk, pick pocketed, get a case of the clap from a transvestite hooker named Michelina, have your car stolen and get explosive, projectile, all orifices diarrhea from some Pluma Blanca Cerveza and dogmeat Tacos. If Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers were to do this again, it would probably sound more like Combat Rock...
Why do I envision Tiffany walking through the marketplace, buying rings that they guarantee will not your fingers green, chickens and then finding Biff and riding off in his custom 57 Chevy lowrider?
I got to spend a good part of the day in the just-down-the-hill Mall; dropped the wife off at Regis for a 10000 mile service, the car off at Sears for a 5000 mile service and spent hours not drinking in the Tally Ho Tavern trying to beat the devil but sitting in Barnes and Noble. Constant stream of phonecalls that I didn't get because Motorola appears to have made that cell phone shielded from the signal...the calls would have pissed me off or amused me or something -- we don't have the oil you asked for for the sled but we have this and we're going to do it; we don't have that either but we have this other stuff; oops, we were wrong, we do too have what you wanted and we're going to use that. Go figure.
On the way out, we stopped and traded in cell phones and carriers. People were actually very helpful -- I always found Catherine Zeta-Jones the image of helpfulness, my self -- and we now have semi-smart phones that I am probably too bad tempered and ADDS these days to really figure out. However, the spouse is happy because she now has GPS and I'm happy because I hate AT&T on principle. I realized as we were driving home, that I had not checked email once all day, and figured that I was probably not missing anything important, but would probably have a mail box full of alarums and hazards from Defeatist Central and Malcontent Control. Nope -- which is good, it means they had better things to do today than send each other emails. It's actually almost pleasant at the moment in the Crossroads of Opportunity -- still low 90s; other years, 110F has been consistently buried by this time and the temperature is still climbing, headed for 100K...I spent a few minutes looking at stuff, and saw this, which gave me a smile and a momentary good feeling about the Faith of My Fathers, Mothers and Everybody Else going back to the 5th Century...
Indeed, the announcement that the Vatican rag of record has declared The Blues Brothers a Catholic classic is somewhat redemptive, I guess...Dan Ackroyd announced that he'd been an altar boy at age Six which I do not believe, but that he was somewhat lapsed, which the AXE had no trouble believing, but he was writing a check for the local parish. Most of us old and lapsed Catholics from pre-Vatican II days really have a lot of residual fondness for the old girl, even though the ideology is absurd: Ratzinger a totalitarian more interested as Protector of the Faith in theological trivia than abuse of power through the abuse of children; and Jesus wasn't a Catholic or even a Capricorn, but a Jew...giving the whole Christkiller thing kind of an odd-twist...in fact, Jesus was found guilty by a somewhat corrupt Roman military governor and executed by Romans. So, the Italians killed Jesus. Or not...
Anyway, as I've pointed out in the past, no Catholicism, no Irish monasteries preserving culture after everything went pear shaped for the empire. No Occam's razor, no Aquinas, no Gothic cathedrals, no Charles Martel and boys at Tours. No Catholicism, and we'd all be Muslims. Or, possibly Druids. Or Vikings.
Most likely Muslims, although Christianity does pretty well in really cold climates; not so much Islam, although parts of Western China, Pakistan and Afghanistan get cold as a Viking Hell. No Catholicism, no Protestant Reformation, work ethic. No Catholicism, no Elizabeth; no Bono and Edge. No Catholicism, no revolt.
Doesn't mean it's right. James Joyce, when asked if he were becoming a Protestant after he renounced Catholicism, said no, why would he trade a logical absurdity for an illogical absurdity; he thought so much of his witticism, he put it in Portrait and in Ulysses and probably in Finnegan's Wake but in some nonsense non-rhyming Irish version of Cockney rhyming slang and Sanskrit. Probably put it in a personal ad in Zurich looking for a typist.
No Catholicism, no Protestantism. It serves a purpose, for those who need it. For those of us who don't, it's a fond memory that appears to mask a falling fortress, crumbling under neglect, ignorance and the assaults from within of the privileged and the trivial. Now, in a piece in the Atlantic, Ross Douthat makes a critical point discussing the idea that the Catholic Church is on it's last legs.
"The Church has been horrifyingly corrupt
in
previous eras and still survived. It’s been led by ecclesiastics who
make
Bernard Law’s hands look clean, and still survived. It’s faced fiercer
enemies
than Richard Dawkins (think Nero, or Attila, or Voltaire) and still
survived.
Time after time, G.
K. Chesterton wrote, “the Faith has to all appearance gone
to the dogs.” Each time, “it was the dog that died.” But if the Church
isn’t finished. period, it can still be finished for certain people, in
certain
contexts, in certain times. And so it is in this case: for millions in
Europe
and America, Catholicism is probably permanently associated with sexual
scandal, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ. And as in many previous
dark
chapters in the Church’s history, the leaders entrusted with that gospel
have
nobody to blame but themselves.
I don't know. I think that there will always be those who need a god and who need a personal god. Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Animism -- they exist because we had a need that we still have. The AXE's blend of Stoicism, Tiffanyism, Existentialism and Scholasticism is definitely based in large part on those 16 years of Catholic confinement...and Dan, at six your were probably a choir boy rather than altar boy. However, same silly costume and same nuns pointing the way toward the truth, the light and boy's room.
There are days I miss Sister Teresa Marie teaching first and second and then second and third grade simultaneously. Feeling of safety is long gone, the feeling that someone has a plan is definitely long gone; Sister Gregoria hasn't shown me how to throw a curveball later, and Fr. Major hasn't told me to grow out my crewcut and use a comb either. That church is gone, as is the sense of trust and the belief that God sees all. If God sees all, Ratzinger and the Pederastic Priests and Brothers are in for a hell of a hell.
I ultimately go back to my anti-theistic epiphany -- there is no god, god has a plan beyond our understanding, or god is an evil motherfucker with a warped sense of humor and no good intentions toward us. I know what I think...
"I didn't make it to your funeral/I didn't want ritual or resign.." So,because we can...and yeah, I miss Tacoma. And, Neko is an incredible talent and the media is worrying about Perez Hilton and Miley Cyrus' underwear...
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