Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Le message annuel du Nouvel An de notre président

Comme vous le savez sans doute, je tiens nationalités mulitiple. Je suis Américain, je suis français, mais surtout, je suis 100% Grolandais! Comme mon devoir patriotique, je vous présente le message annuel de mon président.

TIME

Funky Walk

Listen, I'm gonna tell y'all sumthin that y'all  doin' but you just don know it, Baby!
Dyke and The Blazers 1966
Probably the first reference in pop music of the term FUNKY!

American Exorcism 12/31/13 The Beast In Me.....




Transcript between Jake Evans and 911 dispatch operator On October 11, 2012 from his home in the upscale gated community of Aledo, Texas:
911 Dispatch: Parker County 911, where is your emergency?
Jake Evans: Uh, my house.
911: What’s the emergency?
Evans: Uh, I just killed my mom and my sister.
911: What? How did you do that?
Evans: Uh, I shot them with a .22 revolver.
911: Are you sure they’re dead?
Evans: They’re dead.
911: Okay, I want you to stay on the phone with me. Are you alright?
Evans: Yeah, I’m alright. (The gun) is on the kitchen counter.
911: Jake, are you on any medication?
Evans: Uh, no. I’ve been going to the allergist, I’m on allergy medication. Other than Zyrtec and Advil and Pseudoephedrine, I don’t take anything else.
911: Is there any reason that you were so angry at your mother and your sister?
Evans: I don’t know. … It’s weird. I wasn’t even really angry with them. It just kind of happened. I’ve been kind of, uh, planning on, uh, killing for a while now.
911: The two of ‘em, or just anybody?
Evans: Pretty much anybody.


911: Why?

Evans: I don’t know. I don’t really like, uh, people’s, uh, attitude. … I think it’s kind of, very, like, you know, emotional. They’re verbally rude to each other and stuff like that. I don’t know. It’s just my family is just kind of really I guess this is really selfish to say, but I felt they were just suffocating me in a way. I don’t know, I’m pretty, I guess, evil…Whatever, I’m sorry.
911: Were your mom and sister in their beds?
Evans: I don’t know. This is going to really mess me up in the future. I told my sister that my mom needed her. She was in her room, and she came out of her room, and I shot her. And she rolled down the stairs and I shot her again. And then I went down and I shot my mom maybe three or four times, but I’ll never forget this. My sister, she came downstairs and she was screaming and I was telling her that I’m sorry but just to hold still – that, you know, I was just going to make it go away. But she kept on freaking out, but she finally fell down and I shot her in the head about, probably, three or four times.
911: Are you in the kitchen?
Evans: Yes.
911: Where’s your dad?
Evans: He’s out of town. Washington, D.C. And, uh, I guess for future reference, I don’t really want to see any of my family members, like visiting or whatever. I just don’t want any type of visitors.
911: You don’t want to hurt yourself, do you?
Evans: Just to let you know, I hate the feeling of killing someone. (Sighs) I’m going to be messed up.
911: You just take a deep breath. We have deputies coming, and they’re going to help you. Just to let you know, we’re going to help you, we’re not going to hurt you.
Evans: I understand if ya’ll want to.
911: No, we’re there to help you, Jake. Everybody thinks we want to do bad things, but right or wrong, we want to help people, and we’re gonna help you. Do you understand that, Jake?
Evans: Yes.


911: Is it a gated community? Is there a gate?

Evans: Uh, yes. You want the password? (He gives her the password)
911: It’s going to be alright, it really is. They’ll be there shortly, won’t be long now. Jake, would you mind turning any of the porch lights on?
Evans: I have turned the front lights on. (pauses) I was thinking of my sister. She was 15.
911: How long ago did (the shootings) happen?
Evans: About, uh, 30 minutes ago. (breathes heavily)
911: You’ll be alright, Jake.
Evans: I’m really worried about, like, nightmares and stuff like that. Are there any times of medications, and stuff?
911: Well, I think there is. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor but … I’m sure your family will get you the support you need.
Evans: I don’t mean to sound like a wimp or anything, but this is, wow, I’ve never, like, done anything violent in my whole life.
911: You don’t sound like a violent person. But um, help will be provided for you. Medical and psychological. That will be provided, so you don’t have to worry about that right now. Take deep breaths for me now, you’re doing fine. In through your nose, and out through your mouth so you don’t hyperventilate, okay?
Evans: (breathing)
911: Good, you sound a lot calmer right now.
Evans: I didn’t want them to feel pain, that’s why I used a gun, but it’s like everything went wrong.
911: Jake, my officers are almost there, would you be willing to walk out on your own?
Evans: Um, yes, I forgot to say before I called, I put the gun on the counter, it’s still loaded.
911: Okay, that’s fine. I’ll stay on the phone until it’s time for you to walk out. Are you on your home phone? Is it cordless?
Evans: Yes.
911: Jake, what I want you do to is walk outside, but when you’re walking outside, stay visible, don’t walk behind any furniture. When you open the front door, put your hands up in the air, just walk very slowly, and walk outside, and keep your hands visible, alright, sweetie? I’ll talk to you later.
Evans: Thank you (puts phone down)

911: You’re welcome.

Sunday, December 29, 2013


Over 1,250,000 Burgers!

I'd like to invite you all down to my little "bunker" for a pre holiday soiree to celebrate my stat counter as it rolls over the 1,250,000 page view mark! We're serving Cheeze Wiz on Ritz Crackers...I've laid in quite a supply for the duration and cocktails. If you can't make it down, well then here, 
click on this link at your own risk. Ooops, I made a mistake...1t was 1,254, 5000....I still have another 5000 to go before I reach 1,250,000....What am I going to do with all this damn Cheez-Wiz in the aerosol spray cans?

Cargo Culte


Serge Gainsbourg 1971
(I try to translate)
I know of the the magicians who call to jets
In the jungle of New Guinea 
They scan the zenith coveting the guineas
That pillaging the freight would bring them

On the sea of coral in the wake of this
Machine those creatures not deprived
Of reason those Papuans wait for vapour
The wreck of the Viscount and that of the Comet

And as their totem hasn't ever been able to bring down
To their feet either a Boeing or even a DC-4
They dream of hijacks and of bird accidents

Those naive shipwreckers armed with blowguns
Who sacrifice to the cargo cult
By blowing toward the azur and the airplanes.

Where are you Melody and your wrecked body
Is it haunting the archipeligo where the sirens live
Or rather, attatched to the plane whose alarm
Siren has become silent, did you stay

Adrift on the currents have you already touched
Those bright corals of the Guinean coasts
Where those indiginous magicians act in vain
Who still hope for smashed planes

Having nothing more to lose or a God in whom to believe,
So that they give me back my insignificant loves 
I, like them, I prayed to the night cargo planes

And I hold onto that hope of an air
Disaster that would bring Melody back to me
A minor turned away from the gravity of the stars. 



Saturday, December 28, 2013

A Time Honored American Tradition Since 1772!

Edward Snowden
The Traitors of Today are the Heroes of Tomorrow! Edward Snowden is the latest in the line of a time honored tradition. The tradition of exposing state secrets at one's own peril to protect the common good.  During the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg was called a traitor, charged and tried for leaking The Pentagon Papers. He was acquitted after a mistrial and the leak of the Pentagon Papers was one of the most important bricks in the wall of evidence that swayed American public opinion against the war. The
Daniel Ellsberg
incompetence of G. Gordon Liddy in retaliating against Ellsberg led to the formation of his "Plumbers Squad" which culminated in the Watergate Scandal and the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. We are all familiar with the charges against Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and most recently Edward Snowden. All villified in the press and and charged with crimes against the state in leaking embarrassing information which has only ultimately changed the public debate and led to reforms that are curbing abuses. This is all about the abuse of power and the access we the people have to power is knowledge. Leakers give us the knowledge for us to regain our power as the people! I'd like to recount another case of leaking that was called traitorous at the time, but ultimately the outcome proves my point about the balance of secrecy and power.
The case I’m referring to has nothing to do with WikiLeaks, Assange, Snowden or Manning. Called the Hutchinson Letters Affair, it began in December, 1772 when Benjamin Franklin, who was in England at the time, anonymously received a packet of thirteen letters. They were reports by Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, to Thomas Whately, a leading member of the British government. In the letters, Hutchinson made
Free Chelsea Manning
some damning comments about colonial rights. Even more provocative, Hutchinson recommended that popular government be taken away from the colonists “by degrees”, and that there should be “abridgement of what are called English liberties”. Specifically, he argued that all colonial government posts should be made independent of the provincial assemblies. Finally, he urged his superiors to send more troops to Boston to keep American rebels under control.
Understanding the inflammatory nature of these letters, Franklin circulated the letters to his American friends and colleagues but on the condition that they not be published. Clearly in the public interest, at least from the point-of-view of American revolutionaries, the letters were published, in defiance of Franklin’s request,  in the Boston Gazette in June of 1773.
As you can imagine, the patriotic citizens of Boston were furious, and in May 1774 Hutchinson fled the colony back to England before he could be tarred and feathered. As the American colonies were on the edge of rebelling against the authority of the Crown, this could easily have triggered a revolution, and while it didn’t, it certainly provided the insurgents with ammunition in their fight against England.
Having been severely embarrassed and having had its interests in the American colonies compromised, the British government set out to discover who leaked the letters. In December of 1773, three men were charged, two of whom fought a duel over the matter and were preparing to do so again. As it turned out, they had nothing to do with the Hutchinson letters, and in a letter to the London Chronicle, Franklin confessed: “Finding that two gentlemen have been unfortunately engaged in a duel, about a transaction and its circumstance of which both are totally ignorant and innocent, I think it incumbent on me to declare (for the prevention of farther mischief, as far as such a declaration may contribute to prevent it) that I alone am the person who obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question.”  However, he refused to say who gave him the letters
Obviously more benign than the US government of the twenty-first century, Benjamin Franklin was not locked up and held in solitary confinement, as was the case with Manning Bradley, or threatened by charges of espionage, like Assange.
On January 29, 1774, Franklin was hauled up before the Privy Council to explain why he had leaked letters in the ‘Hutchinson Affair’. He was accused of thievery and dishonor, called the “prime mover” of Boston’s insurgents and charged with being a “true incendiary”. Throughout the hearing, Franklin maintained a dignified silence. For his disloyalty to the Crown, he Privy Council held off sending Franklin the gallows or even sentencing him to an afternoon in the stocks. Instead, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn was satisfied with the tongue-lashing he meted out to Franklin and the next day the Board of Trade dismissed Franklin from his post as Deputy Postmaster General of the North America colonies.
Benjamin Franklin
Traitor of his time, Hero of today!
Had the Espionage Act been in place in Great Britain in 1774, Franklin would not have been around to lead the War of Independence, nor would he have been around to raise vital funds to support the rebellion and we would not have seen his signature on the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution.

Friday, December 27, 2013

O Little Town Of Zimmerman

There Is Danger In The Manger
The Claremont, California United Methodist Church has had controversial, politically provocative Nativity scenes in the past that have included Mexican immigrants, same sex couples and the homeless.
These have all been created since 2009 by Hollywood production designer, John Zachary. Zachary is a member of the church. In the past few years, his controversial nativity scenes have been vandalized because of their controversial content, but his work is generally well received and he tries to strike a chord of common compassion that resonates in the minds of the viewers. This year's display was unveiled on December 8th and will be up until January 5th and it features a tragically wounded dying Trayvon Martin
This year’s scene looks traditional at first glance. Joseph and Mary are in silhouette inside a wooden shelter against a backdrop that resembles stained glass.
Zachary said: “If you drive by, you think, oh, that’s nice. Then you think, what’s that black kid doing there? So you take a look. I thought this would be more controversial, but I come to find out people don’t really like people gettin’ shot,” Zachary said with a chuckle. “They may not agree what to do about it, but they agree it’s a bad thing.”

Here's a video of Zachary explaining it in his own words.

The Poison Nib

In my formative years, in the early 70's I discovered the work of the English artist, Ralph Steadman in the pages of Scanlan's Monthly...A brilliant, but short lived literary/art/political magazine with very high production values. Steadman did some brilliant charicatures of NIxon and then through the magazine, he was teamed up with Hunter S. Thompson. There first, uhh, team, assignment was to cover the

The Scanlan's issue with the first collaboation
between Steadman and Thompson
Kentucky Derby. The piece, The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, alone is harrowing enough and Steadmans illustrations are savagely brilliant, but to hear Steadman recount his experience of working with Thompson is a descent into an inferno. Steadman was relatively innocent when it came to recreational drug use. Thompson was a possessed demon and the story ends up with the pair in a small boat out at Newport News stoned on mescaline and other assorted substances attempting to paint obscene graffiti on the side of a million dollar yacht. I think they got away with one good "Fuck The Pope" before they were discovered. The story ended with a seriously deranged wet semi nude Steadman in the lobby of their hotel being restrained by the staff screaming for bloody vengeance after he discovers that Steadman has fled without paying the bill and he is without funds or means to get back to New York. It made for epic art.
Of course, if you know popular culture from this period, Steadman was reunited with Hunter S. Thompson inan episode that has become almost mythologic. He travels to Las Vegas and is the partner of Hunter S. Thompson in his journey into the very center of the demonic psyche of America and ended up creating the hallucinogenic illustrations to the piece commissioned by Rolling Stone
a page layout from Fear and Loathing, enlarge if you dare
Magazine, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Did you ever see the 1998 version of the film directed by Terry Gilliam, the only human capable of attempting to transform the story into another media? Johnny Depp played Thompson and Benicio Del Toro played the character that Steadman had mutated into, the sidekick that Thompson refers to as his "lawyer". Steadman claimed that it took him years to recover from his association with Thompson, but he just got better as time went on. He has produced a massive body of work, I just picked up a nice hard cover copy of his Illustrated version of George Orwells' Animal Farm from 1995. I still think he is one of the best graphic artists working in illustration today. His depictions of Richard M. Nixon are still some of the most savage and psychologically accurate depictions of real
power  not only publically crumbling but  having a psychotic public crisis ever depicted. That is why I was so gratified to see Toronto's free alternative weekly newspaper Now Magazine. They commissioned Ralph  to draw Mayor Rob Ford for this week's cover. It's a great choice for a political year that was marked by so much fear and loathing (and an abundance of drugs). The issue also features Rob Ford's 50 stupidest quotes of 2013 (let us take a moment to admire the restraint of the Now staff in limiting themselves to a mere 50 here).  Rob Ford should feel honored to have entered into the rogues gallery of  Ralph Steadman, Steadman again proves that no one could have ever done it better!

Thursday, December 26, 2013




I can not wait until they put out more music! If you can't stand the noise, then that's all the more reason I love this music. Real punk was always anti elitist, anti establishment and total freedom. I think I have very eclectic tastes in music, but some times when I try to explain what what really excites me, I start blubbering about industrial accidents, explosions, the sound of reality self destructing, with a good beat, of course. The energy transcends the mere technical knowledge of a recording engineer...it it's really good music, it will melt down your expensive mixing board! The most expensive sound system can only give a pale, limp and insipid imitation of this reality. Here is the translation of the lyrics of Pussy Riots, 2012 single, released after their arrest and imprisonment:
Putin ignites the fires of revolution"

This State may be stronger than the time in jail. 
The more arrests it makes, the happier it is. 
Every arrest is carried out with love for the sexist 
The one who botoxed his cheeks and pumped his chest and abs. 
But you can't nail us in a coffin. 
We throw off the yoke of former KGB! 

Putin is lighting up the fires of revolution 
He's bored and scared of sharing his silence with the people 
With every execution: the stench of rotten ash 
With every long prison sentence: a wet dream 

The country is taking the streets with no fear 
The country is going to bid farewell to the regime 
The country is going like a feminist wedge 
And Putin is going to say goodbye like a sheep 

Arrest the whole city for May 6th 
Seven years in prison are not enough, give us 18! 
Forbid us to scream, walk and curse! 
And go and marry Father Lukashenko 


PRIVACY MATTERS!


No matter what you may think about Edward Snowden, because there seems to a concerted effort to discredit him on the left, as well as what we expected from the right, he is absolutely correct. He is critiqued for his political evolution and reported statements. He has been called a racist because he had criticized Obama in the past. Anecdotal information culled from statements by his co workers has been used to build a conjectural bank of accusations about his motives and imagined real ideology. In some ways the radical left that criticizes him for this construct of supposed evidence by using information selectively mined from the internet supports a lot of what he is saying in this message.We are living in a world that goes beyond the imagination of George Orwell. I know that my blogging activities are being monitored. I have accessed direct information that has let me know that this is a fact.  That has a lot of bearing on why I don't write more about French politics. I will never own a cell phone. The speculation as to why he did what he did seems pretty unbalanced as to what his critics have conjectured as to what he could have expected to gain and the reality of what he did and the personal consequences of his actions. None the less, he has set in motion our awareness and the beginning of a real worldwide movement to re liberate the internet and give us back our privacy. Nothing will ever be the same, it never is, but at least we have the knowledge and knowledge is power.
I don't think he is being egotistical when he states that his mission was accomplished and has been been vindicated. And why we are on the subject, if Vlad could free members of Pussy Riot, for what ever reasons in his political game, why can't Barak Obama Free Chelsea Manning NOW!

The Traitors of Today are The Heroes of Tomorrow.

Cha Cha Heels For Christmas

I finished the last of the eggnog and now I have to toddle off to bed. I hope got what you wanted from Santa. Dawn Davenport was bitterly disappointed.

Monday, December 23, 2013

I'm Dreaming Of A White Santa

Dan Ackroyd from the 1983 classic, Trading Places.

And The Sun Keeps Shining....


This is what the energy industry and their paid lobbyists don't want you to know. The larger red square represents the total area of solar panels it would take to power the world with the present state of the art passive solar energy technology.  If we actually made free safe energy a priority, we would be much more efficient than this, but then the Koch boys would have to find a day job.

Eppur Si Muove


"And yet it moves" is a phrase said to have been uttered before the Inquisition by the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in 1633 after being forced to recant his "belief" that the earth moves around the sun. In this context, the implication of the phrase is: despite this recantation, the Church's proclamations to the contrary, or any other conviction or doctrine of men, the Earth does, in fact, move around the sun, and not vice versa. As such, the phrase is used today as a sort of pithy retort implying that "it doesn't matter what you believe; these are the facts".
There is no contemporary evidence that Galileo uttered this expression at his trial; it would certainly have been highly imprudent for him to have done so. The earliest biography of Galileo, written by his disciple Vincenzio Viviani in 1655–1656 does not mention this phrase.
In 1911, the line was found on a Spanish painting owned by a Belgian family. This painting was produced within a year or two after Galileo died as it is dated 1643 or 1645 (the last number is partially obscured). The painting is obviously not historically correct, because it depicts Galileo in a dungeon, but nonetheless shows that some variant of the "Eppur si muove" legend was in circulation immediately after his death when many who had known him were still alive to attest to it, and that it had been circulating for over a century before it was published.
“The moment he was set at liberty, he looked up to the sky and down to the ground, and, stamping with his foot, in a contemplative mood, said, Eppur si muove, that is, still it moves, meaning the earth."

Eppur si muove. Strong words, defiant words. True words.
Galileo stood up to the Inquisition and knew that the reality he had proved would endure the temporal punishment he was forced to endure. The church was threatened by reality attacking it's doctrine. Doctirne was it's claim to authority and power. They were raging a war of suppression of the ever mounting tide of reality as their absolute medieval authority was crumbling. This was the time of the Reformation and to have this upstart Italian astronomer question the basic premise of their mythology was just a little bit too much!
Today, we deal with the reality of facing mass extinction of our specie due to the reality of the atmospheric phenomena of climate change. It's not the church that is the ultimate suppressing body anymore. They are scrambling to cope. The multinational energy corporations, and we all know who the perps are are doing everything they can to suppress alternate energy ideas and research and actively suppress and persecute scientists who research and report the facts. What they are doing is bigger and more powerful than any effort the reform and reality blocking efforts of the church could muster or imagine.
The organizations that actively block efforts to address climate change are funded by a large network of conservative donors to the tune of nearly $1 billion a year, according to the first in-depth study into the dark money that fuels the denial effort.
The study, published Friday in the journal Climatic Change, analyzed the income of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups, and industry associations, funded by 140 different foundations, that work to oppose action on climate change. The study’s author, Robert Brulle, refers to these organizations as the climate change counter-movement, and concludes that their outsized influence “has not only played a major role in confounding public understanding of climate science, but also successfully delayed meaningful government policy actions to address the issue.”
“It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this,” Brulle told the Guardian. “This is a large-scale political effort.”
For me, this is the greatest criminal conspiracy of the history of our planet. It's about immediate profits versus the extinction of life on earth as we know it. And after it happens, who will be left to utter the phrase, "Eppure si muove"? Here is a link to the study...unfortunately, it is not free at this time.
read more about the scale and who is doing this after the break.
fucking pollock!

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Where There's A Will, There's A Way

Or, the modern day composer refuses to die!
The Solstice, the cosmic alignment, the last night of the ecstadistic ritual celebration of Zappadan. Today is Frank Zappa's birthday, who cares what year he was born...Frank only becomes more
Conlon Nancarrow in his studio in Mexico
timeless as we mere mortals pay attention to the paltry reality of...time! It is the pataphysical reality, the astronomical alignment of the signs in the universe we inhabit that matter. We are bound to observe signs and portents and pay attention to the various astral configurations in this glorious constellation. One of the astral figures that Frank paid attention to was the great American composer, Conlon Nancarrow...who you probably have never heard of. But as Frank said, "The Modern Day Composer Refuses To Die!" Nancarrow was born in 1912 in Texarkana, Arkansas. He was a communist jazz musician who played trumpet and volunteered to go to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fight in the Spanish Civil War. After being interned by the French after being liberated as a prisoner of War in 1939, he became en mired in the political legal complications that many of the idealistic young fighters had in re entering the USA because of their political beliefs. He moved to Mexico in 1940 and became a Mexican citizen in 1955. Her was never allowed to re enter the USA as a resident because he refused to hypocritically recant his political ideology and beliefs. He came to America a few times to accept awards and appear at festivals celebrating his music, but he finally died in Mexico City in 1994.

I had heard some of his work years ago. He was a revolutionary composer who embraced and pushed the technology of his world. His medium? Player Pianos! Nancarrows composed many pieces using the mechanically punched rolls of paper to create music that was physically impossible. or so he thought, for utter humans to replicate. He was influenced by the writings and work of Henry Cowell and began to think about the possibilities of electronic music. He continued to compose music for a few years, but found, especially in the more traditional musical world of Mexico City, that it was impossible to have it performed. By a stroke of luck. in 1947, he inherited enough money to allow him to travel to New York City and buy a custom-built manual punching machine to enable him to punch the piano rolls. The machine was an adaptation of one used in the commercial production of rolls, and using it was very hard work and very slow. He also adapted the player pianos, increasing their dynamic range by tinkering with their mechanism and covering the hammers with leather (in one player piano) and metal (in the other) so as to produce a more percussive sound. On this trip to New York, he met Cowell and heard a performance of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (also influenced by Cowell's aesthetics), which would later lead to Nancarrow modestly experimenting with prepared piano in his Study No. 30. 

Nancarrow's work reflected a new awareness of technological assistance in composition and the performance of music. His work began to fuse the 20th century avant garde advances in tonalities, the sense of rhythmic  freedom and improvisation of jazz with the imagined goal of the precision that technological freedom he could obtain with total control of his medium. In his rather isolated world, he was unable to find musicians who could play what he composed, so he found a real freedom in a technological approach that the mechanically punched musical rolls gave him. But of course in reality, when there is a will there is a way. Many of Nancarrow's scores have been transposed and performed by real humans. For example, this arrangement of his study #7, performed by the Intergalactic Contemporary Ensemble in 2002:

Listening to this composition makes it easy to see why Frank Zappa often referred to Nancarrow as a major influence. The mechanical compositional precision of Nancarrow is a major factor in Zappa's orchestral composition. In 1986, Frank Zappa released a recording called Jazz From Hell. Interestingly enough, it was his one recording that got him a Grammy. It was almost entirely a solo project, except for a few live guitar tracks integrated into a few pieces. Everything else was composed and performed, track by track by Zappa on revolutionary Synclavier sampling keyboard. He had even stated that he was trying to create music that could not be performed by humans. But, as we have seen before, where there is a will there is a way. When in 1992, he was commissioned to put together a series of symphonic concerts called The Yellow Shark with the German  Ensemble Modern, the group of musicians asked for an arrangement of G-Spot Tornado. Zappa provided the score and conducted the piece and The Ensemble proved that it not only could be performed by humans, but choreographed as well: 

Pretty cool, huh? It was Zappa's last live appearance, he was tragically ill with cancer at the time and was dead with in a few months. But the real reason for this piece, the connection was a link from the great Mexican bass player and composer, Carlos Medina Mendoza who met Nancarrow a few times shortly before his death and sent me the link for this mash up by Nancarrow of Zappa's composition, Willie The Pimp, with Captain Beefheart's vocals, re imagined by Nancarrow. At the beginning of the piece you canhear him laughingly say, "This is really folkloric!"

Is that enough music appreciation for you boys and girls? You want more? Hey whats the name of this blog?
I HOPE YOU HAD UNE TRES JOYEUX ZAPPADAN 2013!

My Deeply Felt Apology

I and many other bleeding heart librul commentators and bloggers have been venting their outrage on the persecuted and maligned Republican Party Conservatives who are trying to restore a sense of decorum, so to speak, to our electoral process.  We have spent an inordinate amount of time in falsely accusing them of lying in their claims of corruption and abuses while they attempt to purge the voting lists of ineligible voters. I was wrong, the system is being corrupted by dishonest voters and I stand humbly corrected. The last straw in demolishing my arguments and claims was the news that Liz Cheney's still works in Virginia and he’s not about to move his real special patootie to godfersaken Wyoming and is registered to vote in two states! This is a clear case of voter fraud!
Politico reported Wednesday that Cheney’s husband was registered to vote in both Virginia and Wyoming despite signing a document in the latter state saying he was not registered elsewhere
This is like being a little bit pregnant. Either you are or you’re not. The Conservative reformers are right, I was wrong and Liz Cheney’s Senate campaign in Wyoming continues to be dogged with news about her family.
Dick Cthulu And His Demonic Spawn
Who would have thought that her very special family ties could cause her so many problems? Do you think the conservatives who venerate her as their demonic warrior princess care? Nahhhhhh..............

Thursday, December 19, 2013


Thank You, Uncle Al....

I don't have the archival links, but I want to pay homage to this Grand Schvantzer, Al Goldstein who died at age 77. Al was a pornographer, in the most technical sense of the world, but he was a hero of freedom of the press and fighting the good fight even if there was a lot of messy pubic hair and body fluids involved. He gave me and a lot of my friends back in the early 80's much needed support and artistic creds as cartoonists and alternative artists. If you had asked me at the time, "How old is Al Goldstein?" I would have probably guessed 77 years old...he was always an old fuck and ageless.
After working as a press photographer and tabloid journalist, Goldstein began publishing the pornographic Screw weekly magazine in 1968, six years before Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine, and outlined its mission statement in first issue.
“We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ,” read the manifesto. “We will apologize for nothing. We will uncover the entire world of sex. We will be the Consumer Reports of sex.”
Goldstein fought similar legal battles to his notorious competitor, having been arrested 21 times on indecency- or obscenity-related charges and sued by Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1977 for publishing the claim that the one-time presidential candidate had learned to perform sexual acts by reading Screw. Wallace and Goldstein settled for $12,500 and Screw agreed to print an apology. 

Goldstein produced the 1973 pornographic film, It Happened In Hollywood, featuring Wes Craven as assistant director and editor.
He also debuted the long-running “Midnight Blue” late-night interview show in 1974 on New York public access cable television, which he used to curse his many enemies, his family and anyone else who offended him.
I’m infantile, compulsive, always acting out my fantasies,” he told Playboy in 1974. “There’s nothing I’ll inhibit myself from doing.”
Goldstein hired underground cartoonists to illustrate Screw, publishing such artists as Robert Crumb, my old friend, Milton Knight, Danny Hellman and Art Spiegelman as well as myself back in 1982. That simple decision by Al gave me a few good years as a credible artist back in the days. I was the Art Editor, cartoonist and an illustrator of a Lower East Side Art Journal, Red Tape. I was also the staff incoherent rock star who bit the tip of my tongue off live on stage at Danceteria ( great theater, lots of blood, but it only fueled my guitar solo!)...but that is another story.....Goldstein supported many alternative cartoon illustrators and gave them the credentials they needed to make their art more mainstream and lucrative...this is not about capitalism, it is about survival......
His magazine eventually began to lose advertisers to free weekly publications, and Goldstein failed to invest heavily enough in video or Internet pornography.
He was convicted in 2002 of harassing a former secretary in print, and he published doctored photos of his son having sex with men and his own mother, Goldstein’s third ex-wife, after the son asked him not to attend his graduation from Harvard Law School. Screw filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and Goldstein lived in homeless shelters and Veterans Administration hospitals until his friend, the magician Penn Jillette, paid for an apartment for him. His cause of death was believed to be renal failure. 
Seriously, I must say... Why do I still feel like Ed Grimley when it gets to be this time of the year?
I must be going mental, you know...Thank you, Bing!

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Lost In Midst of Zappadan

I think today is the fateful 13th day of Zappadan...It is also the "Night of The Living Van Vliet" which casts a particularly powerful portent in the cosmological aspects of this crucial intersection of pataphysical events . I haven't been posting much Zappa stuff this year, but I never saw this piece before. Circus Krone from Munich German Television in September, 1978. Due to the extremely acute cosmological requirements of this auspicious day, I am required to honor the ritualistic observation by continuing in German: 
Diese Leistung ist berechtigt, Wir Verwirren Sie nicht herum! Ende der 70er Jahre der Mutter Line-up mit Ike Willis. Eine sehr ecletic Leistung, einschließlich einer klassischen Überstellung des deutschen Liedes, Sie sind mein Sofa # 2 ... das Lied, das Gott seinem Lieblingsmöbel sang.

Monday, December 16, 2013


Listening To The Inner Voice


Every once in while, we are graced with a naive insight. We have a glimpse of reality that we all have the ability to access, but for most of us, these are momentary flashes of truth. For some of us, these moments have occurred with the assistance of chemicals, for many, longer are more controlled access is obtained through meditation and discipline. Most of the great breakthroughs in science and physics have been the results of intuitive flashes of insight that were painstakingly made into theory and then proven. Both Einstein and Tesla described their visionary breakthroughs as a result of a process that started with a moment of "Voila!" In my experience, I have had momentary flashes that gave me insight to the possibilities of how life evolved from chemical to molecules, but it took reading the work of Richard Dawkins, specifically his great work, The Selfish Gene, to affirm my vague insight. Dawkins really explains how life could evolve as a chemical/electrical process. He gave flesh to a vision. Dawkins also alludes to the evolution of consciousness. The stages of our collective intellectual mental evolution as a specie. I feel that religion was a stage in the intellectual evolution of our specie. I also feel that this stage is over and we are at a sort of "evolutionary bottleneck" that we have to get through to survive. Again, vague insights and ideas, but it took this phenomenal book,Perhaps the most controversial book ever written in the field of psychology,  Julian Jaynes' mid-seventies classic, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." In it, Jaynes reaches the stunning conclusion that the seemingly all-pervasive and demanding gods of the ancients, were not just whimsical personifications of inanimate objects like the sun or moon, nor anthropomorphizations of the various beasts, real and mythical, but rather the culturally-barren inner voices of bilaterally-symmetric brains not yet fully connected, nor conscious, in the way we are today.

People have been trying to disprove his theories with flawed research. If we have evolved physiologically, then why would our neurological processes also not evolve
I have taken some text from his book and condensed it to give you an idea of why I think this book is important.

In his view, all people of the day would have "heard voices", similar to the schizophrenic. They would have been experienced as a hallucinations of sorts, coming from outside themselves as the unignorable voices of gods, rather than as commands originating from the other side of the brain. After a long hiatus, the study the inner voice, and the larger mental baggage that comes along with having one, has returned to the fore. Vaughan Bell, a researcher from King's College in London, recently published an insightful call to arms inPlOS Biology for psychologists and neurobiologists to create a new understanding of these phenomena.
If you want to read more...this goes on after the break!

Economic Epidemiology

Yer Honor, I just had to do away with him. He was cheatin' at cards...Please your honor, my family was starving so I had to shoplift the giant economy pack of Beef Jerkey...Yes, your honor, I know I mis represented my undeclared income and failed to pay taxes on it, but after my unemployment ran out, I spent it all on my rent!
There has been a previously undiagnosed epidemic running rampant in America. There have been millions of victims for many, many years. The untreated victims have been persecuted and sent to debtors prisons and forced into years of economic slavery because until now, we were unaware of the tragedy of Povertyitus. The symptoms of Povertyitus went unrecognized and undiagnosed for years we blamed the sufferer and not the disease. Well, thanks to the discovery of another economic epidemic decimating the other end of the social structure of America, perhaps there is hope for the sufferers of Povertyitus....
It was brilliantly uncovered in the successful defense of the 16 year old Tarrant County, Texas spoiled drunken brat, Ethan Crouch, who after stealing liquor from a Walmart, crashed his car into a group of pedestrians, killing four and paralyzing another for life. He had a blood alcohol level of .24...three times over the legal limit. Crouch's lawyer had a psychologist testifying for the defense diagnosed Couch with "affluenza," a term popularized by British psychologist Oliver James to describe a pathological valuing of material wealth over all else. Couch's psychologist, G. Dick Miller, uses "affluenza" somewhat differently. For Miller, the term describes a condition in which a wealthy child is so over-indulged, he loses the capacity for responsible behavior.
According to the Star Telegram, Miller testified that Ethan was never disciplined, and enjoyed freedoms "no young person should have," including the freedom to drive since the age of 13:
“The teen never learned to say that you’re sorry if you hurt someone. If you hurt someone, you sent him money.”
In spite of being guilty of manslaughter and his previous 3 drunk driving arrests, The Texas court accepted the Affluenza Defense and put Crouch on probation and his parents have to pay a few hundred thou to have him rehabilitated. Can we get the same kind of justice, or something similar for the victims of Povertyitus? Maybe it would be symbolic compensation if the victims of Affluenza were made as part of their rehabilitative therapy to give some of the source of their affliction to the victims of Povertyitus, which would act as a preventative vaccine so to speak, there by curing two epidemics with one simple act! One epidemic could cancel the other! I'm brilliant, ehhh?????
Nahhhh........The victims of povertyitus could never afford the kind of expertise legal and psychiatric defense it would take to make this work in a Texas court of law. A public defender just doesn't have that kind of time. Texan Justice just doesn't have that kind of compassion or imagination. 
Meanwhile, Povertyitus spreads unchecked, claiming thousands of new victims daily and at the same time, alas, the Affluenza epidemic seems to be infecting more and more young wealthy brats by the hour. There was a very serious outbreak of Affluenza, just last week in Los Angeles. Last Wednesday, December 12, a $7 million LA-area mansion with no one at home set the stage for an epic party that will cost 16 teenagers some time in court after they trashed the place.
Some high-school students nearby announced a party in the property’s backyard on Twitter, Lt. Arthur Scott of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Industry Station told KTLA TV on Wednesday. The property is on the market, listed at about $7 million. The teens broke into the home and did $1 million in estimated damages in what Scott described as a “free-for-all,” as they Tweeted selfies with stolen property like a suit of medieval armor and a stuffed snow leopard.
Police arrested 16 people — 13 juveniles and three 18-year-olds — after following the trail through social media where the participants posted their hijinks.

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My only question here, and this is going to be a tough one, is that this is the affluenza of the owner, Nick Radolfi, more powerful than the affluenza of these kids?

Sunday, December 15, 2013

The Remedy

 The Affluenza Epidemic got you down? It's Povertyitus Season! 
There's a simple easy and effective low cost cure to all of those pesky class war fare problems:
TRY FREE MONEY NOW!

Saturday, December 14, 2013


This oughta get you in the mood...for something....

SCHISM!

Hell, ain't nothiin' I like better than watchin' a good old intra denominational religious faction war...The religious right, the conservative catholic bishops have been working up to this for a long, long time and now, egged on by FOX NEWS which is fed by the mental illness of Conservatism in America, we may finally see a real religious war with millions of catholics having to choose whether they want to follow Pope Francis' literal interpretation of the words of Jesus or go self righteously to hell in the gas guzzling limo of their dreams. Cause, that's where we are heading folks! I am a militant ex catholic atheist and proud of it. I have to admit that I was a little disturbed when Francis seemed to be trying to do the right thing on so many levels, but it's the organization, the family business, the religious mafia. You can't fight it and he is cannot fight the plague of Psychopathic Personality Syndrome, (thank you Kurt Vonnegut) that has enabled the greed and disconnected most of the 1% from the real world they don't think they live in or exists. On one hand, you have the Most Holy and Righteous United States Catholic Bishops Conference and their constant conservative meddling in American Political matters. The latest, of course was Bishop Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, who on November 20, 2013 pulled a blatantly political stunt by conducting an exorcism to protest the adoption of same sex marriage rights in that state. Conservative Catholics across America applauded Poprocki's activism, but when The Pope delivers a theological statement about the immorailty of Capitalism, every conservative talking head exploded simultaneously in condemning a religious figure for speaking of a reality they didn't want to hear. Personally, I would like to see a good old fashioned Schism! A personal bloody crusade led by say a new American Pope, Rush the First of the Good Old Reformed American Konservative Katholic Konference of real Katholics who Know how to Kill! Back in the day, Popes would lead armies to crush theological rebellions and had gang fighting factions that went out and kicked the asses of their factional rivals! They even had sex with their daughters and made their sons Cardinals!  Pretty Krazy Katholic Kool, huh? Rush might make a pretty cool pope if we could get him off of the prescription drugs.....
I guess Rush might cut a great figure with his obnoxious rabble rousing empty eloquence and the right costuming accessories...a color co ordinated miter and mumu ensemble perhaps....because America has already entered into the first stages of a real revolution. Though it has accelerated...we are already seeing the effects of the konservative war on the poor...It’s already happening with Vets and the disabled. It’s capital’s way of getting rid of “useless mouths”; cheaper than Hitler’s or Stalin’s methods.And they and the media just lies about it all the time for example:
read more after the break: