ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST
Yes, it keeps on happening. Someone I liked, someone I thought was a friend, a pal, a contributor, and a confidant has gone and turned on me faster'n you can say "Benedict Arnold," and if you're wondering just who this torn sphincter I'm talking about is it's none other than (onetime BLACK TO COMM fanboy, now beneath-contempt snivel) Ken Shimamoto, and you can read his grade-z sub-anal opinion of me right here (go to the 10/20/04 post and scroll down a bit after reading a lotta tiresome autobiographical spew). I must say that I was kind of curious as to what had happened to cause one-time pal Shimamoto to take a powder from the BLACK TO COMM camp, thinking that maybe the ol' rummy had once again fallen off the wagon and Signal Tenn'd himself out of commission for good but no, it seems as if Kenji's on the weblog kick just like the rest of us and by the way, he just hadda go and join in the choir along with ALL THE OTHER DOUCHEBAGS OUT THERE and proclaim that your humble scribe is "proudly racist/sexist/homophobic" as if this was the etched in stone and EVERYBODY knows it's true! I would have expected liver damage from you Kenny boy, but BRAIN damage????
I mean...whatta hunka turds! And what really gets my goat is that everybody with a gripe or a beef against me or the mag (I presumed it was because of a layout error that affected Shimamoto's Greg Shaw interview that appeared in issue #24 but I guess I was wrong) has to lay out an entire rant against me (and my beliefs) and distort them (or not know when the humor starts or stops...haven't you guys ever heard of satire???), and then prance away WITHOUT GIVING ANY SORT OF COHESIVE PROOF THAT I AM ANY OF THE THINGS I AM ACCUSED OF!!!! It used to not bother me, but the whole thing has gone out of control like a runaway truck that I gotta step in atop the fray and once and for all say ENOUGH!!!!! But despite my claims to the contrary these ad hominem attacks just a'keep on comin', with besotted jerks like Shimamoto saying all them nasty things about me then go running to hide behind mummy's skirt like a nice little jizbag! How typical! And what frosts my pumpkins is that here I am, a guy who gives VALUABLE SPACE in my mag and the time of day to people who seem all "gosh it" who have approached me and I've taken 'em under my wing and all that big brother give the neophyte a chance stuff WHEN I DIDN'T HAVE TO (hey Ken, say "hi" to Alan Licht for me!), and then they go around and STAB ME IN THE BACK and say all sorts of virtual UNTRUTHS (that's a nicer way of calling you unreconstructed rectums "liars") you KNOW they wouldn't say about all of their "heroes" and "idols" (like Lester Bangs or Richard Meltzer...them names sound familiar Kenny baby?) WHO WERE TEN TIMES WORSE'N ME 'N ON ALL COUNTS but get away with it because they're "hip" bigcity scribes with friends and influence and all I am is some suburban schmuck who's doing this for the FUN of it. Some fun, eh? Any way Kenny boy, did you ever think of giving Nick Tosches grief for his usage of terms like "jazz darkies' ape-like brains" not to mention calling Albert Goldman a "kike"? Oh yeah, he's a big name, well-published guy and all I am is some small-press peon who wouldn't even THINK of printing such bile!
I don't wanna rehash all of the tribunalistic charges that have been brought against me (besides, I thought I pretty much mopped up the floor with my defenses against noted pipsqueak Dave Lang [and no, I'm not going to link up manwithoutballs' site for you either!] and Jay "I haven't read an issue of BLACK TO COMM since 1997 but I can still run you down if I like" Hinman), but for the neophyte idiot out there let me say that I am not racist and I would like someone to give any concrete proof that I am! C'mon all you prissies out there, I dare you for once in your trust funded lives to point to something I said or wrote or printed that could in any way equal ANYTHING spewed by Robert Shelton or George Lincoln Rockwell. Or even popped off by one of your inbred uncles or aunts who got passed over for a promotion at the dung heap for that matter. You think that Jimi Hendrix comic which spoofed his love of white women was "racist"??? C'mon, NATIONAL LAMPOON woulda rejected that one as being too weak had it been submitted back in '74! What else is there...oh yeah, all of the reviews of black avant garde jazz artists and those Funkadelic albums which still give me joy and the like must PROVE that I'm a racist! Hey, how do whatever comments I may make (some of which I have changed my mind on, some which you know were just harmless jokes) rank with some of the ACCEPTED by the hip community racism you see in things like R. Crumb's ANGELFOOD McSPADE fercryinoutloud!!! I would never dare go to levels like that even though I'm the guy who thinks that a lotta things out there verboten to satire and spoofing sure could use it! How RIGHT I am Kenny boy, and you're lucky there are about ten states seperating you and me because if we were in the same room I'd tear you apart as if it were an outtake from DEADBEAT AT DAWN! Suck on that one awhile sunshine!
Point number two..."sexism"!!! Hoo boy, I kinda feel like I'm Archie Bunker and I just walked into that episode of ALL IN THE FAMILY where this uppity feminist type had a cardboard cut out of some Archie lookalike that was supposed to represent "the male chauvinist pig" making all sorts of baseless comments about "men" that men never could get away with making about women! I still wonder what all of these pointed attacks about me being "sexist" amount to anyway...is it because I know that the old style of family (y'know, OZZIE AND HARRIET, LEAVE IT TO BEAVER and all that stuff Phil Donahue hates) is way superior to the modern "if it feels like a family it is one" anti-mentality? C'mon kiddies, why don't you give me some CONCRETE PROOF that I'm the antiquated ogre you all DREAM I am rather'n spout off your hip-de-la-hip screeds and sashay away! Afraid of changing my mind, or are you more afraid of your own preconceived notions being challenged???
And as for the grand old finale HOMOPHOBIC, well, when I see pure unadulterated idiots out there running solely on impulse having fun by living from orgasm to orgasm, all the while forcing people who don't want to believe in their views for whatever reasons they may have to ACCEPT THEM OR DIE, ransack churches (while getting a pat on the back from the media at large for doing so) and DEMAND cures for their specific diseases to take precedence over all others (while maladies affecting more people are relatively ignored because their "consituents" aren't politically correct enough), how would you expect me to feel? Especially when the same things continue on even to this day, with radical gays (who never do get called on the carpet unlike yours truly) celebrating the tenth anniversary of "Stop The Church" and all honest criticism of their lifestyles being squelched other than on (perhaps) so-called "hate" radio? You think I'm exactly gonna give in, sacrifice my views and opinions and join in that big march smiling in lockstep with the rest of the hip cause bandwagon jumpers? Hey, I said it before and I don't wanna say it again but I have no real beef with the "homosexual" (the world gave us some good ones, like Roy Cohn, Whittaker Chambers and Justin Raimondo), but the "gay" (with all the modernity that term implies, including all of the critiques I just laid out for you), well that's a different ball of wax entirely. It's like (I don't particularly wanna quote 'em now, but...) what NATIONAL REVIEW said when Cohn died; he may have slept with men, but he wasn't gay. Mull that one over for awhile, sweetie.
I dunno why I go on and on when I could be writing neat blogs about more important subjects like rock & roll (I mean, did KICKS and NEW ORDER have to put up with any of this guff???)...let me just say that JUST BECAUSE I DON'T KISS THE ASS OF THE HIGH GODS OF MULTICULTURALISM, FEMALE SUPREMACY AND GAY HEDONISM LIKE YOU DO DOESN'T MEAN I'M RACIST, SEXIST OR HOMOPHOBIC!!! Listen Shimamoto (and that lying little piece of smegma posting that bit about Miriam Linna not being racist but li'l ol' ME being another story entirely on the Bomp! website), you may have some sort of beef against me for a layout mistake on my part (which I apologized to you for, of course without any acknowledgement) or for whatever cockamammie reason you may want to concoct, but if you have anything you want to say about me why don't you have the GUTS to say it to my face rather'n go around behind my back calling me a buncha names because you think you won't be called on the carpet to "prove" your worthless claims! Well, I'm calling you right now...throwing down the gauntlet and DEMANDING you put up or shut up with regards to your fetid accusations! No hearsay, no half-baked excuses...I want REAL PROOF and not the 150 stuff you were probably swilling when you wrote that tripe.
And hey readers...I mean the honest-to-goodness true fans out there who enjoy BLACK TO COMM and the views expressed and the general fun and games I've been giving you for a long time, why don't you get up off your duffs and give Shimamoto a piece of your mind! I've been a bit miffed at some of you not coming to my defense when I could have used the reinforcements in past excursions against Lang and Hinman amongst other shites, so if you would pleasepleasePLEASE give ol' Chris a li'l hand and tell this evildoer exactly where to get off I really would appreciate it. I've always been more'n happy when you'd help me out in the past (and hey, I don't ask you for much!), but now's certainly not the time to waver! Just scroll up to the first paragraph, click on the underlined link, and KILL!!!!
And so now I find out just what happened...and Ken, I thought you were a fine fellow and true blue BLACK TO COMM fan, but now I know you're just another lower'n low turncoat on par with Cosloy, Lang, Hinman and the rest of the rectal rockets out there in build up/tear down land. And I HATE YOU for that...really, an agonizing death from cancer is too good for you (not to mention a night romancing a roomfulla Turkish sailors)! And while I'm at it (and listen up you other blogwads out there) your funeral is my party! Anyone daring to call me all of those beneath-contempt things thinking they're gonna get away with it ought to know better, but I guess you were way on a bender to realize otherwise. (By the way, do you imbibe around the grandkid???) And you have the unmitigated GALL to call me racist, sexist and homophobic...after all, it was YOU who wrote that stuff about black guys peeing on white women (article to be posted as soon as I dig it up) which even ol' I thought was well beyond the pale!!!
TWO-DAY-LATER ADDENDUM! This latest post hasn't caused quite as much a stir as I thought it would've, but if I may let me direct you to the Agony Shorthand site that's run by one Jay Hinman where this current internet donnybrook of mine is being covered. Hinman of course is the one who's said some rather putrid things about me as well as BLACK TO COMM a few months back (on the tail of Dave Lang's screech...or at least he pretty much said that he agreed with just about all of it), and his latest post dealing with the current brouhaha is, I must admit, an interesting overview of things even though the man doth exaggerate (I haven't been making references to him THAT MUCH...maybe he's the one who's paranoid!). Still, it seems that he wants to smoke the ol' peace pipe, and while I personally thought his olive-branch reaching out rather, er, condescending, I gotta give credit to a guy who really egged on a lotta the distortions and outright lies Lang had stated on his blog. However Jay, why would anyone want to write me telling me I'm an "OK guy" after Lang, Shimamoto and YOU have done your best to ruin my reputation? Still, the idiots keep on attacking both me and BLACK TO COMM via the comments box, and if you'd like to read the piece and even join in with your own pro-BTC opinions, just press here.
1 hour ago
11 comments:
And another thing...Shimamoto. in the course of a couple of telephone conversations with me, thought it was apt and proper to refer to people of my ethnic background as "guineas" (and note that I never said anything bad about people of Shimamoto's heritage who I have stated that I actually think are swell folk 'cept for those horny businessman-type guys who like to take sex tours to the Phillipines and bonk underage gals---the usage of the term "Jap" that might have appeared in past issues was purely done with a WW II spirit in mind much like my throwing about of the "Kraut" tag). Personally I always thought he meant it affectionately and I never raised a fuss or holler about this not-so-nice term either. But really, if Ken can get away calling me a racist I guess you could call Ken one himself for that if you want to stretch things, but since Eyetalians aren't part of any protected class (like most Euros for that matter---I mean when did you hear anyone raise a big ruckus about "dumb polacks" or "stingy scotsmen" comments?) nobody's gonna care one whit!
Your outrage at being called a racist and a homophobe seems a bit less than genuine, considering (for one of many things) the fact that you had a poll in your mag asking for people's least favorite ethnic/racial group. I'm no PC high horse rider myself, but that sure didn't strike me as "good natured fun". Or the seemingly (and I say "seemingly", I haven't counted the actual instances of it) endless sidetracking of a review of some record into a soap box rant against homos/black people/women having the gall to want to be treated on an equal level with white men and how it's all gone down the crapper since the glory days of Leave It To Beaver. I certainly wouldn't paint you as a white robe wearer or a Rev. Phelps admirer (I would hope not), but I don't think you have any more reason to be surprised at people's perception of you than a Holocaust denier does at being assumed to be an anti-semite.
David, that (in many ways restrained) poll question was pretty much in jest, along the lines of Jim Marshall in NEW ORDER responding to some jokingly critical letter to his magazine with the line "How would you like to be a lampshade?" which I think is pretty caustic compared to anything I would care to print (though I thought it was a funny ha-ha poor taste joke like the kind you saw on seventies shows like SNL and FERNWOOD TONITE during the late-seventies...I brought up things like "Dial-a-Jew" and "You've Come a Long Way Buddy" is a previous post). And compared with the taste-level boundries being stretched by a lotta folks in a typical mid-eighties FORCED EXPOSURE way that have gone down in the past, you must admit that BLACK TO COMM is much milder in tone than any of those "bad taste" reads. And FE never got the heat put on it that BTC has, nor have they been called Nazis. (And yes, I knew I was going to get heat for what I've written...from unmitigated imbeciles bred to think we should all be happy and holding hands as the end times near.) As for record reviews turning into "soap-boxes" you're acting like that's something new I'm doing, but frankly, how can/do you see me complaining about blacks/women/homos being equal? (I guess it's how you define equal, but we won't go into that here.) I have no idea how you can see me thinking blacks should be suppressed...is this because I don't give lip service to government-controlled "affirmative action" vote-grabbing ploys which hints that blacks are such dummies they can't compete with the rest of society? If anything, "aa" is an insult to everybody involved, somehow operating under the belief that all the whites are going to bar blacks from higher learning and jobs and keep the good degrees to themselves. Minorities who can get these things on their own merits are perfectly fine, but the concept of giving points (more and more as time goes on) just so the professional workplace looks balanced between races is pretty much a cock and bull story handed to us by patronizing whites. (There have been disaster stories in business and schools resulting from "aa" and I must admit that I've always cringed when I've seen people fighting "aa" being portrayed as white-hoods on the news when they were merely expressing their own personal beliefs.) I see no reason why less-intelligent people, WHITE and well as black (and I capitalized white there to emphasize my point in case it slipped by any of you readers) have to be given special treatment for anything. (I guess that's the elitist in me, since I agree with people like Ayn Rand here and disagree with John Calvin when she said that it's the rich and intelligent and not the "common man" who should be placed on a pedestal...I certainly wouldn't want a common man to operate on me, that's for sure!) As far as "women," just because I KNOW that thirtysome years of feminism has wreaked havoc (which you may see as progress, but your utopia just may be a dystopia) doesn't mean I think they should be suppressed. The radical feminist agenda certainly should be, especially with its rowdies claiming to speak for all women when in fact they are a minority growing smaller by the days. It kills me that nowadays, being a women isn't just being a member of a sex, but a "frame of mind" according to the libbers running the modern feminist game. I think I spoke well regarding my homo views in Friday's post, but hey, given that you think (or I assume you think) that gays can do no wrong then you must support the evil (remember THAT word???) private and public practices and silly DEMANDS that AIDS must be cured and cured NOW (and they were saying that in the 90s!) because I haven't heard ANYONE in the mainstream media or amongst the underground rock world who has said otherwise. Not even an "I agree with their views but disagree with their tactics" statement. If anything, commentators and lackeys all over have been BENDING OVER BACKWARDS (no pun intended) to defend every sort of terroristic practice of the radical gay that they condemn right wingers for! Maybe that's one reason I get pretty wired over things like this! And maybe if you watched more LEAVE IT TO BEAVER and less SEX IN THE CITY and got into the show and saw its humorous and moralistic (oops! dirty word!!!!!) value you wouldn't be coming down really hard on it. Hey, I appreciate the note and thanks for writing it, but I know that your position and views are way slanted in another direction and I can't totally blame you if years of progressive education and a desire to be like others got to you (or so I assume). Actually, I used to think just like you and we would have gotten along swimmingly at one time, but then I saw things happening and people/groups demonized for defending their long-held values refusing to be quislings for that Long March towards a new world, and I pretty much began to change my mind more sooner than later. And you can distort my views and take satire (OK, a touchy subject...look what A MODEST PROPOSAL did for Jonathan Swift anyway!) and criticism for defamation just like the folks at GLAAD...that's your choice but really, unless you've known, talked or written to me for awhile and made an honest appraisal of just WHO I AM, can you really go and believe I'm the goose-stepped moron like Shimamoto make me out to be???
A final word (for this post)...at one time I thought it better to pretty much stay above the fray and let my enemies spout off their lies thinking they would bury themselves. I'm not a fan of Ronald Reagan but that's what he did to great effect. He never even mentioned his opponents by name, and this tactic seemed to show to people he was "above" whoever he was up against. However in my case, I've discovered that keeping my mouth shut pretty much leads people to think that I am in fact guilty and am not replying to these attacks out of abject shame! So I decided that a good defense better be GOOD, and I don't know if my defenses against any of these bloggers is good enough at this point...time will tell. Anyway, if you have any comments pro or con, please write in. If you're cordial enough you'll get a cordial answer, if not...please be warned.
An addendum to David's post...I thought what I was doing was mild (though in the same spirit) compared to what Tesco Vee used to wallow in, or perhaps Scott "Top Ten" Kempner's listing of his hobby as being "chasing negroes out of my neighborhood" in BACK DOOR MAN, or Russell Wolinsky's comments about "gooks" in TEENAGE WASTELAND GAZETTE. (Or even a snide remark like when Steve Hesske mentioned in a letter to TWG an aside about his friend Jack Johnson, "not the spook boxer or any relation because he's white.") A sick har-de-har-har... Like I said earlier, this kind of humor was huge in the seventies for those who can remember the Golden Age of Bad Taste Hip Television (and lingers on down the line though sans potency re. Howard Stern) and frankly, when Spiro Agnew made that "fat Jap" remark I (like Lester Bangs) thought he was joking around with a friend (who was Chinese anyway) and when Nixon kept getting called on the carpet by clampdown cheerleaders like Frank Rich for his various comments about various ethnic groups I believed that Rich was just making another cheap shot about some guy Rich still has a beef against. (As opposed to LBJ who seems in retrospect like a genuine racist even if he tried to hide it well; you gotta remember the anti-war left in the late-sixties made much use out of him requesting that his old home not be sold to blacks!) What I am doing (as anyone who can comprehend my writings will tell you) is just what people like Frank Sinatra and Desi Arnaz use to do..."Hi, you dirty WOP!!!" "How ya doin' ya SPIC!!!" Sick maybe, but not racist and more or less in a joking mood that makes more sense than all of the nicey-nice bludgeoning one sees these days.
But really, I thought I EXPLAINED a lot of my views in my writings over the years, and seeing people pick out various items here and there in order to build up a slanted case against me while ignoring positive things I have said is just one more example of people trying to bury me and the mag without any hope of a truly fair trial! Now I know how the victims of Stalin felt!
"...Or the seemingly (and I say "seemingly", I haven't counted the actual instances of it) endless sidetracking of a review of some record into a soap box rant against homos/black people/women having the gall to want to be treated on an equal level with white men and how it's all gone down the crapper since the glory days of Leave It To Beaver."
You mention that you "haven't counted the actual instances of it" and you're honest enough to admit that, but where have I ever said that I was speaking for white men per se (as if white men are supposed to be POWERLESS???) The only ones I've heard who believe things like that are the fringe radicals who want white men reduced to a new style of slavery that suits their own wants and desires. Or the wants and desires of their white male lackeys. However, I can understand how many white men would feel being torn down at every turn...I remember in my younger days this Vietnam vet who kinda looked like Dick Cavett told me that it was the WASP male who's the suppressed, hated, lowest creature extant, totally reviled by society at large and passed over for every shard of acknowledgement or recognition. I asked how he could say that, since I thought the WASP man to be the ones best off financially/socially in the United States and the English speaking world for that matter. After a number of years I eventually understood the guy's ire, though expanding on his point I would say it now applies to ALL men regardless of race/creed etc. But enough reminiscence. Like I said a billion times before I knew I was gonna step on toes and offend certain people (usually the ones who see no qualms in ridiculing people of various ethnic and religious persuasions, making them out to be agents of Satan or whoever's wrecking their attempts to create "the new person"), but getting the bull from the presumably intelligent likes of Lang and Hinman who I've had no qualms with, getting accused of all sorts of EVILS was a sucker punch that still stymies me. (And Hinman said his was not written with "hatred" in mind, but that ultra-critical, whiny and biased post of his certainly wasn't a love letter!) And at a time when I NEEDED a push to move more magazines (and I've had just about as much trouble distributing the new issues as I have the early ones, given the adverse reports of many of you above-it-all scibes/powermongers out there!), and do you think ANYBODY would want to sell it after the unprovoked attacks on the part of Lang and Hinman??? In closing (at least on this post) let me say that I wear my battle scars proudly no matter WHO they come from, and if I hadda do it all over again...maybe I wouldn't have RESTRAINED myself as much as I have. (And believe me, there were times when I really coulda gone for the blood!)
ONE MORE THING FOR NOW...(before I think of something else or belabor the same old point)...just WHAT IS IT that you readers out there have against LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, which as I posted was perhaps the only sitcom to capture the spirit of growing up suburban in the fifties, sixties and (for me) seventies? I think I answered my own question there, but I'd like your opinion on it.
(And while I'm on a roll)...it was Hinman who called me a hypocrite and "same soil tiller" (a term he continued to use in future posts in order to razz me) when it is he himself who writes about the same groups (like [yawn!] Mission of Burma) repeatedly. I guess if there's some carpet-calling to be done maybe I should be the one to do it as well.
That's a lot of words there.... first off, I actually really like Leave It To Beaver, I just recognize that the world in which it was set was one in which the groups mentioned were kept firmly in their place to the benefit of white men. I certainly don't spend any of my time wringing my hands over this, but I do recognize that it was an irrational state of affairs and am glad that it's largely over with. I'm also not one to think that any victim is in some exalted position over everyone else, and I don't really have anything good to say about gay pride week, MLK day, the nonsensical idea that "all men are rapists", or affirmative action at this point. Your writing seems to indicate that you see it as one way or another, and you yearn the old way, where women,negroes and homos stay in their rightful places. I could be wrong in that, but that's the impression you create. I hope you're not so far gone that you consider "your least fave ethnic/racial group" to be satire?
And I've never willingly watched more than ninety seconds of Sex In The City. That's insulting.
Hi Dave-I was just guessing about SEX IN THE CITY, Guessed wrong obviously. My apologies (and you don't hear that much from me!). As for your other views, well I would say that you're mistaken that I'm yearning for days when "women, minorities etc." were kept in their place, and maybe I can see how you would think so and maybe not. I sure yearn for MANY things from those days (and I'm talking the roughly post-World War II to maybe late-seventies era which encapsulated a lot of the LEAVE IT TO BEAVER mentality that I grew up in although I'm stretching things), like stable families, higher SAT scores, low illigetimate rates, black school children who could really compete with white ones academically etc. I don't yearn for the lack of medical breakthroughs and shorter lifespans or the hard lives people had to lead compared with today's easy-going nature, but hey, I like the old stuff whether they be TV shows or movies or rock & roll, and I passionately write about it. Believe me, I certainly don't stick up for the subjugation of minorities and women (though I disagree with many things the women's liberationists have done...however I do like what such maverick feminists as Kitty Bruce [a lesbian!] and Wendy McElroy have said). I thought most people would have realized this, but maybe I haven't made enough of a point of it.
One more thing regarding your first note...you said something along the lines of that my bitterly reacting to being called racist etc. could be akin to a Holocaust-denyer reacting adversely to being called an anti-semite. OK, but has anything I said really been on the level of Holocaust denying??? Maybe if you put it this way...if someone was critical of Israeli policy or Ariel Sharon, would THEY be anti-semites? There are many, right as well as left, who have questions about these things that you or I may or may not agree with, but too many of them are called anti-semites even for using terms like "neo-conservative" of all things! Ralph Nader wrote an eloquent letter to Abraham Foxman saying that just because he may say things about foreign policy and Israel he is not an anti-semite nor should he be called one. I may say things critical of various groups, but that doesn't mean I have an abject hatred of them. Maybe at one time I was frothing at the mouth mad about certain events (I remember being ready to fly off the handle once after reading some saccharine pro-gay, anti-Catholic thing printed in THE VILLAGE VOICE, and that probably inspired some wild screed on my part!), but afterwards I thought that sinking to the level of those I may hate for their behavior may only drag me down with them. Or as someone once said, those who go out hunting monsters better beware of becoming a monster themselves.
A correction...the feminist I am talking about is TAMMY Bruce...KITTY Bruce is the daughter of Lenny who also led an early CBGB band called The Great Mistaque!
And that's "illegitimate" or so I think...speling never wuz my best subject!
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