BLOG TO COMM

FINAL (?) THOUGHTS

Well, I must admit that my last post didn't quite elicit the kind of response that I hoped it would have (mainly the public lynching of Ken Shimamoto), but hey, it was a good try. But still, despite me having to resort to making the same claims and defenses over and over again let me clear a bit of the flatulence-laden air (some of it mine, some of it others) and maybe give the final word on this whole sordid affair.

To those who decided to ram themselves into the fray by making personal attacks on me, well, that's your problem I guess, but even though Scott Soriano and Dave Lang pretty much said the same things in their posts (Scott more rabidly than Dave, and repeatedly as well...and Scott, do you beat up retarded people often???) and I repeated my points about ten times as well, please let me clarify things once and for all by saying this (and saying it on my own turf where I am MASTER)...the entire gist of my previous post is not that I can't take "criticism"...have you people read all of the negative reviews of BLACK TO COMM over the years anyway?...it's just that there's a BIG DIFFERENCE between criticism and defamation, and when I'm called on the carpet, brought up before the tribunal etc. for such charges as being a nazi (though Shimamoto probably didn't mean that I don the brown shirt and storm the local synagogue, but deep in his heart he probably wishes I did) and held up as an example of a "bad man" (all the while seeing all of the hard work and money invested into my "creation" being poured down a rathole...after all, who wants to buy a magazine from a BIGOT?), how would you expect anyone with a sense of ever-dwindling pride to react anyway? Scott, I KNOW what you were trying to say and BELIEVE IT OR NOT I can see your point, only when it's being screamed at me like some drill sergeant at a buck private the message seems to get lost somewhere down the line. I've learned as a kid that the more someone yells at you the less you listen, and if I got some hard knocks because of that well too bad for me I guess! And hey Dave (and Karl), yes I KNOW that if I dish it out I have to "take it"...and I have been taking it longer than any of you out there would care to realize. Maybe all of these attacks against me just struck me at the wrong time in my "pathetic" life, maybe I was placed in a rampaging mood because these utter slams were done by people I had no qualms against and who in fact I had admired from afar, and most probably it was a combination of the two that got me into more of a fighting frame-of-mind. And with distributors either going out of business or refusing to touch BLACK TO COMM for their own reasons (which is OK for them, but makes things hard on me), and general readership dwindling more and more as the days go by (you can just hear the violins playing in the background!), why shouldn't I be angered, especially when people have to go and make accusations based on MY PRIVATE LIFE and draw all sorts of innuendo and conclusions acting all the while as if they knew about me more than I did myself.

If I have any apologizing to do, it would be to the readers of the Agony Shorthand blog for using foul language in my response to Soriano (I must keep things clean), not to mention the Next Big Thing one for trespassing into the Greg Shaw obit comment section notifying readers to check out my defense against Shimamoto (didn't know I was breaching any sort of weblog etiquette here, but that's my own stupidity I guess). Like I said, you don't hear this often from me, but "sorry."

But really, there is one thing I am totally disturbed about regarding this whole affair and that's Dave Lang's deleting of his anti-BTC/me posts. I'm sad not only because I knew these posts would eventually come to make Lang look like a bigger imbecile than he's already made himself out to be, but because occasionally I would go to those posts and read 'em for writing inspiration. Really!!! From now on you can expect some pretty lame scribing from me, and blame it all on Dave!!!!!

Another thing I'm sorry about is that both John Righter and J. Neo Marvin didn't weigh in with their comments! I may have said some snide things about Righter in the past because he seemed to jump to conclusions about me and my life (or at least he came off that way), but at least he seems to have a modicum of intelligence that would have been welcome (and just watch, he'll probably now come out with a totally negative appraisal of me!). As for Marvin, the man's a hoot. We could have used some of his levity injected into such a dire situation!

But like, do I really care once you get down to it??? I mean, I've been trashed, mashed, mangled, folded, spindled and mutilated by the best ones over the years, and yeah, I've really suffered sales-wise when Gerard Cosloy pulled his little tricks on me back in the late eighties. And at that time I thought that maybe the bad publicity would work for me, that sales would zoom out of control and BLACK TO COMM would be as big as FORCED EXPOSURE or even THE BIG TAKEOVER, sharing magazine rack space with the glossy rock mags and even being hailed as "the new CREEM!!!" Cosloy and Patrick Amory's attacks on me and the mag certainly put an end to that pipe dream and translated into poor sales and a snowballing of negative publicity for me that I still haven't recovered from. In fact, if you're petty enough like me you could "blame" Cosloy and Amory for the rabid, anti-social tone of the mag from the early-nineties onward if you so desire, or at least blame 'em in part! So maybe that's why I am so touchy, and Scott, you're not "paranoid" if there actually are people out there willing to ruin you and your magazine's reputation for whatever occult reasons they may have. So maybe that's why I try to keep my guard up now and go on the attack at the first whiff of anti-BTC bigotry. Being called a nazi, racist and all of those other unfounded claims may not seem like much, but they can lead to permanent damage as I've learned first hand (and Miriam Linna can also attest to that!). And hey, at one point I didn't mind being called any of those things mainly because these terms were being flung around so fast and so loosely that I thought they've lost all their meaning by now...I mean, how many politicians who are constantly bombarded with those tags really are what their enemies call them??? But I guess times change faster than I thought, or perhaps what doesn't stick to one person sticks to me plenty!

Expect something more light-hearted next go 'round. And Dave, I'm not going to delete the post I wrote about you despite your questionable action. It's the second best thing I've written all year and I already deleted the Agony Shorthand one, which was the first best thing (the jury's still out on my Shimamoto slam)!

Well, my Uncle Tib once told me that I'd get beaten to death if I kept popping off the way I do, and maybe this will be the closest I'll come to it. But I think I got more than a few good swings in myself.