FRY PUSSY RIOT!!!

OK, now that I got that outta the way what else can I do to offend the casual blog strollers out there? You know, the ones who just might be hittin' this blog thinking they're gonna be wallowing in even more self-righteous feelygood buffers and other bits to assuage their feelings of superiority o'er the average workaday scrambler (such an EVIL beast!). Howzbout a li'l bitta polly-tix, and that of the (hoo-hah!) confrontational variety at that? That always gets the blood boiling, the fever pitching, the self-righteous wretching...

I (along with you and every political pudendum on the internet for starters) see that republican candidate Mitt Romney has picked none other than congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, an act which has got a few people all happyhappy and others doin' the big groan. Forgive me if I remain straight-faced this time...actually Ryan, despite his support of the TARP bailout and war without end (amongst many other major faux pissoffs), comes off better'n some of the nimnuls that coulda gotten this thankless job, though in the here and now is that really saying much? I mean, at least he gives lip service to free markets this and Ayn Rand (yawn!) that so you can tell he does at least have a modicum of brains as opposed to the usual politicians who seem to get their talking points from whatever talk radio or tee-vee pundit the decide to tune in.. (I do hope you are doin' a li'l "reading between the lines" here....seems I have to tell you when and when not to these days!) And next to some of the turdbombs that current veep Joe Biden has been dropping maybe Ryan would a marked improvement! Still, when it all comes down to bare knuckles I'll have to say that my favorite homo Justin Raimondo has it right once again...this choice is a snoozer. (Of course, if you want to read another view that's at least has a sense of humor that the left has been lacking for the past thirty or so years click here.)

Funny that the Ryan pick has brought up/back the whole Ayn Rand "question" to the point where I've seen many a commentator mention this bitch in ways that make her out to be the most vile, evil and loathsome creature to roam the face of the earth. Well I dunno about that and given the likes of Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro amongst many others she does look positively angelic. I've made my thoughts on her known many a time before so I'm not gonna rehash 'em here, but frankly I will say that Congressman Ryan's paens to her economic ideas really don't ring as strongly with my set of values as they should. Now, if he were gung ho on some real rabblerousers for freedom such as Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess and maybe even a whacked out nut albeit a whole lot more meaningful'n her counterparts Emma Goldman I would be jumping on the bandwagon like potrzebie, but at this point in time.....eh!

But sheesh, as far as some of you people out there who are deriding Rand like that well...you're kinda making me wanna love the self-sufficient bitch  (and Paul Ryan) in some weird twisted way! I mean, while combing through some comment section somewhere or other (I think it was a youtube thingie on Ron Paul) some gadfly actually had the nerve to say that people who believed in self-reliance and individualism were sociopaths! Gee, I'm glad that there are people like that around who just happen to know more about others and are duty bound to let them know the error of their psychological makeup---sure need more of 'em to set us on the straight and narrow! And surprisingly enough, on Facebook former Mirrors drummer Mike Weldon had presented a selection of Rand's opines (I believe taken from her interview with Mike Wallace in the late-fifties) via some youtube upload in an attempt to point out her universal danger which I will admit stymies me considering how I understand it that Mirrors were formed with a Randian damn the flow, go against the tide credo to 'em! Dunno what to make outta all this, only that if these people can get apoplectic over some long-gone Russian neo-libertarian who thought she was hot stuff what would they make outta a real hero standing against the tide of pseudo-conformity and lockstep governmental crackdowns initiated by the same generation who loathed government a good forty years back (as Cyril Jordan said, hippie is a word that's short for hypocrite)..............like (as if I had to say it) ME!!!! No matter who wins the sweepstakes this November, I better keep an eye out for the pitchforks and torches that will eventually be comin' after me like a scene out of FRANKENSTEIN!

So yeah, maybe Rand is a godsend (heeeee!) next to all of those altruistic goody-two-shoe world savers that  have been giving us the Pollyanna bit ever since the sixties turned into THE SIXTIES, but sheesh, about 90% of you Rand haters out there actually make me want to read ATLAS SHRUGGED dirty scenes and all!  At least the other ten percent who are critical of her on a more solid basis (Objectivism as a philosophy "built on sand" on one hand, her dismissal of mysticism and her rampant uber-ego on the other) make points I can really osmose to. The rest of ya are how-shall-I-say nothing but leftover Weathermen looking for a new ROTC building to bomb in the name of love. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole lot of ya still cried yourself to sleep after reading CRAIG AND JOAN, TWO LIVES FOR PEACE while contemplating doing the suicide game to protest the war in...oh yeah, war ain't that bad now that Obama's running things, eh?

For the best critique (and a cunning one at that) regarding Rand, why not view the following video presentation of MOZART WAS A RED, Rothbard's own one-act play (loosely based on his own experiences with Rand that culminated in their big falling out) which probably says more about Rand than you or I ever could! Personally I find this not only informative (even if the facts are tweaked for artistic purposes) but pretty funny, something that a SNL or SCTV woulda done had they been a little hipper'n decided to go after Rand the way they did other visible icons of the mid/late-twentieth century. In fact I can see it all now...Eugene Levy as Rothbard, Andrea Martin as Rand, Dave Thomas as the cuckold husband...



If you need more evidence, Thomas Fleming's latest column in THE DAILY MAIL which I am uploading here in order to back my already etapoint views says reams more about Rand and the cult than I ever could. Give it a go and educate yourself for once,  OK?

And as far as any (hopefully) last words of the subject of Rand and Ryan go, when you boil it all down to the bare bones all I can say that's good about the latter (which is a whole lot less than that Paul Ryan can) is that she at least influenced those fantastic Steve Ditko MR. A, KILLJOY, THE QUESTION and many other hard-edged, nervy and downright offensive to bleedheart types comics that continue to give me a huge thrill after a good twenty years of constant reading! Those remain off-the-wall and refreshing, and given their hard uncompromising tone they sure come off grand next to some of the mooshier comic book examples seen for well over four decades by now. Other'n that I'll stick with the other paleocons and libertarian types at CHRONICLES and TAKI'S TOP DRAWER who, although not influential enough to inspire any comic books that I know of, also offer definitely non-jackboot anti-Hobbesian opines and tend to offend the same kinda people who've been deriding me for ages because I'm acting like a one-percenter for brushing my teeth and wiping my butt! After all the abuse I've taken maybe it is time for a little "get back", eh?

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The spate of JACK BENNY PROGRAMs that have been popping up on the CLASSIC TELEVISION PROGRAMS blog via youtube have been keeping my busy as of late, and for a guy who really would have liked to have watched these now-rarities for years on end (and was kinda hopin' that the local PBS station, which was milking YOU BET YOUR LIFE and BURNS AND ALLEN reruns throughout the mid-eighties, woulda taken a chance running 'em on a nightly basis) these certainly are a godsend. Sure a whole lotta the oft-shown (via Golden Age of Television collections and the like) ones such as the classic Humphrey Bogart cop show spoof are here, but it was sure splendid getting to see some fresh to mine eyes episodes like the one where Jack took the Beverly Hills Beavers to the same amusement park where Beaver (as in Cleaver) was afraid to ride the Big Dipper roller coaster (!), and Jack's Maxwell getting stolen resulting in him heading for the local Bev. Hills PD where he has to put up with a cop played by Lyle Talbot! Of course the one where Art Linkletter spoofs his own kiddie interviews complete with Rochester in Davy Crockett gear had me hitting the ceiling like nothing since the time I was picking something off the floor in the nude and my cold-nosed dog Sam just happened to sneak into the room behind me! These high-larious programs really stand the test of time and unlike most things passing for "funny" these days actually had me sporting a big smile of pure joy on my face! If you wanna really do me in just have shows like this banned for all eternity and watch me wither away into nothing! (Of course considering my size that might take some time, but I guarantee you I will wither away!)

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Bad week for deaths...first onetime Sweathog Ron Palillo joins ex-classmate Robert Hedges in the big detention hall in the sky, and now word comes out that not only has former O REXTACY/QUATRO QULT editor and musician in his own right Solomon Gruberger passed away, but he did so two whole months ago and nobody managed to tell any of us! Definitely a huge part of seventies fandom, Gruberger is probably best known for his various musical endeavors from O. Rex to the Afrika Corps, records which helped define the late-seventies Amerigan underground musical landscape just about as much as alla those other home made platters that have adorned our collections for quite a long time. And if that wasn't good enough he was quite the prolific writer who not only wrote for his own rag but his brother Jay's RAUNCH 'N ROLL as well as some of the bigger and better names in fandom such as HYPE. And rilly, if you think my writing could seep out around the sausage casings of "taste" into realms of political/social un-piousness you should get an eyefulla of some of the stuff Gruberger not only wrote, but fanzine editors felt worthwhile enough to PRINT. In an age where modern uplifters feel it oh-so-important to bowdlerize everything to the point where we are supposed to feel queasy even saying things like "f-word" and "n-word" and "c-word" Gruberger's writings slammed you in the face with the actual anglo saxon term no expletives deleted! I guess someone will find him a brave and free-thinking soul a good five-hundred years from now but face it, now he's just an uncouth schlub just like the rest of us. A dead schlub at that, and boy does that make me feel sad.

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Here are a few more cassettes I just happened to get along with the Siouxsie wonders that I wrote up last week. Eddie and the Hot Rods' PRE ISLAND DEMOS 1976/PARIS THEATRE LONDON 1977 is a good 'un with great sound and hot enough performances from thee group that was getting the primo punk tag just before the Sex Pistols stepped up to the bat and began givin' 'em a run for the money. The demo side also features Lew Lewis on harmonica adding a particularly bloozey effect that got lost on subsequent releases, and I gotta admit that if most rock music listeners of the era were "confused" by the presence of a relatively short-haired musical act covering songs like "Woolly Bully" and "Gloria" right inna middle of alla that pretense and progressive rock musicianship then so be it! Hey, I might have loved the mid-seventies in their own esoteric ways that presented for me the better moments of the present with the past seventy years of culture still easily at my fingertips, but if I hadda live in a time loop of 1958-1966 with alla its energy and tee-vee epiphanies boy would I be one happy camper! Anyone who would want it any other way deserves to be shown repeated airings of THE ROCK MUSIC AWARDS hosted by the Captain and Tennille until they cry for Don Kirschner!

Wasn't expecting to get the UK Subs tape...I received it by mistake though the guy who sent it said I could keep it so here's a writeup! The UK Subs, like the Exploited and more of those SOUNDS bands for wont of a better term, were part of that era of English punk rock that most of you sophisticados don't quite care for. Never heard any good reason as to why, but in some circles bands like these are strictly nov  schmoz ka pop! However, I gotta say that I certainly found way more meaning in the entire pack of 'em than all of those Julie Birchills out there who were only using their lofty big city rockcrit statuses to leap forward to bigger things, and as we all know in Julie's case those "things", along with the rest of her, got pretty big as time crept on. (As if I should talk given my own losing battles with the bulge and ravenous appetite very much akin to Yogi Bear and his lust for "frozen pizza pies!")

But really, I can't find much if any fault with this '82 recording which shows Charlie Harper and the boys (whoever they were that week) presenting a straight-ahead set of punk rock as it pertained to during a time when it seemed to have been "written off" by big business moguls then came back with a hard cold vengeance. Hard and angry musings here that I guess went hand-in-hand with the entire gestalt or whatever they called it that was going on in England during the early-eighties, a time when we could have only hoped that it, along with its British neighbors Scotland and Northern Ireland, would have been somehow decimated, but as luck would have had it the entire place remains relatively intact. Feh!

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Not that much new in the line of music this week. Just these few shards which, if anything, reflect the slow going music scene which we here at BLOG TO COMM have had to put up with for nigh on thirtysome years. Yeah, the days of wanting to go to the local record shop and buying it out are long gone, so at this point in time its pretty much get what you can and live off the fat of your record collection, advice that I'm sure more than a few people have been following these past umpteen years.

But hey, I did manage to get a few new notes circulated into my system, and (using classic DRAGNET-speak) the results of that trial can be read directly below...

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I'M JUST THE OTHER WOMAN: MSR MADNESS VOLUME 4 CD-R

Another Bill burn of yet more of those "set your poetry to music" scams that used to get advertised all over the back of national magazines for a longer time than I can remember. Rodd Keith's back, and overall the selection's good enough with a nice variety of easygoing, early rock 'n roll and country to keep this moving and hey, even the disco and (get this!) rap stuff is good enough in its own downhome addled way that you don't mind hearing it in the company of some of the most awkward poetry ever set to pen. Believe-you-me, some of these lyrics are so klutzy and stilted that even """""I""""" coulda written 'em!

Amongst the winners here are Trendy's "Facts About Crack" (perhaps one of the latest entries here considering its tres eighties subject matter), John Muir's Apollo 11 tribute "The Moon Men", Buddy Raye's "No More Liberty" (kinda sounds like something Archie Bunker woulda sent in to MSR 'stead of the poem Edith wrote!), and Bonnie Graham's "He's My Chocolate Baby", one of two odes regarding miscegenation here which make me wonder... But then again, how can I leave out Bobby Blake's "Betsy and Her Goat", sort of an updated "Mary Had a Little Lamb"???. That one just touches my heart with its simple tale of devotion like a nice case of acid reflex.

Hotcha cover by former underground cartoonist Justin Green makes for a nice top off for this collection that'll please just about everyone. The rural set'll love it for the simplicity and snappy tunes while alla you big city sophisticados' get your jollies laughing at alla them rubes. Of course level-headed people like myself will like this for what it is...yet another long held mystery about those back page ads fleshed out and pretty entertaining at that!

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Frijid Pink-EARTH OMEN CD (Repertoire Germany)

I'm like one of those extraterrestrial space disasters you used to see on the old STAR TREK tee-vee show. Y'know, the big massive amorphous blob or cone that looks like a BUGLE corn snack enlarged 100 million times that sucks up everything in its sight to keep on existing. Only instead of  sustaining myself by draining the energy banks from a starship I live on high energy rock 'n roll music, or at least something that remotely approximates it. And with such a thing being in extremely limited supply these days you can bet that I will seek out such over-the-top no-holds barred music wherever and whenever I can find it. Thus, I've been taking a whole lotta chances with my hard-begged moolah trying to find my next fix of stoneage primal rockist frenzy and usually failing to get my fill of what I've been on the lookout for lo these many years!

This is the one I've been tellin' you about last week in the course of my '72 CREEM mag appreciations which I decided to snap up if only because of one measly track. Namely, elpee closer "Mr. Blood", a track which was described in a way that would lend the reader to believe it had at least a halfway decent Stooges appreciation to it. Yeah, I know that many of these Stooges comparisons really do reek esp. when it's Metal Mike Saunders (a man I truly admire and respect) comparing side one of Ten Years After's WATT to the early Stooges or Chuck Eddy (a "man" whom I most dearly loathe) telling us that Van Halen's "DOA"'s the closest anybody's come to the Stooges ever (sheesh, what about Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam?), but given how I've been grasping at straws trying to latch onto some new energy source it's like I'm not exactly gonna be letting a good chance at hearing a neet Stooge swipe go right past me, eh?

So no, I'm not gonna buy any Van Halen but I did Frijid Pink if only because these 1972 Stooge references seem to mean a whole lot more'n the quap numbnut xerox fanzine jerkoffs like myself were writin' 'bout 'em in the eighties. And given the wall of loathing and hatred Ig and company hadda endure for years these namedrops and asides do matter esp. when uttered during the lifetime of the group's original tenure! And yeah, I know that Frijid Pink were of the latterday Detroit era which means they were drawing more energy from the likes of Ted Nugent and Grand Funk Railroad* 'stead of the MC5 and our dear Stooges, but a Stooge mention is a Stooge mention and when doody calls you know I'm honor bound to dive right into it!

Anyway, on this third Pink album (by which time the group only retained one original member, the drummer, just like the Choir by the time they recorded their '68 album!) the creepy forces of '72 youth gulcher have sunk their claws deep into the band's entire reason-for-being. TRANSLATION: this rot has a whole lot more to do with the sanctified touchy-feelyisms of Funk than it does of the Five, Stooges, Up and all of the hard-edged acts that got even the most cosmo writers from TIME and NEWSWEEK interested in Detroit rock. Yeah, '71-'72 were bad years for teendom what with the Vietnam War and all of those pitter patter paens for peace, but the music, lyrics and approach on EARTH OMEN ain't exactly anything to remedy the sick sad state of suburban hippydom and ecological doomngloom right outta Paul Ehrlich's worst dreams. No wonder NUGGETS was the best rock album of the year, and that was recorded a good six to seven years earlier!

But I guess Frijid Pink were staying on the youth miasma course with this one, which is why this album sounds like the worst of Grand Funk (and they did have their trashier moments I can enjoy) with all of that crank out hack melodramatic music that really hit a chord with more'n a few kids who probably gobbled this one up expecting the newest tangent in rock music. But really it's a downer, with standard guitar cliche #24 meeting up with angst-filled vocals straight outta Eric Burdon after runnin' outta eggs (or black chicks) and a general dinge that I never could wash outta my system. I guess if you like BLESS THE BEASTS AND CHILDREN you can appreciate this, but when that gunk was permeating my adolescent air the only thing I wanted to do was rush home and watch an old JD film or spin a Four Seasons record if only to resensify myself!

Even the supposed Stooge swipe was nothing but a semi-hard rock number that didn't conjure up any memories of the Grande Ballroom days as much as it did of the more tiresome aspects of what was passing for FM rock at the time. After hearing this, I can understand why the guys who wrote these "Rock-a-rama" reviews in CREEM didn't sign their names!

Bizarrely enough, the only interesting track on this platter was one of the bonus cuts, a re-do of the old Moody Blues "chestnut" "Go Now" which was faithful enough to the original and coulda made it on the AM dial what with the Blues still a potent chart force (and hey, if you gotta ride on some tails I guess a buncha leftover British Invasion limeys'll do as good as anything). Other'n that, it's like zilchville for Frijid Pink who, amongst all of the other Pink groups in existence from Pink Floyd to the Pink Fairies really dropped the ol' turd when it comes to making records. Makes me glad that early-seventies introspection and post-acid rock was quickly being taken over by early/mid-seventies decadence and glam within the wink of an eye because frankly, if this stuff had continued any further I'm afraid the only thing we'd be listening to nowadays is tired nerdy whiny mellow metallic rock performed by youth with chips on their shoulders and trust funds to carry them all through, and you wouldn't want to put up with that now, would you?

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*After reading more 'n more I gotta say that Mark Farner just hadda've been the biggest wuss to hit early-seventies rock even if he could produce some good thud when he wanted. Peter Crowley told me about the time he saw Funk at Shea whilst seated amongst carloads of suburban teens who were driven to the show by their mommies and how funny he thought it was when Farner uttered the famed four-letter bomb and the kids yelled in approval much to their guardians' dismay! Well, hotcha for him for doing what I'm sure John Lennon woulda loved to have done at the same venue a good half-decade earlier, but what can you say about a guy who claims that he had a dream where none other than Jesus Christ appeared and told him that the greatest threat facing humanity at the time was not war or rampant loathing enacted via force, but overpopulation??? Sounds kinda strange though I don't doubt it happened. But how much stock can you really put into your dreams? I mean, if I told you I had a dream where Jesus told me to go out and chop up the bunnies that are permeating my yard with a lawnmower you'd just think it was another nutzo subconsciousness scramble akin to the ones I occasionally tell you about on this blog. I mean dreams are dreams and I dunno if anyone could take theirs seriously, but gee...when Farner talks about Jesus and overpopulation and how we will all be falling off the edge of the earth by the time 1999 hits  it just seems about as altruistic and as phony (same thing!) as that part of the GRAND FUNK LIVE album where he tells the audience not to take the acid 'r whatever that the guy next to you is passing your way, and the stupid dolts CHEER him...sheesh what a pansy!