Archive for August, 2004
Only the good quit young.
Monday, August 16th, 2004Picked up Orbital’s final album (”The Blue Album”) today, and goddamn if it isn’t kick ass. After piss-poor showings the last time out by Air, Fluke, Underworld, Prodigy and almost every other decent electronic outfit out there, it’s a fucking shame to know this is the last album they’re going to do. Oh well. Pick it up. It’s great.
Off to Eagle Rock for an hour or so of bowling with some friends before heading into the ‘wood to catch PJ Harvey at the Knitting Factory. Why the fuck she’s playing there is beyond me, but I’m not complaining. I never thought i’d get to see her in a small venue again.
vonnegut!
Friday, August 13th, 2004Vonnegut writes! Thanks to michaelmoore.com for bringing this to the masses… man, i wish he’d squeeze out just one more book…
August 11th, 2004 10:31 am
I Love You, Madame Librarian - by Kurt Vonnegut
by Kurt Vonnegut / In These Times
I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.
In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.
In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.
With good reason.
In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.
Piece of cake.
The O’Reilly Factor.
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.
Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?
american idiot
Thursday, August 12th, 2004Off to san diego for the weekend to chill out and try and have some fun. no laptop. no web shit. yay.
this has been all over the place, but i still love it. take a listen. my favorite part is the reporters laughing in the background.
and then there are our new clients… i’ve never been a big fan, but i’ve gotta say it’s cool what they’re doing. it’s not dylan or anything, but then who is these days? anyway, the radio people are starting to do their own cutups to the song… one of the first ones is already out there. take a listen. i mean, it’s not gore vidal or arianna huffington or anything, but this will probably get through to more people’s heads…
took a break, finally
Tuesday, August 10th, 2004launched our new green day site last night, tweaked it a bit today… and finally took a breather before moving on to the next major project. went and saw the village… i liked it quite a bit. not the finest in the world, and thinking about the plot too hard causes some serious issues, but well done…
