More cowbell please....

Spin magazine has another ultimate list issue. Their fifteen greatest cowbell songs of all time had me sitting on the floor at the airport, laughing my ass off. I am sorely tempted to copy it out for you right here, the smartass comments are priceless. That would be wrong. Well, maybe they'll let me give you the list and one smart ass comment.

"1. Mississippi Queen - Mountain: The cowbell jam to end all cowbell jams. Mountain are to the cowbell what Dostoevsky is the the Russian novel.
2. Funk #49 - the James Gang
3. Don't Fear the Reaper - Blue Oyster Cult
4. Photograph - Def Leppard
5. House of Jealous Lovers - the Rapture
6. Honky Tonk Woman - the Rolling Stones
7. Saturday Night - Schoolly D
8. Electioneering - Radiohead
9. Silence Kit - Pavement
10. Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey - the Beatles
11. Hey Ladies - Beastie Boys
12. Evil Woman - Electric Light Orchestra
13. Celling Dr. Love - Kiss
14. Low Rider - War
15. Private World - the New York Dolls" - Spin

This could be a sleep-deprived-you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. Nonetheless I encourage you to go read your neighbor's May 2004 issue of Spin and give this list a test run.

DC comics = evil

When I was a youth, my mother would drag me to the mall and sometimes I could convince her to let me hang out at the bookstore while she shopped. It was there that I found a comic book called Elfquest. I discovered it in full color condensed graphic novel form. The drawings were beautiful. The characters were vibrant and the story had adventure, friendship, humor, magic, love and conflict. It was excellent. Periodically I check up on the series. In later editions the coloring was not so great. The old edition had very warm tones while the later color editions were decidedly more blue. then the books got smaller and they were in black and white. The stories and characters continued to be compelling.

And today at Pages For All Ages I see that DC has picked up the title, released it in black and white and shrunk the book down to the size of a postage stamp! You can barely make out the pictures, they are very muddy looking. How can you expect new readers to fall in love with this story if you don't present it in a format where the art can be properly appreciated? DC has done some very good things comic-wise. This is not one of them. I am so disappointed.

Project Vote Smart

Every birthday I joke with people that when I turn 35, I will run for President because I can. Most folks roll their eyes at me but according to www.vote-smart.org I'm not the only one with big plans. There's a long list of presidential candidates for 2004 and one potential candidate. You'll have to guess that one for yourself. For those of us who grumble about the two-party system behold:

Party Name (# of Candidates)

American (1)
American Independence (1)
American Tradition (1)
Constitution (2)
DC Statehood Green Party (1)
Democrats (59)
E-Democratic Party (1)
Fair Representation (1)
Green Party (8)
Health (1)
Human Being (1)
Independent (31) Is there an Independent Party?
Independent, Democrat (1)
Libertarian (6)
Menorah-Thor (1)
Mike's Party (1) (Yes, the Candidate's name is Mike.)
National Barking Spider Resurgence Party (1) (His name is Mike as well)
Native American Party (1)
No Party Affiliation (8)
Party X Independent (1)
Prohibition (2)
Reform Party (2)
Republican (26) (Didn't get the memo from GW.)
Socialist (1)
The Anti-Hypocrisy Party (1)
Turtle Political Party (1)
United Christian (1)
United Fascist Union (1)
United States Justice Party Americale (1)
United Vertans Rights (1)
Unknown (6)
Vertans Industrial (1)
write in (9)

There you have it, according to Project Vote Smart we are not a 2 party system. There are 29 political parties that have candidates running for president, and several (46) individuals that are running apparently outside of party lines.

The web site is pretty cool. You can look up who represents you on the federal and state level and learn about them. Voting record, Finance stuff, interest group ratings and such.

www.vote-smart.org

Benefits and the lack of benefits

AR is throwing a benefit show for her sister who has been diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. Her sister has big medical bills to contend with and hopefully this will help. The bands donate their performances and get more exposure, the bar gets customers, the crowd gets to see a cool show and give a little money to help someone they may or may not know who is in need. When it works, it works out well.

I used to see lots flyers for benefits for the well-known causes: Habitat for Humanity, Animal Shelters, benefits against AIDS. Over this past year I have started seeing more flyers for benefits for individuals, often for people who can't pay their medical expenses. It is nice to know that these people have friends who want to help them. It is sad to think that they are in such a vulnerable position. It is a moment to be grateful for having a job with benefits and wonder what happens to people who don't have jobs, benefits, family, or friends to raise money on their behalf.

I guess this is what conservatives want instead of taxation and government agencies. If locals think something is important they can come together and raise resources for it. It would become clear what the priorities of a community are. If you can't attract volunteers and you can't raise money, your cause must not be so urgent.

Still some important things require resources beyond what individuals in a community can offer. I think it would take lots and lots of rock shows to raise money for a library or a school or a bridge.

And it seems wrong to have a woman's life hang in the balance of whether or not people come to a rock show.

The Uses of Post-it's

I was walking by a parked compact car today and noticed that it had bright blue post-it's stuck all over it. One said "Hello, my name is Kim-Chi-Cha." And then next said "Zoom Zoom!"
Had me a good laugh.

short term stress reliever

I got freaked out and overwhelmed today.

To break that mode, I tried shouting and throwing things. (Yes, I am three.) It made things worse. I got more worked up.

So I started walking down residential streets enumerating aloud the things that I hate: getting parking tickets, bureacracy, cilantro, people who don't wait their turn at 4-way stops .... Never lingering just enumerating with each step.

After a while I ran out of personal hatreds and I started listing things that my friends hate. From there it went to things I have heard strangers say that they hate and things I could envision being hateful. I walked through hate, dislike, annoyance, irritation, distastefullness, arbitrary personal preferences and kept walking until I reached ridiculous. I started to laugh.

I'm sure it is healthier to meditate, but who can sit still for that long?

Reading Lolita in Tehran

"I don't know why people who are better off always think that those less fortunate than themselves don't want to have the good things - that they don't want to listen to good music, eat good food or read Henry James." Razieh in Reading Lolita in Tehran

I read "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi this past week. This book is more than beautiful. This book is food. This book is bread. It will feed you.

Azar Nafisi is an Iranian woman, a teacher, and a scholar of Western literature. Her book begins with the class she taught out of her home after being expelled from the University of Tehran, the class to which the book title refers. A class of seven women who met every Thursday to read and discuss the relation between fiction and reality. Her reality is a world in which reading The Great Gatsby is controversial and Henry James stirs people to anger. A world in which people roam the streets punishing the suggestion of impropriety. A world in which keeping your soul together is a daily struggle against cruelty.

From here it expands into a kaleidoscope of memories of reading, of teaching, of revolution, of living in an Islamic republic, of living through war, of living under the veil, of oppression, of fear, of courage, of a magician.

She believes that the soul survives evil and is restored "through love and imagination."
Reading Henry James is not superfluous to life. Reading Henry James is at the core of what makes life worth living, reading Henry James is part of how we retain our empathy, our compassion, our humanity.

Her writing is visual and splashed with color in a way that I would like to emulate. My world is far too reductive and I am an unrepentant list-er.

I cannot do this book justice. I can only recommend that you pick it up. This book is food. It is bread. It will feed you.

Cerberus Staffs the Show

The Dead Like Dallas show had to get moved to a new location this past Thursday. Z agreed to have it in his basement and I worked the door. Which means I stood at the back door, stamped hands, and collected money from punks and people who like melodic hardcore. I passed them through the door and closed it behind them. They walked through a long narrow hallway down the stairs into a tiny basement filled with unholy noise, red lights, and a teeming, sweating, thrashing mass of people.

Later I couldn't shake the feeling that I was Cerberus that night.

"Cerberus - Cerberos - Kerberos
Three Headed Hound of Hades  

The three-headed, serpent-tailed dog Cerberus [...]
Cerberus was a fierce, pitiless, flesh-eating watchdog, stationed by the River Styx, from which post he would keep the living from entering the land of the dead. Even the gods feared Cerberus...."
from http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_cerberus.htm

Getting old

It drives me crazy to see 22 year-olds go on about how they are getting old. To my mind, if you don't sigh a lot, you don't grunt when you sit down, and you don't grunt when you get up
... You are not old.

I am wrong to cast the stone. I moan about getting old. I am trying to quit. If I am bitching about being old now and I live long enough to need walker and a hearing aid, I will have wasted a lot of my life force bitching about the inevitable.

I am at the point where
- I have visible grey hair
- the smile lines don't go away when I'm done with the happy face
- a stiff night of drinking causes immense pain for much of the next day
- the kid who bags my groceries calls me "Ma'am."
- recovering from an all-nighter takes two days of good sleep
- excessively greasy foods makes me queasy
- I am at least as passionate about buying bed linens as the latest "It" band's CD ... if not more
- I refrain from chatting up 20 year old boys with wallet chains
- I go places and the music is too loud

Time passes and we change. We grow. We age. We die. This is how it is.

There is a day to day generational contrast to my existence. I live in a college town. I walk down the street and am surrounded by beautiful youth, people who are at a minimum ten years younger than me. Sometimes I wonder what I have done with that time, what I have gained, and if I have learned anything worthwhile.

Still, I would not go back. I have clear memories of the mess I was. Times has freed me from things that used to plague me, freed me to become a different kind of mess.

Grad School:

1% inspiration
49% perspiration
50% desperation

The question of conflict

When I was in the 7th grade on a day when we were't diagramming sentences my english teacher said something about themes in fiction. She said that every story has a conflict to be resolved.

Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Society
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Machine
Man vs. Self

Conflict is at the heart of a story. It motivates the characters and drives the story from point A to point B.

Conflicts in my life are banal

Girl vs. Alarm clock
Girl vs. Cat
Girl vs. Clutter
Girl vs. Parking meter
Girl vs. Apathy
Girl vs. Writer's block
Girl vs. Microsoft product
Girl vs. Twinkie

I have reached an age where I meet people my age that are divorced.

I breathe a sigh of relief that I've never been divorced.
But this is not a virtue, I am not married.
It is something of which I know nothing.

"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together" - Paul Simon

What brings a person entwine her life with that of another?

I am in awe of such fearlessness.

webcomics and windex

I wake up in the afternoon and tell myself "Today I will not read any webcomics."
And then a few hours later I am wondering:
What's happening to Ariel at www.queenofwands.net ?
Has Aubrey beaten anyone else up at www.somethingpositive.net?
Is there a new journal comic entry at www.keaner.net/journal.html?

And there I am reading webcomics. Following links to other webcomics. *guilt*
Of course I have to take time and read the whole archive... *more guilt*

The first journal comic I encountered was the journal comic by Drew Weing www.drewweing.com/journalcomic. I was blown away. Wow. It was funny and touching and real. In his hands the ordinary moments of a life became unspeakably beautiful. It made me feel less alone in the world.

I have this idea - that everyone else's life is like a windex commercial - "Put on a Windex Shine" - that everyone else in the world goes to sleep at a decent hour, flosses regularly, gets plenty of fiber, and sends their Christmas cards out the day after Thanksgiving - that remembering to get the recyling bin to the curb on the right day and eating square meals are a prerequisite to a virtuous life. Sometimes I think it is the secret to happiness. If I did the daily stuff I'm supposed to, my life would be a windex commercial and I would be virtuous and happy.

I tried it once. I cleaned my room, I flossed, ate semi-balanced meals, mailed in my warranty forms, and read the fine print on official documents that came in the mail. It sucked. It was nothing like an windex commercial. It's what grown ups do though. Right? Whether it's fun of not.

The N word

This weekend I encountered the word nigger twice. I have not heard a person say that in conversation (except in the media) in years. It is an ugly hateful word. It is much on my mind right now. I cannot bring myself to type it again. So ironically I am writing about it while tap dancing around the word itself.

J insists that N is a word that was first used to refer to Irish immigrants in this country and that the term was used in reference to black people later. It seems unlikely. In the dictionary the primary definition refers to black people or dark skinned people. There is a dictionary entry where N is "Used as a disparaging term for a member of any socially, economically, or politically deprived group of people." Which at one time the Irish in the U.S. were. Still, I'm pretty sure that it's been decades since the last time an Irish American was called a N.

But for the most part N refers to black people.

Chuck D had a rant in which he insists that N is not a term of love. It is a word whose meaning and history is tied to slavery and hatred. A few hip-hop albums are not going to change that so quickly. He thinks it will never be a word of love.

His whole rant on this got me thinking about the scene in "Pulp Fiction" in which Ving Rhames character asks Bruce Willis' character "Are you my N-----?" It is a scene in which a white man is expected to tell his black boss that he is. It is not a term used by equals. In this scene the colors of the roles are reversed. And it is still a word of subjugation. Like the concept of being someone's bitch as opposed to being a bitch.

As a child when I heard white kids refer to a black person as a N, I got angry and confronted them about it. They would always insist that they were not referring to all black people. There were nice black people who they liked and there were others that behaved like N's and should be referred to in such a matter. Interestingly, Chuck D used the word cracker to refer to a particular white person in the same way. He said that here were some white people who behaved in a certain way and that was best described as being a cracker.

This is a race trap. Cracker and N are two words that are deeply steeped in racial identification and a racist history. If a person is ignorant, or rude, or despicable, or racist, or insulting these are decisions that he/she has made as an individual about what to think, what to say, and how to act. If a person is rude what matters more the color or the behavior?

Skin color you cannot change. Behavior and point of view you can. This is the hope of humanity.

Chuck D is member of Public Enemy

If you get the chance to hear him speak,
Take it.
If you are looking for someone to give a talk,
Invite him.

I love Charlie Rose

If I could have anyone's job I would want to do the Charlie Rose show. And do it exactly the way he does it.

Wynton Marsalis said on Charlie Rose Tuesday:
"The Sound is the foundation. The sound is your identity. Before the sound is the breath and the breath is like the thought and the sound is like the word. So when you purify the breath you purify the sound - for wind players 'cause we breathe. *inhales* *exhales* Sometimes I'll be teachin' class and I can tell that a kid - before they even play I just hear the breath
*shakes head smiling* *waves hand*
oh no no no the breath is not right. You purify the breath. You purify the thought and to get deeper in the sound and you can get more nuances and colors and shadings in the sound."

It's true for singers too. You think the note - hear it inside your head. Take a breath and you let the note out with the air. In that act you shape the sound in our case with the word.

He talked about jazz the meaning and the mission and the culture of jazz. And strangely, I realized while listening to him helped me to realize the value and meaning of a scientific education.

Chuck D is a member of Public Enemy, not Run DMC

Five hours of sleep two nights in a row - not good.

Damn insomnia.

Can't think, can't speak, can't function, can't sleep.
I am all brainstem.

christian rock - the lamb in wolf's clothing

*snort* I have problems.

categorical imperatives

Writing about music I can't find good comparisions or categories for the tunes because I am
radio-grown and don't have that hipster background. Can't tell hardcore from punk from crustcore from thrash. How do we communicate without a common language? Labels and more labels.

The Postal Service

"I am thinking it's a sign
that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images
and when we kiss they're perfectly aligned."
-The Postal Service

It's a new wave/synthpop revival. That damn Ben Gibbard. I bought the album "Give Up" and it's entirely charming. It has a guileless, ingenuous quality. The bouyancy of Jimmy Tamborello's programming keeps things moving and expansive which without undercutting the sensitive guy lyrical content.

I grew up in the 80's. I am a sucker for this crap.

Check out Menthol. They do up the new wave revival dammy fine, kid!