More posts at other people's blogs

So, I watched this movie, "Agora". It gave me a lot to think about. My friend, Ish, at The Cahokian, wrote about the movie. I liked what he had to say.

I am an occasional communicant in the Episcopal Church. I don't talk about my religion much. I figure my behavior will say more than my words. Besides, I don't feel like answering a bunch of questions. I don't have good answers for all of them. I don't believe Jesus rode dinosaurs. I do think evolution is a perfectly sound scientific idea. I don't think it's a very good creation myth. I do believe women have every right to choose in matters concerning their own bodies. I can't justify the Spanish Inquisition. I don't think there's an invisible old white man in the sky who hates us and punishes us. I do favor secular society and the separation of church and state. I am afraid of the Christian Right. I do think they are fascists.

As usual, I save my best stuff for other people's blogs. Here's my first impressions after reading Ish's comments on "Agora":

"I'm familiar with Hypatia's story and I want to see this film. As one of your Christian friends I do have to jump in with something. I wasn't in Alexandria so I don't know for sure, but Roman Paganism was not kind, open minded or nature loving. I think Alexandria's brutal Christian mobs had more in common with Paris's brutal mobs during the French Revolution than with the mobs that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are threatening to unleash. I think many of the violent and intolerant Christians imagined, falsely, that they had been empowered by Rome's decision to make Christianity the state religion. I think it was Reinhold Niebhur who said "Religion is very good in the hands of good people and very bad in the hands of bad people."
Still trying to take in the history of Christianity and relate it to Christ's ministry. I haven't gotten very far."

So, I was happy when I got ahold of a rental copy of "Agora". Here's what I wrote to Ish after seeing the film:

"I got a chance to see Agora. Wow. A great film that asks more questions than it answers. Here's a question for you. Haven't you ever wanted to smash all of their idols? Haven't you ever despised the long thoughtful moments that make up the life of Hypatia, knowing that every leisurely moment was purchased with years of suffering by a slave? Haven't you ever been willing to see the whole body of their knowledge smashed and burned, knowing that their universities are monuments to oppression and cruelty?
I know I've felt that way more than a few times. What would it look like if I was allowed to act on my anger? Could I stop myself at some decent moment and only destroy what needs to be destroyed?
I know that I pray in a church that was built by former Confederate generals who were hoping to recreate the decadent morality of the southern elite in a California valley. I know that the head of my church, The Archbishop Of Canterbury, presides over the church from Lambeth Palace, a palace built with profits made in the gigantic slave plantations of the Caribbean. I know that millions of young women were worked to early deaths to pay for that splendid building.
How much of this am I willing to see destroyed? If I was given free rein to destroy all that I despise what would prevent me from becoming a monster?
I suppose the good news is that I am not likely to have to answer those questions in real life. I lead a quiet, pleasant life paid for, in part, by the suffering of countless others.
I remember when we were young radicals, people from other tendencies would criticize us for refusing to compromise with reformists and labor bureaucrats. We were afraid to dirty our hands is what they said. Is that idealistic avoidance nothing more than privilege? What if saving your soul is the best you can hope for; knowing that you've betrayed your ideals in the endless battles of life?
Damn, too much to think about. I've got errands to run."

Poetry is for assholes and I know I'm one. Who the fuck can afford the luxury of philosophy? Who the fuck can do without it? Please, no glib replies.

I know I've worked up a pretty good ukulele version of "There Ain't Nothin' To Do" by The Dead Boys.

Oh hell, Happy new year.

Do people still come here? It seems they do. I keep meaning to post something, really I do. I'll try again in 2011. Dope City Free Press has been on a hell of a roll. Tim's blog, Poop In The Pipes, is great. Daisy Deadhead at Daisy's Dead Air is always interesting. Brown Femi Power will always be a hero to me. Nazz Nomad continues to rattle his sword at the world. Brother Ib at Siblingshot In The Bleachers is back with a new addition to his household. The Cahokian has emerged as one of my big fave blogs. Princess Sparkle Pony is swell as ever. Doc 40 is now broadcasting from Brighton, England. Civic Center continues to expose me to high culture in my own town. Blogging is not as dead as some people would have it.

So I'm listening to Gospel music and Cotton mill music and reading Chris Hedges.

Honest, I'll try and talk about it soon.

Here's Cheetah Chrome, by the banks of the Wabash in my old Indiana home. He's playing with some old friends and acquaintances. That Frankie Camaro was a rockin' motherfucker.



Happy New Year everyone.

Further inspiration from Tim

For a while I inspected the welds on these big ass diesel crank cases for locomotives and tug boats.

Tim has got a pretty good blog called Poop In The Pipes. He posted something about working in a factory that made me think about my last factory job. I suppose I mourn the passing of the industrial economy but not enough to wish I was working in a factory. The money was good. I used to get fired a couple of times a month. The foreman would yell, "Your ass is fired! Get the hell out of here!"

I'd stand there and say, "I'm not going anywhere till I talk to my union representative." Then I'd stand around and wait for the shop steward.

The steward would show up and ask me what was going on and I'd tell him I hadn't been to work for three days and I hadn't called in sick. I didn't have a phone and I didn't like driving to the phone booth to call in sick. He'd say, "That's bullshit. You don't have to call in sick till the fourth day." Then he'd go to the foreman and say, "Don't be an asshole. This man needs his job. If you fire him you'll be violating the contract."

The foreman would say, "Yeah, but it's the third time he's pulled that shit this month." This was true. I did not have much of a work ethic. Sometimes I'd get "sick" on Monday and Tuesday, come to work on Wednesday, think better of it and get "sick" all over again Thursday and Friday. I kept that up for a couple of years until someone crashed into my car and put me out of work for a couple of months. That gave me some time to think. When I came back to work I didn't last long at all.

I posted the rest of the story as a comment at Tim's blog:

"My last factory job was a couple of miles from the nearest bar. I could punch out for lunch, drive the couple of miles, drink seven beers, eat a sandwich, drive back to the factory and punch in in exactly 30 minutes. The beers would make the floor feel pleasantly rubbery just as I was walking away from the time clock. I was worthless after lunch so I tried to do my work in the morning. By quitting time I was sober and feeling like shit.

That was in Chicago and it was a long time ago. The factory made parts for locomotives. The parts got assembled in a different factory so I never saw what exactly I was building parts for. I would fish parts out of bins, assemble them in jigs, weld them up and stack them in other bins.

One time one of the crane operators came to work drunk. His foreman told him to go home so he went back to his car and came back with a 30/30 rifle and started shooting out lights. Eventually he ran out of ammunition, someone took the gun away and the cops came. This all happened about 30 feet away from me but there were stacked up parts bins between us and it was so noisy that I didn't notice the gun shots.I didn't even know I hated that job until my foreman explained it to me. He said, "Look, I have a wife and two kids and a mortgage. I have to work here. You're young, you don't owe anybody anything and you're wasting your time here." Every time I think about that guy I could fucking kiss him. On the mouth."

Update- I should add that at first I was an enthusiastic worker at this job. I worked my days off and stuck around for overtime. It was only after I got overexposed to racist bosses and some creepy racist and anti semitic co workers that I started to get fed up. I decided I didn't want to get into management or to rise in the corporation. Then, without realizing it, I started to hate my trade and to just get tired of the whole thing. Like I said, it took a smart and good boss to explain me to myself.

Nobody has listened to this song since I posted it months ago. What's wrong with you people?

Go Out Smokin'- The Meat Purveyors (buy)

Where I stand on the anarchy question

From my friend, Tim: "The twelve step group model is the truest form of libertarian anarchy at work in the world today. No one is in charge, nothing can be changed without the informed consent of the people, it's free, you can leave when you want, you can come back when you want and, no one group is affiliated with any other. The entity has no opinion on anything other than their own business, anyone can join, all group politics are strictly internal and handled as such. Dues, fees and contributions of labor are all unenforced and voluntary." Be careful who you tell this to, they might not know they are involved in anarchy.

From John Ball: "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty."

Really, I'm not much of an anarchist but I'll stand by these two quotes.

A victory for gay hippies, latte drinkers, beatnik poets, pointy headed intellectuals and liberals. Also, a victory for a fine baseball team. I've had a real good time following the World Series and I'm enjoying this victory.

I was going to post "Till Victory" by Patti Smith but I bought it from iTunes and iTunes now claims that it owns all of the music that I bought from them and I am not allowed to burn those songs to CD or convert their format. Today the world series. Tomorrow we destroy the iTunes store. Wednesday we'll hang the last banker by the guts of the last Republican.

How about this instead?

I Left My Heart In San Francisco- Tony Bennett (buy)

Go Gay Hippies!

This guy got on my bus 15 years ago who turned out to be this guy I hadn't seen in 20 years. In the meantime he had acquired a soon to be ex wife and a sweet terribly serious little boy. We made friends again and the little boy grew up. Along the way, the kid developed a taste for alcohol and weed and pain pills and lies. He ended up pissing everybody off so bad that he checked into rehab at the strong suggestion of his entire family. He finally decided that maybe that wasn't such a bad idea and he's been sober for almost a year and a half. Somewhere in there he picked up a guitar and became a pretty good player. He gets a big kick out of the fact that his dad's old friend is sober and we hang out together on our own now. He's been saying we should get together and learn a song sometime and today was the day and this was the song.

It was funny for me because he can play all kind of weird jazz chords and he knows all of this music theory and he can improvise in keys that only dogs can hear but he did not know how to play a country and western waltz. I got to get him up to speed on 3/4 time and led him through the chord changes chanting 1-2-3/ 1-2-3.

He suggested that maybe it would be cool to try playing the song to some kind of speeded up ska beat. He thought that would make the song sound funny and not so serious. I had to explain to him that the song is already funny. Apparently he hadn't considered that possibility. I sang it to him in my best super sincere country western voice and he had to admit that maybe it was a funny song after all. He played me a really funny song he wrote about having sex with farm animals.

The hardest part of "Pardon Me" is the spoken word part. You have to sound like you are just talking casually but pace yourself so you say the last word just as the guitar plays a G chord. We just barely got that going when it was time to leave.

I dropped him back at his house just before the Giants game started. He said, "I really wanna see the San Francisco Gay Hippies beat the Texas Oil Assholes." It didn't happen tonight but it's nice to know that every Giants victory is a victory for gay hippies everywhere. I keep thinking that it's my imagination that the World Series is about politics but the TV kept showing that notorious asshole and murderer George Bush. I was watching the game in a taqueria for a while. Somebody said "Bush really looks like shit." Somebody else said, "Good". To me he looked pretty hung over.

I had a pretty good day. Go Gay Hippies!

Then there's this

This is as lovely a Bay Area moment as I have ever seen and I don't even like Journey.

I'm a fair weather newbie fan, so fucking what?

Nobody here but us Giants fans. Good to know that San Franciscans are still all about "fuck you".

I haven't really followed professional baseball since the Mets won the 1969 world series. I am really enjoying this world series though. After hearing, for years, that San Franciscans aren't really Americans, from tourists for chrissakes, it is a real pleasure to see George Bush's baseball team beaten by San Francisco. I know this makes me not a real fan plus how dare I confuse sports with politics? All of that. I don't care. This is fun. Texas fans are scandalized by Giant fans smoking weed in the stands? Personally I think that gay Giants fans should scandalize them worse by kissing in the stands. As Soupy Sales once said, "I'll kiss you between the strikes and you can kiss me between the balls." Sadly the series is moving to Arlington. I'm sure Arlington has a really nice Walmart and I'll just bet they have a really good TGIFridays too. As the Talking Heads once said, "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." Go Giants.

Apropos of nothing whatsoever, I really like The Thermals first ep. They have some other good stuff but this is the one for me.

No Culture Icons- The Thermals (Buy)

Posted elsewhere

Originally posted at John Shirley's Facebook page.
A work friend very earnestly explained to me that his wife did not understand his desire to get together with other people who are "interested in exploring anthropomorphic animal costumes". I about shrieked, "Holy shit! Are you a furrie?"
He started looking all serious and said, "Why? Is that a problem for you?"
I think his wife should restrict his computer privileges. This is a man who has already admitted to me that he has built his life around ideas he learned from Star Trek.
Moody-ESG (buy)

Why I write

So the other day I'm watching this interview with some guy I've never heard of. He says, "Writing is for people who like to be by themselves but also feel this need to communicate." That sums it up. I don't write much and I don't write for noble, world changing reasons. Sometimes I need to tell somebody something

A Perfumed Garden- The Television Personalities (buy)

Detroit in the '70's

Like I've said, all my best stuff gets posted elsewhere. A few days ago a friend sent me an article about Detroit. It set off this long reminiscence about life when I was 19 or 20 years old.

"I moved there 37 years ago and huge areas of the city were already abandoned. I used to live in one of the semi abandoned mansions near Indian Village. 13 of us were renting a 10 bedroom house with servants quarters and horse stables for something like $150 a month. It was as insanely dangerous as the South Bronx or Alphabet City (Back then) but cheap to live, tree lined and you could get a two day a week student job in the car factories for union wages. If you were lucky one of your two days was Saturday so your pay started at time and a half. For a while there I was even living on my earnings working one day a week at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue Assembly plant. It was the weirdest mixture of Industrial culture, apocalyptic urban collapse and '70's bohemianism.
Cheap rent, high wages but there were no grocery stores, drug stores or laundromats. You had to take a long bus ride to the suburbs to buy fresh vegetables or do your laundry and anything that wasn't left locked up with serious hard core locks would be missing when you got back. Everyone (except me and my friends) carried a gun and people got shot all the time. When I was living in a row house near downtown someone kicked in our back door while we were upstairs. We thought about going downstairs and then realized that who ever it was had heard us and they hadn't left. We figured he'd kill us if we went downstairs so we stood at the top of the stairs and cleared our throats until he left. (Ahem, ahem) There wasn't really anything to steal so he ended up loading a box with all of our groceries and stole the little radio that was our only source of music. Everything else had already been stolen earlier.
I find it amusing that some of the trendiest anarchist ideas being advocated by dreadlocked vegan trustafarians were originally developed by friends of mine in Detroit. They were mostly young autoworkers taking classes at the Harvard of the industrial proletariat, Wayne State University. I still sometimes hear from those guys and I don't think they're impressed with their followers.
A while ago I ran into one of my old radical roommates from those days, a (then) young Black guy who grew up in Harlem. Now he's a shop steward for the San Francisco City electrical inspectors. He's married to an old radical girl from back then. They own a house in an outer neighborhood in SF and talk about moving to the Sierras when they retire."

A little further reminiscing, My roommate Jim was a tall skinny hillbilly intellectual from some little town in upstate New York. He had a badass Mercury Cougar with alloy wheels and wide tires. He used to be a heroin addict. Then he was an auto worker. He said that factory work was like being a junkie. A year or two would go by and you couldn't remember anything but a couple of bad days and a couple of good days. All of the other days were the same. 

One morning we woke up and Jim's car was sitting in the alley without wheels or tires. The thieves had courteously left the car propped up on cinder blocks with a full tank of gas. We had already been robbed of our little radio and the house was so cold that turning on the furnace was more an act of defiance than a remedy for the cold. We gathered up our tiny collection of 8 tracks and went out to the car to get warm, listen to music and drink. We were having as much fun as we were capable of, even if we didn't know it. 

Below Your Means- Alice Cooper (buy)

He's In A Hurry (To Get Home To My Wife)

OK, So I decided not to post that song but I'm posting these two other heavies. This CD has a ton of great titles and a hell of a lot of great songs.

 Look, is anybody following my logic here? I don't listen to much "punk rock" and I  almost never post any "punk rock" songs here but I think most of what I post here is pretty much punk. Perhaps I am full of shit.

Then again, one of my favorite quotes is, "I used to think I was open minded but then I found out I just liked weird shit." Make of that what you will.

Pardon Me (I've Got Someone To Kill) - Johnny Paycheck (Buy)

It Won't Be Long (And I'll Be Hating You)- Johnny Paycheck (Buy) 

Paycheck was the most morbid hard core honky tonk guy on Earth. There's songs about nuclear destruction, songs about getting beat in bars, songs about cheating wives and songs about murder. It's the nuclear destruction thing that kind of pushes him over the top. I mean, most honky tonk songs are about self loathing and drama but you know...

I posting this in a hurry but I'd like to pause for clarification. No one has ever exactly defined hipster to my satisfaction but most people seem to agree that hipsters enjoy irony. I'm not a hipster. I like these songs.