Bane's secret genius.

Holy shit, did Bane actually write a song about Texas Hold-'Em poker? An actual, first-person narrative song about playing Texas Hold-'Em poker? And it doesn't rhyme? And it's about Texas Hold-'Em poker?
Thank you, Bane, for writing a song that finally settles the argument of, "What is the worst hardcore song ever?" Now that we all have that to agree on, I'm sure scene unity is right around the corner.

Insane.

One of my favorite things right now is the slogan of the Revolutionary Communist Four Speaking Tour, “It’s Way Past Time to Throw Off the Chains of Oppression and Get With the Emancipators of History!”, a slogan whose totally awesome "Goddmamn it already," cranky vibe more than makes up for the fact that it is way too bulky and unwieldy to be a slogan that anyone will actually ever use. The other one of my favorite things right now is the Campo de Montalban cow/goat/sheep cheese. Imagine a shit-tight 3-on-3 street ball team, where each of the members is one of the type of milks that go into Campo de Montalban, your pallet is represented by the court, and the basketball is flavorfulness and when you eat some of it it's like all three of them are doing insane backwards slam dunks at the same time. Serious.

Farm Aid: the quickest of recaps

The only part of FarmAid that was better than Jeff Tweedy dropping two curse words and a blunt critique of the Bush administration into probably the weirdest live music set CMT has ever broadcast was when John Mellencamp dropped one curse word and a blunt critique of the Bush administration into a live CMT broadcast dudes all over the country had been sitting on their couch waiting for all day. If you're talking strictly the best musical moment, it was the couple of seconds connecting the moment I realized that the guy backing Neil Young up on guitar was Willie Nelson and the moment I realized that Emmylou Harris was walking onstage to join them. I was ensconced in the VIP luxury of the Sun-Times box seats, at approximately the height and angle relative to the stage that you would expect from an out-of-body experience.

"Sales of shit-cheap vodka soar...clips at the top of the hour"

There are two old guys downtown who stand on opposite sides of the street holding signs to warn passing tourists about the powers of Soviet mind control on one corner and, I forget, something like the evils of the Catholic church on the other. Usually the only reaction that they get from passersby are the kind of sarcastic laughs and pointing fingers that any nutbag wearing a sandwich board outlining the structure of the secret ruling class should expect when he goes out in public, but I bet in the coming weeks both of them will get at least a few people coming up, saying, "Jesus, do you know something? Anything? What the fuck is going on?"

A sampling of headlines from CNN.com as of 3 AM CDT:

"Poll shows Katrina's racial divide"
"Police find 8 Ohio kids locked in cages"
"Baby born to brain-dead woman dies"
"Police: NYC firefighter assaults immigrant"
"Chimps killed after zoo escape"

And that's just the front page.
I'm not looking at CNN.com again for another week. Fuck it, I'm not going to look at shit, I'm going to keep my eyes closed so tight that they bleed for the next week and a half because if I see so much as an empty bag of Doritos in the gutter I'm going to lose my shit in a way that could only be described as "completely."
You gotta be at least a little envious of those chimps, though. At least they could reach out and touch the bars they were locked behind, and at least they could get get away from them for a minute of unimaginable freedom before the zookeeper capped them down. Imagine how those minutes must have felt...

Cont'd

A non-specific response to the situation, but TVOTR keeps me believing in the possibility of actual voices being raised in actual protest in actual new and novel ways, theirs being a way that uses the pulse and reverb of a Peter Gabriel song to explore that space where liberal minds go when they're pushed too far by anger and start getting Manson-y. Bonus: the lyrics read like a harDCore song except probably for the part about dosing the pigs with acid.

Responses.

Imagine a blog devoted entirely to excuses why the blogger couldn't update...
The thing is, I got nothing. Everything that could be said about Katrina has been said better than I could, and writing about anything else feels cheap. I was at the bus stop today reading Spin's article on Franz Ferdinand and could barely hold in the, "Who cares?" that I wanted to yell out when I came face to face with the reality of where the drunken antics of rock semi-stars really fits in the eschelons of worldly importance. Consider my life and the would-be rock semi-star antics that it's based on and understand the worldshakingness of that realization. Consider a generation raised in these solipsistic decades under fallen-out hippies and the media empire they've built, and understand how the men who run this country can create this most fecund ground for a revolution without worry, because that revolution simply will not come. Understand how the task of processing tragedy via art will fall yet again into the wrinkling hands of Don Henley, how our demographic's yelps of outrage will inspire nothing more than another night of attempted dancefloor hookups, remixed and unimportant. We've embraced and recombined the aesthetics of all the most revolutionary musical movements since 1962 and shorn them of their revolutionary power by thinking the aesthetics alone can communicate our outrage, but our songs don't dare, don't confront, and end up little more than advertisements for hairstyles. For the first time in my life I kind of respect Conor Oberst and the yelps of outrage that he's been putting on wax, because crafting articulate lines about inarticulate frustration is unfashionable and great. Yelling shit of importance out into the cavernous echo chamber of American youth apathy is worth something, even if, in the end, it does about as much good as the "No War" button that's holding up my bedroom curtain.
What we need is an anthem. Is there going to be a "Kent, Ohio" for every black man whose liberation at the hands of soldiers came by a bullet instead of a seat on a bus? For every black woman raped in the essential hours wasted by uncaring, powerful men? The refugees being sent to detainment camps in Oklahoma, finally on paper as second-class citizens instead of just informally, will they have a song? I will try to write one for them, but I am not a great artist. I'm not sure that anyone else right now is either.

The Mathematics of the Politics of Ecstasy

Just finished the Perfect Panther record. For I think the first time I've made a record without a song about hating myself. The closest is a bit of self-recrimination about not being more active in promoting feminism, I guess, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just feeling better about myself. Or maybe my disliking certain people has finally outweighed my own self-dislike, because it has proportionally, an equal amount of diss songs as the last 50 Cent record, but with several hundred percent more parts that sound like we've been listening to more Nick Cave than we actually had.