( 1:25 AM )
Lies
Alright - I've stayed away from the whole Iraq war thing for long enough. I just read that Defense Department scumbag Paul Wolfowitz admitted in a Vanity Fair interview that they more or less used "weapons of mass destruction" as a pretense to attack Iraq because it was the one issue everyone could agree on using to justify the attack. Well moron, using a lie to justify a war is just plain evil in my book. Does anyone remember that President Johnson used the phony Gulf of Tonkin attacks to justify his escalation of the war in Vietnam?
I guess I'm naive to be so astonished by this, but it's hard for me to believe that the head of our government continuously lied about the reasons for this war and no one cares. No weapons of mass destruction? So what. Saddam was no threat to his neighbors or to us? Big deal. No affiliation to Al Qaeda? He got what was coming to him.
Sorry, but this is insane to me. Right now I hope Bush starts another war so his rich business cronies can go in and clean up the mess for massive profits. But even more than that, I hope that everyone who supports this criminal loses someone they love in his next little war. Maybe they'll finally take a minute to think about why that person is gone as they're standing over the lost loved one's grave.
( 2:16 AM )
New York, New York
Um, first off, it's been a weird kind of month. Haven't much felt like writing, so I really haven't been. But I want to and decided to read my fellow 2Wallers' blogs for inspiration. And the rants on New York "Fuckin'" City somehow inspired me.
I'm an Ohioan in my blood, and I lost four years of my life in Los Angeles before moving to the Big Apple. So I've got a vibe on the nice Midwestern life, the almost retarded slow pace of LA life, and the manic fast pace of the East Coast. And frankly, at some point when the time is right, I want to get back to that middle-American lifestyle.
Now even though I know New Yorkers can be humongous a-holes, I still believe that 9 out of 10 are pretty nice people. It's just that #10 is so loud and obnoxious that that's what gets set in people's minds as the standard New Yorker. Trust me on this.
( 2:24 PM )
Cream (sha-boogie-bop)
A couple of nights ago I was doing a search (excuse the detour here, but why do we even call it a search anymore? We've got about 9 interns/fact checkers at our office and at any given time half of their monitors are showing Google. So let me rephrase...), I mean, Googling "Detroit rock music." See, I have this theory that Detroit is the next "new" rock'n'roll Mecca simply because 2 acts - Brendan Benson and the White Stripes - have it in common, and because of the "old" Detroit's influence on modern rock (via the Stooges, MC5, and maybe Mitch Ryder) on the likes of the Hives, Vines and my new faves the Flaming Sideburns. Anyway, my search yielded 2 striking results. The first was a couple of compilations that I hope to check out to see if I can offer any proof of this theorum. But the other was a link to what I thought was the defunct Creem magazine.
You see, Creem was the first magazine I ever subscribed to. While my brother was reading Sports Illustrated and my parents were flipping through Time, I was up in my bedroom laughing out loud and often nodding my head in agreement with the passages in Creem. To this day, I think Creem was the best rock mag ever. There's really no better word than irreverent to describe it. Creem would give a band an amazing record review, then trash them in interviews. Nothing was sacred, and irony and stupidity were highly valued in its pages. Plus they had great taste and helped turn me on to many bands I'd never heard of. But best of all they never took rock'n'roll too seriously. They were always looking for the humor and absurdity of it all, and when it comes to rock, that's always easy to find.
I also have to blame Creem for dragging me down into the insipid argument 'who's better Led Zeppelin or the Clash?’ Stupid me was a metal kid back then, so I definitely sided with the chaps who had chops rather than the dudes with 'tude. Which ended up being a huge mistake because I was so against “the only band that matters” moniker that the Clash had that I refused to listen to them until the early ‘80s? My loss. But at least Creem refused to choose sides because stories on Elvis Costello ran side by side with a Bob Seger feature. So they always managed to present the whole picture.
Creem was such a heavy influence on me that I decided to study magazine journalism in the hopes of writing for them one day. Somewhere in my junior year when I found out how much music scribes made did I decide to get a real job. But that's how much they influenced my thinking. So I was very pleased to find that they're back in action with one of their original photographers publishing them now. Although rock's not as interesting now as it was then, hopefully they'll bring that old sensibility to their coverage. If so, and they're desperate for writers, maybe I can bring my career path full circle. Hmmmm....
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