Tennessean Remix

                                               

Jessi Colter Song

MTC Cronin Poem

Inevitability

Everything fails.
So why bother calling it that.
It doesn't distinguish anything.
Why bother when everyone bothers.
Except for a few.
They succeed at failing before the rest.
(They know what to call it.
(And don't bother doing so.))
Success is inevitable.

Four Hundred Children and a Crop In The Field

Dancing With My Self-Esteem

“The advent of music videos as a significant factor in popular music, more than any other cause, created a new metal hairstyle. This second style is still long, but it is cut in a shag or layered manner . Moreover it is styled after each washing with mousse and blowdryers. The new style has not supplanted the old one, but has been adopted mainly by metal audiences and artists that favor lite metal and by those classic metal artists with wide appeal. Long hair has reference not only to a prior subculture but to distinctive body movements, which are a functional alternative to dancing. Youth music, in particular, accords danceability high importance, as evidenced by 1950’s rock and roll, the dance-craze songs of the 1960’s, such as “the locomotion” , “twist” and “monkey” and disco and punk music in the 1970s. 

Dancing is alien to heavy metal for two basic reasons. One is the continuation of the tradition of the youth counterculture. The audience for psychedelic music and for folk-inspired political protest songs listened while seated, to better concentrate on the lyrics. Second, dance is understood in the modern West as an erotic activity. As a masculinist and overwhelmingly masculine grouping with an extreme heterosexualist ideology, the heavy metal subculture stresses male-bonding, not male-female pairing. Thus, it did not appropriate dance as it had been traditionally understood. It also could not refine dancing as the punks did by making it an individual rather than dyadic activity, because of its valorization of community. Yet heavy metal music is based on a strong, regular beat that calls for the movement from the body. One might sit still for folk or psychedelic music, but only the motor-impaired or those who are extremely repressed will not move to the sound of heavy metal songs.

The solution to the problem of body movement was to create a code of gestural response to the music that could be shared in common. One of the two primary gestures is the arm thrust, usually a sign of appreciation but also used to keep time with the rhythm. The other primary gesture, called headbanging, involves a downward thrust of the head with a gentler upthrust. The move is distinctive enough to metal to serve, by metonymy as a designation of the metal audience: “headbangers” ….Individualizing the purchased t-shirt is a frequent practice, particularly by ripping off the sleeves, which is often done in public after purchasing a new shirt….A distinctive demeanor and expression are also nurtured in the metal subculture. The familiar insult that metal fans are “slack-jawed”, evincing a look of dull stupidity, needs to be examined. In part it is an accurate characterization of the faces of those emerging from a heavy metal concert, but it could also describe anyone who has just spent several hours enjoying ecstatic physical activity. The look also reflects the impact of the drugs (downers) and beer consumed by metal fans…the slack-jawed look is neither indifferent or alert. It often accompanies the self-described state of being “wasted”. If you are wasted, you are not available to the everyday world, nor are you setting an example for it. You are simply out of it. The other key expression of the member of the metal subculture, the eager look of the ardent enthusiast, is only for insiders. This face is put on not only at concerts, but while listening to favorite songs or even talking about admired artists or their work. Parents, teachers and the world in general are not privy to this second expression."

-(Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal, 1990)

Desecularization of Nothingness

Mod Cons

 http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

http://chronicle.com/article/Inherently-Violent-Why/125023/

http://www.badrepublicans.com/conservatives-always-wrong.html

hhttp://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Movement_Conservatism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjmjqlOPd6A&feature=player_embedded

Local Trio Pushes Taxonomic Drive to it's Constitutive Limit

Kingsley Amis Poem

Nothing to Fear

All fixed: early arrival at the flat
 Lent by a friend, whose note says Lucky sod;
 Drinks on the tray, the cover-story pat
 And quite uncheckable; her husband off
 Somewhere with all the kids till six o'clock
 (Which ought to be quite long enough);
 And all worth while: face really beautiful,
 Good legs and hips, and as for breasts - my God.
 What about guilt, compunction and such stuff?
 I've had my fill of all that cock;
 It'll wear off as usual.

 Yes, all fixed. Then why this slight trembling;
 Dry mouth, quick pulse rate, sweaty hands,
 As though she were the first? No, not impatience,
 Nor fear of failure, thank you, Jack.
 Beauty, they tell me is a dangerous thing,
 Whose touch will burn, but I'm asbestos, see?
 All worth while - it's a dead coincidence
 That sitting here, a bag of glands
 Turned up to concert pitch, I seem to sense
 A different style of caller at my back,
 As cold as ice, but just as set on me.


http://www.drunkard.com/issues/08_05/0805_kingsley.htm

Keeping It Inconclusive

Dave Hickey on Hank Williams' Phrasing:
http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=9568

Big Black Tour Diary:
http://www.petdance.com/actionpark/bigblack/tourdiary/

We Live a Long Long Time to Get Old:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVTNcZZ1z98&feature=related

That's Agritainment!

http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/2011/07/11/country-boys-are-wearing-out-calling-cards/

Rapublicans:
http://rotatestockforfreshness.com/rapublicans/

Rustic Hinge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n24GK7_vxg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFMMj6wsvIY&feature=related

Country Fuzz Spectacular:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/11/country-fuzz-sp.htmll

3 Short BBC Docs: The Span/ Val Lambert/
Gene Vincent:
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/07/between_the_gutter_and_the_sta.html

Capitalist Realism

                               "Who is in charge of the clattering train?
                              The axles creak and the couplings strain,
                            and the pace is hot and the points are near,
                             and sleep hath deadened the driver's ear,
                           and the signals flash through the night in vain.
                            For death is in charge of the clattering train."

               http://www.emule.com/2poetry/phorum/read.php?7,153503

Happy Birthday to my Dear Wife Cassie Marie Berman, b. August 20, 1975

Ancient Technophobia

The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy
My belly was my sundial - one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when was 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can't fall to until the sun gives me leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials
The greatest part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.

-fragment by Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254 BC - 184 BC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plautus

Didion on Gingrich

"...What has lent Mr. Gingrich’s written and spoken work, or, as he calls it, his “teaching,” the casual semblance of being based on some plain-spoken substance, some rough-hewn horse sense, is that most of what he says has reached us in outline form, with topic points capitalized and systematically, if inappositely, numbered. There were “Seven key aspects” and “Nine vision-level principles” of “Personal Strength” (Pillar Two of American Civilization), there were “Five core principles” of “Quality as Defined by Deming” (Pillar Five), there were “Three Big Concepts” of “Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (Pillar Three). There were also, still under Pillar Three, “Five Enemies of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (“Bureaucracy,” “Credentialing,” “Taxation,” “Litigation,” and “Regulation”), which would have been identical to Pillar Four’s “Seven welfare state cripplers of progress” had the latter not folded in “Centralization,” “Anti-progress Cultural Attitude,” and “Ignorance.”

In Window of Opportunity, Mr. Gingrich advised us that “the great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts,” and offered “five simple steps to a bold future.” On the health-care question, Mr. Gingrich posited “eight areas of necessary change.” On the issue of arms control, he saw “seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons.” Down a few paragraphs the seven imperatives gave way to “two initiatives,” then to “three broad strategic options for the next generation,” and finally, within the scan of the eye, to “six realistic goals which would increase our children’s chances of living in a world without nuclear war.”

“Outlining” or “listing” remains a favored analytical technique among the management and motivational professionals whose approach Mr. Gingrich has so messianically adopted (balancing the budget and “finding a way to truly replace the current welfare state with an opportunity society” could both be done by the year 2002, he advised the Congress on the occasion of his swearing-in as Speaker, “if we apply the principles of Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker”); yet few of his own “areas” and “imperatives” and “initiatives,” his “steps” and “options” and “goals,” actually advance, on examination, the discourse..."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/aug/10/the-teachings-of-speaker-gingrich/

Newt on himself: "There's a large part of me that is four years old. I wake up in the morning and I know that somewhere there's a cookie. I don't know where it is but I know it's mine and I have to go find it. That's how I live my life. My life is amazingly filled with fun."
http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910

CIA Sex Slaves in Music City

"...CIA operative country music entertainer Boxcar Willie burst onto the country music scene after an ad campaign of high tech hypnotically persuasive produced television commercials that strategically made him an overnight, sensation and "star". The country music industry's Freedom Train needed a conductor to lead the industry and fans to Branson, Missouri, and Boxcar Willie was placed in the driver's seat.
I had much contact with Boxcar Willie personally since my government sponsored cocaine runs often coincided and intermeshed with his. But I never knew Boxcar Willie as well as my daughter, Kelly, knew him. Kelly has named Boxcar Willie as one of her primary sexual abusers in three different mental institutions, and has voiced frustration at the lack of justice. "Why am I the one locked up while my abusers remain free?" she constantly pleads. I assure her I am doing all I can to blow the whistle on Boxcar Willie for hex, and expose his role in transferring the country music industry to close proximity of the Lampe, Missouri CIA cocaine operation as outlined by Bill Clinton."