Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

If there’s a rock and roll heaven, you know they’ve got a hell of a band

– The Righteous Brothers

Of course, rock stars dying is a regular news item any more and it’s not too surprising. The 60s were 60 years ago, so the musicians from that golden age are passing on at a fairly regular rate. All of them will be noted by their fans, and all of them deserve to be, but, to be honest, not all rock stars are, or were ever, equal.
Little Richard, who passed away today at the age of 87, was one of the greatest. He was an incredible performer, who gave it all he had. He was a larger than life personality, a primal force, a being of pure energy. I was surprised to read that he never had a number 1 hit, but everybody remembers Tutti Frutti, when he sang whop boppa lu bop ba lo bam boom.
This was back in the 50s, when rock was just getting started. It was the time of Elvis, and Buddy Holly. When The Beatles were playing in Hamburg, back when they were The Silver Beatles, probably before Ringo joined the group even, they played as the opening act for Little Richard, and he had a profound effect on their career.
He once said “In ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand” when Paul McCartney did that ‘Woooooo’, he got that from me,” and he was probably right.
His influence on the music we grew up with was dynamic, was electric, was a kick in the pants to everything that went before it.
He is gone now, but his music, and his spirit, will live forever.

When you go to an open mike poetry reading, as I frequently do (yes, I spell it mike because it rhymes with bike and hike, and it does not rhyme with tic, or Bic – fight me) you expect to hear some cringeworthy stuff. Nature of the game. Same when you go to karaoke, or to an open mike comedy night. But, when you are watching a standup comedy special on TV, you expect to hear somebody who knows how to tell a joke. These are professionals, after all.
But, I just watched a show called Degenerates on Netflix, and that was not the case. Interesting format, basically each episode a different comic, and a great theme song, but damn. Not one of them could get through a set without saying motherfucker, usually several times, all of the female comics talked obsessively about their vaginas, all of the black ones said nigger a lot, and only a handful of them were truly funny, or had any original take on the world at all. The dwarf was funny, but it was still very identity based. The ex-felon with the drug problem was maybe the funniest, but also the crudest, and his story about how he was thinking of committing suicide but then a girl offered to have sex with him and it saved his life was actually kind of touching, despite the graphic description of her very hairy vagina.
But, I guess in some ways I’m becoming more conservative in my old age. Not politically, hell to the no, but socially, and culturally, yeah.
Anyway, Netflix is great because there is just so damn much of it, so I adopted the expedient of listening to a comic and if I didn’t like them, I just dropped them and went ahead to the next episode, the next comic. Finished the series in two days, and did some other stuff, too.

Watched a sci-fi movie today, not a great one but worth watching on about day one million of quarantine. Actually, it was worth watching not because it was a great movie, but because I had some insights into the whole genre, as it was basically one cliche after another.
The idea was that there was a problem with the Earths outer core, the molten part had stopped moving and was just sitting there, so people with pacemakers were dying, flocks of birds were going crazy, and the space shuttle had to make an emergency landing in the Los Angeles river. There are certainly more beautiful rivers in the world, like any of them, but the Los Angeles river has probably appeared in more dystopian sci-fi than any other.
Anyway, they assembled a team of scientists to go down to the center of the Earth and fix the problem (with nukes, natch), and it included a humble college professor, a lady astronaut (and of course they were the two survivors), a jovial French scientist, the know it all celebrity scientist who everybody hated and almost wrecked the mission by panicking but eventually redeemed himself by dying, the eccentric black scientist who lived out in the desert and built the ‘ship’ which could take them down there, and the least significant guy, who was the first to die.
There was one scene, where college professor was explaining to the military brass what was happening by slicing open a piece of fruit, and he explained how the thin skin was the atmosphere, the pulp was the mantel, and the pit was the core, and I realized: this bit, this little bit right here, is the educational part, disguised as part of the action, and what makes it worthwhile to watch science fiction.
Because, unlike with most genres, you actually learn something.

Apparently the New York State Democratic primary is back on, and Bernie Sanders will be on the ballot. We have Andrew Yang to thank for that, he’s the one who took the fuckers on the New York board of elections to court. He’ll be on the ballot, too.
I urge all my friends and relatives in New York to take this last chance to vote for Bernie. Biden’s been the presumptive nominee for quite a while now, and it should be clear what a disastrous candidate he’s going to be. He doesn’t campaign much, he frequently screws up and says embarrassing stuff when he does, even his stated policies are lame and his recorded policies, the things he’s fought for throughout his career, are atrocious. As far as corruption and misogyny go, there’s nothing to differentiate him from Trump. Quantity, maybe, but that doesn’t matter.
So, vote for Bernie in the New York primary. Or Yang, if you’re seriously opposed to the Green New Deal, or Medicare for All, or you just absolutely hate Bernie Sanders supporters more than you love economic justice.
If Biden wins anyway, you can still vote Green in the general election. It’s still basically Bernie’s platform.

Much has been written about what this quarantine will do to us all psychologically and mostly I tend to brush it off because, hey, I’m all right. Staying at home, with my family, and watching a shit ton of garbage TV, and don’t even have to justify it. But, I know it’s bad for others.
In Russia, three doctors have “fallen” from windows, and I put that in quote marks because it’s obvious bullshit.
At least two out of the three were outspoken critics of the way things are being handled, like lack of medical supplies, protective equipment, and doctors having to work despite having the illness themselves.
Two out of the three are dead, but the other one is in pretty serious condition, including a cracked skull. He only “fell” from a two story window.
In Michigan, USA, a store employee was shot and killed after he told a customer she had to wear a mask to come in. They argued, she went home and told her husband, and he (and a friend) came back and shot the conscientious employee dead.
That seems bizarre to me, living in the Czech Republic, where I put on a mask just to take out the garbage, and nobody has been allowed into any store without one for months, and nobody’s been shot.
Some individuals are going to deal with this situation better than others. Some countries are going to deal with it better than others. Defenestration and people going crazy with guns are two of the worst ways of dealing with it. So far.