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Music

Post image for Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation?

Back in my adolescent narcissistic bubble, the months preceding December 8, 1982 was dark. Yeh, I was sixteen, had my driver’s license and pretty much unfettered access to a car. I had a girlfriend and my jump shot got me all kinds of attention in the halls and in the locker room; but I was spending hours upstairs locked inside my bedroom air guitaring for hours to The Who’s Quadrophenia, bathing my mind in the rock opera’s baroque amphetamine-fueled suicidal dreams and existential teenage angst.

The album is a weird, wonderful, conceptual mashup of identity and rage, mixing tensions between the four original band members with a progression of drug use and dissociative identity disorders: specifically schizophrenia and split/multiple personalities.

Just like high school.
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Back in November, Bruce Worden and Clare Cross offered up this updated, and creepier, version of the 1947 classic children’s picture book by Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon. This parody features Keith Moon (1946-1978) [Annie Leibovitz portrait], the impish drummer for The Who.

Click the picture to wish all your little rockstars goodnight.

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Howard Zinn: 1922-2010

January 28, 2010

Howard Zinn

After reading Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Bruce Springsteen sat down, wrote, and recorded “Nebraska,” perhaps his best social and political work. Zinn once said he decided to write A People’s History after listening to Woody Guthrie’s lyrics about Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre. Guthrie goosed Bob Dylan towards political consciousness who in turn moved Springsteen to consider writing stories “from below” — stories against the grain of the “great men” theory of history.

It’s a nice group, a kind of four horsemen of social justice in a way, who has lost another one it’s members.

I learned of Zinn’s death late last night while checking the news between connecting flights from Denver to Billings. I sat in the plane’s darkness looking out the window at the lights below — cities and towns — but from this height, not people in cars driving kids but abstract patterns, lights, moving slowly below or not at all.

For me, this distance-created abstraction is a Zinn moment. It recalls his commentary on modern warfare, which he oft repeated and goes this way in one of his talks:
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Ignacious Mombola

So much of the news from Africa is depressing: famine, aids, wars, orphans, despots, you name it. It’s not just the mainstream media; I’ve been hit recently by a kind of “year-end giving blitz” when relief agencies scramble for your 2009 tax planning largesse. Lots of hungry kids with flies in their eyes. I’m told by my non-profit friends that this is because people only give to tragedy not joy.

I understand this. I don’t blame them, and I don’t think they overstate or outright lie just to raise money, at least as far as I can tell.

What’s lost in that reportage, and in mainstream imagery, is how crazy wonderful the people and place is. Since mid-July, I’ve spent a month in Africa, enmeshed in a couple of pretty serious issues but there’s a great deal of joy.

I don’t want to downplay the problems or fetishize smiling kids. But I get a little tired of how we often fetishize starving kids with flies in their eyes.

The following video is just some videographic ballast. Read More…

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Police Room 619, September 12

September 12, 2009 Childhood Delusions
Thumbnail image for Police Room 619, September 12

When I got home, I ran up to my room, tossed in a fresh dip of Copenhagen, dropped the needle on Peter Gabriel III, and jumped back onto my big sloshy hand-me-down-from-my-brother water bed to sink into the music.

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