no punks, new wave

over the next few days, I'll update this
entry that's about a book I just finished
called "New York Rocker" by Gary
Valentine.

This guy was the first bassist for Blondie.
I picked up the book in the library discard.
As you can see from my "top of her game"
entry, I am impressed with some of Blondie's
works and Debbie particularly.

Gary was the kind of quietish guy who
sat in the corner, writing in his journal.
But thankfully he did, because we learned
about  a lot of the early days of punk and
how it grew.
I know, you're saying Blondie was not punk.
How true that is. It seems that Gary was
unsure about whether he was in a punk or
a new wave band even though he always said

"punks in ripped clothes,

us in skinny ties"

It was amazing that a guy who played music

and was idolised by kids, could be so pedantic

and boring, and small minded, but he was. Not too much,
but he did complain about stuff a lot.

Gary was a voracious reader, but his writing

was not all that entertaining.

The guy wrote a few songs, in his days with

the Blondies and even had one single as the 

leader of his own band.  I will not link to it

because it's such a saccharine song, it would 

be perfect for K-Tel Kids Kollection. How this

guy thought he was a punk, I'll never know.

I'm sure he was trying to make money, but
that is not punk, either.

He did however, get a chance to be in a punk

group of sorts, after his solo stuff. 

he was in Iggy Pop's band 

for 6 months

\m/ much respect

He got to play old Stooges

toons. wow. tons of groupies too.

Gary started out in Jersey, then ran away from home

at 18, and lived with his starving buddies in a bad 

neighbourhood of Brooklyn. 

Then he chanced upon Debbie Harry and Chris 

Stein, through a mutual friend. Without being

able to play a note, he was taken on as the bassist

because he could play a bit of piano and had 

written some poetry.

How simple things were, back in 1975.

[early song]

[early song. their rockingest. probably a cover]

The band had to live together, sometimes in their 

practice space because they were always broke.

I read the whole process of how they slowly 

came to success as the scene was going wild

with the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith,

Richard Hell, Talking Heads.

And Gary was around the Cali punk scene which
started later. Again, Gary wrote about it, he was not
a punk. He was playing pop nearby, let's say.

We learned a lot about his girlfriends and other

conquests. NY, Cali, tour bus

We learned about his fascination with magic 

and witchcraft (like Chris Stein) that led to him

following a charlatan who had him sitting in 

positions at particular times of the day. Wacko!

A lot of drugs were going around in those days.

In the end, you cannot take the opinion of one 

band member when he complains about how his

friends turned their backs on him. He quit when 

he realised that Debbie and Chris were ready to

kick him out. I figure he's mostly right, but he
doesn't know why he was ousted. Chris and
Debbie manipulated the others into hating Gary.

[Gary absent from this pic, on their first Cali tour.

Debbie was very new wave, and the others indicated

various psychoses]

He did mention how the band signed a bad 

management contract in 1976 that Gary was

all against, but they screamed at him to do it.

In the end he was right, as I'd heard from other

sources that the band had been swindled all
along. Of course they were. They were drugged
up artists and the wolves were circling.

[The wolf. what does the manager do? take 15%, er 25%]

They signed a bad record deal. but the producers
were not stupid and pasted Debbie's boobs front and
centre.

Smart move because the rest of the band
looked like evolution, backwards.

[Gary behind The Hair. more about devolution, later]

However, the he-said she-said makes everybody 

seem small. So here's what I think was going on:

Debbie had started in a 60s hippy band 

The Wind in the Willows

I'm serious. If you knew where 

the name came from, you'd think they were insane.

[check Youtube. they were insane]

LATER,

Debbie was a backup singer with the Stilettos

[also on Youtube. a cultural nightmare

mishmash of cliches]

There, she met Chris Stein, and they both quit to strike out
together.They gathered up a band, thinking that everybody
else was a simpleton employee, so that those 2 could have all
the glory and cash.

That is true, and Gary said it. Even though they got gypped
by managers, Debbie had a  mansion. But the other band
members had a hard crash into reality. Jimmy Destri went
into construction. Chris was supported by Debbie, and Clem,
the drummer, played with Gary on Iggy's show.

Back to poverty for most.

But Gary could write songs so, it seems like Debbie and Chris 

felt that if they were to ever make it, they had to get rid of Gary.

That anger also probably meant that they had to take their

music up a notch, because, until then, Gary was the best 

songwriter.

[OOPs! a cover of a song from the 60s?!]

[a Gary song. Gary on guitar, pogoing. Chris in GREEN]

[a Gary song. Gary's gone. If punk means scrawny, ugly,
weird white guys, then Blondie qualifies. Deb is wow]

Indeed they did step up to the plate. Their three big albums
came in succession after that. I am still so impressed with
aspects of their history, that I commented
how they seemed on top of the world. But then, BOOM,
in 1981, it all disintegrated. Probably stress-related. They
all went a bit nutso. You could tell from the last big Blondie
video, Tide is High.

In reality Debbie was not very confident, even though she
was stunning. Gary had to admit that. But, she and Chris
were a battery and they supported each other. and it worked.
She told everybody Chris was a genius, and Debbie needed
Chris to tell her how lovely she was. So Chris was a genius
because he knew Debbie's beauty, and whatever talent he
saw in her, was his meal ticket.

You will soon understand how nutso Chris was. This guy
was trying to get famous and yet in TWO early videos
he wore a suit.

A GREEN NYLON SUIT

it wasn't the worst shade of green, but it was green

[Gumby strikes again. Chris in Green. Deb is wow]

the other stuff in the story
-Gary was fond of his pogoing, but the others wanted
to kill him. It wasn't punk pogo cuz he looked like a
suburban high school kid anyway. 

-Debbie acted in Roadie (sh*tty movie) and Cronenberg's
I-Forget. She looked ravishing, but was not an actress
and did not look mentally well.
-Patti Smith hated Blondie and undermined it by getting
band members to quit. In the end, most band members
came to resemble Patti- gaunt, translucent skin, bug-eyed
-They crossed paths with a lot of the artists and non-artists of
the era.

[blank generation documentary. all the early bands, even the NY Dolls!]

they gag most of the news too

one thing I've noticed about the 24-hour news channels. Even
though they are supposedly competing, they do seem
very similar, as to their content, and the fact that they
can milk 5 inconsequential stories all day long.

They have a shared monopoly on the news, and
they tell you what you "need to know"i.e. nothing.
They are tools of the government, as regards big national
and international policy.

That's why The BBC is now destroying the image of the NHS
as they've been told to do.
They denigrate immigrants and the long-term sick.

They seem to have forgotten the lepers in the Banks.
They are untouchable, not because they're disgusting
but because the government is protecting them.

So, why wouldn't the BBC gag its employees to keep
them from talking? They gag everything else too.

The  important principle here is :

how the F$^&k you can legally tell someone

to shut the F$%^&k up! what happened

to free speech?

checkit:  Telegraph

BBC spent £28m of licence-fee payers' money gagging 500 staff

The BBC has used licence fee payers' money to buy the silence of more than 500 staff with payouts of up to £500,000 each.

By Steven Swinford and Neil Midgley

10:00PM BST 18 Jun 2013

According to figures released under Freedom of Information, in the past eight years 539 staff have signed gagging orders at a total cost of £28million.

The scale of the pay-outs led to accusations that the BBC was using the agreements to silence potential whistle blowers and victims of bullying or sexual harassment.

They were disclosed to The Daily Telegraph ahead of the publication of what is expected to be a highly critical report by the National Audit Office next month.

Lord Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, has already admitted that the findings will prove "difficult" for the corporation.

Stephen Barclay, a Conservative member of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "These payments are at odds with the fundamental values of the BBC and a betrayal of the licence fee payer.

    The BBC were right to broadcast the North Korea exposé

    17 Apr 2013

    BBC 'tying itself in knots' over song mocking Thatcher

    12 Apr 2013

"They expect their hard-earned money to be spent on supporting creative talent and world class programmes, not on payments to silence people."

The BBC confirmed that almost all of the settlements, known as compromise agreements, contained confidentiality clauses.

Tony Hall, the new director-general of the BBC, was so concerned by the scale of the payments that he introduced a £150,000 cap on severance payments in one of his first moves in his new role.

The biggest pay-offs were made to BBC managers, with 77 executives receiving more than £100,000 and 14 over £300,000.

They include George Entwistle, the former director-general who received a £450,000 pay-off, double the amount he was contractually entitled to.

He resigned last year in the wake of the Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine scandals after spending just 54 days in the job.

Two unnamed individuals were given pay-offs worth £500,100 and £524,681, while Sharon Baylay, the former director of marketing, received £392,000.

The pay-offs were also BBC staff who signed the orders after claiming they were victims of bullying or sexual harassment.

Miriam O’Reilly, the former Countryfile presenter who won a landmark case against the BBC for age discrimination, was offered a five figure settlement by the corporation in exchange for her silence.

She rejected the offer. "These gags are so legally binding that people cannot even speak to their spouse about them," she said. "They are wrong. The BBC as a public service broadcaster is renowned for honesty, truth, and freedom of speech. They should not be stopping people from telling the truth."

The true cost of the agreements is likely to be significantly higher, as the figures do not include the costs of legal advice for the BBC and employees or other benefits such as health cover, counselling and training.

A BBC spokesman defended the use of compromise agreements as “standard practice”. He said: “The BBC always insists that individuals take independent legal advice before entering into them.

how to deal with glass half full, glass half empty

UPDATE on the philosophy of the glass
containing 50% liquid, from Twitter:

The Dude! ‏@AhmedAllabidy 8 Aug

Dear Optimist & Pessimist,

while you were arguing over the glass of water;

I drank it … Sincerely, the Opportunist.

--
I'm sure you can recall how some people
use cod psychology to try to convince
normal people to accept their bullsh*t.

They try to say, you've got no choice
by instead attacking your way of
looking at life. You're supposedly viewing
the glass as half empty, while it is
in fact, half full.

Now, you can confidently tell those
bastards that the glass is always
full, but unlike the glass, your
smart-ass friend is full of sh*t.

badideastshirts

bridge falls under weight of neglect

while the alt media is railing against this,
and sometimes pussy-footing around it,
many countries are crumbling, literally.

The US is in serious need of infrastructure
funding, but the government is running out
of money. So bridges go boom.

the reason? rich people and big companies
send their electronic money overseas. No see
no tax

here's a pick of massive bridges that need
to be replaced soon, and won't until ...

a little trim around the edge. oops

in simple pictorial terms, here's why austerity is stupid.

You go around trimming stuff you hate, like healthcare
education and other stuff that people need to survive and
thrive, because you're a conservative.

But you think you're trimming that, and you end up trimming
your tax take and your GDP.

Freudian analysis of the lowly crapper

as a continuation of my recent Freud story,
here's an analysis of the anal stage of life.

So many of us are stuck up our own butts.
That makes this discussion of the toilet, the
ceramic part, such an "eye" opening event.

Zizek treats us to some Slovenian scatology.
Drop that sh*t on a shelf and look at it!

BTW, I've got a bit of toilet talk myself. Did you
know the crapper is named after its inventor,
Thomas Crapper?



this is followed by a new work in the German
dictionary. The hallowed "shitstorm" has been
honoured with a place in the Deutsches good book.

scheise, I don't speak Slovenian

checkit:  guardian

A shitstorm in a dictionary

Germans are not obsessed with faecal matters, just very reluctant to use sexual metaphors in a negative way

Philip Oltermann
.co.uk, Wednesday 3 July 2013 17.39 BST
Jump to comments (496)


The announcement that the word "shitstorm" has entered the most commonly used German dictionary, the Duden, after being used by Angela Merkel has triggered the usual wave of cliches: that Germans are darkly obsessed with pooping, farting and bottoms, psychologically stuck at the anally retentive stage.

As the great German linguistics blogger Anatol Stefanowitsch has shown in this excellent blogpost, the "Germans love shit" meme can largely be dated back to a 1984 book by the US anthropologist Alan Dundes, called Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder. Dundes claimed that German folklore was riddled with an "inordinate" amount of shit-related riddles and proverbs, and that Scheiß (or Scheiße) was "the most often used word in Germany today". But, as Stefanowitsch impressively shows, it's just as easy to think of shit-metaphors that litter English speech, a "shitstorm" being what can happen when the shit hits the fan, someone serves you a shit sandwich, talks bullshit or beats the shit out of someone, or when things generally end up up shit creek without a paddle.

Arguably, the tendency to psychoanalyse the German attitude to bodily functions goes back even further. In 1973, the American novelist Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying claimed that the architecture of German toilets revealed something sinister about the psyche of those who sat on them:

"Go into any German toilet and you'll find a fixture unlike any other in the world. It has a cute little porcelain platform for the shit to fall on so you can inspect it before it whirls off into the watery abyss, and there is, in fact, no water in the toilet until you flush it. As a result, German toilets have the strongest shit smell of any toilets anywhere ... German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything."

Slavoj Zizek has elaborated this into a wider critique of German metaphysics.
Pathologising linguistic tics can lead to precisely the kind of ethnographic generalisations the Nazis practised to excess, but – and here I would disagree with Stefanowitsch – that doesn't mean that the predominance of poo-talk is a complete myth. Linguist Hans-Martin Gauger spent several years comparing swearwords in 15 different languages and concluded not so much that Germans were inordinately obsessed with faecal matters, but that there were inordinately reluctant to use sexual metaphors to express negative sentiments.

Look up "motherfucker" in the Langenscheidt dictionary and you get Arschloch (arsehole). In German you don't say: "Verfick dich (fuck off)," but "Verpiss dich (piss off)"; you don't feel "fucked off" but "beschissen (shat upon)". Even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was happy to use the filthy German equivalent of "kiss my arse" in his 1773 play Götz von Berlichingen: "Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich im Arsche lecken!" Only the Swedes share a similar reluctance to use sexual metaphors as swearwords.

Gauger admits that, with the globalisation of German, that reluctance is starting to wear off, but he insists that Germans should, at any rate, not be ashamed of their linguistic habit, but proud of it. "I find it much more troubling when we use sexual organs as terms of abuse." In fact, even shit can sometimes be used to connote positive feelings in German. When I was a little baby, my grandmother used to call me "mien lütten Schietbüddel", "my little shit bag" – "Scheißerle" is a similarly affectionate Swabian term for a toddler.

Erich Maria Remarque's great first world war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, recalls communal military latrines as one of the few positive experiences of the conflict:

"The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily."

The question remains why the German language would, in any case, need to import an English word such as "shitstorm" if it already suffered from such a surfeit of faeces-related metaphors. The answer may be that "shitstorm" in German actually means something very different from what it means in English. The Duden defines it as "a storm of outrage on the internet" – highlighting how social media have increased the speed and reduced the length of our daily outrage. The Urban Dictionary, on the other hand, defines it as a disaster in a much broader sense (and Collins doesn't recognise the term at all).

Personally, I wouldn't have put "shitstorm" in the dictionary, but its much lovelier antonym, the "candystorm" – an example of "globish" if ever there was one. Only yesterday, the German Green MEP Volker Beck was calling for a "candystorm for Edward Snowden". No shit.

NSA world view

this is a simplified world view that helps the NSA
rule over everybody it wants to.
If nobody can, or wants to, fight this system, then
we deserve what we get.
So far, Spain Portugal Austria Italy and France have
all participated in air piracy on behalf of the NSA.
It's not looking good folks

Ritholz.com

Real life-size samurai warriors

I think they were guarding the local corner store.
I don't know for sure, but it sure looks like these
guys were the real deal.

I think it's mindblowing seeing photos from a time
when it was rare, looking at something that is long
gone.

These guys look nuts enough to kill. 1870 was wild

ceci n'est pas un blog

i don't know what he's talking about. I swear this
is a blog. I wrote it myself.
Figures. Magritte's French. can't read the English

from badideatshirts

Charles Schultz re-united the Eagles

I know it sounds crazy considering the
fact that Charles Schultz has long been
dead.

I mean in the 1970s. The Eagles, a
band from California, broke up after
another reefer-induced scrap, for
a number of days.

Their neighbour heard the ruckus and
brought the boys together over a
barbecue.
He played the following song, and put
a smile on their faces.




and they said "what the F4^&%$^K. Let's get back
together"