Over the next few weeks, I will be migrating my old MySpace blog entries to this current blog. Join me in reliving my thrilling past! The old postings will show up on my homepage (see above) and then will nicely disappear into the archive. Enjoy!
I ventured out on my own this evening, book in hand, to find a place to get an actual full meal and read a bit. Imagine my joy when - after a few blocks of steakhouses and a drab place ironically, apparently, named Margaritaville - I happened on a restaurant called The Library, decked out with books and other theme-appropriate paraphernalia AND a decent selection of meatless items. I stepped inside and grabbed a table, selected a grilled portobello sandwich and set to finishing chapter one of Lenin’s Private War.
The classic rock that was playing in the bar wasn’t obtrusive and I was able to read until my dinner arrived. At some point, the bartender made a wise decision to turn off some god-awful late-period Genesis song, but then doubled-back and put on the obligatory 90s-rock station… very loudly. As I read the final few pages of chapter one, I had to battle the incoming sensory overload of “Killing In the Name Of…” It was brutal, and confusing, for, while Zac De La Rocha may share some political ideologies with the opponents of Lenin, reading about the backstory that led to their expulsion from post-revolutionary Russia while listening to his scream, apparently, at his mother (from a Freudian standpoint), was not easy.
I don’t ask much in life. And I wouldn’t deign to ask a bar to turn down their music if that is how they want their place to be. All I ask is that they change the name of the place! Make some sense, please! Irony has no place in food service.
As I sat in the lobby of the Good Nite Inn enjoying my meager continental breakfast this morning I couldn’t help but notice as Fox News began a special interview with none other than Ted Nugent. They had the Nuge live by phone and the topic was, what? The current financial rescue plan, of course! Sadly, the sound wasn’t loud enough for me to hear what the Motor City Madman had to say about the state of our economy (he may be an asshole, but he’s not an idiot), but better than any nuggets he may have bestowed upon the world was the fact that, since it was a phone interview, Fox filled the visual void with a slideshow of images of Nugent in full hunting regalia, posing with carcasses, drawing his bowstring taut, ready to kill, or just smiling maniacally in an open field. It was brilliant. If anyone can find this segment online, PLEASE post a link.
“It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where — where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is - from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to … to our state” - Sarah Palin
Stay tuned for Cold War II.
Looks like I’m putting on my clown nose and getting back to work on the road. Tour dates have all been added to my calendar, with maybe a few more coming before all’s said and done. Just like last year, it kicks off (for me) with a PKO show - this time at the swanky Room 5! Come on out and see me off.
Along with the excitement of an election season comes the inevitable crushing depression of an election season. Those of us who have put our apples in a major-party candidate’s cart have to cringe and wince our way through the next two months as people who were up until now generally coherent and dynamic when talking about issues reduce themselves to lobbing asinine barbs and constantly repeating easily-digested pseudo-facts about their opponents. This is just the kind of battle that destroyed John Kerry and I do worry that it will diminish Barack Obama’s considerable power as the weeks drag on. Yes, I will make clear now that I am supporting Obama. And since Sarah Palin’s addition to the McCain ticket, the reason why has come down to something really fundamental.
While I find camp Obama’s parroting of “voted with Bush 90% of the time” grating and infantile, what really firmed up my convictions was hearing a crowd of thousands in St. Paul loudly cheering Giuliani as he openly derided the idea that HOPE was something to rally behind. Really? Hope is silly? Terror is THE unifying cause that Americans are supposed to be concerned with in these particular times?
But the lines of clarification are even more basic that. If anyone were really being honest here, nobody thinks that any of the four people on the ticket lack the basic skills required to run the country. In so many ways, it comes down to your public face. Both GW Bush and Bill Clinton won their elections based in large part on how they made people feel. You watch footage footage of the two of them on the campaign trail and it’s obvious why they were presidential material.
What’s happening at this phase of the campaign is woeful and it affects everyone negatively. Sadly, I feel that when the fight turns muddy, the conservatives tend to come out on top. I won’t speculate at this time as to why. But all the arguments about lipstuck pigs, senate voting records, sexism, racism, ageism, whatever - none of that has any real bearing on who is most fit for office. Why? Because both sides are lying and both sides have done ill among their good. That’s where we are in our history. Why sling mud when nobody is clean in the first place? What was that thing Jesus said about throwing stones? Shit, I can’t recall it right now. Apparently our Christian candidates have forgotten as well.
And the people talking about the election in the media are worse than useless. Jon Stewart’s recent then-and-now clip collections lately have been so right on that they are really not funny when you get down to it.
But if you want my simple sound-bite answer to why I support Obama, it comes down to one little sentence and its emphatic support clause:
“I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live” - John McCain, 2000.
Well, maybe two sentences if you want to include the time McCain called his wife a cunt. Aside from the stark contrast of the slur and the fact that McCain’s opponent is a member of a historically maligned minority, the most interesting thing about this article is that the arguments McCain’s supporters use in his defense are exactly the same arguments W. Axl Rose used to defend himself for these lyrics, from the song ‘One in a Million:’
Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to meThey come to our country and think they’ll do as they pleaseLike start some mini Iran, or spread some fucking disease
That argument can be boiled down to “if you’d lived my life, you’d understand.” Is that so? The actions of some individuals should give you carte blanche to spew racist language without fear of reproach? It’s this kind of rights-of-the-victim-to-bigotry that creates a great many of the problems facing the world’s societies today, from Serbia to Iraq to Los Angeles. John McCain is so mad that the members of an opposing army whose underdeveloped country he was bombing would resort to primitive measures in retaliation that he remains unapologetic and resolute in clinging to his primitive vendetta.
Contrast that to a candidate who - and I don’t care how black you think he is or how privileged he’s been compared to others - I guarantee you has faced repeated prejudice throughout his life and has risen to prominence without hatred and is now in a dead-heat race for the White House and my answer is simple. Obama’s is the face, and the voice, that I want representing our country to the world. And his sometimes flawed and corrupt cabinet is the one I will trust to run our affairs for four years over McCain’s sometimes flawed and corrupt cabinet. And good luck to everyone. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, and looking ahead, I prefer hope over hatred.
PK & I listened to a story on NPR this morning about MMA. No, not Movie-Man-Ass, but Mixed Martial Arts. That’s the official name, but it seems to essentially to be no-holds-barred cage-fighting. The thrust of the story was about increasing efforts to regulate the “sport” as its popularity grows, especially right here in California. There were concerns about Steroid use, of course, but also use of recreational drugs. The latter, worried on official, could debilitate a fighter’s response times and open him/her up to injury.
My feeling is, don’t regulate fighting at all. Regulation is merely a convoluted falsehood designed to mask the fact that any so-called recreational fighting - from boxing to dog-fights to pro wrestling - serves the same purpose it did when the Romans fed human beings to animals for fun. It allows people to vicariously deal with their enemies with extreme physical violence and that is uncivilized no matter how you package it. Go ahead and let them kill each other, charge extra for the pleasure, I don’t care. It’s barbaric from the sandbox all the way to the arena. Don’t pretend otherwise.
This week marks the release of the new Paula Kelley Orchestra EP ‘Airports’ and we’re doing it all hi-tech style with a special pre-release widget from a cool company called Gydget. The widget should appear below and you can listen to the whole EP right here within the confines of my blog, or you may post the Gydget to your own MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, or other page. W00t!
One of the more curious realities of touring is the surprisingly scant amount of time I spend actually experiencing live music. There’s the set I play, of course, but other bands on the bill are more often than not sacrificed in the name of dinner, sleep, silence, or a desperate search for anything fun on the Interweb. Having just completed a 3-decade tour with Lifehouse (ok, three months, but with all the breaks and make-up dates…), I can say that I do now recognize a great majority of their songs, but due in large part to the feet of cement that often separated us when they played, I have very little idea what Jason Wade was singing. Here’s the best I could come up with as I sat in our bunker-like dressing room in Corpus Christie, TX.
And shake a gleaming line
Was out of town
Ken Chang’s a meanie
No, wilted only
Shakira pees a right way
Is numb, festoons
So my you
I’m so why is so to my
Cuz I love my home
Some of, in my hole
I stray, Ragu, fall to the ground
Gonna buy myself a soda pop
I think I probably spaced out on a verse here and there, but you get the idea…
File this under forcing myself to write something, or even under whining if you like, but I feel like I’ve been neglecting the blog in the past couple weeks. This week I’ve had a pretty good excuse. Saturday I played a show in Newburyport, MA with MN, after which we drove 6+ hours to Camden, NJ for the next day’s show. After that show I drove 7 hours back to New England for some excellent family time. Flew to L.A. on Tuesday, flew to Des Moines on Wednesday, drove 3 hours to Kansas City that night (much of the drive being in monsoon conditions), slept 2 hours to wake up and fly to Detroit, then drive to Ann Arbor for a show there tonight. Tomorrow I fly home and then have three shows in SoCal before heading to Tucson on Friday for what will be the last full-band MN show of the summer radio-show season. Phew! Everything’s been going very well, and that’s great, but sleep and decent food have not been happening very much. Electric Lotus and some movie-watchin’ with PK tomorrow will do wonders, but it’s only a start. Thank you for indulging me, unlucky reader.