01.19.15
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 3:41 pm by George Smith
I’m not surprised Clint Eastwood’s movie about Chris Kyle, American Sniper, broke box office records this weekend.
Are you?
Only a minority of Americans have been involved in the forever war. But reverence to the military and service is a deep part of WhiteManistan’s character, I’d say strongly influenced by a universal nagging guilt.
So when a movie on the forever war comes along, particularly one made by Clint Eastwood, it has a great chance of success.
WhiteManistan hasn’t had many war movies to stir a righteous enjoyment in the last decade. I skipped Zero Dark Thirty but did see Lone Survivor which I didn’t think was anything special.
Americans have the military they deserve, one that runs itself with little or no oversight. In payment we’ve been asked to stay out of its way, pretend to like it, swallow the ill will and tragedies that are the consequences years later, give it any resources it needs and keep believing that all of it [fill in the blanks with your favorite myths, received wisdoms and stuff].
Buy me a ticket and I’ll review it here.
It’s 20 dollars in Pasadena.
Good-looking commercial mythology, seen watching football on Sunday.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:03 pm by George Smith
I’d still have only eighty dollars.
“President Barack Obama will use his State of the Union address Tuesday night to stake out a populist vision of tax reform and new middle-class benefits [to be paid for by a capital gains tax increase on the wealthy] — and practically dare Republicans to say no,” writes Politico.
Indeed, they have taken that dare & already said “NO!” It’s just theater.
And the President will be booed by half the room, as well he should be, because we voted for the other side a couple months ago and that wasn’t theater. Even though a polling says his popularity is at some kind of high.
So share this song [1] in defense of the swag of wealthy Americans. It never gets old. I even made the lyrics scroll so you can sing along!
1. I know you would never share it. I write it to be irritating. I’m fully aware that me asking someone to share something from here on the Internet is like asking for a new car.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:56 pm by George Smith
Bigger.
Dateline — Westport, October 1966 and the British invasion! The Yardbirds featuring the not yet super-famous rock guitar gun-slingers Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck had landed in Connecticut!
The Westport Staples High School auditorium was the famous rock group’s first appearance in the United States.
How did it happen?
It’s a remarkable story told in “The Real Rock n Roll High School: True Tales of Legendary Bands That Performed in Westport CT,” compiled by Staples grad Mark Smollin and the students who were there.
In 1966 Staples students Dick Sandhaus and Paul Giambacinni wanted to make their high school days special. And they had a subscription to Billboard magazine. So with the audacity of kids they pitched the idea of bringing the new cutting edge of pop music, rock bands in the charts, to Staples. And the principal bought it! As long as the two could keep the stars to an initial down payment of 750 bucks.
They did.
And so they booked the Beau Brummels, a California band then climbing
the US charts with a single entitled “Laugh Laugh.” The Staples auditorium was filled to capacity with screaming fans, kicking off what would be a long tradition of big name rock bands appearing there.
Tour promoters and record labels realized Westport’s high school was a great stage, one where the teen fans would show up and bands would get a warm reception.
So along came The Yardbirds, Cream, Sly & the Family Stone, The Doors, The Animals, Pete Seeger, Blues Image and many more.
The illustration in this post, excerpted from the book, is a collage of snapshots taken at the Yardbirds show.
In late summer I copy-edited The Real Rock and Roll High School. It is a good book, one of a kind describing a part of history from the beginnings of classic rock, something that happened nowhere else.
I thought of it as an oral history, a richly illustrated scrap book and fond high school memoir filled with pop art, concert posters, ticket stubs, local newspaper clippings, and many photos taken by students.
It was fun to do and obviously a labor of love.
In the process it also exposed the limitations of ebooks and publish-on-demand at Amazon CreateSpace.
If you read the standard news on do-it-yourself publishing, Amazon is the be-all and end-all, the perfect place for everything: Publishing platform, print-on-demand, ebook distribution and the website where you will build a career and following in front of the largest potential audience.
Not so fast.
Amazon CreateSpace can’t handle books like The Real Rock n Roll High School.
And the reasons are actually pretty simple. Amazon’s technology isn’t up to the challenge of sophisticated and complicated pages loaded with color photos, black and white imagery and text. It cannot make such a volume into an ebook for Kindle, either.
That’s not something you read in Amazon’s fine print. The author of The Real Rock n Roll High School had to find out the hard way that Amazon’s self-publishing couldn’t produce a good quality physical or electronic copy of a color dependent mixed-media volume on good paper, the likes of which you can still find by the hundreds and thousands in old brick-and-mortar stores across the country.
So how do you do it? Old school. The hard way, like book publishers have done for centuries. It turns out there are some things traditional book printing is still much better at.
Is there a digital copy of the book available? Yes, of course. As a .pdf, a form in which it looks very good.
But you don’t really need Amazon for that now, do you?
Here is the ordering page.
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01.17.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:38 pm by George Smith
At RockNYC:
Never speak ill of the dead. And so it has been for Kim Fowley, Hollywood impresario, producer, self-promoter and talent scout for the crass just-for-the-sake-of-it, third or fourth-tier glam rock artist, all of it over the span of half a century. In the obituaries everyone’s come out with praise and fond memories of a life goodly lived.
As organizer/producer of the Runaways alone, that would have been enough. In the last dozen years Fowley was a major character in three movies, two on the Runaways (one, the big famous Hollywood production with Michael Shannon with the vulpine producer, the other the not-so-famous documentary, Edge Play) and one about Rodney Bingenheimer, “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” If Bingenheimer was the mayor, Fowley, as it appeared, could have certainly been its animal control officer.
“[Fowley] sometimes claimed to have been born in the Philippines in 1942 (many accounts say he was actually born in Los Angeles), which would have placed him there during the vicious Japanese occupation in World War II,” Billboard wrote dryly in a recent obit. So what if it’s fiction?
It’s a good detail and who would care if all the plaster stuffing up the cracks between the facts of Fowley’s art and business is somewhat made up?
The consensus of the death notices is that Fowley relished being thought of as a bad man with a heart-of-gold, that, perhaps, he wished he’d been American tv famous. But you get the idea he kind of knew it would never happen with bands like Venus & the Razor Blades, The Orchids (the Runaways redone), the Quick, the Hollywood Stars and, yes, the Runaways. Not even with enough albums to asphyxiate an elephant, a number of them big sellers in name. Not in Seventies America.
At least that’s what it looked like back in the Rust Belt while paging through Creem, Circus and Rock Scene magazines. Fowley always got great publicity. Heck, it was still great entertainment!
And so you see the print, the concept, the photos, the minor desecrations of American middle class pieties for short, amusing and sometimes almost anthem-like tales of garbage spied in the streets were actually better than the reality.
“Punk-a-Rama” and “Dog Food” as in, they ate it in place of cake, by Fowley project Venus & the Razor Blades read and looked great. And then the record arrived. You kept it but after scoring five years later you’d only played it ten times.
Fowley had hits. “Alley Oop,” a novelty by the Hollywood Argyles. “Nutrocker” by B. Bumble & the Stingers. The latter probably earned him the most money when Emerson, Lake & Palmer covered it on a vilified but stentorian live tribute to Mussorgsky sold at a promotional bargain price, “Pictures at an Exhibition.”
Believe me, laugh now, but that moved units in 1971.
As for Fowley’s glam rock trip, “International Heroes,” from 1973, again — looked real good on paper and in early rushes. There he is in gender-bender lipstick and eye-shadow, the poor man’s Ziggy Stardust but perhaps with a disease.
“Kim Fowley’s new album … will place him in the ranks of David, Mott, Alice and Lou in the hearts and palms of the American teenager,” reads Capitol’s press. In the palms? All right!
But you’re going to have to listen to it in the clips before crossing that bridge.
And you can see ’em here, believe me, you’ll want to, they’re short, along with the rest.
Or go to YouTube and type Kim Fowley. There’s no shortage of material. The man was made to be the video platform’s Ed Wood.
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01.10.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, Shoeshine at 12:06 pm by George Smith
Nothing bad ever goes away for good here. Like turds, these things just float back up to the top of the great public punch bowl of life, again and again.
Mitt Romney wants to be President, again.
It’s hard!”
The guy, of which who said it, died.
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01.08.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:09 pm by George Smith
What you already knew, what I made a sermon and a song about, reported by one of the Culture of Lickspittle’s shoe-shine class poor man’s intellectuals at the Washington Post’s “Wonk blog”:
Most of America’s richest think poor people have it easy in this country, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center. The center surveyed a nationally representative group of people this past fall, and found that the majority of the country’s most financially secure citizens (54 percent at the very top, and 57 percent just below) believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
[And a] quarter of the country … feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don’t work hard enough.
Now go listen to the sermon, Jesus of America, and tell me it’s not better than anything you can read on the matter.
“[He] is not the one who fed the poor loaves and fishes. This is not the Jesus who liked lepers. He found the liberty, the land of liberty and freedom; we told him what to do.
Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor; if you do, they’ll come right to your door. They’re gonna wind up like stray cats, around your door on the floor, begging for loads of kibble and rich food. Everyone knows they’re just selfish animals.
That’s what Jesus said.
And remember, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a poor man to get into the kingdom of Heaven.
Buy a copy of the album, Loud Folk Live, five bucks — cheap. Or review a copy. Or talk about it. Or something. Or not.
The New York Times continues its series, more or less described as Wrestling with the problem of WhiteManistan, in Sunday’s edition entitled, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?”
The answer is “Yes.” But with a deadly qualifier.
It’s cheaper to live in the neo-Confederacy but it’s based on destructive model that ends in national entropy in the collapsed democracy. The economic success of New Dixie, if you can call it that, depends on continually depressed and compressed labor costs coupled with fossil fuel mining booms.
The latter also threatens quicker ruin from global warming.
The Times contributor recognizes this as a serious problem with national, even global, consequences:
But fracking and sprawling your way to growth aren’t a sustainable national economic strategy.
The allure of cheap growth has handed the red states a distinct political advantage. [The red state] economic system may be outmoded and obsolete, but it is strong enough to blight the future. The Democrats may be able to draw on the country’s growing demographic diversity and the liberal leanings of younger voters to win the presidency from time to time, but the real power dynamic is red.
“Despite their longstanding divisions, red state and blue state economies depend crucially on one another,” writes Richard Florida for the newspaper.
Florida seems to imagine there must be a solution. We must somehow learn to go forward.
But you can’t really speak the truth about WhiteManistan in a big newspaper. It’s too depressing.
There is no way forward in my lifetime. The division is permanent. The present is blight. The question is how fast it worsens in the coming years. And how much money one has to be insulated from the consequences.
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01.06.15
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:50 pm by George Smith
Before Xmas Michael Mann’s “Blackhat” was an object of ridicule here, another way too obvious product from the Culture of Lickspittle
Blow up a Chinese nuclear reactor, research advisors courtesy of US cyberdefense officials! Just brilliant.
The first thing in the trailer — a quote from Leon Panetta on the likelihood of “cyber-Pearl Harbor — showing the people who made the movie have lost their grip.
Wait for the unintentionally hilarious moment, near the end, when a big red emergency banner reading “NSA Breach” appears on screen.
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01.05.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Phlogiston, Rock 'n' Roll at 4:00 pm by George Smith
One of electric guitar effects maker Electro-Harmonix’s first consumer devices, this 1970 Black Finger, a “Distortion Free Guitar Sustainer,” has been with me for 45 years. The last thirteen of which had been spent in closets in a box because it didn’t work.
I made getting it going again a holiday project. A liberal application of De-Oxit and some fiddling with the tone potentiometer and power supply leads and it came back to life.
It’s a compressor and probably the first one ever made for electric guitarists. [1] The basic layout is the same as the company’s Big Muff Pi fuzz tone. From 1970, it shares an identical triangle knob layout, plus an on-off switch in addition to the usual stomp switch and a two-battery power harness, just as many of the 1970 Muffs.
In the early Seventies EH removed the on-off switch, put the knobs in a straight line and added an illustration of a, well, black finger.
The 1970 Black Finger contains a real pile of old transistors. In use, after twisting the knobs for the degree of compression wanted, I always left it on for the duration of a session.
It is not a light compression. You know it’s on and squeezing the signal from the guitar, from a lot to really a lot. At the lowest compression delivered, it makes country licks and jangle rock pop. On the extreme end the attack of the guitar virtually disappears.
Electro-Harmonix has a tube-driven Black Finger compressor in its stable but it’s not really anything close to the same pedal.
The 1970 Black Finger was not particularly common. I never met another person who used one. Today there are one or two videos of old models on YouTube. (I’m planning on putting up a demonstration of it when I have the time.)
Of course, it was made entirely in the US 45 years ago before the forty year slump and the installation of corporate dictatorship. And it turned out to be a bit more long-lasting than the American Middle Class.
I used it at swimming pool parties in Pine Grove in 1970 and dragged it almost everywhere through dive bars with the Highway Kings in the mid-Eighties.
The Black Finger had a disadvantage which made it unique, a noise factor, actually. It takes two 9-volt batteries and when they run low the unit begins to distort, hiss at you and pump audibly. That had its uses.
Here’s an old review I wrote of it thirteen years ago for a web music site.
I’m taking it back (edited):
I used [the Electro-Harmonix Black Finger] for thirty years with a Fender Vibrolux and a variety of Hiwatts. It worked well with both but was extremely useful with the Hiwatts when it was necessary to squeeze more sustain out of fairly clean but overdriven sound at a volume level somewhat less than what would kill everyone but the criminally rock and roll insane.
It helped produce an unmistakably brutish sound that used to be common in the Seventies but which is rarely heard today. Waxing heavy on the control knobs makes for a variety of really abusive tones.
The first time you stomp the Black Finger into “on” it hesitates before giving you anything. A nice feature! As if something were charging up or picking up a head of steam before getting rolling. After it’s been stomped “on” once in the session, the lag goes away.
Who knows why it’s that way?!
As for reliability? Utterly so.
If you had a metal box of circuitry that lasted thirty years, what would you think? You could throw it into a landfill and if it didn’t rust it would probably still work when you dug it up ten years later.
Of course, this may be just the case with mine. Not yours.
Seems to be made of old battleship steel. (Actually aluminum although it is a heavy pedal.)
Requires two nine-volt (that’s “two” as in an eye-popping T-W-O!) batteries and eats them at a moderate but not accelerated rate.
Opening the kit to replace them is reasonably but not overly trying.
The edges of the inside of the battleship steel case are sharp and I have occasionally non-fatally nicked a finger while replacing T-W-O, that’s “two,” nine volt batteries.
The Black Finger always did me good. And the name! Exquisite!
Colleagues marveled at the sheer stubborn durability of my Black Finger.
They even sometimes mocked and laughed in disrespect at the annoying glitchy tones coming from it when the batteries ran low and it started to eat itself. But they also admired the clear, thick sustain that educated use could wring from it.
Certainly, it is a tool of utility in making old school rock. While not indispensable, I have never heard anything quite like it since.
The Black Finger has mostly always sounded old although it sounded quite new in 1970 or so. Guaranteed to sound old now, always.
That’s good!
It’s a tough, brutish, potentially ugly-sounding compressor that works well with tough, brutish, potentially ugly-sounding big amplifiers and fuzz tones. (Really, you put a fuzz face circuit after it and the results are great.)
It is not for milchtoasts.
You should be an old, crabby guy with a beard and a large bald spot for best results with the Black Finger.
1. The only other electric guitar compressor on the market at around the same time was the Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer.
The Orange Squeezer was a ca. mid-70’s very small box with a fixed setting. It was much less aggressive, smaller and simpler in design than the EH Black Finger.
It attained some popularity for its use by Steely Dan (obviously never credited on recordings), some country artists who loved what it did for their picking, and later, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits.
Like the old Black Finger, who uses Orange Squeezers today?
Really, nobody. Maybe some older session aces who either have originals or who bought clone designs of the original, which exist, but which still aren’t popular in any real sense.
There’s not much to compare between the two designs although I’d argue that the Black Finger I have, when set right, works great for accentuating country licks, adding warmth (although the tone knob can make it really irritating, too) and with distortion (refer the fuzz face citation) furnishes the vintage A-to-Z with the twist of the guitar’s volume knob early-70’s hard rock sound.
The Orange Squeezer was deemed more successful. No one credits the Black Finger with anything. It was totally eclipsed, and then erased, by the rapid success and reputation of the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi fuzz. (Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd wanted the Muff fuzz after Dark Side of the Moon. What if he had heard a Black Finger in line before his Fuzz Face?)
The only other compressor I’ve used that’s equal or better (for my taste) is the one designed into the Scholz R&D Sustainor which came many years later. At a practical level, the Scholz R&D compression circuit of the mid-Eighties was/is somewhat easier to work with and a slight bit more naturally musical than the original 1970 Black Finger. Both supplied a lot of compression. There were no really mild settings to be had from either.
What’s the difference? The Black Finger was not set in its equalization. Maxing the compression only kills the attack from the guitar as it blooms the tail.
The compression in the Scholz circuit, along with the rest of the design never totally kills the attack but does add a lot of mid-range.
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01.02.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 1:10 pm by George Smith
You feel it in about every aspect of American life. The relentless corporate grasping, an environment in which every minute of every day is taken up with the extraction of every last bit of profit possible from the populace.
The television slate of bowl games yesterday neatly illustrated it. And I’m not talking about the ridiculous corporate brand names the the country’s most odious firms have insisted on strapping onto these things.
What I am talking about has to do with control of the American web. I haven’t had television for three years but I can tell you that three years ago I could still watch most college football game broadcasts on the web free at ESPN’s web portal. This did not seem to be a big deal.
Yesterday, and for most of the past two years, that’s been a memory. Corporate America has taken complete control of the web and now it’s a toll road.
At least ninety-eight percent of the games this holiday season were pay-walled, requiring you to sign in using your cable tv provider credentials.
Corporate America doesn’t call it that. It’s changed the meaning of the word free into there’s another automatic ticket cost for that. Because the only way to watch ESPN’s tv feed on the net is by having a business contract with the web content providers that have deals with them.
The only actual free part, and it was meager, was on ESPN3.
There the sports network offered a minimal slate of the lower tier bowl games free but only as streams called Skycam or Spidercam.
A Skycam stream is a feed from behind the line of scrimmage of the team that has the ball. There is no play by play or instant replay. You also cannot hear the announcer at the field.
Think of it as the worst end zone seating available except with no play-by-play calling and no scoreboard. You can Google the live score in another browser window.
But you still get force fed all the commercials in full HD in the breaks.
Now, go ahead. Sneer at me for watching college football. But I’m here by myself in Pasadena and that’s what I was going to do. Watch the Rose Bowl. I live here.
For the Rose Bowl, it was the “Spidercam” feed on ESPN3.
Four minutes in, the network pulled the plug on that, too, although it had allowed morning viewing of the Michigan State/Baylor and Wisconsin/Auburn games.
Suddenly, a pop-up appeared on the Rose Bowl stream, one insisting you prove you were getting internet access from an accepted provider.
Finding a pirated stream and getting past the advertising overlays designed to put ransomeware on your system took me another ten minutes. I lost the first quarter of the Rose Bowl doing it but then watched, uninterrupted, the rest of ESPN’s live broadcast.
So I did get to watch.
But the wall-to-wall avarice shown by the already insanely wealthy agencies of college football, ESPN and the cable providers is just another illustration of things very worthy of hate and destruction.
In the morning the Rose Parade was free. Corporate America also couldn’t monetize the sky over Pasadena. I stepped outside to see the yearly stealth bomber flyover of the Rose Bowl, just a little northwest of me, before the kick-off at two o’clock.
But living in this country you have the feeling business would have been into your pocket for even that if there was a way.
Please provide your log-in credentials from our list of providers before you can step outside.
As a related thought question: Do you think corporate America is worth defending from cyber-attacks?
For Heaven’s sake, if “yes,” why?
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12.24.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 3:14 pm by George Smith
Freedom … because Google’s toffs and geniuses said so:
“Given everything that’s happened, the security implications were very much at the front of our minds,” Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote in a blog post. “But after discussing all the issues, Sony and Google agreed that we could not sit on the sidelines and allow a handful of people to determine the limits of free speech in another country (however silly the content might be).”
For the last two decades more people in the national security state have been hoping for and predicting, first — “electronic Pearl Harbor,” then “digital Pearl Harbor,” and now “cyber-Pearl Harbor.”
Because they would all benefit from it. And even while it stubbornly refused to transpire, they made out on the subject very well, anyway.
Now that it’s here and gone, figuratively triggered by Seth Rogen, many are a little bit at a loss for words. Because you can’t go to war over a cyber-attack that stuffed Seth Rogen’s movie and Sony, if only briefly. Seriously.
It’s kind of a bummer.
From the New York Times:
When does a cyberattack against an American company, network or government agency warrant military involvement?
Ummm, not now, say all.
“But just because a victim state may be entitled to use its military to take countermeasures does not mean that it necessarily should,” writes Kristen E. Eichensehr, a visiting assistant professor of law at UCLA. “Other options, such as criminal prosecution, international sanctions and old-fashioned naming and shaming, may be legal, available and more effective responses.”
“We will not go to war over Sony, nor should we,” adds James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s frustrating …”
No war. But give more money to the private sector, writes Jason Healey: “[In] nearly every significant attack or conflict, the savior has been the private sector, companies like McAfee or Microsoft that have the agility … The answer to ever-worsening cyberattacks is an overriding priority on defense centered on our true cyber power, America’s private sector.”
Got it. Give more money to large security corporation so they can protect the stuff of the 1 percent, like The Interview.
“For years now, the Obama administration has warned of the risks of a cyber-Pearl Harbor, a nightmare attack that takes out America’s power grids and cellphone networks and looks like the opening battle in a full-scale digital war,” writes David Sanger, also at the Times.
“Such predictions go back at least 20 years…” he continues. You bet.
There is, of course, an anonymous “senior defense official”:
“If you had told me that it would take a Seth Rogen movie to get our government to really confront these issues, I would have said you are crazy … But then again, this whole thing has been crazy.???
Seth Rogen is now a kind of universal IQ test. If you want to see him or his movie because it says important stuff about computer security and freedom, you flunk.
Computer Security for the 1 Percent — from the archives.
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