11.01.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 7:39 am by George Smith
“Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else …” reads Paul Krugman’s column today.
People in poverty deserve it, because of the bad choices they’ve made and the belief that the market always rewards those with merit. There is a war on the poor and it’s the “defining issue of American politics.
“47M Americans hit by food stamp cuts today,” reads USA Today.
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10.17.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 2:29 pm by George Smith
There are no Holy Grails or epiphanies to be had in Nazareth, PA. It is not a town of treasure or import. Trust me. Been there many times. The Highway Kings rehearsed in a Pleasant-Valley-Sunday-style tract home in Nazareth. But over the weekend the New York Times ran a piece on another bifurcation in New America’s Culture of Lickspittle, in this case, the acoustic guitar, a musical instrument designed to be cheap and for everyone to play, now something domestically made as a collector’s item for the wealthy and their upper middle class shoe-shiners who haven’t yet been obsoleted.
The genesis and use of the acoustic guitar in this country does not lie in the heart of the aristocracy.
However, like everything else in the society that has two tiers, the very rich and the poor and getting poorer, if one is to survive making a material good in America, you must evolve it into a snob artisan commodity.
And that’s where Martin Guitars of Nazareth, PA, and the New York Times come in.
From this weekend:
NAZARETH, Pa. — For guitar aficionados, a visit to the C. F. Martin & Company factory is akin to a religious experience. They talk in reverential tones about the handcrafted instruments that have been coming off the production floor here for more than 150 years, even referring to certain models in online discussion forums as “the Holy Grail??? of the acoustic guitar.
The reason for this unintentionally laugh-out-loud news is a coffee table book on Martin guitars, Inventing the American Guitar, and the exhibit of them at the Metropolitan.
“The text of the book, which is in coffee table format, is supplemented by lush color photographs of the guitars themselves, many of them close-up shots that highlight design features or the sheen or grain of the wood that Martin used,” informs the Times’ reviewer, Larry Rohter. “The effect is similar to that of viewing a Georgia O’Keeffe painting that magnifies the stamen of a flower or part of a cow skull …”
The quality of praise arcs ever upward:
“We’re seeing the appreciation of these things as objects, not just as tools, which is why you’re seeing them in an art museum,??? Arian Sheets, the “curator of stringed instruments at the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota” told the newspaper.
“[Classic] Martins can sell for well into six figures, reflect how these vintage instruments — including the banjos, ukuleles and mandolins that the company has also manufactured at various times in its history — are being elevated to the status of works of art.”
New Martins cost between $1,000 and $11,000.
Like Fender Musical Instruments, Martin almost went out of business in the Eighties. Bad management and the emergence of dance, disco. and rap/hip-hop hurt the company’s market, reducing production at its lowest point to 3,000 instruments in a year.
A bit over a decade ago the American guitar instrument split into two divisions. One made cheap instruments that people could still afford to buy by scrapping their old factories and moving production to Mexico, then China. The other half, much smaller in terms of manufacturing floor space and workers employed, devolving into “custom shops” providing domestically made snob-priced instruments for musicians with recording contracts and lawyers and bankers who might have played in crappy bands in their college years, now with greatly expanded disposable incomes.
Like Martin acoustic guitars, domestically made electric guitars became investments, paradoxically priced out of the purchasing range of most of the employees now pushing them on show room floors.
Woody Guthrie’s acoustic guitar had a sticker. It read “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Now they should could come with an update: These machines are for corporate fascists.
“Sorry.”
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10.12.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:14 am by George Smith
For a friend’s birthday.
Don’t you think everyone deserves a song?
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09.30.13
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 2:07 pm by George Smith
“Baby Blue,” an aching pop rock single that went to #14 in the USA in 1972, played in edited form at the close of Breaking Bad last night, was perfect. Right to its poignant rising final guitar flourish, so exquisitely compressed you hear string noise as the show fades to black, it’s a song that put to music loss, regret, and now — meth and death.
Badfinger was a tragedy. Despite singles success with Apple Records (Come and Get It, No Matter What, Day by Day and Baby Blue), the dissolution of the Beatles’ company and the withdrawal of a record from the American market seven weeks after release in 1974 left the band with no income. Despondent, Pete Ham — the voice of “Baby Blue,” committed suicide by hanging the same year.
Another bandmember, bassist Tom Evans, hung himself in 1983.
By tomorrow rock critics at all the on-line magazines will have picked over the song and the band, ruining it if you paid attention.
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09.28.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, WhiteManistan at 11:27 am by George Smith
WhiteManistan Blues Band weekly Saturday anti-corporate fascist 1 percent shopping plutocracy jam deep inna heart of Pasadena. Margaritas, Trader Joe’s select Cava, Sekt or ‘champagne’ — one of these combinations.
Wish you could be here. But you can’t.
Cyberwar. Keith Alexander. China. Al Qaeda, Asymmetric. Oh, really?!
Atomic Reactor amp of the WhiteManistan Blues Band. And it sounds it, too.
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09.23.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, WhiteManistan at 2:41 pm by George Smith
If you’ve been wondering about what’s behind part of the GOP hate party on food stamps, it’s outrage over Jason Greenslate, a San Diego surfer with a hard rock band called RattLife, who has an EBT card.
Fox News made a special example of him and the GOP has been using video of Greenslate to inflame people with the implication the SNAP program has expanded because of alleged moochers like the “beach bum.”
“You can no longer sit on your couch or ride a surfboard like Jason in California and expect the federal taxpayer to feed you,” said Kansas GOPer Tim Huelskamp when the House food stamp cuts were voted up last week.
Greenslate, who cooperated with Fox in hopes of getting publicity for RattLife: “I do work. I’m just not making any money. I’m setting up a career for myself.”
Darrell “Benghazi” Issa of California delivered this unintentionally amusing quote: “Clearly it’s an example of somebody using a government program that is unreasonable, considering he has chosen to make less money and is using public assistance for a lifestyle decision … He obviously is anticipating being very rich later and not paying back the money.”
Getting rich playing in a rock band, yeah, that happens so easily.
Anyway, this is a standard right wing media trick — finding one person getting a detested government benefit, in this case, a food stamp recipient, ideally in a blue state, someone most offensive to WhiteManistan. And Jason Greenslate is certainly that. His band, Rattlife can be found on YouTube.
Rattlife is an 80s-90s Guns n Roses in Hollywood style-act and the videos are worth checking out for the comments alone, now made by the terminally enraged in WhiteManistan who seem to think if they get angry enough, they can will Greenslate out of existence or, at least, maybe get him arrested.
:I don’t think that one person [in a Fox News story] should be the decision for 47 million people [on food stamps],” Greenslate told the media today, which is certainly a sensible statement.
There’s another reality here, unstated. Job opportunities and wages are so poor in southern California that if Jason Greenslate worked the kind of more traditional “jobs” actually available, like wait staff at Starbucks, he’d still be eligible for the SNAP program, anyway.
I like Jason Greenslate and because he so pisses off the party of extremists who have used him in a right wing media gotcha, you should like him, too.
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09.13.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Rock 'n' Roll at 9:14 am by George Smith
Should’ve been a folk hit. But we’re not really into even letting a few eke out a few pebbles on social music, are we?
Friday music loud electric folk rock for modern raging inequality:
“Blessed are the job creators, ’cause they can always hire way more waiters.”
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what has happened.
Krugman, from today in the NYT, ‘Rich Man’s Recovery:’
“Basically, while the great majority of Americans are still living in a depressed economy, the rich have recovered just about all their losses and are powering ahead.”
Just published Piketty/Saez (UC Berkeley) data on inequality and the recovery of the super-wealthy after the Great Recession.
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07.28.13
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 1:43 pm by George Smith
Mick Farren, UK rocker, author and troublemaker, passed away while performing onstage with his old band, the Deviants.
As a young man I bought Deviants albums, along with his later solo releases, Screwed Up and Vampires Stole My Lunch Money, the latter of which featured charming titles “Half Price Drinks,” “I Want a Drink,” and “Drunk in the Morning,” a trilogy that communicated a certain amount of personal biography.
When I first moved to southern California, Farren was living in LA and writing a weekly column for the long since gone Los Angeles Reader, an alternative newsweekly.
Here’s a bit from the David Frost show, with Farren explaining how he injected a bit of craziness into the Isle of Wight rock festival in 1969.
And here is an excerpt from one of Farren’s book, one which I bought, entitled The Black Leather Jacket:
“It was all too obvious that (the black leather jacket) was my provisional membership card to the Bad Boys … I’m sure my normally level-headed mother saw it as the first rash step down the slippery slope that led all the way to drugs, degradation and cheap women. So, for that matter, did I.
“… I struggled into what was going to be my first cool leather garment. The leather creaked with newness and smelled like the interior of a factory fresh car … My legs seemed longer, my shoulders broader … I looked so damn cool. Mother of God, I was a cross between Elvis and Lord Byron!”
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07.04.13
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, WhiteManistan at 8:23 am by George Smith
Have a good 4th. Eat hot dogs or something. I will.
It has the John Philip Sousa feel. I asked him for help when I wrote it.
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07.01.13
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, WhiteManistan at 10:57 am by George Smith
This week, along with the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg, the 35th anniversary of Texxas Jam, the high water mark of WhiteManistan Rock.
Now painful memories.
Go to the theatre, pay 20+ dollars, sob into popcorn in humiliation and the ravages of time.
Music Trivia: Watch as film from the teaser pans over the sea of flesh that’s the happy crowd. Thirty two years later many of them voted for the WhiteManistan male crabs now picking on women and trying to outlaw abortion in Texas. Man, we were so hip.
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