gallas13

while on the subject. . .
of the neighborhood, i have to say that this hubris that seems to have infected every white kid east of the mississippi is really becoming hilarious. the other day the missus and i were standing on the corner, and some journalist - some twenty something intellectual no doubt - approaches us and begins to ask questions about whether or not we're from the hood, and whether or not we minded that starbucks was fixing to open. when i answered, "i'm ambivalent," she rapidly turned to the missus and baited her into some diatribe about it detracting from the uniqueness of the neighborhood's - indeed all of new york's - character. i said to our reporter, "this fucking neighborhood is already los angeles honey. write that down." she didn't. why? because her head (the reporter's) was and is too far up her ass to admit that we are living in the hot topic generation. now my girlfriend is on the record in some paper barking the same old "local good, starbucks bad" blue state party line. listen, i'm not particularly enamored with the establishment starbucks itself, or with wal mart, or macdonalds, but i find it absurd that people harp so. if we really cared about our health, or labor practices, we - the collective we as americans - wouldn't spend our money there. what in fact i think is happening is that we have a small cardre of loud, overeducated and underemployed whities with nothing better to do than not shower and bitch. and start the umpteenth thin lizzy rip off band. and be totally oblivious to the reality of the common lower middle class citizen with kids and little to hope for than hope for the next generation.

the very punk rock that fuels these idiots' idealism is a laughable skeleton of itself. it was a time and a place unique to the reagan era - now that employment and interest rates are relatively low there's enough stuff to distract the common man from getting enough groundswell to do anything remotely edgy. the public gets duped into a sham war, and can't even find a candidate worth voting for to oust the jackass that marched us into some other jackasses' oilfields. the proverbial wool was pulled down long long ago, but now i'm afraid we're far beyond hope of pulling that wool up. our next generation is already high on it's own self-rightousness and self-centeredness. what we need folks is a catastrophe. a disaster so big that everyone loses someone important to them. otherwise we're just sleepwalking for the next several decades.

i really wanted to tell that fucking reporter all of that.

what about bird?
having rambled all of that straight out of my ass, let's agree to agree that frankly almost anything remotely edgy is so hilariously copied or diluted as to have lost it's novelty value. and that's okay. the american entertainment and fashion machines are tremendously adept at rooting out anything remotely unique, marketing it, and replicating it ad nauseum if it has any appeal whatsoever. and that's good because it means jobs. what strikes me i that there ARE genuine american art forms that stil exist in pockets, but remain either unnoticed, or sadly left as antiques in a dusty shop window. jazz is a case in point. probably no other form of american art can touch the breadth or depth of accomplishment that american jazz musicians have reached, and yet - aside from the silly copycat diana krall's of the world - how many under 40 jazz musicians can you name off the top of your head? we're letting it die. and maybe that's just the way of the passenger pigeon, of the sabretooth tiger, of leaders and pioneers. . .we assasinate them all - some quickly with a point of lead, others slowly with the arsenic of our indifference.

i am, on a positive note, going to see d.e.v.o. tomorrow night. ha cha cha!!!