And I don’t want to ball about like everybody else,
And I don’t want to live my life like everybody else,
And I won’t say that I feel fine like everybody else…
Ray Davis was writing anthems about not fitting in long before punk became fashionable. This one appeared in summer 1966 on the flip-side of “Sunny Afternoon,” but didn’t make it to America until years later when The Great Lost Kinks Album was released.
Well Frank settled down in the Valley
and hung his wild years
on a nail that he drove through
his wife’s forehead…
… he sold used office furniture
out there on San Fernando Road
and assumed a $30,000 loan
at 15 1/4 % and put down payment
on a little two bedroom place
his wife was a spent piece of used jet trash
made good bloody marys
kept her mouth shut most of the time
had a little Chihuahua named Carlos
that had some kind of skin disease
and was totally blind. They had a
thoroughly modern kitchen
self-cleaning oven (the whole bit)
Frank drove a little sedan
they were so happyOne night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple Mickey’s Big Mouths
drank ’em in the car on his way
to the Shell station, he got a gallon of
gas in a can, drove home, doused
everything in the house, torched it,
parked across the street, laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red then
Frank put on a top forty station
got on the Hollywood Freeway
headed north
Never could stand that dog
Do you hope to make her see you, fool?
Do you hope to pluck this dusky jewel?
The Doors didn’t even want to bother with “Hello, I Love You,” it was one of their first songs and they thought it was a throwaway. Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra Records, talked everyone involved into recording it after his 10-year-old son heard the band’s original demo and said, “Dad, I think that’s a hit single.”
The book to read is Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture.
Image by TONY WOOD
… As Judge [Jed] Rakoff stated, the Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Citigroup with “a substantial securities fraud” in the sale of a billion dollars’ worth of toxic securities that were designed to fail and which the bank had bet against… Citigroup had already paid fines for four similar scams. The judge observed that “although this would appear tantamount to an allegation of knowing and fraudulent intent, the SEC, for reasons of its own, chose to charge Citigroup only with negligence” despite the far more serious charges called for in securities law.
The failure of the SEC or any other government agency to hold the banks accountable provides the essential justification for citizen action of the sort the Occupy movement has offered…
And this is Scheer describing the situation in downtown Los Angeles, which sounds roughly similar to the situation in my hometown, Philadelphia. Police forces in both cities wiped out highly visible Occupy encampments at the same time:
… Of course the traditional cardboard encampments of the homeless three blocks away, a sprawling and constant feature of life in downtown Los Angeles, remained undisturbed. Sanitation and safety issues are of no concern as long as such manifestations of deep societal inequality are so far from the corridors of power as to be, in effect, invisible.
Have I shown you my legions?
Every time this guy opens his mouth, he proves he’s not only an arrogant plutocrat but also a dangerous creep:
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said the New York Police Department was like his own personal military force during a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to PolitickerNY.
“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world,” he said. “I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.”
Bloomberg was speaking about why he prefers City Hall to the White House. But later in the speech, he raised the possibility that he would seek the presidency. He claimed the executive duties performed by mayors prepared them for the White House better than other political positions.
Bloomberg recently came under rhetorical fire for the NYPD’s actions in Zuccotti Park. When police moved to evict “Occupy Wall Street” protesters, reporters were prevented from witnessing the scene and some were even arrested.
The city also closed airspace in lower Manhattan to prevent news helicopters from taking aerial footage of the police crackdown.
The human rights organizations PEN American Center and PEN International condemned the restrictions on press coverage as “an obvious abridgement of the First Amendment right of all Americans to monitor official actions that clearly carry their own First Amendment concerns.”
Imagine if the well-manicured mayor, who bought himself a third term, were actually to become president and have control over the real army.
Coo coo it’s cold outside. Coo coo it’s cold
outside. Ooo coo coo. Don’t forget your mittens.
Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he
said: Well just take a right where they’re going
to build that new shopping mall, go straight past
where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a
left at what’s going to be the new sports center,
and keep going until you hit the place where
they’re thinking of building that drive-in bank.
You can’t miss it. And I said: This must be the
place. Ooo coo coo.
“Big Science” is the title cut from the first album by Laurie Anderson, the New Yorker who seemed to single-handedly bring “performance art” into the mainstream in the 1980s. But it’s not about science at all. It’s about urban sprawl and self-imposed isolation and phony individualism and the other forces that have killed the sense of community in much of America.
The piece is as funny as it is scary. Anderson uses her electronic instruments to create a landscape as big and empty as a prairie, and her voice is beautifully sardonic. She makes numbness sound sexy.
Millions are protesting in Britain, and it’s no wonder — the government is making an already sick economy even sicker. Paul Krugman provides a good analogy:
… History says that a financial crisis reduces long-run growth potential if policymakers don’t limit the short-run damage it does.
And yet what’s happening in Britain now is that depressed estimates of long-run potential are being used to justify more austerity, which will depress the economy even further in the short run, leading to further depression of long-run potential, leading to …
It really is just like a medieval doctor bleeding his patient, observing that the patient is getting sicker, not better, and deciding that this calls for even more bleeding.
And the truly awful thing is that [David] Cameron and [George] Osborne are so deeply identified with the austerity doctrine that they can’t change course without effectively destroying themselves politically.
The other truly awful thing is that there are so many Americans politicians who are just as destructively reactionary as the British PM and his henchman, and working people will continue to suffer if they prevail. This is one reason why the Occupy movement in this country has to keep a high profile despite demolition of encampments by police.
In applauding the smackdown of the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding its $285 million penalty against Citigroup, Matt Taibbi wrote, “The [Judge Jed] Rakoff ruling shines a light on the way these crappy settlements have evolved into a kind of cheap payoff system, in which crimes may be committed over and over again, and the SEC’s only role is to take a bribe each time the offenders slip up and get caught.”
So-called objective reporters saw things differently. Edward Wyatt of The New York Times opened his news report by defending the poor, beleaguered SEC:
When a Wall Street firm trades billions of dollars of securities a day and sometimes showers seven-figure bonuses on top executives, regulators are hard-pressed to fashion a penalty that really hurts.
He added that Rakoff
… added another dimension to that quandary on Monday when he told the [SEC] that he could not determine whether [its] penalty against Citigroup was adequate if he did not know what had really happened.
In other words, the SEC isn’t an integral part of the corrupt system that allows Wall Street firms to get off with a slap on the wrist, without admitting to fraud or even discussing the facts of a case in a public court. The SEC is a victim of a policy dating from the 1970s, before the Wall Street firms joined with commercial banks, effectively making them too big to police.
Wyatt quoted an SEC official’s explanation for why the agency makes secret settlements with Wall Street firms:
“We agree to settlements because they achieve for us largely everything that we could hope to get should we take the case to trial,” Robert Khuzami, the S.E.C.’s enforcement director, said in an interview this month. “I think the message is pretty clear. And the investors get their money much faster, because, as you know, lawsuits can take years.”
Which is total bullshit to anyone who believes in the rule of law, but Wyatt ended the piece without so much as a quotation from a legal expert challenging Khuzami’s feeble rationale. Nowhere in Wyatt’s article was the suggestion that the SEC might escape its “quandary” by hiring more enforcement agents and being less secretive.
The Wall Street Journal also said the SEC faced a “quandary,” but it at least noted that some legal experts think the agency “had only itself to blame by failing to provide the judge with enough information to make a decision on the proposed settlement.”
Neither the NYT or the WSJ even hinted that the SEC might be, at the very least, shirking its duty and ought to be rebuilt from the ground up. As Rakoff wrote:
… In any case like this that touches on the transparency of financial markets whose gyrations have so depressed our economy and debilitated our lives, there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth.
Rock & Metal Reviews That Hit Hard
Thoughts on Literature, Expressing Creativity, Being Authentic
the literary asylum
The Power of Story
"We make bitter better."
Your Home For Independent Journalism
Personal Musings and Thought Experiments
A baseball publication that embraces the absurdity of life, the 8-1 putout, and the history of the OAKLAND Athletics (cococrispafro@gmail.com)
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.
Open Your Mind
Liberal Politics, Media Criticism & General Mayhem
Where is your nonfiction section please.
Epic fantasy & military sci-fi author.
For lovers of reading, crime writing, crime fiction
A trip through life with fingers crossed and eternal optimism.
A Chronicle of the End Times since 2006 PE (pig era)
Helping idiots who desperately need my assistance by calling them fucking morons since 2004
Odd Man Out 