Friday, December 31, 2004

Rockin' it in Homeland

Not much to say tonight but,


HAVE A HAPPY AND HEALTHY NEW YEAR!!!!!!

Going to see the two best bands in NYC right now, Outernational and Gogol Bordello at north six in W'burg Brooklyn

Everyone raise a glass tonight for those less lucky than us.

PEACE AND LOVE

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

The "normals"

Most people that will be reading this blog, at the start anyways, will not consider themselves to be "normal" people. Most of my friends are intellectuals on the surface but bohemians at heart. They read Chomsky, Zinn maybe even Mao or Lenin. They drink far too often and (hopefully) have sex freely though (hopefully, again) safely. We feel almost like a loose knit group, a community even, that values not just life but the fullfillment of life's joys and tragedies at the same time.

With the wars and "natural" disasters we are told to accept as part of everyday life, now happening almost daily, we stop and reflect on the meaning of life. Also on ways these horrible things could of been prevented, at least I know I do.

How about the "normal" people? The millions and millions who spend a significant part of their lives watching (and believing) TV. The ones who take the "news" as sacroscant?? The people who don't realize that we live in a culture where truth is most closely represented on a cartoon show about a made up family who live in an unknown state in the US rather than on so called reality shows??

Do the events in South East Asia and the Middle East make them shudder to think about life and it's value??

It's funny how memory of events long ago help you understand the present. I remember my 6th grade teacher asking us what we thought about the union carbide gas leak disaster in India long ago. One of my fellow classmates remarked, and I will remember this for the rest of my life, "My Mom says that it's God punishing them for not believing in Jesus". My teacher thought this as plausible. He was a deacon at his church. He also sung to us hippie songs such as blowing in the wind every friday.

Weird.

I am now counting the mintues for some 700 Club reject to spout that garbage any day now. Remember, 9-11, to these fundamentalist culture killing freaks, was a type of payback (blowback?) from God. The crime? Allowing abortions and homos to run around freely. I haven't even heard Bin Laden ever say something as stupid as that. Although I am sure Bin Laden wouldn't be crazy about said homos strutting around any caves in Pakistan.

I am hoping aganist hope that the "normals" will not brush this umimaganiable disaster under their emotional rugs in this fashion. Are "they" thinking now "Damn, maybe if these countires weren't under so much debt and their infrastructure so shitty, more people would of been saved"?. Do the "normals" even think this way?? Do they know that the floods in Haiti that killed thousands were not "natural" disasters but man made because of de-forestation??

Is it pompous of me to ask..do the "normals" even think? Do the "normals" even care?

Nothing surprises me anymore. I mean the Red Sox won the world series for geebus' sake!!

Maybe the end is nigh.....

Monday, December 27, 2004

Can 15,000 corpses be entertainment?

You bet your sweet ass they can be. When I read the yahoo headline "Earthquakes cause Tsunami, kills thousands all over Asia" I chuckled, but not in a amused way. I chuckled in the same way I did when I saw a building I used as a compass ever since I was allowed to walk the streets of nyc by myself, with a huge gaping hole in it. Then only to collapse a few minutes later, not even realizing it's twin had already perished.

You know, it's that "what the fuck?" chuckle. Then after the inital shock of seeing the bulidings fall, my brain kicked in and I realized there were people in there. Then I thought, wait a moment my (now ex) girlfriend works 5 blocks away, holy fuck!!

If I wasn't from NYC and I didn't know anyone who worked near or burned or jumped to death live on TV that day, the chuckle, that weird chuckle, would of been my lasting impression of the day. It's like when you hear about a earthquake in "west bumble fuck", Iran that kills 50,000 or so. It makes an impression, some kind of impression, but only like a murder scene in a movie, not like the impression you get when your loved ones forget about you or god forbid abuse you in some way.

Reading about 15,000 people dying made me chuckle and had me mesmerized. I almost wanted to thank them for entertaining me for the 2 and a half moments it took me to read the article.

Then I remembered about a drinking buddy of mine. A rich kid NYU student, who when he isn't blindingly drunk and screwing young women and calling me an old fart cause I can't come close to matching his acheivements, actually cares for people who aren't as lucky and white as he is.

He told me he was going to India. When he told me this I initally worried (ever since Indiana Jones when I think of India I think of little Hindu slave children and for some reason I dont think I am far of the mark there except for the fact that their middle class is half the size of the US total population) so I asked him, where in India are you going? He said "everywhere".

Everywhere his family's ambition, guile and skin color can afford to send him to. That might be in some morgue somewhere.

I am drinking tonight to either his memory or (hopefully) him reading this post when he gets back and wanting to kick my ass or (most likely) buying me another shot of Jameson.

Cheers and Peace to you Chris wherever you are, and please be alive you fucker.

To the other 14,999, thanks for the entertainment. To their families, don't despair, I'm sure Hollywood, or maybe even Bollywood, will make a movie about the poor pale face tourists who lost all their property (gasp!) and (oh yeah) died. Maybe they can use you as extras or maybe you can even play little hindu slave children all grown up .

With the rupees you make from that you might be able to buy the water you thought your Gods gave to you for free when all along (or just until "free trade" made this possible) it was owned by humans. Although some of those humans, whose job it is to collect your water tax, might of perished today under the crushing weight of 30 foot waves, I am sure there are now others taking their place to make sure your account is current.

Update on this post 01/12/05:

Not only are the now 150,000 corpses entertainment for us 'mericans (like we didn't need more entertainment), but the major papers (here in NYC anyways) are printing page after page of how our glorious leader and God's chosen country is leading the way to help save these poor unlucky people. I guess the on going coverage of wanton killing of Iraqis is making our collective red blooded 'merican cock to lose it's erection. We need these feel good stories to get hard again. I guess the money being spent (pledged more like it, big difference) for the asian disaster compared to the money we spent in Florida for their hurricane disasters (election year money) or the cost of liberating people from oil, culture and lives in Iraq has not entered the equation yet.

Saturday, December 25, 2004

What hood you from yo?

One of the things that make NYC so great is the diversity of its neighborhoods. Also how diverse neighborhoods are right next door to each other.

Growing up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (Which was/is mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican) I could walk up 3 blocks or so and be in a Chinese neighborhood (which to the Puerto Rican and spanish speakers who lived there, was still called Sunset Park, so god knows what the Chinese called it).

If you walked another block over you would be in a Palestinian neighborhood, which was still called Sunset Park. But if you traveled another block over you would enter the biggest Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in America, Boro Park.

Believe me nobody would mistake Boro Park for Sunset Park, even though now there are more Mexicans and Polish moving in. I just finished living in Boro Park for the better part of 10 years and hopefully now they will have halfway decent restuarants and some hot ass Polish woman walking around (They should be happy I left).

There aren't too many places in the world you can do this and thinking about that always puts a smile on my face. But what brought this up in my brain today was nothing to smile about.

I read this article about Fallujah and was expecting the usual: some people being let back in, a couple of hundred at a time. Being retina scanned, and ID'ed (which now have to have afixed to their clothing at all times, I guess the Army ran out of star of davids)and the ex-residents complaining that their city was destroyed.

But as soon as I started reading the article, something struck me. The 'hood they were being let into was called Al-Andalus. To the regular american joe schmoe that means absolute dick. To me it struck a chord. Al-Andalus was what the moors/arabs called their kingdom when they ruled Spain for hundreds of years. Being partly of Spainish and Moorish descent that meant alot.

Think about the history of these people that long ago, what they accomplished and where they are at now. Cordova back in the 10th century in southern Spain was a cultural center for Iberian, Arab and African cultures. A melting pot if you will. There is alot written on this in Tariq Ali's book Clash Of Fundamentalisms.

Oh and by the way Al-Andalus is in shambles and "unfit for animals".

Where else to go but Mama Africa to find a Cultural Hero?

"Get in the canoe," says Baaba Maal. "We're crossing to Mauritania." It is getting on for midnight in the little town of Bakel, way out on the eastern borders of Senegal, and one of the great singers of Africa is on his way to a concert. We've already been driving for some 10 hours across flat, arid scrublands, and now, in the darkness, we have arrived on the banks of the Senegal river. The boatman launches us in the direction of what sounded like a riot on the far side; it turns out to be several hundred of Maal's followers who have been waiting hours for his arrival.

We fight through the crowds to scramble into a Land Cruiser, which blasts out well-worn cassettes of his songs as it bounces away. There seems to be no road and the driver swerves between bushes and the edges of dusty fields. There has been no sign of a border post, and I have no visa.


Great article read here.

Note the difference of his performance for his African fans and those for his fans in Western Europe and the handful in America. It seems like he is part of the audience back home in the motherland but just another black entertainer in the west. Also note how he uses his performance in Mauritania to teach the youth about the culture of the tribes of West Africa (where he come from Senegal in paticular).

Reminds of when I saw the Wailers in NYC expecting the audience to be full of super cool (very hungry and giggliy) open minded people from everywhere. That romantic vision was destroyed when some jerk off yelled out while the sax player was doing a solo and the band was doing one of their instrumental numbers "Shut the hell up, play some marley goddammit I payed my money for that, not for some Nigger to play some crap I never heard before" obivously he kept the Nigger part of the tirade at a lower volume than the rest of the sentence but the point was well made.

We are the paying customers you are the entertainer you do what I say. Step and fetch it, boy....CultureLess...



This is a Public Service Announcement With My Mac

Deciding to do your own blog is like deciding to marry your computer. You can mess around with her, go on the internet here and there, read about your favorite topics and so forth, but that is only 2nd base maybe even 3rd base. And for some of us there might even be some foreplay involved but that is a topic for another type of blog.

I am realizing now that by starting the CultureLess blog I am now making a major commitment to sitting on my ass, even more than before, and for those that know me my ass does not need to be any bigger.

The reason I am still going to go ahead and increase the size of my rear end is this, to make a blog that is not about pointless personal garbage. I will not tell you when I score with some chick (unless I see ya in a bar and you see me with the kool aid smile and a story to tell). Besides there wouldn't be many entries on that blog.

The main reason I want to embark on this adventure (I am such a yank. Only an american would consider sitting down fingering plastic buttons an adventure), is to free these insane thoughts from my head and share them with the world.

Most of these thoughts concern the slow death of culture in this country while we export this dying corpse of human relations we have developed here to others. "Wo"(-Kenau reeves, any number of movies), you must be thinking, "If I had all that crap filling up my head I would counter act that with some kind of numbing agent". Way ahead of you. Since giving up on religion a long time ago (the numbing thing wasn't a phsyical thing it was "spritiual"..pbbb..more on the meaning of pbbb later), my preferred agent of numbness is now alcohol.

Nembutol numbs it all but I prefer Alcohol-Joe Strummer

When I am not thinking about Hindus in India eating super size fries fried in animal fat , or the Muslim girls I constantly see wearing headscarves walking out of Mcdonalds (Is mickey d's really halal meat?), I am amazed to think about how, through all this madness, there are people out there carving out some kind of refuge of culture in our beautiful free and properous 4th reich. I want to dedicate this blog to those people.

The people who think for themselves, who want to create more than they consume. People who consider life a blessing and not their personal toliet.

A great way to tell alot about a person non sexually is to find out who their hero is. Unless your hero is a porno actor or actress.

Who is my hero? Those who keep Culture alive and fight to keep it living and breathing and are against everything that injures, poisions, or beheads it like Ignorance, War, and wrestling, yes wrestling. But not the wrestling from Mexico that shit is for real....

So if anyone out there has a hero or can point out some people helping to keep music, art and proper human interaction alive let me know. I rather you let me know along with a couple of pints at a pub so to make this blog less ironic but this is where we are in the "21st and a half century"-(duck dogers..cartoon fans anyone???)

My pick for keepers of the flame sort of speak are of course here in NYC (when I have more time to figure this blog thingy out I will start posting about people all over the world resisting in their own special way).

gogolbordello

This band is a NYC band in every way possible. They are imposing, argressive, multi-culti, perverse, obscene and fucking great. Gypsy drunk punk with some electro thrown in. They will be playing in my land of birth Brooklyn at northsix with the also outstanding Outernational. GB's new album J.U.F. (Jewish Urkranian Friendship) is an adrenaline pumping addictive musical collage of beats from all over our beautiful world. Get it!!

Outernational

Another amazing band from my beloved city. If Operation Ivy were from NYC instead of the land of strip mall hell of the west coast they would of wished to be as good as these guys are and will be. I know, I know hyperbole, blah blah, but trust me when you see them live you will think, hey these guys just got together? There are going places!!

I just saw them for the first time last saturday for a Joe Strummer book release party and, while I picked my jaw off from the floor and stopped dancing like a wildman, i asked myself, "Was it like this when the Clash got together in '76???"

New Years Eve show people, to all New New Yorkers...if you want to be entertained here in NYC on New Years Eve...it's gonna cost ya!!


Peace, love, lust and music be unto all of you

Oh and happy Pagan holiday to all

djshoghi