Public Address - Club Politique (Home)

Martini Time | Feb 16, 2006 22:23

Maybe one of the highlights of 2001 was seeing the Rev. Horton heat not once, but twice, in concert in a respective couple of cities. The second city was Melbourne at the renowned Corner Bar, Richmond. But the first was the more memorable, a place in Fort Worth filled with Psychobilly goons and their poodle-skirted ladies.

And the song the Reverend did not play? 'Cowboy Love'.

I remembered this because the song has always made me chuckle, mostly due to such classic lines as the opener "I want to go two stepping, with a good looking big black buck", and was guaranteed to start a riot. Also because I saw on the news this evening that Willy Nelson has gone and released a gay cowboy song. As you do.

Me surprised? No. Thing is, in 1989 while many at Robert E. Lee High seemed to think that guys wearing skin-tight clothes, big belt buckles and snappy shirts was 'macho', I wasn't really convinced.

When you come from the Mount you get used to seeing people in baggy tracksuits and the like. Then you get sent to Texas on a student exchange and get exposed to horrors in your peripheral vision. Like guys in tight jeans rolling their balls into more comfortable spots. Eeeeshhh...

Anyhow, if you're going to be exposed to anything from the Country and Western school, go the more modern versions. And psychobilly is one such way to go. Find yourself something off Sub Pop and get into it. If you can find it, get yourself a copy of the Flametrick Subs (they were on their own label when I bought the album). They're nutters. All I can really remember is the tiny cowboy hats and the stage lighting, only red, from below. They had these cheerleaders with red and black pomp-pomps and '666' on the front of their very small leather dresses.

Live, songs like "Beer-run" and "Plastic Jesus" are genius. If I had a band, or talent, I'd do a cover of their song "Government Issue Bathroom Tissue" in a second.

Otherwise I think I may have mentioned Supersuckers' "Must've been high", a classic known to far too few. The next cover I'd do is "roamin' round", or "Juicy Pureballs Hungover Together".

The theme to all this, you might notice, is Country and Western. Unfortunately, living in Texas kind of means that listening to crap country music kind of rubbed off on me. Before I left to go overseas a dude from school used to listen to Johnny Cash, and it was a long time in the South before I realised just how much foresight the guy had.

Just the other day I heard Radio Active playing Cash's cover of "Mercy Seat". His version of the song has been giving me cold shivers for years. It's far better than Giant Sand singing "Red Right Hand" (although the latter is still a good cover).

I digress though. Go and see Walk the Line. I'm sure in a week or two every second person in the office humming "Ring of Fire" will become tedious, but for now, it's kinda cool. Plus, I hear it's a much better film than Brokeback Mountain. Hayden has a report of the average response to the latter.

Yeah... cowboys... what I mostly remember was the way the place had barely changed. I had headed back to Texas as an ordinary tourist after spending a year at home. After spending a month or so in a smallish town working as a roofer with these guys who liked to call Arabs 'sand-niggers' (it was a few months before Gulf War One), a friend and I drove this 70s Mercedes down to Austin for a little contrast.

What I immediately noticed was the lack of really tight jeans. For some reason as Texas gets more liberal the dress becomes less homoerotic. Kind of a weird reverse-gayness thing going on there. Guys start doing stuff like actually 'hanging out with girls' instead of each other, and there's a lot less chewing tobacco. Hitting each other becomes less of a form of bonding.

Once again, there's nothing about the idea of a Brokeback Mountain-type film that surprises me. Any group that routinely refers to the best things in life being 'stallions', 'bull-riding' and that whole mythology Speights has bought into has got to be questioned.

Seriously. Two guys up in the Alps who prefer beer and each others company to women? You gotta wonder.

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Enemy Mine | Feb 13, 2006 20:42

Something that's been aggravating the hell out of me lately is the subtle difference between an 'online journal' and a 'bulletin board'. For some reasons there is this belief that posting acres of drivel for people to 'discuss' is equivalent to posting a log.

If you're essentially consolidating news stories then you're not really creating a journal, what you're doing is providing an RSS with commentary. A sometimes inane commentary.

Look at this guy for example. Way back in December I was travelling up to Auckland to sponge some free food, and gave Dean a lift. The poor dude was stuck in a bus stop to shelter him from the pouring rain, and just needed a hand. In return he shared a story about an insane American crusader in Pakistan, and it was the highlight of my trip along the island. It's a shame I just haven't had the time to get to you all yet.

Essentially it involves a guy who may have seen the Blues Brothers one too many times and was out to kill Osama with this big feck-off sabre. Dean reckons the Middle East is littered with these guys.

Like I say, online journal.

Then we have our old friend David Farrar. If you really need a wee trip into the wonders of idiocy on the interweb I suggest you delve into the comments to this bulletin. In this bulletin and associated comments we have both the best and worst of the interweb all wrapped into one.

We have people making outrageous comments with no substance. People exposing their prejudices and being pulled up for it. People telling outright lies and being exposed. And people constantly confusing the really serious events of places overseas with dinner parties in Grey Lynn.

I know you're all busy people, and many of you won't have time to really get into the stuff being said there, but here's a small taste of the reasoning going on to provide you with an example

I googled the following string "death penalty" + "USA" + "support for", and opened the first link, here. I checked out the site and found this graph.

What this tells me is that 43% of people in the USA support the death penalty. So with a population of 296 million that's a total of 128 million people who are willing to line up and stick a needle in an ethnic, mentally ill or stupid mans arm.

Even worse, there are an estimated 224 million Christians in the US. Now, seen as all Christians read the Bible they must logically follow the old maxim 'an eye for an eye', and any effort to try and stop all these slavering, bloodthirsty murders from not throwing the switch on the electric chair will fail.

You see, Americans are just like that. It's in their culture you see. All those years of growing up watching cowboy films (except the gay ones), and listening to gangsta rap has just made this culture where they like to see people getting killed. Pretty soon anyone who so much as looks at anyone wrong will be next on the chopping block.

Are you starting to get pissed off? Smell bullshit? Fair enough. None of these assumptions or 'facts' are true.

So why do I rant? Because this crap about suicide bombers shits me.

People, let me introduce you to a little friend of mine. It's called a Fuel Air Explosive. Essentially it's dropped from a plane and descends while releasing a large amount of aerosol. When it gets near the ground the bomb ignites, virtually vaporising everything over a given distance. Play the animation, it's very instructive.

Too expensive or flashy for you? Then how about this one. It's called an AK47 and the world is littered with these things. This is my favourite bit.

With the 5.45mm bullet, the tumbling produced a maximum wound expansion twice at 10 and 40cm of depth. With the 7.62mm bullet, the maximum wound expansion occurred at approximately 30 and 40 cm. 40cm is the average thickness of a human trunk.

Lovely. A gun that can shoot the average person in half on an average day.

If the million rifles in Mozambique are too far away for you, you can always buy one in Christchurch for about two grand.

You know who mostly gets killed by these things? Not soliders. Ordinary people like you and me.

The opinion that there is something about suicide bombings that makes it any worse than pointing a rifle at someone, pulling a trigger and leaving a 40cm cavity in their torso is to my mind both naïve and stupid.

Look, at present we have 39% of the American population in support of the decision to invade Iraq. But do think that all 115 million people support any action that would result in the killing of civilians? Because that, by it's very definition is what war means. And these aren't extremists, they're just a cross-section of Americans who believe in an idea.

War has never resulted in anything else, at any time in human history, and anyone who tells you any differently is either a liar or a fool. And many people think we're in a war with Islam. Too many. Do you think they're lying to themselves, or you, about civilian deaths?

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