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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
Live free or die!
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September 24, 2005
Do your Godly duty
To our animals, we are gods. Sometimes being God means doing some killing.
CLICK HERE to read my essay "Doing your Godly duty: Cats need killed."Labels: god, julie andrews
posted by Al at 9/24/2005 02:22:00 PM
September 23, 2005
Walt Rimler is SO sorry about that breakdown
Walter Rimler is quite the scholar of pop music. I found his 1984 book Not Fade Away in the Bracken library at Ball State lo nigh on 20 years ago.
This classic analysis of Broadway vs rock era songwriting made a big enough impression that I looked up the author years later on this newfangled internet thing they came out with. I'm pleased to call him a friend.
Besides being a scholar and a fine, humble human being, Walt turns out to be a pretty fair tunesmith in his own rite.
I'm thus doubly pleased as not just a friend but a connoisseur of popular music to be hosting some original Rimler music at MoreThings. He's kindly given me permission to post his song "I'm Sorry."
This exceptionally insincere apology for having a "breakdown" is the berries. Not to pigeonhole him, but Walt's got sort of a Tom Lehrer thing going on here- except that it's even better than most Tom Lehrer. It's just one damned catchy little tune.
He seems to be quite proud of the breakdown he's detailing. The part that kills me is the whip marks on the bust of Princess Grace. For starters, what kind of person would have such a thing in their home to begin with?
CLICK HERE to download "I'm Sorry" by Walter Rimler.
posted by Al at 9/23/2005 12:46:00 AM
September 21, 2005
Dr Demento says that my God can beat up your God
Hey, hey, the fam got some action with Dr Demento!
Dr Demento was a big deal with me and the brothers growing up. The good doctor introduced us, among other things, to the joys of Frank Zappa and Shel Silverstein. One of my top moments of pride in high school was getting Frank Zappa's classic "Titties and Beer" to #1 on the Funny Five one week in 1979.
Imagine my special thrill, then, to find that the good doctor played one of my brother's songs on the show this summer. JULY 31, 2005 PLAYLIST
The astute Dr Demento played Steve Barger's "My God Don't Take No Crap" on the July 31, 2005 show. Kick ass!
Steven fits right in there. He may not be as famous and successful as Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, but he's just as demented in his own special way.
I haven't even had a radio hooked up in the house for years to listen to anything, so I don't hear the show often. Obviously, now I'll have to hunt down a copy of the show.
Inspirational verse of this humble gutbucket country stomp:
Your god just makes me sick
Your god's so kind and loving
I strike him in the face
He turns the other cheek
He says that he forgives me
I say, 'Man, you're a freak'
I think I oughta kick his ass for being such a geek
Reckon wonder does setting the volume and hitting the "record" button on my Mini-Disc for this very simple (but clean direct-to-digital) recording now qualify me as a famous "recording engineer" or perhaps even "record producer"?
This was commercially released in 1998 on the old MP3.COM label on the album Mud Pies for Mommy. Those albums are all out of print, but a lot of it is available for free right here at MoreThings. Yes, life is good.
CLICK HERE to download "My God Don't Take No Crap"
CLICK HERE for Steve's page, with more downloads, bio, and even some lead sheets.
CLICK HERE for the official Dr Demento page.
CLICK HERE for playlists for something like every show in Demento's 30 years.
CLICK HERE to request "My God Don't Take No Crap" [or anything else for that matter] for an upcoming show.Labels: god, julie andrews
posted by Al at 9/21/2005 09:45:00 PM
BOO!
I wrote a story a few days ago about Bill Clinton's appearance on ABC. This resulted in a delightful poem dedication from our pinko pal Shark.
-- An Early Halloween Poem --
by Shark
There's a liberal in the attic,
a socialist by the door,
a pinko commie lurks downstairs
with the ghost of Micheal Moore.
There's a lefty in the kitchen,
an atheist hides there too,
moveon dot org -- they're poised to strike;
and Hillary just said "Boo!".
But of all the scary monsters
that float before their eyes --
while they whistle past the graveyard:
Bill Clinton never dies.
Thank gawd we have Bill Zombie
to haunt them every day;
thank gawd the Bride of Clintonstein
will never go away.
Big Barger gets the "willies"--
RJ thinks Zombie lied,
Together, they still conjure up
the twins that never died.
Their fear is hard to fathom,
since it's all inside the head,
But I like the thought that every night
a Dem's beneath their bed.
~ BOO!
Al's post-script: I woke with a start last night to scratching at the window. Grabbing one of our numerous firearms, I went expecting to find Bill Clinton doing something really wrong. Turned out that it was just Evan Bayh, come to return some of those votes that got yanked from me last fall. Heck, Evan ain't so scary.
posted by Al at 9/21/2005 03:02:00 PM
September 20, 2005
New album releases, week of 9-20-2005
File under: "If you loved me, you'd buy me this": Rhino's putting out Ray Charles' Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1952-1959).
By way of new recordings, Genius and Friends is one of the last things he was working on before he passed, based on some original 1998 recordings. It's a follow-up set of duets to last year's big hit. Rand help me, but I'm right real interested in hearing Ray and George Michael sing "Blame It On the Sun."
File under: "If you hate me, you'll make me listen to this": Barbara Streisand puts out Guilty Pleasures, a quarter century later follow-up to her collaboration on Guilty with Barry Gibb. In fairness, that was one of her biggest albums, and this new one is already #5 on Amazon. I for one can hardly wait to hear a BS peace anthem called "All The Children." Oy vey.
Earth, Wind & Fire's new Illumination album features input from the Black Eyed Peas among others.
Night Train to Nashville, Vol. 2 on Lost Highway is the follow up to last year's Grammy winning collection of Nashville r&b from 1945 to 1970. It features among others Arthur Alexander, Clyde McPhatter, the Imperials and Esther Phillips.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Jon Bon Jovi ain't my cup of tea, what with me liking good music. Still, his new Have a Nice Day album has a nicely evil cover.
CLICK HERE for the complete list of this week's major new album releases.Labels: new_album_releases
posted by Al at 9/20/2005 01:48:00 AM
September 19, 2005
Sinead O'Connor - Collaborations
CLICK HERE for my notes on Sinead O'Connor's outstanding Collaborations collection.
posted by Al at 9/19/2005 10:16:00 PM
September 18, 2005
Bill Clinton's racial demagoguery on This Week with George Stephanopoulos
Bill Clinton appeared on ABC's This Week this morning (9-18-05) with George Stephanopoulos, carefully and purposely accusing President Bush of callous indifference to black people.
First off, ABC News is rapidly losing credibility as a news source. Fox News is often accused of being biased in favor of the right, but they're not hiring Karen Hughes or Karl Rove to conduct news interviews with George Bush. That ABC absolutely handed their prime Sunday morning news show to a supposedly retired political operative tells you a lot about their credibility. Monica Lewinsky could not have performed a bigger act of publicly servicing Clinton than did his other former employee George Stephanopoulos.
Most former presidents at least try to put on a minimal facade of class, refraining from overt partisan hackery and at least trying to appear like an elder statesman. Then there's Bill Clinton, who of course was all about how much he's continued to devote himself to just trying to help out society- unlike that President Bush who only cares about the rich people, and certainly doesn't care a thing about poor black people.
I think we did a good job of that. For example, we had the lowest African-American unemployment, the lowest African-American poverty rate ever recorded. We had the highest homeownership, highest business ownership, and we moved 100 times as many people out of poverty in eight years as had been moved out in the previous 12 years.
This is a matter of public policy, and whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up, and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the eighties; that's what they've done in this decade.
In the middle, we had a different policy. We concentrated tax cuts on lower income working people and benefits to low-income people that helped them move from welfare to work, and we moved 100 times as many people out of poverty. We know what works, and we had a program that was drastically reducing poverty, and they got rid of it. And they don't believe in it.
And I don't think that it's race-based, but it has a class impact. And in Louisiana, if what you do affects poor people disproportionately, then, it will disproportionately affect black people.
This is cheap, ugly racial demagoguery, and dishonest even before you get to the demagoguery. He says the words "I don't think that it's race-based" as if he's being diplomatic- right after unmistakably saying that it is. Hey, we were helping black folks. We know what will reduce poverty, but "they don't believe in it" because they just want to help the rich folks. Also, there's the casual conflating of black with poor.
Note specifically the twice stated claim that he had "100 times as many people out of poverty." That's absurd on the face of it. How many people is he claiming were in poverty under Reagan and Bush senior, and how many is he claiming to have rescued? If absolutely every person in the country had been in poverty under Reagan/Bush, and only 1% managed to get out from under it in that time, Clinton's 100x number would still have been mathematically impossible.
You could spend all day parsing out the various dishonest and extremely unlikely statements. For example, he claims not to have discussed the upcoming vote on Supreme Court nominee Roberts with Hillary. "I have no idea what she's going to do. I haven't talked to her about it."
But forget the rest of his fraudulence and falsehoods here. They pale next to this purely calculated pouring of salt into our country's racial wounds.
Singer Kanye West got a lot of grief recently for a couple of remarks claiming that Bush doesn't care about black people and such. Now, that was foolishness, but it was just a cheesed off pop singer popping off at the mouth.
Bill Clinton on ABC, on the other hand, knew what he was doing, and did it with malice aforethought. Those are very carefully crafted words obviously engineered to stoke resentment and racial paranoia in the black community.
This is Bill Clinton's idea of being an elder statesman.
posted by Al at 9/18/2005 01:12:00 PM
One Nation Under a Groove
CLICK HERE for my track-by-track notes on George Clinton's 1978 Funkadelic album One Nation Under a Groove.
posted by Al at 9/18/2005 06:00:00 AM
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