Category Archives: Life
Buy Our Album! We’re Nirvana!
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end
It’s 20 years today since Kurt Cobain died. There’s still argument over whether it was a suicide or not.
I didn’t get into Nirvana’s music right off the bat, but I did like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and once I dived into alternative music, they were right up there. They were one of those bands where I hated some of there songs and loved others … not a lot of middle ground. At first, I thought they were going to be the next fad, maybe be a big name band. Like everyone else, I had NO idea just how big they were gonna be. I don’t think I’ve seen anything else quite like it in my lifetime.
People just could not get enough of that song. It was everywhere. I think it inspired more people to pick up guitars than anyone since the Beatles, or maybe even since Elvis.
I wasn’t one of them. I had wanted to play music since before that, and didnt pick up guitar until well after Kurt was dead. But Nirvana was definitely a strong influence. Some of the first songs I learned to play on guitar were Nirvana tunes. Let’s face it – solos aside, a lot of them aren’t that difficult once you master power and barre chords. They are, however, teriffically arranged power and barre chords.
Reportedly, Kurt claimed that he knew he had “made it” when Weird Al Yankovic parodied one of his songs. To hear Al himself tell it –
For whatever reason, my manager tried and tried and said he couldn’t get through [to Nirvana]. He contacted them again and again and they never got back to him. So he said, “If you want to do this parody, it’s on you. You’ve gotta talk to the band.” A friend of mine was in the cast of Saturday Night Live [UHF co-star Victoria Jackson]. I told her, if you ever get Kurt Cobain alone in a room, put him on the phone, because I’d love to talk to him — and she did! Directly! He was sweet and he got it in like five seconds and said, “Of course you can do a parody.” The famous quote from him was, “Is it going to be a song about food?” because at that point that’s primarily what I was known for. And I said, “Well, no, it’s going to be a song about how nobody can understand your lyrics.” And he said, “Oh, sure, of course, that’s funny.”
Yankovic also stated –
It was exceptionally hard shortly after Kurt passed. It was still my biggest hit at the time, and I couldn’t not do it because the fans would want to hear it, but at the same time, it was uncomfortable for me, especially. So for a long time after Kurt passed, I would always preface my performance of the song by doing a somber dedication to Kurt in his memory. The hardest one was doing Seattle, because I didn’t know if I should be doing that song in Seattle at the time. I didn’t know how people would take it. I asked a lot of journalists there, “Should I do this? Should I not do this?” And almost unanimously they said, “You should do this. It would be cathartic.” And it actually went over extremely well.
I don’t remember where I was when I found out Kurt had died or anything like that. I’m not a hardcore fan keeping vigils or whatever. But I have always been a bit fascinated by him and the band, and sometimes pick up the odd and random bit or piece of history I trip across.
It Sure Sounds Funny When You Say His Name Like That
Send me off to the morgue I’m ready to be buried away down in my bed
And I’m alone without the sun
Please just take oneAnd by the grace of god go I into the great unknown
Thing are gonna change in our favor
– For Squirrels, “Mighty K.C.”“ KC stands for Kurt Cobain. He’s dead. The song is by a band called For Squirrels. They’re dead, too.” – From here
I remember when I first heard the song “Mighty K.C.” It was September or October 1995 on the local alternative rock station. I didn’t know it was about Cobain’s death when I first heard it, but the lyrics did stand out, both morbid and hopeful at the same time.
The other thing I didn’t know was that two members of the band died in a traffic accident before the song was even released. They were traveling in a van that flipped over, killing founding members Jack Vigliatura and Bill White and tour manager Tim Bender. I heard a DJ explain this not long after the song hit the airwaves, casting an entirely different light on the verses.
The video sort of merged the original theme of the song with the death of the band members, showing home videos of the band projected onto the body of a Kurt Cobain lookalike. Rather clever, I suppose, as a tribute to both.
The band menbers were big R.E.M. fans, and you can hear it in this song. It almost resembles R.E.M.’s “Fall On Me” in places.
Nearing The Event Horizon
Population keeps on breeding
Nation bleeding, still more feeding economy-Ten Years After – “I’d Love To Change The World”
This Daily Caller piece calls for “de-growth” –
Environmentalists are pushing a new way to deal with global warming and overpopulation: the U.S. needs to “de-grow” its economy.
What is “de-growth”? It means forcing people to work less to make them more equal, consume fewer goods and use less electricity. Think of it like camping, but for the rest of your life.
…“There’s no such thing as sustainable growth, not in a country like the U.S.,” Worldwatch senior fellow Erik Assadourian told Sierra Magazine.
…De-growing the economy means working less and consuming fewer goods and electricity… “If we had a livable wage and could each work a 20-hour week,” Assadourian said, “we’d have time to choose more sustainable options that are also better for ourselves.”
…About a month ago, former Vice President Al Gore suggested that “fertility management” was crucial to fighting global warming and promoting development in poor countries.
The article covers quite a few pages from the Progressive textbook … shrinking the economy, reducing population, forced equality, mandated wages coupled with higher taxes, increased leisure time, and a simultaneous worship and fear of science. But all these are driven by one concern – a belief that everything is zero-sum consumption.
There’s no allowance for replenishment of goods and resources, or that more people might result in more production. Nothing that resembles, you know, work. It’s pure consumption. And they want to reduce the competition.
Red Days And Green Flowers
Uptown
It’s murder
Out in the street
So I’m talking to Allamagoosa while Pandora Radio is playing and this song comes on. “Oh, there’s a cheerful Valentine’s Day song… especially if you consider the massacre.”
Since she’s a fan of anime and many things Japanese, does that make her my Mandarin Plum?
Social Fairness
Brent Parrish on The Inequality of Equality, and questioning the concept of “social justice.” It’s not too long, check it out.
Where most Social Justice types get hung up is confusing fairness for justice. What’s fair is not always necessarily just.
The hot trend among social justice crusaders nowadays is “income inequality.” This parallels another problem, which I believe is just as serious – Traffic Inequality. It’s not fair that Sunshine Mary and Donal Graeme, among others,¹ get more readers than I do.
Clearly, the answer is to redistribute readers. Enacting a Minimum Traffic law would transfer excess readers from high-traffic sites to writers like myself who fall under the Readership Poverty Line. Seriously, does Mary really need all of her (as of this writing) 1,378,008 hits, compared to my 9,923? That’s over one million more hits, and she only started writing about 3 weeks before I did (and if we consider that those numbers only track her current site, I’m actually about 8 months ahead). If she cared, she would distribute some of those hits to the rest of us.
Under the labor theory of value which many SJ crusaders seem to subscribe to, I should get the same amount of traffic as SSM, and more than Donal. So why should they get more traffic?
Readers – like most incomes – aren’t distributed, they are earned. Value isn’t determined by labor, but by the benefit one gains from the product. Other writers post material that readers place a higher value on, and so those readers are more likely to return. More people want to read about traditional sex roles or the definition of Game than about 3D printing firearms or Batman vs. Donkey Kong. One might even argue that they are better writers than I am.²
Those others also post on a more consistent schedule than I do, which attracts and keeps readers. They also promote their work more than I do. They’re the 8 PM show five nights a week and get paid accordingly, whereas I show up Saturday night and hang around the parking lot after hours entertaining a few friends and passersby with off-the-wall stories for tips and free sodas.
No one held a gun to anyone’s head and forced them to read SSM or Donal or whoever over me.³ Unfair as it might be, it’s not unjust. Trying to get readers from them by any means other than writing to suit the existing market – or finding a new one – would be coercion, which is both unfair and unjust.
¹ Waaayyy too many others. A pimp can’t catch a break these days.
² Stop smoking crack. Your mom would be so ashamed.
³ Okay, Donal might have. He’s tricky like that.
The Art Of Capitalism
Jesse Myerson posts at Salon Why You’re Wrong About Communism: 7 Huge Misconceptions About It (And Capitalism).
My favorite part is when he ends the piece with this claim –
…most of the greatest art under capitalism has always come from people who are oppressed and alienated (see: the blues, jazz, rock & roll, and hip-hop). Then, thanks to capitalism, it is homogenized, marketed, and milked for all its value by the “entrepreneurs” sitting at the top of the heap, stroking their satiated flanks in admiration of themselves for getting everyone beneath them to believe that we are free.
Cafe Hayek (where I found out about this) quickly and efficiently dismantles this claim –
Overlook the questionable claim that most great artists under capitalism were oppressed and alienated. (Were Lennon and McCartney, Berry Gordy, Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, and Andy Warhol truly “oppressed and alienated”? How about Jackson Pollock? Thomas Hardy? Ernest Hemingway? Lawrence Olivier? Raymond Loewy?) Focus instead on the critical reality that, in fact, there are countless great artists, and Niagaras of profound art, produced under capitalism. The same cannot be said for communism.
The reason is simple. Capitalism supplies artists not only with abundant materials and media for producing and sharing their works, but also with the freedom and personal space for them to create. In stark contrast, communism necessarily prohibits would-be artists from pursuing their muses. All means of production under communism are owned by the state, and, hence, remain off-limits to artists whose individual plans do not mesh with the central plan.
I hadn’t seen Myerson’s piece when I did this post of my own earlier, but mine suggests a basic flaw in his claim – would a communist society permit a publishing house to print sympathetic stories about a character who fought for the enemy side in the biggest war it had ever seen?
He’s half right about great artists often being alienated and oppressed. But this isn’t political, it’s social alienation… sometimes actively rejected by peers, other times because of their own issues which have nothing to do with anyone else’s reaction to them. Artists are usually different from most people. If anything, capitalism helps them reach out and speak to other rare people like them.
There’s another way that capitalism has helped artists. In the 1950s, profits from their high-selling horror magazines allowed E.C. Comics to subsidize the science fiction books they wanted to do. Until Congress threatened to censor them, that is (shades of communism).
MegaExtremeUltimate Table Tennis
Long shots, injury, and (literally) demolishing the boundaries of table tennis.
Reframing The Conversation
SCENE: NSR walks into the room just after Allamagoosa has just rolled out of bed, and has not had breakfast yet.
NSR: (walks up behind her to give her a hug) Love you.
Allie’s belly: *bloorrrp*
(beat)
NSR: I’m gonna interpret that as I give you butterflies in your stomach.
The Day After
All across America, people are just now waking up from their New Year’s Eve partying (which often continued well into New Year’s Day), and greeting each other. (Not to be viewed by those with delicate constitutions)
nightskyradio 