rock band tsar live tonight at 10pm
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Monthly Archives: March 2005
sometimes everything is perfect
and sometimes in that moment you see everything thats wrong. and sometimes the thing in there thats wrong is you.
ive been lucky in love. i’ll admit it. for some reason the coolest girls in the world want to hang out with me and be more than friends.
often there comes an occasion to photograph a moment, or we might pass a mirror and are forced to peer into it, and very often id see our reflection and id think that poor poor beautiful girl. look at who shes got hanging on her. pawwing her. smelling her.
talking so dirty.
surely she deserves better than a sinful filthy slothful letch.
her name was shhhh and she came in a dream. twenty three and never been kissed since high school. twenty three and never been touched. twenty three and within days so into me and likewise im sure.
we watched tv and ate and rode in her car and sat in her car. later we kissed in her car and talked in her car and did everything except go in my house cuz we knew what would happen.
we’d talk about the bible and the church and the Lord and we’d read from it. and then we’d kiss.
because im a pig my hands would wander but she was like those indian goddesses she had more arms than me and deflected my every advance and so i used my xbi superpowers to french in such a way that it would hypnotize those thousand hands and finally put them to rest.
turned out she had superpowers herself and within a week i was on my knee during american idol begging her to be mine, i even took off my cubs hat cuz i meant it and she said yes and everything was surreal except for the shooting stars and the fireworks and still she wouldnt take off her top which was perfect and we kissed some more.
i wrote in here about her and i held back from writing everything about her and i wrote in my dreams about her because it was two different universes crossing paths on a leather couch. hugely different universes that literally spoke foreign languages.
and i was almost twice her age. and black and proud. and xxx. and etc. she lived with her folks. she drove a car. she’d never done drugs. one shot of booze would make her pass out. although she loved the Lord she hadnt read every detail of the bible like i had. she absorbed the love of the church while i lapped up each word of the good book the best book my favorite book. she wanted to hold hands on the promenade, i wanted to dress her up like a school girl and have her twirl on my isla vista coffee table. she wanted to watch american idol i somehow would slip in gg allin.
and what turned us on the most was it still worked. how can you disagree with a girl with twelve arms. and everything made sense anyway because everything she believed in came from the pure part of our hearts. we were listening to nwa and she heard a word and said whats a spic and this girl grew up in la!
i never saw her ass i never saw her sex and maybe thats good because id be doomed forever for she never farted but if she had it would smell like potpourri and when we broke up yesterday her tears sparkled like silverdust.
later she sent me an email so full of love and insight and promise and cheer that i knew what i had always suspected which was the angels had demoted a cherrub girl who it had turned out had been falsely accused.
ben lee + in italy + gorilla mask + the arcade fire on conan
dont quit your gay job
by tony pierce
america’s sweetheart, james guckert, aka jeff gannon, aka bulldog, aka eight inches cut, was given the shaft by the white house last month when they yanked his daily day passes to the west wing press room.
what jimjeff doesnt seem to grasp is nobody ever had a problem with him specifically. the problem was that the Executive Branch was sneaking in a gay male hooker into the white house for the sole purpose of lobbing softballs to the press secretary and the president
for purposes of propaganda.
somehow jimjeff doesnt understand that he was simply the tool. we have no problems with tools. most of us either deal with tools every day or we use tools. he was used by BushCo, but for some reason he doesnt see that.
so yesterday he wrote the cutest piece of lovey dovey propaganda that he titled
Bush: Freedom is the Direction of History
before you say, wtf does that mean, just know that it’s hard to tell whether guckert wrote the blogpost to prove that he is a real journalist or a real columnist, or to prove that hes bored out of his mind.
WASHINGTON (JeffGannon.com) President Bush delivered a major address at National Defense University Tuesday, pointing to the advance of democratic principles in the Middle East as proof of success in combating global terrorism. Speaking at Fort McNair in Washington, the President reiterated his commitment to promoting liberty around the world.
at first blush it seems like jeff is writing a news item but with subjective phrases like “major address” and “proof of success” you realize youre reading the lede of a (sorta lame) propaganda column.
during the next five paragraphs jimjeff covers the president’s speech with alertnating graphs that begin with either “Bush” or “The President”. fancy!
until of course, he got to this unfortunately awkward sentence:
The President drew parallels between the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that drew the United States into World War II with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that claimed 3,000 innocent victims and compelled America to lead the War on Terror. He said that the lesson of Pearl Harbor was that “unopposed tyranny, even on far-away continents” threatened U. S. national security.
where to begin? probably here: if youre going to write an opinion peice full of Rovian concepts like “War on Terror” don’t put it in a story that looks like a straight news article otherwise it screams of propaganda.
we all know that jimjeff can write propaganda. what we are curious about, slightly, and what he appears to be doing by posting this to his blog is show that he can actually be a “real” journalist and either be an insightful commentator/opinion writer or a reliable newsman.
instead he continues to be precisely what everyone thought he was: a clumsy, inarticulate, know-nothing mouthpeice for the right who couldnt prove that he belonged in the white house, so the administration snuck him in through the back door.
my advice to mr. guckert is to pick. either be a columnist or write news. if you want to say “The President of the United States spoke yesterday and defended his belief in the war…” say it. use his quotes to back it up. but know that if you infect your news peices with debateable sentences like below, people are either going to laugh at you or snidely call bullshit
Buoyed by successful elections in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, Bush pledged to continue the push for democratization of the Middle East. He offered encouragement to oppressed people of the region to demand liberty, especially women.
i will call bullshit on it because didnt the dude who won the election in Iraq – isnt he against shaking hands with women? therefore how is Bush either calling that election a success or demanding liberty to women?
if i was jeff i would title my blog Pro-Right Propaganda or What Bush Said and come out of the partisan closet. i would also pick one or two points out of the president’s speech, for example, and expound on it. thats what other columnists do. thats even what most bloggers do.
you can even say “omg the president was so on fire yesterday, he totally compared Pearl Harbor with 9/11 and everyone cheered and it was so hot that you wouldnt even believe it…”
but this half assed shit is purely that
and proof positive that there was a hooker in the hizzie who didnt belong there.
and if what Gannon is trying to do is show the world that he is a writer, he’s failing.
it must suckert to be guckert
hi raymeee,
yes i miss you too. im so sorry i havent written in so long, but like you, i also have a significant other who, like you, takes me to canadian hotels, and like you, keeps me up all night as we disect bible passages.
dude, you dont have to tell me how shitty this hockey strike is. here in LA, as you know, we have two teams. they both suck but we miss puck so badly that we can barely enjoy this heatwave that we’re getting, but fuck the weather, lets go back to you, how are you raymi? how?
do you know youre still my second favorite blogger? only behind flagrant disregard? do you know that the best thing about wednesdays on the blogosphere are poetry wednesdays over at annika’s tankboy’s blog? do you know how great your nudity looked yesterday? do you know that sometimes i dont even read all the things that you write, just every other word.
i have a weird thing with your blog. i love it, but i want to savor it, so sometimes i will see that youve updated and i look at it and i wont read it right away, i will do like the english beat and save it for later.
but then i get distracted and forget to go back and read it and forget all about it entirely and then i will remember a few days later and i’ll go oooooh awesome i get to read raymi the minx’s blog. and then i get happy again, followed usually by distracted again and then the viscious cycle spirals around again.
when are you going to dump your nice man and move to hollywood, baby? when will you put together a book like i did and sell it for far more than i did and therefore make far more money than i did.
let me interview you someday soon.
i want to do a raymi photo essay interview
i havent done a proper photo essay in a long time, i would love to come back with a great one of you, who i adore, who everyone adores, who writes the blog that i wish i had the nerve to write.
you dont think i dont want to get topless on this shit? you dont think i dont want to write about my love for carebears and rainbows like you do? you dont think i dont wanna raymioake like you do?
all i ever end up with are dumb rhymes
youre a gibson sg and im wind chimes
narkoleptomania + the new yorker talks about bukowski + raymi
TSAR will be at SXSW
on St. Patty’s Day at the Hard Rock in Austin at 2:30pm.
it is a free show but you have to get your name on the list and the list is filling up quickly
so if you want to see the best band that will play at SXSW
and if you want to see them without paying
and if you want to see them without having to get a $24908572345 SXSW pass
and if you want to see them rock the hard rock
email tsar2001 @ earthlink.net
and hurry
and bring hot babes
and prepare to hear a selection from their upcoming new cd Band Girls Money on TVT Records
afterwards feel free to buy me as many free drinks as you like 🙂
why i use blogger
by tony pierce, 111
if i ever invent something i would want people to use it.
id be pissed if they used a knock off version. especially if my version was free and constantly being updated for free.
and especially if i was cool about my product and always tried to keep it working well.
most of you kids are too young to remember when netscape came out. it was the first web browser that kicked ass. in my opinion.
this was before the dot com boom it was before everything. i think television had pretty much just been invented and Netscape showed up with a browser that was capable of letting you do background colors. it was amazing.
people said, how can they make any money giving this browser away for free? will it work long-term? what will happen when Microsoft comes out with a browser?
for a while Netscape dominated the field and most people used it and when Internet Explorer came out it was clunky and bad and people rejoiced for the little Northern California company cuz they proved that Microsoft couldnt kick everyones ass at everything.
And Netscape went public one day and it opened at $35 and it closed at $75 and even though none of us were rich enough to buy any shares we all were so happy for them for providing a great product, fighting off Bill Gates, and making their money through investment instead of through charging their customers.
As time went on they kept making improvements and it wasnt until Microsoft started to cheat did things start to fade. And then of course AOL bought Netscape and everything went to shit.
When Blogger came out they reminded me a lot of Netscape. They were this Up North company of pasty white boys and girls who had a simple little product that worked most of the time. It was a little more complex than Netscape cuz you needed servers to do shit and they needed to constantly update their technology, but for the most part it was free and easy and did what it said it would do. It helped you blog.
As you know I was lucky. I started blogging in August of 2001 and in September, right after the terrorist activity, my blog started to get serious traffic on account of my photo essays that emptied out onto the busblog, and ever since then I had a “popular” blog.
Besides the loyalty thing, one reason that I have always wanted to stay with Blogger is because I want to show people that you dont need any fancy software, you dont have to host your own shit, you dont need great design, you dont need friends in high places, and you dont need to write about politics or sports or sex or anything other than what you want to write about and you could still get hits.
I could very easilly have 3-4 designers re-do this bad boy and make it look 1029346132 times better than it looks right now. I could have ads, I could get MT and have categories, I could trackback on comments, I could do tons of shit. But I dont want to because I want everyone to know that you dont need to do that to be “popular”.
all you need to do is rock
and do it every fucking day.
like
it could be her friends,
her family, her chamber maids, her eux du toilette, her como say deecey, her little french twist, her smooth smooth skin, it could have been anything
and logic i whispered has no place here. here meaning love. in the parking lot of midnight tacos at dinner time. she was sobbing just a little bit cuz thats what you do when youre little red hottie girl with a wolf riding shotgun with a paw on your lap. whispering is the only way.
you can get close. you can take your time. its not like she talks all that much when shes scared anyway, its not like she can say what she wants to say so i hiss away the bad vibes.
the devil doesnt wear a red suit and knock on your door with strippers and bags of golden coins i tell her inbetween licks to her lobes. only gentlemen knock.
no he sits in wax of your ear and tunes into your station and says the worst things
you two arent meant for each other
he thinks youre fat
his alabama black snake’ll split you in half
youre just one of a long line of princesses. just one.
and he doesnt need a roomful of chimps to type up his best material cuz his shit writes itself. just serve em up. age weight riches bitches smarts sex drugs rock.
and she finally says in such a little tone
tiny tone
how do you ignore it?
sometimes i’ll just look at her.
sometimes she’ll look right back at me.
sometimes i look at her and soak it all in, cuz it is a dream, they tell me, but i soak it in anyway cuz i dont dream.
i whisper
you cant ignore them. theyre there. you just have to make songs out of their words
or poems
or blogs.
and whenever you can,
kiss the girl.
kitty bukkake + raymi + robby + anna banana
my local rag,
the LA Times, which rarely gets anything right, mostly because theyre a monopoly, whatev, published a column today about Six Apart, the company that brought you Movable Type and TypePad.
We’ll forget that the journalist chose to only interview the principles of the start up, Ben and Mena Trott, and one of their investors to tell the story, cuz you know, whatever.
And we’ll forget that the writer just tossed out the idea that Google’s Blogger software is “largely free and aimed mostly at novices,” cuz, you know, free means it doesnt matter, and novices … dont matter either?
And we’ll forget that the busblog has been happily on the Blogger tip since we began, but am i a novice? Is Raymi? Anti? Matthew Good? Flagrant, Leah, Zulieka, Bob Mould, Heather Havrilesky, or Rupaul?
call me crazy but one reason i like using Blogger is cuz it’s free. i also appreciate that Google is behind it. yes there are ups and downs to either platform, but in my opinion i would much rather have the brainiacs at Google trying to figure out whats up with Blogger the few blue moons where it’s having issues, than to have to try to debug Movable Type like i see my friends and others have to deal with all the damn time.
obviously, in the political blog world i would be in the minority, as most of them choose to have full control of their blogs – which means being fully in control when things break.
but the LA Times should know that the political blog world is just a portion of the blogosphere, and far from the majority. which is one reason why Six Apart bought LiveJournal eariler this year.
am i expecting the LA Times to know the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between LiveJournal, Blogger, Blogspot, Movable Type, Diaryland, Xanga, and the others? dude i’m happy when they spell Los Angeles right, so no, my expectations are very low.
what i did sort of expect was them to i dont know, talk to someone at Blogger/Google to get another point of view on Six Apart’s impressive success story. Or, i dont know, talk to some Los Angeles bloggers who use MT and maybe one or two who don’t.
but why would the LA Times ever want to inject a local angle into anything… ever?
plus we Blogger bloggers don’t matter, cuz, you know, we’re novices who just use free software to dick around in our pajamas. Lord knows none of us would have a rebuttal to the investor of Six Apart who was quoted in the end of the article who shockingly said, “The future of blogging is not about bloggers who want audiences of thousands. The majority will be those communicating with four others or so.”
I, for one, have never met a blogger who would prefer to have an audience of four instead of an audience of thousands. Nor have I ever seen anyone who started a blog to share with their four closest friends. When people want to write something for four friends its called an email.
Which is also free, and therefore doesn’t matter, I assume.
Fuck the LA Times who insist on letting their writers cover shit that they dont have a clue about and aren’t interested in telling a real story.
people are all, how can you not blog about work?
dont you get pissed off sometimes and just want to vent? dont you get frustrated and just want to talk hella shit? dont you just wanna tell your little victim story about how people dont respect you and dont listen and how youre great and theyre dumb and then have all your readers agree with you?
and i tell em it’s easy not to blog about work. just like it’s easy not to say oh man look at that hottie, when youre holding your girlfriend’s hand. you can think it, you can say it later to your buddy, but only an idiot would actually write it in his blog, even if his blog says “nothing in here is true”.
besides, the xbi is an oasis of enlightenment. people love me and respect me and appreciate the fact that ive been here for close to four years now and have culled some sort of expertise in my field. they listen closely when i say things and they reward my vision with compliments and support. i have no complaints about this place whhich is why ive stayed here for so long.
dont you think a guy like me has been approached by tons of companies who could use an eternally optimistic superhero who can communicate well, make people laugh, and spot problems before they become problems, and put out fires as they happen while staying cool under pressure? of course. and people throw money at me and i throw it right back. money. who needs it. its not freedom, its slavery.
freedom is having a lifestyle so bare bones that you’re not bound to any one source of income to live comfortably.
but the thing is, we as humans are addicted to self-induced enslavements. mortgates, marriages, car loans, long term contracts, leases, payment plans. i didnt need to make this swedish girl my girlfriend, but i did. why? because i too paint myself into ridiculous corners that prevent me from being completely free.
ich bein ein berliner.
about six months ago this dude emailed me three or four sentences saying that he wanted to put four words on my blog and in return he would pay me an undisclosed amount of money. all i would have to do is link from those words to his web site and he would pay me all the money up front via paypal. the only thing i would have to do was keep my blog up for six months.
and even though i had no plans to stop the bus, when i accepted his proposal i did get a little twinge that was all, “shit, what if i want to shut it down for a few months and run away to my desert hideaway and lay low, i cant because i made a promise to that dude.”
i had the same weird feeling when i signed the contract with Project DU to keep their button over there on the left side. i was all, the money is nice, but there goes a little bit of freedom. all cuz of money.
now there are other people approaching me. theyre promising money too. i cant tell you what they want me to do for this money but its all legal and legit and im actually, for once, qualified to do the job that they want.
this weekend i procrastinated doing it. and the only reason that i can figure out is because even though working at the xbi is a have-to (“i have to go to work”) and these other things are get-to (“i get to do cool shit for money”), i am fiendish about my freedoms. and sure the trade off is if i stay so hard headed i will never have a house or a car or probably a family, but i will have my freedom.
the other day hunter s. thompson blew his head off. ten years ago one of my other heroes, mr kurt kobain blew his head off too. both of those dudes seemingly had lots of money, and seemingly the freedom to tell people to fuck off if they wanted to. not to mention the fact that they were respected and could have written about work if they wanted. and still they checked out. the question of course is why. why would they do that. id suggest that its cuz they felt obligated to something that they didnt want to do any more. more specific than just “life”.
kurdt obviously was obligated to be the voice of his generation. which sucks. nobody wants that. and he was obligated to front the coolest band in grunge. and he had to slam dance that fine line between punk rock and pop. selling out and keeping it real. plus he married that crazy woman. plus she had a kid. plus his stomach hurt and his drug addiction. but still there was something that was stopping him from going to hawaii and chilling out. was it his obligation to the needle? was he a slave to the drug? perhaps. then what was hunters problem?
all i know is theres some major crime to fight today and i wanted to say hey and wish you all a happy monday and tell you that a week from today im going to be in austin texas at sxsw. an obligation that to be honest, id rather not do because im a homebody, but i realize that sometimes you have to get out of your little house in the bottom of your tree and go out and have an adventure.
the trick is convincing yourself that its a get to, and not a have to.
even if it is.
spent another night in her car
outside my house watching people walk past and look into the two seater. i wonder what people think when they see two people making out in a nice car. i know what id be thinkinging, id be thinking, i wonder if i come back in ten minutes will they be effing. but thats me, mr vegas. life doesnt imitate porn, politics does.
we had spent the warm sunday afternoon on hollywood blvd., namely a pizza joint named two guys from sicilly. it was an old fashioned parlour where the oven and register were right by the front door, and as you walked past that were a dozen little tables, a juke box, and a back area with booths and video games.
we went back there cuz it was dark and the paparazzi wouldnt be so bold. also, i like the dark.
ordered a large everything with peperoni and sausage on one side, and cokes. two punk rockers shot away at area 51 and i sat across the table from her for about two seconds and i said want me to sit over there with you and she nodded her head.
and stared in her eyes and said why are you here. dont you know the evil thats inside of me, the darkness, the filth, the wickedness, the slut. later we would go into sephora at hollywood and highland and see a woman wearing a black im blogging this tshirt but she lies. and my girlfriend said i like you, youre funny.
and i wispered what i wanted to do with her there in that dark back room and she laughed out loud startling the kids shooting at aliens and she said youre violent and i asked am i?
walked over to the jukebox and put on pink floyd breath, doors break on thru, vh and the cradle will rock, marley two little birds, zeppelin immigrant song, elvis costello watching the detectives, and acdc hells bells. how is it that i can remember that but i still havent memorized her phone number.
stolled down the dirty blvd and i showed her the rock shirts and she said how come so many shirts have that symbol on it and i said thats the devil star, that upsidedown thing. she said why. i said theyre just kidding. she looked at me like she didnt believe me.
i asked to see the iron maiden shirts. the man said what size are you, i told him and he showed me one shirt, then another. i was unsure. i said aloud that every man should have a maiden shirt in his wardrobe and i almost walked out with a short sleeved the trooper but caught my eye on a long sleeve killers thats big on me but sometimes you wanna look sloppy and stoned.
we have no business being together i thought at thrifty in los feliz as we walked around the store licking icecream cones and laughing; holding hands and taking our time through the aisles
cuz she didnt want to leave me and i didnt want her to go.