Tender Lullaby
I don't think I'm paranoid, at least not in the clinical sense, but here's the economic predicament that I think America is going to find itself in within the next ten years or so: fucked.
Yes, there are those that point to an imminent economic apocalypse that will happen here, being that our economy is more or less a house of cards at this point, but I tend more toward the theory of a long, agonizing descent into a very convoluted and inextricable mess. This should have happened a long time ago in light of the fact that our economy is, by now, mostly based on imagined wealth, i.e. tied up in reckless home loans, mounting national debt (although the recycled Reaganites presently running the show will tell you that it doesn't matter), a "conservative" president hell-bent on draining the Treasury by spending like a junkie with a death wish, creditors that will extend credit to anything with a pulse, and foremost, a national economy based almost entirely on the availability and abundance of cheap fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, the dollar continues to bobble around and prepare to sink as the rest of the world wonders when we're gonna pull our head out of our ass. You'll recall that our world currency system is not based on anything tangible or of real value like gold, but on a consensus of what the world perceives the future value of a given currency to be, based on its ability to produce wealth. The US continues to shitcan its ability to produce wealth by turning much of our manufacturing and technology sectors to third-world countries, while we invest in building up multinational corporations like Wal-Mart that operate at or beyond the scale of the federal government, and as mentioned, are almost completely contingent upon an abundance of cheap petroleum. Outsourcing is a great idea when the outsourced sector is replaced by some other sustainable means of creating national wealth, but what we're left with, having gotten underway with outsourcing most of what once accounted for most of our productivity, is an economy based on a very precarious and delicate set of conditions as regards our access to cheap oil.
We sink $5 billion a month in Iraq in a massive effort that is by now, essentially geared toward justifying the fact that we went there in the first place. And whether or not the war was a good idea, make no mistake about what effect the instability will have on a) the perception of America's ability to operate responsibly in the world and b) the future stability and availability of all this goddamn oil. Meanwhile BushCo continues its tax relief charade, which is really nothing more than a systematic transferral of wealth to the private sector, ostensibly to take advantage of the everlasting benefits of the American miracle free market.
But this miracle free market is going to produce returns for all of this misappropriated wealth only as long as our economy produces things of real value, and this is all based on extremely disfavorable conditions. What happens when a member of the Saud family stops taking his Zoloft and decides to pull the plug on oil production for a month, then oil shoots up to 80 bucks a barrel, which translates to 4-5 bucks a gallon at the gas pump. How is Wal-Mart going to truck all their goods 3000 miles across the country? How many of us are going to be willing to drive 40 miles to work every day? How many more air conditioners can Las Vegas run, and for that matter, how will California's energy situation, which is already fucked, continue to operate in anything other than complete dysfunction?
Call me a hippie if you must, but when I get to thinking about the precarious position the US has gotten itself into vis-a-vis the goddamn Saudi oil cartel and our Wal-Mart economy, it makes me shudder. New Roman Times. Maybe I should go get a new car on credit.
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Jebus! That shit is a downer! Here's some less disheartening stuff:
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About
CrackStreet.com: a site put up by people in Denver's Capitol Hill neighborhood to illuminate the rampant crack-dealing problem that exists there.
Generate Random Names from Census Data: God dang, I love stuff like this. First run: 2. Jamie Such, Kurt Culwell, Javier Wyble, Guy Ryerson
"How to find a parking space at the mall": an article that specifies four types of parking lot behavior: "search and destroyers," "lay and wait," "stalkers" and "see it and take it". I'm definitely "see it and take it," although I'll also add that I make a point of parking as far away from the destination as possible. We've discussed this before.
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Fireballs of Freedom: Greasy Retrospective (WäntageUSA, 2004)
I've always dreaded reviewing a Fireballs of Freedom record for quite a few reasons. One is that it seems like their tunes and the aesthetic they propagate seems to beg for excessive use of superlatives, and I'm not too keen on that style of reviewing. Another reason is that, as kind of a dickhead contrarian, I feel a strong compulsion to distance myself from the cult of personality that has surrounded the FOF their entire existence, although I do like them all very much personally and think very highly of them. A third reason, and I'm probably gonna get run out of town on heresy charges here, but I find that their albums &emdash;their recorded output since moving to Portland&emdash; have never done much for me. Not that I don't think they're great at what they do, just that that type of thing ain't really my bag, you dig?
However, I can attest to very much digging on this Greasy Retrospective CD. I think the main thing that's setting it apart from their latter-day Estrus/Empty output is that this older (mid-90s) stuff finds them at a time when they were a little more scaled down, before they had turned pro, so to speak. Their tunes were much more irreverent and had far less producerly goop slathered on them. This older shit has a welcome goofballian bent that is often missing on their later stuff, and you don't find yourself feeling obligated to go, "Holy shit, that is some over-the-top dirty rock and roll, bro!" In fact, comparing the new stuff to some of the older tracks, you'd hardly recognize them as the same band. Back then they were much more given to funk-sounding stuff and lots of chicka-chicka and even the occasional high-velocity punk rock foray.
It seems like the FOF started taking it a lot more seriously once they moved from Missoula to Portland in '98 (?) and getting national attention (and who would blame them for that?), and so on their Estrus/Empty stuff the emphasis is on attempting to pummel the listener into submission with this relentless and shrill juggernaut that leaves little room for much else. This selfsame juggernaut one finds on, say, Total Fucking Blowout, I've often thought, also kinda tends to occlude the preternatural band chemistry that was so evident earlier in their career. The chemistry is indeed there, but it's necessarily playing second fiddle to that dirty rock volume conquistador thing you get on their more recent releases.
However, I do take into account the fact that the FOF are dedicated players of The Music and are probably some of the most goal-driven and ambitious sons of bitches I ever met in the rock-o-sphere. And I think it's fairly safe to say that if they'd stayed in Missoula playing songs about sticking drumsticks up their asses and jamming on the theme from "People's Court" for half an hour, in no way would they have acheieved the level of national success and hard-won recognition that they have. And far be it for me to begrudge them any success they've had. So in this way, I feel that, rather than another vertex in the FOF trajectory, Greasy Retrospective is more of a valentine to old-timey fans and scene interlopers of yesteryear. "Viva El Gato" and "Sno King" have a comfortable place in my heart, and I'll be damned if "Vonferno" didn't get me a little misty-eyed this morning.
Likewise, I really dug the liner notes by Josh Vanek, who, in my esteemed opinion, should do liner notes more often. There's a passage therein (hey, wow, that's only one letter away from "theremin!") where he talks about how there's nary a BBQ or party in Missoula where there's not a round of Kelly Gately imitations, and my experience is that that is very true, and I'm glad J-Vo acknowledged it in these liner notes for posterity. For the uninitiated: FOF singer/guitarist/raconteur Kelly Gately has a very distinctive speaking style that is quite captivating. It's this rapid-fire spew of jumbled, almost unintelligible stream-of-consciousness babble punctuated with "itsliketotallyfuckin'" and "fugginexactly!!!" and much raucous laughter and backslapping.
The most remarkable thing about his diction is that he can say an entire paragraph, and you, the listener, can discern maybe three or four of the words he's said, and yet it's still hugely entertaining to listen to him. It's this garbled spray of bizarre colloquialisms and on-the-spot Kellyisms that I'll try to approximate here:
(garbled)LikeTotallyFuggin(garbled)IndianFryBread(garbled)Fuckin'
(garbled)Totally(garbled)LikeFishStick(garbled)AndFuggin(garbled)
OhIKnowTotallyFuckingGuysPeppered(garbled)FugginTotalCriscoDisco
Another remarkable thing about Kelly's diction is its apparent infectiousness. Within a year of him moving to Missoula in '93 or so, there were a handful of ten or twelve guys, and even a couple girls, whose own diction had transmogrified into the Kelly patois, sheerly by dint of his vast charisma. This was kind of surreal, as you can imagine, a bunch of people having suddenly adopted the exact same speech peculiarity, but to my knowledge, it continues unabated to this day in Portland and probably Missoula. Sometimes I think he should do voice-overs or read books on tape or something as a second career just because it's so amusing to listen to him.
But dang it Bobby, if there's one reason you should loop over to the WäntageUSA site and order you up a copy post haste, it's the inclusion of the video made by Andy Smetanka for "Out of My Head." Some real tasty Super 8 (the camera, not the motel) band footage interlarded with some peculiar stock footage that I believe Andy found at a garage sale. A hunk of pure genius is what that is. Hitch your wagon to Andy's rising star now, so you can prop your young'uns up on your knee and say you saw his early stuff back in the day.
Oh, and P.S.: I've always thought that Art Chantry was a great pick for the FOF album covers, but I have to hereupon raise a celebratory glass of TheraFlu to the cover of Greasy Retrospective, done up by Mr. Greg Twigg. Real real high-end product, that.
Speaking of a new car....Hre ya go.
http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/local_business/article/0,1713,BDC_2461_3454006,00.html
- mercer raceabout January 11, 2005 08:07That site requires registration, so here's the text:
Segways and SmartCars come to Boulder
By Sarah Toland, For the Camera
January 9, 2005
It's 2005, and the age of the automobile is far from over: Expect more cars, more trucks, and certainly more SUVs, along with increases in traffic, gas prices and commuter unease.
The outlook for Boulder may not be so grim if residents are willing to adopt smaller, fuel-efficient cars, shared commuter transport alternatives and Segway Human Transporters, Graham Hill says.
All of these components comprise Hill's vision for a better, greener Boulder. This fall, the local transportation consultant and longtime Boulder resident started working for the newly created Smart Motorcars, an eco-car company that shares space with pre-owned auto dealer First Class Imports at 30th and Pearl streets. First Class Imports owner Sandy Greenberg and business associate Leon Atkind started Smart Motorcars this summer to address a demand for greener transportation options, in Boulder and nationwide.
This month, Smart Motorcars will become the first dealer in the state, and one of the first in the country, to sell the European-based SmartCar, a fuel-savvy auto that averages 60 to 70 miles to the gallon. At a slight 1,600 pounds, the SmartCar is not only fuel-efficient, it is smaller than your average automobile as well, designed intentionally to take up less room in the roads, garages and parking spaces. In addition, the car's paneling can be changed in less than 15 minutes, making the car an attractive aesthetic option to the conscientious and creative.
"They're quite popular in Europe," says Greenberg, who already has 12 to 15 orders for the vehicle when shipments arrive on lot later this month. "They're a status symbol in Europe, (and) so far our read is that it will be popular here and across the country."
With the SmartCar on its way, Hill proposed this fall that Smart Motorcars carry and sell the Segway Human Transporter, which he likes to call a "vertical pedestrian:" a two-wheel, stand-up, gyroscope-stabilized device that operates off an electric charge. Easy to use and cost-effective, the Segway HT releases no emissions, averages 450 miles per gallon in electric equivalent and can cruise up to 13 miles per hour.
Smart Motorcars' Atkind and Greenberg were receptive to Hill's idea, and the company started carrying the machines in November of last year. To date, Smart Motorcars has sold approximately a half dozen, retailing at $4,000 a piece.
"With our basic infrastructure for bicycles in Boulder, there is room for Segways to operate without disruption," says Hill, noting he rides his own vertical pedestrian four to five times a week. "They're very good for short trips, for people who want to be outside and for those who don't have the balance for a bicycle. They make great connectors to our transport system, both locally and regionally."
"I love (my Segway)," says Greenberg, who first became interested in the device two years ago. "It's an absolute uncanny machine. It has substantial carrying capacity and mileage capacity. (Because of traffic,) I can get to where I'm going in about the same time as driving. The Segway has supplanted about two-thirds of my normal neighborhood transportation."
Greenberg's confession becomes even more remarkable given his position in the car industry. This fact, among others, gives Hill hope that both SmartCars and Segway HT's can become part of a greater mobility plan for Boulder that incorporates these modern devices into the city's existing transportation system and Boulder CarShare, a nonprofit organization for multiple car sharing and access created by Hill in 1997.
"The city has done a great job getting us interested in buses and bicycles," says Hill, 42. "Not every community in the United States could offer what we can offer here. We have CarShare; we have a transport system that's second to none; we have a great path system. With all these services, you can conveniently get by without a second (household) car."
Boulder resident Dan Sturges does own a family car, but every day he uses his Segway to commute three miles to his job as senior programming manager for WestStart, a nonprofit organization for alternative transportation.
"I think the problem is that people will look at a Segway," says Sturges, "and look at their car and say, 'Both will take me to the market, but my car will also go on the highways  so how can the Segway be more than a toy?' But we don't need cars for the same things we needed cars 20 years ago. We have the Internet, we have regional and local transportation. I think the Segway fits into the paradigm for a new transportation mode in the digital age."
Hill agrees. He envisions a community-based plan for transportation in Boulder consisting of a modern, multiuse network of buses, bikes, CarShare, Segways and a the newly proposed Boulder Breeze. The latter is Hill's bid for an old-fashioned trolley system that would connect Pearl Street Mall with other commercial hubs, such as the 29th Street shopping area. Transportation officials for the city of Boulder are currently considering the Breeze with the possibility of completing a feasibility study for the project this year.
"If you provide these types of vehicles people will eventually gravitate toward them as they recognize they're more convenient," Hill says. "My motivation behind all this is to provide a paradigm shift for people to think about what kind of community they want to live in: Do they want to live in a community that values space for people or space for cars?"
- Pygmalion H. Infestation January 11, 2005 08:32Let's see if I can keep from screwing this up this time.
You always get me with that random name generator shit. I can waste more time there doing nothing than anywhere else.
Decided I want to move to Corndog Meadows.
- Big John February 02, 2005 18:17