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I have seen the future of rock and roll and there’s nothing there
05.10.2011
01:38 am
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Borders Books, Austin. R.I.P.
 
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In this 1978 newscast on movie piracy, we encounter the same wariness that greeted video cassette recorders three decades ago as we’ve seen in recent years with black boxes, CD and DVD recorders, Internet downloading and Youtube. E-books are next.

As art becomes increasingly inexpensive or free to own does it lose its value? Do we start to take it for granted? I know I do. I’m surrounded by CDs of music I’ve downloaded and burned and haven’t even listened to yet. I remember when buying a vinyl record was a big event.

Not only has music and movies become available at little or no cost, the devices we use to record and store them have become dirt cheap. In 1978, VCRs were selling for $1000. Videos, blank or pre-recorded, were ridiculously expensive. I remember buying Road Warrior back in the early 1980s on Betamax for $89.00. It wasn’t that long ago when blank CDs sold for $20, same with DVDs. Now you can pick up a dozen for less than the cost of the New York Times print edition…if you’re still buying newspapers. The cost of duplicating music and movies at home has gone from the absurdly expensive to the fatally cheap.

So now, with music, movies, and eventually books, available online for the cost of a 25 cent blank digital disc how does this work out for the creative community and the future of pop culture?  Free everything is terrific for the consumer (as distinguished from buyer), but what happens to the people creating the music, movies and books? What happens to the people working in record stores, video stores and bookstores?

In my hometown of Austin, three Borders bookstores have closed in the past two months. People have lost jobs. Large buildings are now empty, impossible to lease. Publishing houses are quietly freaking out. There’s no place for them to ship their books, other than Amazon.com., and they’re still very much in the business of selling books you can hold in your hands made by printing machines operated by actual human beings. How many people does it take to make a Kindle versus the publishers, printers, graphic designers etc. involved in the publication of a book?

As indie record stores close, the big chains aren’t picking up the slack. Hell no. They’re devoting less and less retail space to CDs and DVDs and will sure as shit eliminate them entirely soon enough. More people laid off. Blockbuster is bankrupt (as much a victim of their shitty customer as changing technologies) and Movie Gallery is dead and buried. More jobs lost.

In the next few years, I predict we’ll see the death of Barnes and Noble and what’s left of the independent book, record and video stores. There will no longer be neighborhood gathering places for lovers of literature, film and music. The artsy oasis in the shopping mall, that little bit of Bohemia that exists in culturally starved suburbs across America will be a thing of the past. The kids you see hanging out at Borders talking about the latest vampire books will end up congregating in front of Hot Topics sniffing screen-print instead of book ink. And there is a fucking difference!

In the midst of the death throes of the brick and mortar store, artists creating the “product” are left with fewer and fewer outlets that SELL what they create.

I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before. But this shit is real. A society that fucks its artists, is a culture that is destroying its soul. Download to your little heart’s desire, but one day the source of all this goodness will have been sucked dry and there won’t be anybody left who can afford to replenish it. And I don’t believe for a moment that there’s a wave of new young bands, film makers and writers on the brink of creating world class art for the sheer beauty of it. Deep down everybody wants to make a living doing what they love.

As art gets cheaper, the cheaper the art. While everybody was busy celebrating the Internet for providing a free outlet for aspiring rockers to get their music out there, did anyone stop to notice just how much garbage was being created in the name of rock and roll?  Far from being music’s savior, the Internet has become its sewage system.

Video killed the radio star. The Internet killed the rest of us. And yes, I’m part of the process.

Even the good old reliable adult video store is dying and “C.J., the video machine owner” (now in his 60s) is pulling his pud watching Youporn.

When did we collectively arrive at the point at which art was determined to be worthless?

Bootlegging, pirating, porn and the dawning of free art as reported on Cleveland TV in 1978:
 

 
The corpse of a bookstore after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.10.2011
01:38 am
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Creative Writing 101 with Kurt Vonnegut
05.03.2011
08:31 pm
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Short, wry lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the “simple shapes of stories.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.03.2011
08:31 pm
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The Magic Christian: May 1 is Terry Southern Day in Dallas
04.27.2011
06:45 pm
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I’ve been a huge Terry Southern fan for as far back as I can remember—I’d even go so far as to say that I’m a Terry Southern nut. Posting some of his unpublished work here on Dangerous Minds has been a thrill for me. In my day, I have gone about collecting a fair amount of first editions, magazines, memorabilia and just stuff that relates to Southern’s career. In fact, as I sit here typing this, there is a framed poster of The Magic Christian hanging on the wall in my office (it’s the exact one you see above). Terry Southern is a charter member of my personal pantheon of 20th century heroes.

In case you don’t know who the grand and groovy Terry Southern was, here’s a brief bio, taken from the Open Road Media website, where his books are being made available as e-books beginning May 3rd:

Terry Southern (1924–1995) was an American satirist, author, journalist, screenwriter, and educator and is considered one of the great literary minds of the second half of the twentieth century. His bestselling novels—Candy (1958), a spoof on pornography based on Voltaire’s Candide, and The Magic Christian (1959), a satire of the grossly rich also made into a movie starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr—established Southern as a literary and pop culture icon. Literary achievement evolved into a successful film career, with the Academy Award–nominated screenplays for Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which he wrote with Stanley Kubrick and Peter George, and Easy Rider  (1969), which he wrote with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

Truly a “writer’s writer,” Southern was lauded by the likes of William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Stanley Kubrick, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe. Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. He also wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Barbarella, The Loved One and The Cincinnati Kid and for a while, worked for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. He was declared “the most profoundly witty writer of our generation,” by novelist Gore Vidal, no slouch in the wit department himself and is one of the “people we like” chosen by the Beatles for the Sgt. Pepper’s collage. Now the city of Dallas, TX has proclaimed May 1st, 2011, “Terry Southern Day” in recognition of one of the Lone Star State’s few genuine literary legends.

On that day Dr. Strangelove will screen at the historic Texas Theatre (where Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended, btw) and Dallas City Councilwoman Delia Jasso will present Southern’s son, Nile Southern, with the official proclamation for “Terry Southern Day.”  Nile Southern will also be showing a portion of his upcoming documentary Dad Strangelove, about his famous father. A Q&A session will afterwards will be moderated by The Dallas Observer’s Robert Wilonsky, who recently wrote a fascinating article about Nile and the important job he performs of archiving his father’s legacy for cinema historians and literary scholars of the future.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.27.2011
06:45 pm
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William Burroughs, Gus Van Sant and the discipline of ‘do easy’
04.16.2011
01:54 am
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The Discipline Of DE is a short 16mm film directed by Gus Van Sant. It’s based on a story in “Exterminator!” by William Burroughs that at times reads like Buddhist noir:

DE is a way of doing. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE.You can start right now tidying up your flat, moving furniture or books, washing dishes, making tea, sorting papers. Don’t fumble, jerk, grab an object. Drop cool possessive fingers onto it like a gentle old cop making a soft arrest.”

Van Sant discusses the early stages of making the film:

This was my first film outside of my school projects, made in 1977 or so, and was the occasion that I was able to first meet William S. Burroughs, whose writing I much admired and who lived at the time in New York City. I wanted to get in touch with him to ask his permission to film this small story, and found him listed in the New York telephone book. I was under the impression that if I visited him and asked his permission in person that I would have more of a chance. And that may have been true—he did give me an okay—but also I was able to ask a few questions about the ideas in the story.

One of the things he said during our visit, not in the film or story, was, “Of course, when anyone knocks something over, or trips over something or breaks anything, they are at that moment thinking of someone they don’t like.”

...every time I knocked something over or tripped over anything I stopped to think, and I was always thinking of someone or some¬thing that I didn’t like. This was illuminating. Time and again, when I fumbled and broke something, there it was, I was thinking about some unfortunate incident in my past where I had been misjudged, ridiculed, or caught red-handed by someone, or when I stubbed my toe, I realized that I was thinking of a meeting in the future with someone about something that I didn’t want any¬thing to do with. So, the answer was possibly to not do too much moving around when things appear in your mind that could lead to someone or something that you don’t like. I haven’t mastered this one, however.

“Exterminator!” was published in 1973. A couple of years after its publication, Burroughs came to Boulder, Colorado to conduct a series of readings and workshops for the Jack Kerouac School Of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. His concept of doing things easily fit in perfectly with the Dharma teachings of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In an atmosphere dominated by Tibetan Buddhist iconography and terminology, Burroughs’ approach was refreshingly Western while still capturing the essence of Trungpa’s crazy wisdom, a Zen-like attitude, both rigorous and lighthearted.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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04.16.2011
01:54 am
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Top 10 books Americans tried to ban last year
04.13.2011
09:22 am
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You’d think that people who actually go to the effort of visiting libraries, taking books from them, and then reading said books, would be a little more enlightened as to the harm posed to society by banning books. Alas no, as yesterday the American Library Association published its list of the ten books library patrons tried to have banned last year, known as the “Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010”. I’m not familiar with a lot of work on this list, as I don’t tend to read “young adult”-type fiction, but there are some surprising choices on here: 

1. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: Homosexuality, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group

2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: Offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, violence

3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: Insensitivity, offensive language, racism, sexually explicit

4. Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Reasons: Drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit

5. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Reasons: Sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, violence

6. Lush by Natasha Friend
Reasons: Drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group

7. What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones
Reasons: Sexism, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group

8. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Reasons: Drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint

9. Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology edited by Amy Sonnie
Reasons: Homosexuality, sexually explicit

10. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
Reasons: Religious viewpoint, violence

Brave New World? Are they serious?! A dystopian critique set in a future world where books are banned, and they want to ban the book? Then again maybe the pro-ban lobby are actually really progressive, as surely I am not the only who has though that Huxley’s future of mood controlling drugs and casual sex is actually kind of appealing. But I can think of much heavier dystopian work that would seem more suitable for banning. I guess it’s just the sex that’s offensive.

Barbara Jones of the ALA has made a statement about the banning of books, included here in a section from the Guardian’s article on the list:

There were 348 reports of efforts to remove books from America’s shelves in 2010, down from 460 the previous year. But the ALA believes the majority of challenges go unreported, and called on Americans to “protect one of the most precious of our fundamental rights – the freedom to read”.

“While we firmly support the right of every reader to choose or reject a book for themselves or their families, those objecting to a particular book should not be given the power to restrict other readers’ right to access and read that book,” said Barbara Jones, director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom. “As members of a pluralistic and complex society, we must have free access to a diverse range of viewpoints on the human condition in order to foster critical thinking and understanding.”

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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04.13.2011
09:22 am
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Top 10 books Americans tried to ban last year
Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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04.13.2011
08:32 am
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Deborah Vankin signs ‘Poseurs’ at Meltdown Comics
04.12.2011
06:47 pm
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For the past ten years, Los Angeles Times staff reporter Deborah Vankin has covered arts, culture and nightlife for the LA Weekly, Variety, Brand X and the New York Times. She has a special talent for observing and commenting on youth culture in particular.

Poseurs, her new grapic novel, is set amongst restless fashion tribes of Los Angeles and there will be a signing tomorrow night celebrating the publication of the book at LA’s premiere geek emporium, Meltdown Comics.

Vankin told the LA Weekly:

The crux of the story is that a shy, artsy teenage girl gets a part-time job as a “houseguest for hire.” She’s hired by this agency called “We The Party People” who rent out fake guests for peoples’ private parties. Why? Image is everything in L.A., you are who you know. They help “flesh out” the guest list. Thing is: you never know who’s real and who’s rented. Drama ensues.

Buy Poseurs on Amazon

Meltdown Comics, April 13th, 2011 7pm, 7522 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 9004

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.12.2011
06:47 pm
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Popular books with better titles that get straight to the point
04.08.2011
02:35 pm
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Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 
Apparently you can judge a book by its cover thanks to Better Book Titles. The new and improved titles are submitted by readers, picked by staff and then posted on the blog every weekday.

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

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Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead

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Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird

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Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five

See more at Better Book Titles.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.08.2011
02:35 pm
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Poet, prophet and redneck revolutionary: Joe Bageant R.I.P.
03.27.2011
08:22 pm
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Joe in Hopkins Village
 

After a vibrant life, Joe Bageant died yesterday following a four-month struggle with cancer. He was 64. Joe is survived by his wife, Barbara, his three children, Timothy, Patrick and Elizabeth, and thousands of friends and admirers. He is also survived by his work and ideas.”

Joe Bageant was an extraordinarily gifted writer and thinker.  Author of Deer Hunting With Jesus and countless essays and editorials on politics and society, Joe was a champion of human rights and a fearless critic of our government’s mistreatment of its working class. His writing is imbued with compassion but also a caustic wit that laid bare the working class’s tendency to do what is in their own worst interests. Watching Joe tear into the Teabaggers was like watching an extremely large feral cat play with its food. His death comes at a time when his voice is needed more than ever. I’m not sure there’s anyone out there that can fill the void.

This is not an obituary. I’m not trying to give the reader an overview of Joe’s life in a few paragraphs. I am sharing a few of my memories of Joe as a friend and writer.

The last time I saw Joe Bageant was in February of 2009. He helped save my life. I was in the middle of an agonizing divorce, a divorce I didn’t want. I was struggling with the most profound despair I’d ever experienced, barely hanging on, trying to keep my business, my home and my marriage together. I could see the marriage part was doomed but I held on, pretending to the people who worked for me and my customers that everything was okay. It was a pathetic charade and one that was exhausting to maintain. Between bouts of drinking and staring at walls, I somehow managed to create a theater of normalcy…until I couldn’t anymore. While all my friends were telling me to do the responsible thing, to stick it out for the sake of maintaining control of my business and home, it was an unending nightmare trying to sustain a sense of order while suffering through an emotional apocalypse. Money, the house, the business didn’t mean jackshit to me compared to having someone I deeply loved leave me, and leave ugly, after 18 years of being together. I knew I’d die by drink or my own hand if the pain continued.

It was in the darkest night of my dark night of the soul that I received a phone call from an old friend that I hadn’t heard from in at least a decade. It was Joe Bageant. He had no idea what I’d been going through, but I am convinced that somewhere deep down Joe had heard my sobs and felt my desperation. I told him of my situation and he gave me the only advice that made any real difference. Joe said “Marc, it’s alright to run from your problems.” I repeat, he said “Marc, it’s alright to run from your problems.” He was the only one of my friends to say what I had been thinking and feeling but was too emotionally conflicted to do: get the fuck out of Dodge, and get out now! And Joe backed it up by offering me his beach hut in Belize as a sanctuary. I packed my car and drove to the coffeehouse I owned with my wife. She was behind the counter waiting on a customer. I walked up to her and gave her a long and heartfelt kiss. I said goodbye. I haven’t seen her since.

Joe Bageant wasn’t big on doing the “responsible” things in life. He was big on telling the truth, when he wasn’t making colorful shit up, and he was real big at trying to change the fucked-up world we live in. Joe was responsible in that that he kept gas in the truck and food on the table, but Joe never did anything that he didn’t want to do. He got through life by really and truly being himself. Joe had the Buddha nature. He instinctively knew that life was a richer experience if you didn’t try to control or organize it according to outmoded belief systems. If responsibility entailed compromising your values, your compassion and happiness, then Joe was the most irresponsible man on the planet.

I know Joe made his rep as a progressive redneck with a conscience, but that was only one dimension of a complex and tricky dude. When I first met him in Boulder, Colorado in the early 70s, Joe was living in a converted school bus with his wife Cindy and son Timothy (named after Dr. Leary). On the surface they looked like your stereotypical hippie family. But when they spoke in their sultry southern drawls the words that came out of their mouths weren’t littered with hippie cliches or new age jargon. The Bageant family weren’t Aquarian age Clampetts, they were totally unique and totally magic. Cindy was an oldschool southern gal with the most bodacious Afro I’ve ever seen on a white chick and Joe was some kind of madcap hillbilly visionary. Joe laid the southern thing on thick, mostly to humorous effect. He knew his chicken-fried diphthongs would spook the longhairs who were still re-living the last reel of Easy Rider in their heads. Joe played with people’s expectations, he was a real mindfucker. Like Neal Cassidy, Joe had a sense of playfulness and knew how to drive a bus.

Boulder in the 70s was becoming a mecca for poets thanks to the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School Of Disembodied Poetics. The streets and bars were crawling with bards and beatniks. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Creeley, Di Prima, Waldman and dozens of other writers were reading, writing and speechifying in bookstores, schoolrooms and coffeehouses. The Muses had gathered over Boulder like a radiant syntactical cloud, raining down vowels and consonants on tongues of invisible angels. It was impossible to be around the energy of the moment and not think poetic thoughts.

Bageant wasn’t a writer, or much of one at the time. He wasn’t part of Boulder’s literary scene. But, as I would soon discover, Joe was paying very close attention to what was going on and secretly he wanted in. Years later, in an interview with Energy Grid magazine, Joe described Boulder’s poetry vortex and writing in general:

Nobody was sitting me on their knee and telling me the secrets of writing and magicianship. But I was accepted in their company and at parties and got to watch them live their lives creatively and with passion. I came to the conclusion that this writing thing and the arts in general had as much to do with how you lived as anything else. It was clear to me that I should watch and learn from people like Ginsberg, who was the most famous poet on the planet for a reason.

As far as writing goes, I was influenced by all the usual suspects of my generation, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese, William Styron, Genet, and especially all the Southern writers, Welty, Willie Morris… not to mention a lot of people who never got the respect they deserved, especially poets like Marc Campbell of Taos, New Mexico and Jack Collom of Boulder, Colorado. Their works really clued me in on the connection between words, your brain and your heart.

Joe mentions me in the above quote and I share it not to flatter myself but to give you some insight to Joe’s approach to the whole writing thing. I had no idea at the time that Joe gave a shit about my poetry or anybody’s. In some ways I think he may have actually been embarrassed by the notion of becoming a writer. It was too much of a “scene,” too bourgeois and narcissistic. I never saw him writing. I read him my poems and he would nod and smile and blurt out a “right on” now and then, but I had no idea that he was listening with the ears of a blossoming writer. When Joe eventually sprung his work on me it was jaw-droppingly good, fully formed, inventive and visionary. He worked the southern vernacular up into something that drifted on wings of song.

Poets are a competitive lot, lyrical gunslingers looking to lay waste to the latest hotshot wordsmith that pulls into town. I must admit that, along with just about every local poet in Boulder, Joe’s talent sent me racing to the typewriter to take up the gauntlet he had thrown down. Envy, jealousy and the competitive urge may lack virtue in and of themselves, but they can fuel great works. When poets say they only write for themselves, I respond “bullshit.” Go to any open poetry reading and watch the poets chomping at the bit to hit the lectern and spew their restless poesy. It makes the open mic night at a blues club look like the epitome of brotherly goodwill and graciousness. Joe had quietly been honing his craft in the shadows, but when he finally unleashed his writing it was one glorious monster.

On the one hand, Joe was a down-to-earth, unschooled, self-taught everyman who happened to have a brilliant analytical mind. On the other, he was a cosmic cowboy who had eaten his fair share of good LSD and knew that within the yin and yang of the material world lay dimensions of untold beauty and mystery. Instead of fracturing his point of view, Joe’s multiple and occasionally opposing characteristics played off of each other and deepened his perspective on all things, from the mundane to the magnificent. With the added element of a biting sense of humor and a healthy dose of cynicism, Bageant was son and brother to Lenny Bruce, Paul Krassner and Tim Leary. Eating peyote with Joe was like taking a fast ride down the highway of absolute reality while a hyperkinetic bluegrass band played the music of the spheres on a transistor radio made of human brain matter.

When I spent time with Joe in 2009 he was ill. He had problems with his liver (he had been a drinker in his life) and his energy level was somewhat diminished, but his mind was as quick and lucid as ever. He spoke of the many projects he was working on - his blog, a screenplay, memoirs, columns, essays, etc - and gave no hint that his days might be numbered. The word “cancer” was never spoken, so I assume he didn’t have it then or didn’t want to talk about it. I did detect in Joe a sense of urgency at the time. Upon reflection, it seemed as though he was trying to get as much done as swiftly as possible. He had passed the age of 60 and, along with his liver problems, I think he was very conscious of his own mortality. I was used to seeing Joe operating at a high level, but I was not used to seeing him in states of exhaustion. It’s usually spine-stiffening to see an old friend after years of no physical contact. Those are moments when you’re reminded that we’re not going to live forever and there are no exceptions. Not you, not me, not Joe.

Joe had chosen Belize as a retreat because he liked the small fishing village where he lived. It wasn’t a tourist area. It was dirt poor and Joe felt connected to the people living there. Hopkins Village was founded by Africans who had jumped from shipwrecked slave ships in the 1600s and forged out a life for themselves and defended it against the encroachment of European imperialists. These were Joe’s kind of people - independent and loving life despite hardship and adversity.

I had gone to Belize to cry on a friend’s shoulder, but Joe really wasn’t up for wallowing in pity. I mistook his coolness to my pain as being Buddhist detachment or his own self-absorption. As I said, I understand now that he intuitively knew his days on earth were limited and to waste it on the past, mine or his own, was to squander precious time. He had pulled me out the fire and that was enough. It was time to move on, brother. Losing your life always trumps losing your wife. He had saved my fucking life. What more did I want?

Any day spent with Joe was a spiritual adventure. He was always sparking on all cylinders, a speedfreak without the speed. Fortunately for all of us, Joe finished his memoir before he died. I have the feeling it was just the first volume of others to follow. I can’t wait to read it. Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir comes out on March 30th and you can pre-order it here. Buy it and be happy to get a chance to spend some time with an extraordinary soul.

I have no idea what Joe would have done had he lived another 20 years. But I like the future he imagined for himself:

I plan to have a cottage in someplace like Andalusia, or French Martinique; someplace VERY cheap that I can go and write and snipe at the Republic of terror. One man never beat a mob in its own turf. I’ll stroke my wife’s sweet snatch, pet my dogs and give heart to my children (every one of whom is a good lefty) in some dry place where my arthritic fingers will loosen up enough to learn to play flamenco guitar. I’m serious folks! There is not a person on this earth who can say I never did what I promised… eventually. And every reader here, every son and daughter of good yeoman liberty and decency, as it is defined by the suffering poor of this planet, is invited to come visit, eat tapas and drink wine at my table. Solidarity!”

I drank wine at Joe Bageant’s table and it was sweet and the taste lingers still.
 

From Joe Bageant’s Lafayette Park Blues:

America: When we first stepped onto this playground of the national soul together, I truly believed you were not a bully, that you were the protector of queers and thick-tongued immigrants and laboring spiritual hoboes like me. I have tossed down your dreams straight from the bottle with no chaser, then bought a round for the house, because this is the goddam land of the free where even a redneck boy from Virginia can dream the dreams of bards, call himself a writer then walk away from dark ancestral ghosts to actually become one.

I believed it all, America. And I still fall for it if I let my guard down, just like the abused wife who believes she will not be punched again for that thousand and first time. All the neighbors — whole nations — believed in you too, despite the muffled screams of the black slave and the Red Indian coming from within your own house. But now you are lurking on the neighbors’ porches smelling of the halls of Abu Gharib and gun grease and there are no cops to call because you ARE the cops, so they are going to break down the doors and cut your balls off.

I can’t sleep at nights and don’t you pretend that you are asleep. Talk to me! You are going to have to say you love your native son or this whole terrible ecstatic thing of ours is over. You have changed over the many years we have been writhing together in this little power struggle of yours and mine — the one between little guy liberty and big authority. Now you have become the police court judge of my days and I dare not even leave your house for a quart of milk or a look at the stars. It’s too late for counseling. You have broken my heart one too many times. Cracked one too many ribs.

Time is short. Dawn will bring nothing good, I promise you.
Speak to me like you used to.
Right now.
Or it’s over.”

There’ll never be another like Joe…but that doesn’t mean we all can’t try. Power to the people and the poets!
 
In August of 2009 Richard Metzger interviewed Joe Bageant for Dangerous Minds: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Joe Bageant.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.27.2011
08:22 pm
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Space Cat On Mushrooms
03.18.2011
04:39 pm
Topics:
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Ohhh, this book looks way more interesting than Space Cat Meets Mars. Ruthven Todd would be so proud.

Below, a video of “A damn cat eating mushrooms.” 

 
(via Twisted Vintage)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.18.2011
04:39 pm
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