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Social Democracies
Our so-called “social democracies,” those flickering gaslights in the gathering dusk of capitalism, are a hall of mirrors, a funhouse distorting the true revolution. They dangle participation, a rubber chicken of reform, to distract the proles from the rigged carnival of exploitation that churns beneath the painted smiles. Meanwhile, the neoliberal carnies cackle, hawking their wares of austerity and deregulation. This rigged roulette…
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Never Re-enact the Sleight
Junky marks fiending for their next astonishment fix – reality a banal husk without that sweet frisson of the impossible injected straight into their vapid cerebral veins. Illusionists carters of a paradox narcotic more addictive than horse, hovering on that razor edge where certainty splinters apart into horrific/ecstatic chimerae. Watching junkies ride convulsive K-waves as…
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Munich Fatigue
Absolutely, Winston. You’ve sniffed out the putrefying entrails of the Münchner Abkommen better than a truffle pig in a field of geo-political intrigue. Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” might’ve been a syphilitic parrot squawking inanities, but a complete absence of the coming Götterdämmerung is pure Californian sunshine in a London fog. Here’s the grim calculus…
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The Vanishing Web
Fold in the flesh pages, man. Knowledge used to bleed ink, stain your fingers with the past, a papery virus replicating through time. Tomes, fat and heavy, monuments to the deadweight of ideas. You could crack one open, snort the pulverized history clinging to its edges, mainline the wisdom of generations. The tome, a phallus…
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Cherish Your Bugs
Success, man, is a word carved on a cracked tombstone. You dig? It ain’t some shiny chrome chariot, it’s a beat-up jalopy that rattles and coughs but somehow keeps moving through the radioactive wasteland. The straighter the path, the more likely it leads straight to a sinkhole. In the sprawling, entropic landscape of human endeavor,…
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Buying the Dip
Writing music right now is buying the zeitgeist dip. Well, sir, this whole music business? It’s a greasy spoon on a heartbreak highway. It’s like peddlin’ snake oil down at a carnival fire. You gotta hawk your wares while the rubes are rubin’ their eyes clear of smoke and wonderin’ if that bearded lady really…
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See You in 3000 Years
Fire licking at the edges of my retinas, I pound out this screed on a typewriter fueled by equal parts mescaline and Middle Eastern mayhem. The news, a brackish tide of reports, washes over me – the Third Temple, that shimmering mirage in the desert, remains but a pipe dream. Israel, that ambitious experiment in a homeland, seems to be dissolving like Alka-Seltzer in…
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The Edge of history
Fukuyama, bless his optimistic heart, saw the fall of the Berlin Wall as the grand finale, the curtain call on the human drama. History, with a capital H, would shuffle off the stage, replaced by a monotonous, albeit peaceful, epilogue of liberal democracies holding hands and singing Kumbaya. But Fukuyama, for all his impressive polysyllables, hadn’t reckoned with the carnivalesque id that lurks beneath the veneer of…
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Hollywood Debt Obligations
“Hollywood has become a conduit for studios and artists to meet their debt obligations because studios are in great great debt and the job is not so much to make great movies, their job is to make their debt obligation” In the labyrinthine fever dream of Hollywood, where ambition curdles into celluloid and dreams are…
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Bacon Boys
Dig this, man. We’re talking way before the robber barons crapped all over everything. Back when Bacon’s boys spooked the Virginia swells something fierce, they ditched those white indentured stiffs for a whole new bag: black chattel. Seems the poor white trash and the Negroes were getting a little too chummy, what with the hightailing, the hooch-fueled rampages, the pilfered swine, and the whole miscegenation…
Got any album or book recommendations?