Plateau ala Nirvana

"What're they tuning, a harp?" Dig the crazy version of Sweet Home Alabama while they are waiting (see 1st part of vid below).

Dig Dave Grohl smoking a cigarette while playing. That's how good players everywhere just spontaneously bust out in music.
The subject however is Plateau, its lyrics, something about Greenland, the Brothers Meat of the infamous Meat Puppets, another twisted band comparable in stature to the ever-loving Butthole Surfers. Both bands have a distinct Southwest (US) flavor, both rock, both will kick your ass. And dig, my brothers and sisters, Nirvana playing a Meat Puppets song, acoustic, on TV, with 2 founders of the Meat Puppets.

There were times where I keep walking around singing this song...

Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop
And an illustrated book about birds
You see a lot up there but don't be scared
Who needs action when you got words...

Also dig Cobain reading an apparent WFMU newsletter:

Life returning to Chernobyl

Martin Cruz Smith had it right- the mystery writer's mystery writer, in what damn well may be my favorite of his book, Wolves Eat Dogs, describes the area surrounding Chernobyl as a twisted but thriving natural paradise. Today's news story in this link to the UK Guardian corroborates Cruz' vision. Older folks who refused to move out after the meltdown of 1986 describe packs of wolves, forests growing up in the towns and fields, and dozens of other animal species thriving. The area is still polluted, loaded with radiation. Of course Mom Nature keeps doing what she can to heal the wounds.

Cruz Smith makes you feel like you were there. You can see the place. After I read the book I got on the web and found the journal of a woman who'd take motorcycle trips through the area, stopping to take photos and measure the radiation. She wrote that she was glad to have a fast bike, as it was a comfort getting quickly through the areas that were still really hot, and the roads were deserted so she could haul ass as much as the deterioration of the pavement would let her.

The pictures above are of Pripyat, a town near Chernobyl. The woman's riding journal is here. Read and enjoy.

Wolve Eat Dogs also chillingly predicted the Alexander Litvinenko affair.

Johnny Depp cookie

In keeping with my theme of lightening things up a bit around here, I'd like to present this hilarious Johnny Depp cookie I found at the local 7-11 last night. They had about 6 or 7 of them, all hand painted, sugary, crusty, unique renditions of the dependable and talented Johnny. Wow.

Cormac McCarthy on Oprah

Now this is unbelievable.

If you have not read Cormac McCarthy, and you are at all interested in the desert southwest, any kind of dark, bleak literature, well told, gripping stories that do not necessarily have a cheery, rosy, happy, neat ending, then McCarthy is highly recommended. His books include All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, & Cities of the Plain- AKA the Border Trilogy, and Suttree, and 2 newer books, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, which I believe won a pulitzer. Oh and don't forget Blood Meridian- WOW.

The amazing thing about him appearing on Oprah is that he's super non-celebrity, the opposite of famous. The CNN article here quotes a time when he turned down a well-paid speaking engagement in the years when he was barely scratching by. I know from other articles I've read about him that reason he's done that kind of thing is he's too busy writing! He's been kind of a writer's writer for years and years but his stuff is so good that more and more people are reading his books.

As soon as this appears on You Tube I will embed it.

[update 7/11/07: found the trailer for No Country for Old Men here. ]
[update 8/8/07: Dang this guy really is hard to find info on. His books say it best, boys and girls, I will tell you that. However there is an awesome interview here from 1992 published at the New York Times by Richard B. Woodward. Still no Oprah interview on YouTube. Apparently clips are available on Oprah's site & you have to register & etc. C7]

Going solar in Tucson

I am always amazed there is not more use of solar power going on here in Tucson. The average day is sunny. Almost all days are sunny. You can power your house, business, you can make your electric meter spin backward. A solar house setup featured in a recent episode of This Old House in Austin, Texas detailed a system that costs 18,000 dollars- I think this was after incentives had cut the original cost 40 to 50 percent.

Today's article in the AZ Daily Star got me thinking about Arizona in solar circles. The house is a "showcase" home, at a quarter of a mil, but generates all its own energy and harvests water. When it rains here, it really rains, so if you're clever you can water you gardens with what you harvest. But the point is, the more people that go to the trouble of outfitting their homes to face the future, the cheaper it will become.

To say that it pays for itself is important. To say that it's necessary, if we are not going to exterminate our own species with pollution from coal burning power plants, is a more important point.

Kurt Vonnegut dies

This guy had a bearing on life that was a big influence on me from the time I started reading his books when I was 12. Like the AP copy below says, he spoke out about many destructive things- things others just blindly accepepted. The AP copy does not emphasize something else: Vonnegut was a VERY FUNNY GUY. Humor was interlaced in every book he wrote.

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic.
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.
He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge.
He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in the city.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

I was always shaken, inspired, enlightened by every book of his I read. No matter what age I was, each Vonnegut book meant something very big to me and I read many of them a few times. They say he had depression- but here was one guy who didn't spread depression, as I believe so many others do, he spread humor instead.

BushCo hiring grads from Pat Robertson's "Christian" law school

Regent University School of Law, Pat Robertson's attempt to change the world through intertwining "Christian values" and the Law, has had 150 of its graduates hired by the Bush administration since 2001. The attorney who recently resigned as part of the Gonzales scandal, Monica Goodling, who looks like a cast-member from the Lawrence Welk show circa 1973, was a Regent grad. Goodling had graduated from the "law school" 2 years earlier and had been part of BushCo's effort to dump U.S Attorneys who were doing too good of a job. Goodling was involved in importing Karl Rove's pal Timothy Griffin to fuck things up in Arkansas.

Way to go BushCo. The attempts to pack the U.S. Circuit courts with rightwing zealots for judges, label all other judges "activist judges," subvert the law in a million other ways, promote creationism, destroy habeus corpus, the Bill of Rights, and so on, is now joined by a transparent and gutless attempt to give legal muscle to fucking morons who can't separate church from state, who are apparently unaware of the tyrannical actions taken throughout century after century in the name of religion, and are stupid enough to go to a school founded they King of Dorks, Pat Robertson.

Furthermore in an act that surly must be illegal, BushCo placed a Dean from Regent in charge of hiring at the U.S. Government's Executive branch. The hiring of the 150 moronic followers of Pat Roberton's insane and prejudiced social views began immediately after. According the Globe article we can thank the psychopathic John Ashcroft, who put a curtain up so nobody could see the breasts on a statue representing Justice, for the lowering the hiring standards at the DOJ:

"John Ashcroft , then attorney general, changed longstanding rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks.

Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools."

Naturally, Ashcroft is now a professor at Regent University School of Law.

Details are here in the Boston Globe's story by Charlie Savage.

And yes I read about it here in the venerable and great Raw Story.