Well, it happened again. I went out and spent 55 bucks on three new CD’s — and got screwed! I bought the new Stereolab CD called Margerine Eclipse because they are usually great. I bought Best of Iggy Pop CD to sate a nagging Stooges Jones I’ve been having lately. And I also procured Get Born, the debut album by Jet, because “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” is a kick-ass rock song.

I was very excited. The minute I got home, inserted the Get Born disc into the player, turned up the volume, was all ready to rock out with my socks out . . .  only to be slammed in the face with the Pickaxe of Mediocrity.

Ditto Stereolab. Ditto Iggy.

You know what irks me most about being an audiophile? Music CD’s are the only product I know of which you can’t return when they’re broken. Now, by “broken” I don’t mean if it skips or something. Of course they let you return CD’s for that.  I mean the other definition of broken.

If you’re like me, you buy new music CDs because you’re looking for that certain, special feeling when you listen to them. An internal response that is greater than the sum of its musical parts. Such as the first time you heard Zach De La Rocha blaring, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” and you felt like you just got whacked in the head with a bat so hard that blood ran under your fingernails and every cell, every vein, every single pore in your body shut down causing you to fall on your back and gasp and convulse on the living room floor as foam spewed from your maw. That’s what a new music CD is supposed to do and if it doesn’t, then as far as I’m concerned, it’s broken.

55 bucks and not one of these CD’s worked properly. Not the Stereolab (which was stale as a Bill Clinton zipper joke). Not the Stooges (which was obviously mixed and mastered by a team of lobotomized baboons). And certainly not the Jet album (which was just brutally average rock music). Nothing against Jet I suppose. Being average is what most of us are anyway; but then – I’m not paying 20 bucks for averageness. Nor am I paying 20 bucks for cover art, or liner notes, or shrink wrap, or crappy plastic jewel cases.

I’m paying 20 bucks to be stabbed in the stomach and left for dead.

So I decided it was time to fight the power. The next day I went back to the music store, walked right up to the cashier, set the disc and receipt on the counter, and said, “I’d like to return this CD please.”

“What’s wrong with it,” asked the clerk

“It’s broken,” I said.

“You mean it skips?”

“No, I mean, it doesn’t work.”

“It doesn’t work how?” he asked.

“Ok, well, you know when you first play a new rock and roll CD, and this guitar thing starts grinding out your speakers, and the bass thunders in, and the drummer goes slam bang boom-bang, then out of nowhere some ghoul from the bowels of hell starts shrieking — and the whole thing is rocking so hard you have no choice but to carve the heart right out of your chest and swing it by the aorta over your head grunting like an aboriginal in a sacrificial ritual? Well this CD doesn’t do that.”

“You mean you don’t like it?” he snipped.

“No, I like it just fine,” I said. “But I didn’t pay 20 bucks to like it.”

“I can’t help you sir,” he said.

You know how the rest goes: Harsh words were exchanged, and once again my dignified insurgence against the powers that be was mistaken for a psychosis of some sort and was escorted off the premises by the manager’s gentle hand on my elbow, saying in his contemptible, patronizing, shitty-little-record-store-manager’s tone, “Yes sir, we understand your frustration, but this is an issue you have to take up with the record company,” and me snapping back, “But you lie in the same grub-infested bed as them!” as he gently closed door in my face and waved goodbye through the plate glass windows which, too my shame, I considered putting a bench through.

Where are you Chuck D. when I need you most!?

You know, I don’t think the record companies take into account the buyer’s risk when they price music CD’s. If they are selling their product “as is” then the price needs to drop considerably. Maybe, if the record companies hadn’t sold out their customer’s interests for the bottomless bottom line, they might not be losing their asses right now. Because not only did they not nurture us as customers — we who paid for their palaces and Hummers — but they blatantly gouged us, and short-changed us, and when things weren’t going so well for them, they even sued our broke asses.

Anyway, I came home and placed my 3 new discs into The Stack. The Stack is a pile of unlistenable CD’s that I have set aside to resell. When The Stack is big enough, say twenty CD’s or so, I’ll bring them to Cow Records on Newport Ave. The clerk will thumb through to see which ones he wants to purchase and, if I’m lucky, I’ll make enough money to buy this pack of gum I’ve had my eyes on for awhile. Or maybe, I’ll buy a handkerchief for all the tears I’m about to shed for the poor, ravaged record industry.

I’m sitting on my recliner watching The View, as I do every morning, and, as usual, getting quite irritated in the bowels by Sherri Shepherd, the heavy-set, African-American co-host whose big fat face I cannot stand in the least.

The ladies are bantering about how it’s become politically incorrect to say or write the words “Merry Christmas” and how that complicates the process of sending holiday cards.

“All my cards say ‘Merry Christmas,’” Shepherd barks defiantly, “because people know I’m a Christian, and if they are offended, they don’t have to get my card.”

Joy Behar, one of the co-hosts on The View who can actually see and shit, explains to Shepherd that the point of a greeting card is to commemorate the holiday that the recipient is celebrating. “I’m a Christian, too,” Behar says, “but I send my Jewish friends ‘Happy Hanukkah’ cards.”

“No,” spurts Shepherd, “this is my holiday!”

And there you have it, folks. It’s Sherri Shepherd’s holiday; we’re just decorating it for her.

There are few people in this whole wide world whom I despise more than that woman. Her unwavering conviction to fatuous, infantile concepts is astounding. This is a person who believes Christianity predates all religions, wasn’t sure if the world is flat or round and thought that taking Andy Dick to a Pentecostal church service would get him to change his ways.

So, no, I am not surprised that Ms. Shepherd would make such a remark, but when Elisabeth Hasselbeck agreed, well, that was a bit much. Hasselbeck—the blonde, right-wing, bumper-sticker spewing co-host of The View—ain’t no Copernicus, either, but she’s nowhere near as vacuous as Shepherd. Or so I thought. (more…)

“I believe universal healthcare is a right, not a privilege.”
—Hillary Clinton

I really don’t understand this point of view. The notion that we have a right to healthcare ignores two universal truths of the human condition—we all must fend for ourselves and nobody owes anybody a damn thing. This is not to say I’m against universal healthcare, per se. Like everything else in the world, the concept has its pros and cons. But they have nothing to do with whether healthcare is a right or a privilege.

I have long been curious about this concept and have pondered what, exactly, is the difference between right and privilege, and who, exactly, gets to decide who gets which? (more…)

Who would’ve thought that Nordstrom would be the kind of company that would have a rational approach toward holiday commercialism? It’s true. Five days before Thanksgiving, I saw a sign inside the main entrance of the UTC store that said the following: “At Nordstrom we won’t be decking our halls until Friday, November 23. Why? Well we just like the idea of a celebrating one holiday at a time…. Happy Thanksgiving.”

Well, amen! So nice to see somebody over there in super-ultra-mega-corporation-land is finally addressing the issue of the Ever Creeping Christmas. I’m talking about the problem of how, every year, they–and by “they” I mean the Overlords of Christmas Spirit–start introducing Christmas just a little bit sooner than the year before.

(more…)

Have you heard about the latest bullshit gouge attempt by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America)? Now that the organization has successfully devastated the Internet radio community, it’s targeting terrestrial radio for an ever bigger chunk of a pie that the RIAA doesn’t deserve.

The RIAA is doing this, of course, because the recording industry as we know it is dying. The digital age has been brutal to it, and what we are now witnessing are the death throes of the great beast as it flaps its tendrils wildly trying to grab on to anything it can to keep from going under.

In other words, it’s not dying with dignity.

(more…)

I suppose you have heard about the speech Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave at the United Nations last week. How could you not? It infuriated just about everybody in the country.

Mr. Chavez called President Bush, “The Devil.”

He was addressing the U.N. assembly the day after Bush had spoken and said, “Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the President of the United States came here. . . Right here. The Devil came here. And it smells of sulfur today.”
My first thought when I heard that was that George Bush had planted one of his notorious, time-released, sulfurized fart bombs for Chavez’s benefit – an inelegant act of terrorism ever there was one.

My second thought was, uh-oh. Republicans aren’t going to like that. And they certainly howled with contempt. What surprised me however was the number of Democrats who proclaimed offense as well – some who have said equal or worse things about President Bush.

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By now many of you have heard about Ann Coulter’s new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. For those of you who don’t know Ann Coulter, she is the conservative journalist/author/and cable news commentator who loves to espouse her wildly extreme opinion about liberals in much the same way that wrecking balls like to espouse their opinions about inferior structures.

For instance, in Godless, she ruthlessly attacks The Jersey Girls – a collective of 4 wives whose husbands were killed in the World Trade Center and who have since become anti-Bush political activists. In her book, Coulter says The Jersey Girls are, “self-obsessed,” and that they are “celebrity-seeking broads,” and even went so far as to call them harpies.

“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.”

Pretty gnarly.

As usual when an Ann Coulter book comes out, liberals get all whipped up about her coarse invective. And all the lefty talking heads start bemoaning what an abomination is she, and how wrong it is for her to write and that she says these sorts of things.

This is what I hate about liberals. Ok well not all liberals. Just the ones who drone about all the mean, insensitive things said by conservatives. I call them labials – as in pussy-ass liberals. They fear and loathe bad ideas and bad words and demand that you fear and loathe them also. Another argument levied against Ann Coulter is that the only reason she can get away with writing with such vituperation is because she’s an attractive blonde.

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I stopped in Oceanside for the weekend to wind down. Upon my arrival to the pier, I learned that Oceanside was hosting a national cheerleader competition. It was called Bring it Back to the Beach presented by the California Allstars (www.californiaallstars.com) and was conducted in the area surrounding the Oceanside Pier.

The place was crawling with cheerleaders. There were cheerleaders on their way to compete. There were cheerleaders just returning from competing. There were cheerleaders stretching on grass. There were cheerleaders tumbling on mats. There were cheerleaders chatting and cheerleaders joking. There were even little baby cheerleaders — in their little baby cheerleader skirts smiling little baby cheerleader smiles — and I’m thinking, “Aw, look at the little cheer-chicks in training, aren’t they just the cutest little . . . spawns of Satan that ever walked a planet of evil ever??

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