Taking a break....

I'm sure you've noticed, but my blogging has hit an all-time low of late, so I am going to make official what seems to be the case anyway. I'm taking a break from the blogosphere--well the writing part of it, anyway. I'll still be stopping in to read others' blogs, and, who's to say...I may be back on this horse again in a couple months, but right now, for the early/mid summer anyway, it's just silly to pretend that I'm going to be blogging with any regularity. Life is crazy busy, with an impending trip to California to do a whole bunch of hiking in the Sierra Nevada range, and my older son starting college. It's nothing but pure fancy to think I'll be back on here before mid-August.

As a matter of fact, that's what I'll do: check back in on or about August 15, and tell you where I'm at with this thing. Hell, by then I'll probably have so much to tell you that I won't shut up for a few months, but for right now, this blog is one more thing than I can handle. Talk to you in a couple months....and have a great summer.

Zambia Rocks!!

During my most recent hiatus, I've been to Zambia--not actually been there, mind you, but in a musical sense. Who knew that mid-'70s Zambia was a hotspot for fuzzed-out psych-guitar rock?

Let's go there....

First stop is the Witch and their album Lazy Bones.
I hear bits of Funkadelic, Black Sabbath, Humble Pie, Afrobeat and Nuggets-era psych. Who knows what, if any of all that was actually an influence, but it's damn inspiring when, in all their fuzzed-out glory, they riff it up 'til they drop. The wonders of this one are still revealing themselves. More about this here.

Next, there's Chrissy Zebby Tembo and the Ngozi Family--My Ancestors.
It's fairly close in style to the Witch CD, mining many of the same influences, or, at least, appearing to. Like I said, who knows what music these guys could actually get their hands on back then. More about these folks here.

And finally, there's the slow-psych grooves of Amanaz and their album Africa, which you can learn more about here. Amanaz were more about the slow burn than their compatriots in Witch and the Ngozi Family

Y'know that feeling you get when you hear something and wonder how you ever got along without it? That's where I'm at these days with the ZamRock.

Amazing (OK, Appalling) Album Covers

Go here to see more like this.

I am no longer a Democrat

Yesterday the Democrats in the U.S. House decided:

(a) we don't like AIG bonuses **, (b) so even though we passed a (collosally wasteful and stupid) bailout bill that specifically had anti-bonus language removed from it, (c) now we are going to retroactively confiscate 90% of those bonuses (d) by using the tax code to do it.

If they can do that, they can do anything. This is the closest thing to a bill of attainder (specifically forbidden by the US Constitution) that I have ever seen: senators and congressman screaming and yelling that if someone doesn't obey them they will pass a bill taxing the disobedient at 90%, and then doing it. In fact, even worse, they make these threats in derogation of perfectly legal contractual documents, saying, in effect, "If you don't break your contracts with these people, we will take all their money." And now they've taken the first step toward that confiscation.

This is, plain and simple, totalitarianism. It sounds like a move out of the Hugo Chavez handbook. I hated George Bush because he was a warmonger who had no respect for personal liberty and I hate this crew because they seem to think that our money is their money whenever they want to punish us. They have no respect for economic liberty.

So, Democrats, I quit.

Let me be clear: I won't officially resign my Democratic Party membership because I live in a state where you have to identify with either Dems or the Repubs in order to vote in a primary, and I won't politically hogtie myself out of spite. Also, after eight years of GWB I can't register Republican either because I hate what that party, under Bush, has done to the country during that time. So I will *technically* still be a Dem, but, in all but the most formal sense, I am, for the first time in my life no longer a Democrat. They have no more respect for my rights than the Republicans. They just choose to violate different ones. So I will not join them in their totalitarian adventures.

Six months ago when the right was telling us that Obama and the Dems were about to engage in a wholesale conversion of this country into an economically totalitarian/socialist/confiscatory dictatorship, I thought they were engaging in ridiculous hyperbole. Now I wonder, especially when a guy whose intellect I respect so much (Obama) is signed on to this entire mess.

Bye, Democrats! It was a nice long run we had together, but we are done. Finito. The End.



**I don't like the bonuses either, but the way to stop them is to let the market crush the company for its misadventures. Don't bail them out, allowing them to hand many many billions of dollars to foreign banks as they have done. Let them go bankrupt. Bankrupt companies can't pay bonuses. Bankrupt companies re-organize into leaner, more properly-run entities that don't enter into stupid contracts like these. But government tinkering, especially tinkering that involves using the tax code as a confiscatory device, is an outrage. What company in its right mind would choose to conduct (or increase) its business in the U.S. right now, knowing that when the Congress decides, retroactively, that they don't like what you've done, they will use the tax code to confiscate your money? This is madness.

Advice from Thelonious Monk

Awesome (Click photo to enlarge).

Love City Release Their Debut EP

Philly psych/garage rockers Love City just released their debut EP. Considering the way they tore it up at the Khyber on Saturday night, effectively blowing the mighty Reigning Sound off the stage, you really ought to hear this thing. Get it. And, if you happen to live between Philly and Texas, they are headed your way, through the mighty South, on the way to the South By Southwest festival. You will not be disappointed.

The Rest of the Best Albums of 2008

I already told you about the glory and fury of the Mudhoney and Blacklisted albums, but 2008 had a few more keepers (and considering it's March already, maybe I oughta tell you about them, hmmm?). So in no particular order....

There's the tribal, girl-group garage stomp of the Ettes--Look at Life Again Soon:




Then there's the garage/pop Nuggets-y organ-driven, go-go-booted glory of the Love Me Nots--Detroit:



And, changing gears from the garage stuff, there's Toronto band Fucked Up, who offered us their anthemic, post-hardcore take on The Chemistry of Common Life:




And, last, but not least, there are Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, many of whom are still riding high from last year's Grinderman album. They put out Dig! Lazarus, Dig! and it was one of Nick's finest ever, drawing on the best aspects of his classic sound, with a serious kick in the ass from Grinderman:

Oink!

You can go almost anywhere on the Web these days and find some very pointed criticism of this "economic stimulus" bill that just passed, so I won't go on and on about it, but come on, Mr. President....who are you kidding? This is a pork-tastic lie.

We can all have reasonable debates about whether "something" needs to be done by government to help get us out of the current fiscal problems, but even the Congressional Budget Office says that the bill that just passed is worse than doing nothing at all. It is loaded chock full of pork that is unrelated to direct "stimulus" of the economy, and we have little to no idea how we're going to pay for it. Sure, I understand how spending on infrastructure projects creates jobs, but what about all of the education, healthcare, etc. spending in that bill? It's become clear that liberals have decided that if they don't jam a ton of pet projects into this bill, those pet projects won't otherwise get passed soon enough for their liking. And that's not to say that some of those pet projects might not have merit on their own, but they sure as hell aren't "economic stimulus."

This bill is a hideously expensive lie. It is a bit of attempted "stimulus" attached to a mountain of non-stimulus spending. That merit of that pile of non-stimulus spending ought to be debated separate and apart from any "emergency" stimulus action.

You disappoint me, Barack Obama. And what really bugs me is that you seem to know exactly what you're doing. I can't chalk any of this up to dimwittedness like I could with your predecessor.

One of the things I genuinely like about Obama is his brains, but those same brains surely have told him that much of this money isn't truly related to the principal goal at hand--stimulating the economy. Rather, his liberal pals have attached billions of non-stimulus dollars to a bill that we will be paying for a very long time, and they have the nerve to criticize the good sense of those of us who raise questions about it.