"WE WERE STEPPING OVER BLOOD ALL OVER VON MAUR.” / J.G. BALLARD LATEST

unhappyshoppers.jpg

From the Los Angeles Times:

“A suicidal 19-year-old who killed eight people at a mall packed with holiday shoppers had turned his gun on himself by the time police got to the scene, authorities said today. …

“Hawkins apparently stole from his stepfather the AK-47 he used to kill two shoppers and six employees of the Von Maur department store. Five other people were injured, and two remained in critical condition. …

“The slayings were a stark reminder that crowded American malls are potential targets for violence. In February, five people were slain at the Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City by a gunman who was then killed by police.”

From The New York Times:

“[The police] chief said, ‘Obviously we’re in the midst of a very busy shopping season. If you were looking to engage in mass casualty type of incident, you would choose a public place.’ The governor said that Mr. Hawkins had been a ward of the state from 2002 to 2006 and had previous run-ins with the law, but had not been associated with violence.

“Later in the day, Todd Landry, director of the state’s department of Children and Family Services, said that the state provided Mr. Hawkins with stays at residential centers and in-patient facilities and also at a hospital. The facilities provided him with addiction counseling, mental-health counseling and behavioral counseling, among other services, but he said federal and state privacy laws prevented him from being more specific about Mr. Hawkins’ problems.”

Ballardian.com‘s synopsis of J.G. Ballard’s 2006 novel, Kingdom Come:

“Richard Pearson, a 42-year-old advertising executive is driving from central London to Brooklands, a town near the M25 on the western edge of the city. A few weeks earlier Richard’s father, a retired airline pilot, was fatally wounded during a shooting incident in the Metro-Centre – a vast shopping mall and sports complex, in the centre of Brooklands – when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers.”

From wikipedia:

“Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke posted extracts from Ballard’s anti-consumerist novel Kingdom Come on the band’s blog, Dead Air Space, in the months leading up to the release of their 2007 album, In Rainbows.” Here’s one, from 6 Feb 2007. Here’s another, from 11 March 2007..

Author J.G. BALLARD was featured in Arthur No. 15 (March 2005): “Controversial novelist and visionary J.G. BALLARD wonders if something fundamental has gone awry in America. Interview by RE/Search’s V. Vale, with an introduction by author Michael Moorcock.”

Best books J.G. Ballard read during 2007, from The Observer:

“The most enjoyable book was St Peter’s by Keith Miller (Profile), a witty and entertaining account of the most famous church in the world, still standing firm against the tides of tourism that swirl around it. As Miller makes clear, St Peter’s has always been far more than a church. The most disturbing book of the year was Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray (Allen Lane). This is Gray’s most powerful argument yet against the scientific idealists who think they can blueprint a benevolent end-state utopia. Their attempt, Gray argues, has led to the ruined utopias we see around us, and the return of repressed religious belief in its most frightening form. A brilliant polemic, probably best read on the steps of St Peter’s.”

And in The Guardian, Ballard on Christmas reading…

“London: City of Disappearances, edited by Iain Sinclair (Penguin), was last year’s Christmas treat in hardback, a wonderful compendium put together by our psychogeographer-in-chief, and now out in paperback. Strange dreams of a vanishing London die and are reborn on every page. Ghosts haunt the alleys of Sinclair’s maze-like mind, and I couldn’t help thinking of the Warsaw ghetto as he paced Whitechapel and Spitalfields.

“This Christmas I will read The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power by David Owen (Politico’s). Our former foreign secretary launches a scathing attack on the organ-grinder and his eager monkey for their conduct of the Iraq war, a combination of arrogance and incompetence.

“For next Christmas, God willing, I have already reserved The Architecture of Parking by Simon Henley (Thames & Hudson), a hymn to the true temples of the automobile age, multistorey car parks. Those canted decks are trying to lead us to another dimension . . .”

Sole and The Skyrider Band – "Stupid Things Implode On Themselves"

“In the future after a societal collapse, America is reduced to a feudal dystopia. The story focuses on a group of people clinging to life in a small outpost in the desert.

“This video was produced & directed by Ravi Zupa in Two Guns & Rim Rock Arizona. The track, “Stupid Things Implode On Themselves” is from the self-titled album from Sole and The Skyrider Band on Anticon.”

"Demanding the Impossible: Third Utopias Conference" starts today in Melbourne

“In December 2001 the University of Tasmania hosted a successful conference around the theme of Antipodean Utopias.

“In December 2005, Monash University hosted a second conference, around the theme of Imagining the Future, to mark the long-awaited publication of Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson’s full-length monograph on utopia and science fiction. In all, there were something like 90 papers presented to this conference, including one by Jameson himself.

“This third conference will return to the question of how we imagine the future and whether such imaginings remain open to the unforeseeable. Jameson famously concludes that utopia is ‘a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right’. Hopefully, the conference will play some small part in prompting similar such meditations on the impossible. Its keynote speakers will be: Terry Eagleton, whose recent publications include After Theory, Sweet Violence and Holy Terror; Tom Moylan, author of Demand the Impossible and Scraps of the Untainted Sky; Lyman Tower Sargent, founding editor of Utopian Studies and co-editor of The Utopia Reader; and Lucy Sussex, author of A Tour Guide to Utopia.”

Conference programme includes:

Opening by Prof. Rae Francis, Dean of Arts, Monash University

Tom Moylan– Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction

Verity Burgmann – Utopian Socialism: the Australian Experience

A. B. Carretero & Carmen Morales– Dialogic Philosophy, Participative Communication and Utopia

R.J. Imre & B. Patterson– Interstellar Relations: The Westphalian Planet-State

Paul Cheung – Of Cats, Coincidence and Continuity: Utopias with Chinese Characteristics?

Kong Xinren – A Belief Lies in Future: Recent Chinese History Science Fiction

Louise Katz– No Man’s Land and Everyman’s Land: The Ideal Meets the Real in Israel/Palestine

Craig Johnson – Cities from Scratch

Roberto González-Casanovas – Aztec Sacrifice as Dystopia in Colonial vs. Postcolonial Discourse: Cultural Politics in Competing Mythologies of Conquest

Hester Joyce– Lost hope: Pakeha (white settler) anxieties in The Quiet Earth and The Navigator

Peter Marks– Screening the Future: Surveillance and Utopian Projections

Jaroslav Kušnír– Game, Fantasy and Sci-Fiction in Damian Broderick´s novel Godplayers

Mahrokh Hosseini– Elements of Fantasy in Margareth Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale vs. Science Fiction

Chris Palmer– Ambiguous, Unsettled and Unconvincing Dystopias in Recent Fiction

Simon Sellars– Zones of Transit: J.G. Ballard’s Pacific Utopias

Lucian Chaffey– Chaodyssey and annihilation: Farscape’s wormholes and black holes

Chien-fu Hsueh– A Route in-between: The Functions of Travel in Thomas More’s Utopia

Evie Kendal– How the Author is alive and kicking in Utopian “social-science-fiction”

David Jack– Scared Old World: Allegories of Catastrophe in Huxley’s Brave New World

Thomas Ford– Demands and Impossibility: Bureaucracy and Utopia

Christopher Yorke– Utopia and the Death of Virtue

Matthew Chrulew– Heterotopian Science Fiction: Nature and Technology

R. Cunneen– Difficulties with Reading Utopias: The Case of M.B. Eldershaw’s Tomorrow

Kalinda Ashton– History and Amnesia in Amanda Lohrey’s The Reading Group

Lyman Tower Sargent – What would a truly comparative utopian scholarship require?

Jacqueline Dutton– Comparative Mythology

Roberto González-Casanovas – Utopian and Dystopian Typologies of Arawaks vs. Caribs: Relativising Cannibals in Colonial Myth and Postcolonial Critique

Terry Eagleton– Utopia and the New Testament

Will Douglas – The Discontinuity of Possibility and our Hopes for the Future in Last and First Men

Matthew Ryan– The Dystopian rendering of Ideology and Utopia in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Chris Palagy– Circumventing Dystopia: The Grand Inquisitor Fails

Michael Kulbicki– Iain M Banks, Utopia, and Critical Hope

David Farnell– The Morality of Preemptive Regime Change in Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games

Dougal McNeill– James Kelman: Utopias of Form

Claire Henry – Madame X and Girl King on the High Seas of Lesbian Separatist Utopia

Linda Wight – Feminist Utopia or Masculinist Dystopia?

Helen Merrick – Doing science differently? Visions of feminist scientists

Raymond A Younis– The Wheel of Time/Places of Refuge / (Utopian Imaginaries East and West)

Krishna Barua– “The oceanic circle”: Mahatma Gandhi’s and his Ram rajya

Geoffrey Berry – Ecocentric mythopoeia and the absolute aegis of adaptation

Leonard Wilcox– Don DeLillo’s Dystopia: Postmodern Capitalism in Cosmopolis

Wei-Yun Yang– Re-imagination of Galactic Empires: Doris Lessing’s Shikasta and The Sirian Experiments

Zachary Kendal – The Dystopia of Urth: The Myth of Pandora in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun

Thomas Reuter– Arriving in the Future: The Utopia of Here and Now

Stefan R. Siebel– Basic Income: An Economic Utopia and its Reality Around the World

Ben Hoh– “What if the World was Made of Wood?”: The apocalyptic utopianism of blogging geopolitical trauma

Luke Howie– Images and the Monster Within

Alec Charles– The flight from history: British television’s most enduring fantasy

H. Gardner & S. Schmidt– Autopias

Hyijin Lee– Pythagorian utopianism and numerology

Joan Roelofs– The Considerant Manifesto

Dimitris Vardoulakis – Utopia and Suicide in Aris Alexandrou The Mission Box

Rob Baum– Gender dystopia in the Far/Middle East: An Artful Experimen

Angela Yiu – Utopian Schemes in Japan from the 1910s to 1930s

Christopher Yorke – Utopia ex nihilo: Ando Shoeki and the Heresy of Physiocracy in Edo-Era Japan

Lucy Sussex– A Tour Guide in Utopia

Julia Vassilieva – On Imagination, Energy and Excess:The Lasting Legacy of Eisenstein’s Utopias

Rachel Torbett – The Silence Afterwards: Lyotard with Haneke’s “Le Temps du Loup”

Claire Perkins – Your Friends and Neighbours: Recent Suburban Utopias

Kate Rigby– Apocalypse Now: Whither Utopianism in the Midst of Catastrophe?

David Fonteyn– Tourmaline : A meditation on Thanatos, Eros and Fertility

Chris Coughran– Ecology, Eutopia, and the Everted Sphere of the Future

Darren Jorgensen– Utopia as Failed Revolution: Ursula Le Guin and Louis Marin after 1968

Jacqueline Dutton– The Worst Place in the World: French Women’s Writing on Australia in 2007

Bill Metcalf – The Encyclopedia of Australian Utopian Communalism

Julie Kelso– ‘Radical Heterosexuality’ in the Song of Songs: Meditating on the Impossibility of the Love that Cannot Speak Its Name

Sarah Curtis – Evangelical Utopianism as a Hysteric Symptom

Blair McDonald– Finitude’s War: Returning to the Question

Simon Robb– ‘What do you think, children are psychics?’

Pip Stokes – Care of Place

Robyn Walton – Wyndham Lewis, Frank Lloyd Wright: Re-imagining Baghdad and London

Rudolphus Teeuwen– Losing the War, Winning Utopia: Christian Friedrich Weiser and Germany, 1918

A. Milner & R. Savage– Pulped Dreams: Utopia and American Pulp Science Fiction

Oleksandr Golozubov – From Abbey Telem to Animal Farm: spectrum of the comic forms in the European Utopia

Darren Jorgensen– The Dreamtime as a Modern Utopia

Hester Joyce – New Zealand Cinema and Expressions of Utopia

Keynote Address – Chair: Andrew Milner

Lyman Tower Sargent – Australia as Dystopia and Eutopia

Refereed proceedings of the conference will be published electronically in the on-line journal Colloquy.

"Liquor and weed for him were bardic fuel" — Peter Lamborn Wilson's obituary for Robert Anton Wilson

Originally published in Fifth Estate…

Robert Anton Wilson: Author The Illuminatus! Trilogy & Cosmic Trigger, Dies at 74
by Peter Lamborn Wilson

For all we knew, Robert Anton Wilson and I were related. On an intuitive basis—i.e., after several rounds of Jameson’s and Guinness—we decided we were cousins. Subsequently we came to believe ourselves connected to the Wilsons who play so murky a role in the “Montauk Mysteries” (Aleister Crowley, UFOs and Nazis in Long Island, time travel experiments gone awry, etc.). Our plan to co-edit a family anthology (including Colin, S. Clay, and Anthony Burgess, whose real name was Wilson) never materialized—although we did collaborate in editing Semiotext(e) SF, together with Rudy Rucker.

There’s no doubt Bob was some sort of anarchist. His earliest interests and experiences (the School of Living, for example) involved connections with old-time American Philosophical or Individualist Anarchism of the Spooner/Tucker variety, and, in fact, this shared background firmed the basis of our friendship.

When Bob was on the road a lot in the 80s and 90s doing “stand-up philosophy” in cities across the US, he visited New York often and after his lectures he drank with anarchists, libertarians and ceremonial magicians—his fan base, as it were—although he used to say he could never join the Libertarian Party because he couldn’t bring himself to hate poor people enough. He called Libertarians, “Republicans who smoke dope.”

Bob was a Futurist and I am a Luddite, but after a long series of letters back and forth we agreed to disagree on the subject of technology, since neither of us wanted to put ideology in the place of camaraderie.

We got too much enjoyment out of our shared interests: the Propaganda Due, Freemasonic Conspiracy, science fiction, “Irish Facts,” as Bob called his favorite Celtic paradoxes and tall tales, occult and lost history, pirates, strange science and Fortean phenomena, the Discordian Church (co-founded with anarcho-taoist Kerry Thornley of the “Universal Rent Strike,” r.i.p.) in which he appointed me Pope—because all Discordians are Popes. (But Bob was The Pope—also his title in the Church of the SubGenius.) Bob was one of the great pub talkers, probably a lot like Brendan Behan or Dylan Thomas (he somewhat resembled both of them physically).

Liquor and weed for him were bardic fuel.

I’m proud to say I appear—under several guises, alter egos and noms de plume—in one of Bob’s last books, Everything Is Under Control (1998), a sort of encyclopedia of his favorite conspiracies. Unlike some of his admirers, Bob never believed in any one conspiracy as more (or less) real than another. He simply took a chaote’s delight in humanity’s occasional talent for genuine mystery; and for him, Imagination was a form of reality. Was he playing or was he serious? Exactly.

In later years, when he cut down on his grueling dada vaudeville speaking tours and retired to California, we lost touch because Bob decided to colonize the Internet and I decided not to. Our mutual friend Eddie Nix kept us linked with warm greetings back and forth. Eddie sent me print-outs of Bob’s most recent web-page, the Guns & Dope Party (“because that way we have a majority”)—one of his best stunts or japes.

Founding a political party may not seem a doctrinaire anarchist sort of thing to do, but Bob was first and deepest a post-Nietzchean homo ludens, playful man, perpetrator of the lusus seriosus, the “serious joke.” In his best writing, the Illuminatis! books (starting in 1975, co-created with the late Bob Shea) for example, R.A.W. approached his idol James Joyce in sheer ludic intensity, and his other idol Flann O’Brien in number of laughs per page.

Certainly his works belong to the literature of anarchy, like say Alfred Jarry’s or Oscar Wilde’s, if not to the literature of anarchism.

Despite a good deal of suffering in life (his childhood polio and the long sickness of his wife Arlen; the murder of his daughter; and his dying broke), Bob always appeared cheerful, which is either very good advertising for Neuro-Linguistic Programming (a theory he developed with Tim Leary, but which I never quite understood), or else for the therapeutic virtues of cannabis. For instance, some years back a rumor was spread maliciously on the Internet that Bob was dead. Instead of getting annoyed, he had great fun doing the Reports-of–my-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated routine.

I see in R.A.W.’s Wikipedia obituary (sent to me by carrier pigeon from Fifth Estate’s southern HDQ)—an otherwise lackluster text—that Bob was equally amused the second and final time as well, telling his correspondents, “Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.”

He died five days later.

Tombeau for R.A.W.

Poem & pomology — false etymology

or proto-Indo-European ha-ha?

The small-k kabbalist relishes

a poemogranate from the garden

in Grenada. N.E. Vavilov (later

denounced by Lysenko, dies in Gulag)

discovers Eden somewhere in Kazakhstan

not far from the genetic epicenter of hemp.

Noon blue apples. The Discordian Pope

throws out the first ball of the season

over the fence into the Hesperides

or Tir na Nog the island of

Irish Facts. Turn down gents

your jiggers of Jameson’s.

—P.L.W

William Burroughs on…Led Zeppelin! (Crawdaddy, 1975)

Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, And a search for the elusive Stairway to Heaven by William Burroughs, Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975.

When I was first asked to write an article on the Led Zeppelin group, to be based on attending a concert and talking with Jimmy Page, I was not sure I could do it, not being sufficiently knowledgeable about music to attempt anything in the way of musical criticism or even evaluation. I decided simply to attend the concert and talk with Jimmy Page and let the article develop. If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

My first impression was of the audience. As we streamed through one security line after another–a river of youth looking curiously like a single organism: one well-behaved clean-looking middle-class kid. The security guards seemed to be cool and well-trained, ushering gate-crashers out with a minimum of fuss. We were channeled smoothly into our seats in the thirteenth row. Over a relaxed dinner before the concert, a Crawdaddy companion had said he had a feeling that something bad could happen at this concert. I pointed out that it always can when you get that many people together–like bullfights where you buy a straw hat at the door to protect you from bottles and other missiles. I was displacing possible danger to a Mexican border town where the matador barely escaped with his life and several spectators were killed. It’s known as “clearing the path.”

So there we sat, I decline earplugs; I am used to loud drum and horn music from Morocco, and it always has, if skillfully performed, an exhilarating and energizing effect on me. As the performance got underway I experienced this musical exhilaration, which was all the more pleasant for being easily controlled, and I knew then that nothing bad was going to happen. This was a safe and friendly area–but at the same time highly charged. There was a palpable interchange of energy between the performers and the audience which was never frantic or jagged. The special effects were handled well and not overdone.

A few special effects are much better than too many. I can see the laser beams cutting dry ice smoke, which drew an appreciative cheer from the audience. Jimmy Page’s number with the broken guitar strings came across with a real impact, as did John Bonham’s drum solo and the lyrics delivered with unfailing vitality by Robert Plant. The performers were doing their best, and it was very good. The last number, “Stairway to Heaven”, where the audience lit matches and there was a scattering of sparklers here and there, found the audience well-behaved and joyous, creating the atmosphere of a high school Christmas play. All in all a good show; neither low nor insipid. Leaving the concert hall was like getting off a jet plane.

I summarized my impressions after the concert in a few notes to serve as a basis for my talk with Jimmy Page. “The essential ingredient for any successful rock group is energy–the ability to give out energy, to receive energy from the audience and to give it back to the audience. A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy. Rock stars may be compared to priests, a theme that was treated in Peter Watkins’ film ‘Privilege’. In that film a rock star was manipulated by reactionary forces to set up a state religion; this scenario seems unlikely, I think a rock group singing political slogans would leave its audience at the door.

“The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose–that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts–music, painting and writing–is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”

Continue reading →

JOSHUA HOMME: "People say [record] labels are evil. No, they're just lame."

Interscope Sucks My Dick: Antiquiet Interviews Josh Homme Of Queens Of The Stone Age

December 2nd, 2007 by Johnny Firecloud

Josh Homme is not what you’d call a soft-spoken guy. Locked in a Detroit hotel room, the Queens Of The Stone Age frontman answers the phone by yelling “Johnny Firecloud” over and over again. We’ve never spoken before, yet he greets me like a long-lost drinking buddy, the conversational equivalent of a fireworks show. The head Queen refuses to call Detroit by its proper name throughout the interview, instead pronouncing it “Day-twaa” because “I’m trying to help it. The city needs my help.” All of this seems rather natural as we discuss Trent Reznor, Radiohead and Homme’s focused hatred for the record industry.

Antiquiet: Why isn’t the song “Era Vulgaris” on the album?

Josh Homme: A couple reasons. We wanted to give something to our fanclub kids that was good enough to be on the record. I loved watching our record company squirm and go, ‘Our marketing plan!’ when I could’ve gotten Trent (Reznor, who did backing vocals) to be on the album. I also liked that the title track wouldn’t be on the album.

…

Antiquiet: Is the Queens sound a conscious or deliberate atmosphere?

Josh Homme: The thing is, that’s from years of doing whatever you want. Everything you do is habit-forming. You will form a habit of one style or another. And it might as well be getting people used to the notion that you’re going to do whatever you want. ‘Cause all the other habits include kowtowing to what somebody else wants. And there’s never a time to do that in music. As I understand it, your obligation is to play your favorite music that no one else plays, so you have to. And my favorite music is hooky, quirky, arty, dark, surprising, heavy, groovy, soft, emotional but not emo. It wears a sweater because it’s cold, not because it’s stylistically there.

Antiquiet: And it doesn’t try to fit into girl pants.

Josh Homme: Yeah, like there’s enough room for your cock and balls in your pants. And it’s in touch with its feelings, but it’s not a fucking pussy, man. Like, I need Lee Marvin, and I need Robert Mitchum. But I don’t need Sylvester Stallone, unless it’s Tango and Cash, ’cause that movie is fucking awesome. Or unless it’s my new steak cologne called Stologne.

Antiquiet: What are your thoughts on Radiohead’s name-your-price approach to selling their new album?

Josh Homme: I think it’s working great for them. I think they’re doing a really cool job of it and a really cool thing. Not everyone is Radiohead. You’re talking about one of the finest working bands in the world. So it’s tough to transpose a situation that works for the finest rock’n’roll band in the world and sort of move it around the cabin. If you were in a band no one knew, that wouldn’t work so well.

Antiquiet: What do you think of the album?

Josh Homme: In Rainbows? I think it’s fucking awesome. The single they released was like, they’re playing fast, right on, let’s fucking do this man. They’re grooving. That song’s got a real ethereal arrangement, it just kind of comes out of a jam and keeps moving, and little things get stacked on top of what we hear before something else gets taken away, you know? It’s very cool. We were in New York when we heard the first single, and we were like shit, they’re haulin’ ass, that’s awesome.

Antiquiet: When more big bands get free of their contracts and start to do it their own way, how do you think the labels are going to react to losing their grip on what’s been their cash cow for so long?

Josh Homme: Fuck the labels man, they suck. The last thing they’re stripping down is their own expense accounts and shit. I mean, Jimmy Iovine of Interscope records takes a private jet or rides first class to tell a band they don’t get tour support. You know what I mean? Fuck that shit, I’m tired of it. And I’m not gonna be quiet because the American label, not Canada, not Europe, but our American label’s fucking us like crazy, so fuck them. Why should I not say anything, what am I afraid of? I’m not afraid of them. One of the things most notable about us is how we work. You could not like the music, you can do anything you want, but we work and there’s no changing that fact. And all I want to do is what we agreed upon. And I’m not even bitter, people say labels are evil, no. They’re just lame. I can’t download my music from the Interscope website, because they gave that power away to iTunes.

Antiquiet: Sounds pretty backwards.

Josh Homme: Sounds like a bunch of fucking idiots to me. Sounds like you don’t know your business at all. If we were selling shoes, it wouldn’t be like ‘you evil shoe-selling fucks.’ It would be like, ‘how come you’re trying to sell shoes to cows?’ You know?I THINK OF INTERSCOPE AND ALL THESE LABELS AS THE BIGGEST FUCKING IDIOTS ON THE PLANET. And print that in capitals, because they can’t do anything to me. That’s the difference. The reason is because finally, for once, the fact that this is just their job and this is my life does a flip-flop on them because they can’t stop me from being me and from playing, but they can lose their jobs and have to fucking work at Shakey’s Pizza like they should’ve all along. I’m really sad for the days of the glorified groupie with the fucking hundred thousand dollar expense accounts. They’d drop bunches of bands before they would ever cut their expense accounts.And the fact of the matter is that everyone should play music because it’s such a beautiful gift. It’s my religion. But maybe not everyone should play it in front of me. It’s okay to play music in your rocking chair or whatever.

Antiquiet: Well who filters out the bullshit? Someone with better taste?

Josh Homme: There’s so many bands today. What we do in Queens is we make it tough to get in the door, so once you’re in, you’re safe and you can do your thing. That concept is old as dirt. But what labels have done is let anyone in the door, try to throw it all up against the wall, and stick to what sticks. But they don’t know who they’re selling their shit to, you know? So instead of making it tougher to get in the door and having some quality control… ’cause they don’t know what quality is, they’re looking to somebody else, saying ‘is this good?’ ‘Yes, it is.’ So I say fuckin’ start the first fire with their kindling.

Antiquiet: It will be interesting to see what bands do beyond that. Trent Reznor and Saul Williams just did the same thing with Saul’s new album, and now that Trent’s free from Interscope, he’s bound to take it to the next level.

Josh Homme: That’s such a great example. Trent basically did what I’m doing. He was like ‘Interscope sucks my dick.’ ‘Cause they do. I know, cause I’m looking down at them right now. Even what they did was lame. They’re like, ‘Instead of doing a good job, we’ll let you go. And we get a little piece of what you’re doing ’cause we know you’ll work on it more passionately than we will, so we’d rather have a little piece of your passion than a big piece of our apathy.’ The fact of the matter is, they’re right. For the first time ever they’re admitting what they are: not a very good workforce.

Antiquiet: The passion’s all at the bottom of the food chain.

Josh Homme: All the kids, like the girl that hooked us up with this interview probably does more work than Jimmy Iovine because she’s in the nuts and bolts of what goes on in Interscope. The underpaid, overworked section of Interscope. The interns and assistants and people that are starting out. I’m ranting because I know what I’m talking about. I’m also beyond pissed, as in not pissed, because I kinda figure they just don’t know better by now. It’s like when a dog shits in the house, you can hit ‘em with a paper but they really don’t know what the fuck happened. How can retarded kids know to not throw a Frisbee at the forehead of another retarded kid?

Antiquiet: How can they not be aware?

Josh Homme: I’m past the point where figuring it out has any meaning because I already know stuff that they apparently don’t know. And I only know it because I almost tripped on it walking in the front door. I don’t mind saying this shit because I’m a free spirit, man. If you think you can hold me down, best of luck to you. They don’t have the skill to hold me down.

Brawndo available now ?!?

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The Thirst Mutilator is making the jump from the big screen to your local 7-Eleven. As you’ll recall, Brawndo was the sports drink that replaced water, even for crop irrigation (it’s got what plants crave!), in Mike Judge’s cult hit Idiocracy.
Well, starting next week, you too will be able to spurn water and start
your own dependency on Brawndo ($TBA).

True to its movie roots, the
lemon-lime energy drink is bright green “with a smooth tangy flavor”
and 200 mg of caffeine, electrolytes, inositol and guarana.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Bicycles That Carry Powerful Beats, and Even a Rider or Two

New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON
November 29, 2007
thanks Steve Anderson for the link

A new biker gang is roaming the streets of Richmond Hill, Queens. This crew of mostly teenagers can be seen riding along 103rd Avenue just west of the Van Wyck Expressway. The bikes roar, but the booming sound has nothing to do with engines — because there are no engines. They are ordinary bicycles, not motorcycles, although these contraptions look and sound more like rolling D.J. booths. They are outfitted with elaborate stereo systems installed by the youths.

“This one puts out 5,000 watts and cost about $4,000,” said Nick Ragbir, 18, tinkering with his two-wheeled sound system, with its powerful amplifier, two 15-inch bass woofers and four midrange speakers. It plays music from his iPod and is powered by car batteries mounted on a sturdy motocross bike.

The riders are of Guyanese and Trinidadian background. In those countries, turning bicycles into rolling outdoor sound systems is a popular hobby.

“It’s really big where I come from in Trinidad,” Mr. Ragbir said. “When I first came to New York, I started with two little speakers. People here thought I was crazy because no one here has really ever seen it, except maybe for some Spanish dudes with a radio strapped to their handlebars.”

He added: “People say, ‘It’s the next best thing to having a system in a car.’ But it’s better because you don’t even have to roll down the windows.”


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