Things I Have Seen Enough Of

Things I have seen enough of: These ultra-hip, mega-trendy, uber-in-style magazines. The magazines with imaginary debates between Bush and Saddam ("Bush: Hyuck hyuck, I am a dumb cowboy fascist. Saddam: I only want to help my beloved peoples!") The ones with a bunch of rich white neo-hippies talking about how great rap is, and how awful it is that the white people have stolen it from the black people. The ones with photos of J.D. Samson from Le Tigre hanging out at some bisexual juice bar (how can a juice bar be bisexual? Hey, it's 2003, it can be whatever it wants to be, man) with some other counterculture icon, toasting to the opening of some self-proclaimed "artist's" gallery show, which happens to consist of nine hundred 8x10 black & white photographs of homeless people holding up little signs with corporate logos on them (OH! THE IRONY! WATCH OUT!).

The magazines that seem to have some kind of a once-an-issue obligation to do a 14-page article on how "society" "forces" girls to be skinny, articles that are interrupted every 2 pages for ads that feature two women making out, women with thighs as thick as my wrist (OH! THE SELF-CONTR-- oh, wait. This is UltraHip MegaTrendy CityStyle UrbanBeat Magazine, and it can contradict itself however it wants, man) and what the hell are these ads advertising, anyway? They're making out on a Simmons Beautyrest mattress covered in expensive-looking flowers-- which 800 number am I supposed to call for fuck's sake?

The magazines that are thick with full-color, bleed-to-edge, high-gloss, designed-by-some-asshead with-seven-degrees-from-Parsons pages, pages that are bursting with fashion spreads depicting this month's hottest Shiny-Faced, European-ish Models wearing eight-thousand dollar sweaters and belts that were probably manufactured by the very same third-world slave labor that was just denounced three pages earlier as "The Worst Thing That's, Like, Happening In The World Right Now."

I'm not even the type of guy who generally reads "guy" magazines about hot rods and PDAs and rock-climbing-equipment, but I'll gladly take FHM or Maxim over magazines like this. At least the "True Stories" in the back of FHM are always about what some dumb idiot did to his mother in law while he was piss-drunk on Tequiza. I like stories like that. One can only read so many "True Stories" about transvestites menstruating on the 'D' train on their way home from the Fat Guy Eating Beans And Shitting postmodern art exhibit.

God damn it.

Take It Back

Revoke The Oscar. A website devoted to the effort to remove the Academy Award for Best Documentary from the sweaty mitts of Michael Moore, because no matter how much you love him or hate him, the movie that won him the award does not meet the Academy's own criteria for eligibility.

Tell your friends! Spread the word about this site.

(link stolen from Right-Thinking.)

Quoth Mr. Skiba...

The new sub-header quote above is something Matt Skiba said about what punk is, in an interview with suicidegirls.com. (I found it on the alkalinetrio.co.uk message board.) I dedicate it to Kidicarus, the Magnificent Idiot.

An interesting thing to note: In the interview, Mr. Skiba directly compares the Bush administration to Nazis ("What's going on with the Bush administration... they're like Nazis.") and even goes as far as to say "They're just blowing things up and killing people for the benefit of the Bush family and the oil industry."

(Well big, friggin' duhh! Everyone knows how much oil is generated and refined by blowing things up and killing people! It's the chemical reaction of MURDER BROWN PEOPLE + EXPLOSIONS = $$$ OIL $$$)

But then... ZOUNDS! The interviewer actually questions the truthfulness of the "it's all about oooiiillll" line, and gets Matt to admit, "I guess for the same reason that we don't write political songs, I can't go into this huge thing like I know what I'm talking about, because I only know what I hear. How much of that is true? I don't really know."

Unfortunately (for him), Mr. Skiba is still of the "Bush didn't win" school, but that's not the important thing here. The important thing here is that you ask me how I'm gonna get down to the shore. OK, that's not the important thing, the important thing here is that I absolutely disagree with much of what this musician has to say, but I still buy his records and merchandise and listen to his lyrics and love his music because he keeps his politics out of it, 99% of the time. The other 1%? Well, there's a song on "Good Mourning" where he sings about his worst nightmare, which apparently is a world in which satellite-radio owns every radio station and "forces" people to listen to their pre-programmed playlists. My advice to him, should we find ourselves in such a world soon, is that he take his own advice, given in the very same song, which is simply: "turn that fucking radio off."