so after thanksgiving dinner we were talking about movies. i said there were currently no movies out that i was all that interested in seeing; maybe a couple i would be willing to watch, but nothing is out right now that i really cared about, so i said.

after a bit, mom remembered a movie she said i wanted to see: bad santa. at first i wondered if she could be serious, but then she explained why: "it's a coen brothers movie," she said.

i'm a big coen brothers fan, but that didn't sound right because the last coen brothers movie, intolerable cruelty, was just out a couple months ago (& i missed it, now i have to wait until it's out on dvd). but today i finally thought to check on that.

turns out that bad santa is not a "coen brothers movie" in the purest sense (in that it was not written & directed by joel & ethan coen)... but the coens do get the "story" credits for the film, as well as executive producer credits.

so i looked up terry zwigoff, the director (who also gets partial screenwriter credits). apparently he directed ghost world (a pretty decent movie) as well as crumb (which i should have seen 10 years ago, i know).

so maybe bad santa is actually worth seeing. i do have tons of free passes to AMC theatres, two of which expire at the end of december. or maybe i can use those when i'm in san francisco; looks like there are a couple amc theatres there...

if you'll excuse me, i need to work on music now, so i can feel like i actually got something accomplished during my weeklong vacation.

neil bush describes every (straight) man's fantasy:

The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and engaged in sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.

"Mr. Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," Brown said.

"It was very unusual," Bush said.

prwatch has several good links about the massive police brutality at the miami FTAA protests, & daryl westfall passed on a link to some audio (including journalists getting shot). reports are very bleak. i'll be searching for more audio & video footage; i'm sure indymedia & democracy now! will have some good stuff.

oh, & here's an unrelated bit about a bill passed by congress which gives the govt oversight over what universities teach, to the extent that "professors whose ideological principles may not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any part of a course's curriculum containing criticisms of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed entirely anti-American can be barred from ever being taught."

i'm on vacation until december 1! time to relax & finally get some sleep. okay i probably won't get a whole lot of sleep until after the bloomington show on saturday, but i still have a week off after that. then two weeks back at work, then another week off when i go to san francisco... tis the season to slack off from work. falalalalalalala

i finished both my big collage pieces in time for the show, but i'm clueless on what would be the best way to actually hang them. they're basically big pieces of cardboard. it would be nice to keep them protected somehow too. i looked at poster frames but they're too thin. maybe dirtgoddess or bobby vomit will know what to do.

this is just a bad month for cbs. they bent over & spread 'em for the conservatives by cancelling the reagans, a decision that is still getting them in trouble. so in order to fill in some of the cavernous gaps this left in their schedule, they signed up to air a special about michael jackson. by now you probably see where this is going, since michael is once again accused of child molestation...

some shows get cancelled; some get uncancelled. now rumors are circulating about bringing back the family guy. this was a brilliant animated series that once aired on fox, but fox treated the show like an abused spouse, fucking it over every chance they could get & eventually leaving the show bruised, bleeding, & canceled in the middle of the floor. cartoon network picked up the show in syndication, & did something fox had never done: promoted the show! now fox is so astonished that the show is successful (extremely successful) that they're allegedly talking about bringing it back... now of course new episodes of family guy would be a dream come true, but i can't help but think that it's fox's own fault that the show didn't do well the first time it was on....

let's all take a moment to applaud CBS for refusing to bow to pressure, & sticking to their principles by standing up for quality programming like the victoria's secret fashion show. the lesson is that nearly-nude supermodels are good; political discourse is bad. how dare they try to air something about politics on my tv! i just want to see tyra banks in a thong! (hmmm... already i'm envisioning a political drama with lots of cameos by victoria's secret models... ron & nancy having a threesome with elizabeth hurley... ronnie saying "illicit sex may be a sin, but god damn i want a piece of that ass!")

but anyway, if you want to see some censored tv, the good news is that showtime has moved up its premiere to november 30. of course, the version on showtime will probably be expurgated of anything truly controversial, but remember that rule about sex vs politics.... this is showtime after all, & the only movies i ever watched on that channel star people like shannon tweed & have titles like the bare wench project or lord of the g-strings (& how could i forget veronica 2030?)

okay, i haven't seen lord of the g-strings... yet.

holy shit!!! bush has asked the UK govt for permission to shoot protesters!!! i swear i am not making this up; bush is going to london with a massive security team & he seriously had the balls to ask for "shoot-to-kill" clearance, which would have meant that if any of his security people just happened to shoot a protester (or two, or three, or all of them) then they would not have been held responsible. mercifully the UK refused; that kind of security clearance would've been really bad for these guys, who hope to use cell phones & other modern tech to circumvent the ginormous cloud of censorship that will follow bush wherever he goes during his visit, so that they can "disrupt the PR" & get in the way of all his meticulously choreographed photo ops.

& to think just last week bush said he welcomed the protests, saying "I value going to a country where people are free to say anything they want to say."... i guess what he meant was that he welcomed the protesters because they would let him get in some target practice.

hmmm... i was image-searching on google for cereal images & i stumbled across this page (actually you might be better off just going straight to the directory). i'm not sure what it is, but it appears to be a large gallery of collages by young latin students.

just got back from fliering. at luna they had the neptunes present: clones on vinyl, so i was finally able to pick that up. & i scored a pink flamingos poster at vibes; that will go up in my stairwell right next to a great poster of scooby doo in an orange 80s jumpsuit spinning records... it didn't look like missing link was open (at least, their neon "open" sign wasn't lit up) so i didn't stop there but i hit the other 3 i'd mentioned. considering i went to 3 record stores & only bought 2 items total, i think i did a pretty good job resisting my consumeristic urges.

the other day i got a piece of spam with the best subject line ever. the message body was unmemorable, but check out this subject line:

Take care of those erection problems.antisemite

so not only does it accuse me of having erection problems (which is news to me), but it calls me a fucking antisemite! where do those spammers get off? i have plenty of love for my jewish brethren.

the funny part is that i'm 92% certain that the antisemistism bit was a total coincidence; from its placement & formatting it looks like those nonsense strings that often appear in spam subjects (presumably for tracking purposes). those are always the most obvious spam messages: stalliongsta, grow your penis. stjudxjkerh or Hi remember me?? dfshjkjierw. if i'm right, & it is a tracking code gone horribly wrong, a random selection of characters that just happened to turn into an accusation of race hatred, then that is one hell of a coincidence. if not, then it was truly terrible word choice (but probably still randomly pulled, like out of a dictionary file). either way, it was a strange way to advertise info about viagra & its newer competitor, le tigre (oops, i mean levitra).

went to see matrix revolutions today... it was better than reloaded, which tended to be a bit slow at times. reloaded was mostly exposition; revolutions is mainly fight scenes. again, lots of eye candy, with big armored shrikes like on blue gender or any anime with killer robot suits. i would almost go so far as to call revolutions a mindless action movie, except it required two full movies' worth of exposition to build up to that point, so it's not all that mindless. the original is still the best though.

a few days ago kelly sent out an email looking for decoration ideas for the nov 22 show; i suggested i could do a couple poster-sized collage pieces, since i'd been saving a few big pieces of cardboard i received on the back of posters i'd bought. (i have a big vacant area on the wall above my bed that i've been saving for something special, anyway.) the first collage is almost finished; there are a few more spots where i could put something else, but no more spots where i'd feel bad if i don't fill them in. it'll probably be done tonight (or, at least, i'll set it aside as "done" & if i find anything that's just perfect for it i'll add it later). then i get to start on the next one; i feel like i need to finish two at least (there just isn't time to make three before the show).

tomorrow i get to go out fliering. i can't really tell if fliering actually helps for our shows; after all we still don't really explain on the flier what kind of show it is. but i think i should at least drop some at the "big" indie record stores (namely the ones i go to): indy cd, missing link, luna... maybe vibes.

wow, aside from the weekend posts, almost all my posts were done while i was at work. that just looks bad. i don't really slack off that much, do i?

rudy roy "jesus freak" moore has lost his job. the ten commandments judge will be removed from the bench for refusing to follow a federal court order. but the ny times points out that he could still come back next election: "The last Alabama judge was ousted in 1999 after he was found guilty of financial fraud. The next year, he was re-elected to the same seat."

rudy & his followers are still somehow unable to understand that you can't serve two masters without coming into a conflict of interest. especially if one of your masters never really communicates with you in an objective sense. so when the court told him to remove his graven image of god's top ten list, he chose the idol over his job, even while he told himself that by breaking the law, he was upholding the law. it reminds me of when bush told us we were starting a war in iraq to protect peace, saying "war is peace! freedom is slavery! ignorance is strength! a triumphant victory over the orgasm!" (wait, was that bush or orwell?)

of course, with someone like ashcroft still in office as us attorney general, it's not surprising rudy doesn't realize his inherent conflict...

freedom fries forever! the us media, & even many in washington, are finally admitting that france was right. only a few months ago, the mainstream media was so eager to mock france that it doing everything but burning french flags & putting out the fire by urinating on it. how quickly the tides change. i repeat:

france was right

jeez, even ad buyers are criticizing CBS for cowardly cancelling the reagans. "If the networks become even more skittish about exploring American society, politics and culture, it's ultimately the viewers that lose," said one.

how pathetic is that, when even your advertisers are worried that you're too eager to cave in to pressure?

last night i went to the key cinemas on the south side to see the animation show. i give it my highest recommendation. a bunch of different styles of animated shorts, all consistently excellent.

in particular, i am now a total don hertzfeldt fan. shame on adult swim for not airing rejected when they had the chance! i love adult swim, but rejected is as good as or better than just about anything adult swim has shown (& they've shown some really great stuff). it sure as hell is 20x better than that baby blues cartoon... *yawn*

few could deny that being a sheriff or sheriff's deputy is a stressful job. i guess a great way to relieve job stress is gettin' it on with a prostitute. especially if it's one woman in particular, so it seems.

a marion county sheriff's deputy was fired yesterday for protecting & serving up a heapin' helpin' of hotel sex with a hooker. this is the second sheriff's deputy to get nabbed for hiring the same whore!

it makes me wonder just what kind of magical charms this modern-day mata hari might possess. is she just a woman who shakes her moneymaker at local truck stops & sleeps with cops? or is she a mover & shaker of a more subversive political bent? maybe she's trying to solve the problems of our shoddy legal system, one blowjob at a time. stop police brutality by getting the cops laid! hey, maybe that's not such a bad idea...

or maybe she's just really hot, so desirable that even the purest man of virtue would succumb to her advances. the photo of her run by the indy star isn't particularly flattering, but then it's probably a mug shot. i can see how she might be pretty cute in person. or then again, maybe cops just love to blow off a little "steam" by picking up some of the prostitutes they've met along their beat. after all, who would have a better idea of where to find a prostitute than a cop? check out this quote from the woman herself: "There are other prostitutes out there, and there are other deputies having sex with them."

actually, the most scandalous aspect of this story is that it's rather tame compared to the other big police scandal in central indiana right now. i don't really care how many prostitutes the cops hire... hell, the cops could all be issued their own prostitute to go on patrol with them, just like they're issued guns & cruisers... as long as they don't go around shooting & killing unarmed college students.

muncie/ball state police are saying that the murdered kid had "growled and charged at the officer" like some kind of rabid bull... it must've all happened in what matrix fans call "bullet time" because the kid was apparently only "2 feet away", & the cop still had time to pull off four shots, including one to the head. i don't know about these people, but my right arm alone is about 2 feet; unless the cop is a midget, at that range he could've just as easily bitch-slapped the kid. using actual bullets at that range is impractical.

or maybe the cops are just lying; even the kid's police dispatcher friend doesn't believe the police's version of events...

hot damn: cnn is now planting questions in presidential debates! way to go cnn! you're doing a better job of blurring the line between fact & fiction than k street (which is interesting enough for me to watch but has gotten a little too bogged down in its fictional "government probe" storyline)

les moonves tells "an absolute lie" about the reagans miniseries, by insisting that the reason he cancelled it has nothing to do with political pressure (how could anyone who turned on a tv in the last few weeks could believe that?). instead he claims it was "a moral decision", as though suddenly fictionalized biopics are suddenly supposed to be "accurate". (never mind that the movie was probably more accurate than anyone would admit; for example, while it's true that the gipper never said the much-cooed-about line in the script about AIDS patients ["they who live in sin die in sin"], as eric alterman and others point out, 'what Reagan really said was "maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."' yeah, that's not homophobic or unsympathetic to AIDS patients at all.)

of course, when you're right you're not always right... alterman still has some irrational seething grudge against ralph nader for allegedly ruining the 2000 election. as nader points out himself himself, the republicans were the ones who stole the election & the democrats made plenty mistakes there themselves; they didn't need nader's help to lose. sure, nader has his share of flaws but the facts remain that his crusade against corporate power was dead-on. i think michael moore said it best on the ill-fated donahue show, when donahue mentioned the allegation that nader ruined everything. to paraphrase: "everyone i talk to says 'man, you guys were right!'" (this was at the height of the enron story; nowadays the media has mostly forgotten about corporate scandals except for small stories in the business section about mutual funds.) gore would've been a better president than bush, sure, but "better" does not equal "good".

in other news (to follow up on another of my earlier rants), as usual pr watch has all the latest dirt on the jessica lynch story. just go to the spin of the day for november (specifically nov 10, 8, & 7) for a much better collection of lynch links than i could ever muster. god damn pr watch is a good site; i still need to finish their latest book, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq...

one last political bit, since it's veterans day. if you pause for a moment to think about our war veterans, don't forget that nobody else in recent memory more to fuck over our veterans than our current president, who sends our troops to be maimed & killed, while simultaneously slashing & mutilating military benefits.

anyway, that's enough political ranting for now... it's always possible i'll have more to rant about this afternoon. i do have a personal update in mind but this entry is so long i think i should just post it & maybe come back later. is this a political blog or a personal "boring minutia from my life" blog? i guess it's a bit of both, which means it won't be very good at either.

there was a lunar eclipse last night. turns out i had a great view from the attic so i set up the time lapse camera to film it. due to the earth's rotation the moon would creep up & to the right until it left the frame every 5-10 minutes; sometimes the camera would compensate by automatically zooming out. other times i would check on the shot & it would be solid black. i also got some interesting auto-focus effects from the camera trying to focus on a single, distant light source in the middle of a dark sky. with 1/4sec footage taken every minute i got at most a couple minutes footage overall, but it was a worthwhile experiment, an opportunity that doesn't come all that often.

i also watched both harry potter movies yesterday. i turned on the tv around 11 in the morning; it just happened to be tuned to HBOW & the first movie was coincidentally starting... so i watched for a few minutes & pretty soon i was drawn in. after the 1st movie ended i realized why they were showing it: because the 2nd movie was scheduled for its pay-cable premiere later in the evening. i went ahead & watched that too, though it was on during the eclipse, so i missed a few scenes while adjusting the camera. but the movies were pretty good, at least as far as "family" movies go. i wouldn't go out of my way to see them, but the stories were decent, the fx were great, and so on. hardly compares to the lord of the rings trilogy, but then again what does?

i got my first dadaistic "noise" voicemail on my cellphone today. the call apparently came from the 861 area code & i didn't recognize the number. when i tried to call that number, i got an error. plus i've had no luck finding where area code 861 is. so the main theory is that it was a calling card. so while i have some pretty good ideas about who left the message, i won't really know until i ask around...

i went through all my cables & stuff looking for my micromini adapter so i could record the message to my hard drive. (i bought an adapter awhile ago for use with my family radios, & i suspect it would fit the cellphone as well.) no dice. so now i need to get to radio shack to get another one. i have terrible luck with cables & adapters. somehow i lose at least 1-2 cables every show i play. or so it seems.

well even jessica lynch herself has come out to lambast the military for the way it misreported her story in the media, turning her from a normal captured soldier into some combo of she-ra, xena, & the dirty dozen. she's no rambo, she says, & it's honorable of her to come forward & say so (even if it's way way too late).

but at the same time, her story is about to get a lot cloudier. in coming weeks she has a tv movie, a bunch of big interviews, & an authorized biography coming out... & the biography asserts that she was raped while in captivity. of course, she has no memory of any rape; the implication is that this happened during the "three hours" when she was blacked out, with no memory. the book apparently cites some medical records as evidence that it happened.

now of course i don't know whether it really happened (neither does lynch, which means probably nobody knows for sure), & it's possible, since that & worse can happen on the battlefield. but it all seems suspicious to me, because that is the kind of detail that the military would've loved to publicize a long time ago. considering all the lies & disinformation that circulated about pvt lynch, if there were real evidence of rape, bushco would've publicized it long ago to demonize the iraqi army. it would've made the fable that much more sensational: "lady rambo" lynch is ambushed, empties her clip at the forces of evil assaulting her, is eventually overtaken, is brtually sodomized by those vicious baathist misogynists, & is slapped around in the hospital, before her saviors rescue her in a blaze of glory. the sodomy bit adds so much more emotional tension that if this kind of info were out there, they probably would've made saddam himself into the rapist. saddam forcing himself on jessica would've made one hell of a t-shirt. it's exactly the kind of emotional propaganda that the govt loves to foist on us anytime we have a new enemy (& if you don't think so, you must've forgotten the tale of nayirah & the kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators... a story that was completely fabricated to drum up support for gulf war I). of course now we know all the other parts of the lynch fable are pretty much false, so why should we believe this new detail?

in other military news, the sergeant who was accused of cowardice has had the charges against him bumped down to dereliction of duty (ny times article; registration required). this means that he can no longer be given the death penalty simply because he freaked out after seeing a highly mutilated corpse. of course, he already has the stigma of "coward" attached to him so his military career is as good as over, but it's a start. i guess the military realized that with so much bad press out there already, they shouldn't exacerbate the problem by openly turning on their own people.

did you know that members of the US military can be sentenced to death if they're convicted of being a coward?

i'm shocked, but i guess i'm not really surprised. executing traumatized soldiers is probably cheaper than paying their health costs...

in kinda-sorta-election-related news:

unfortunately porn star mary carey did not win the california governorship last year, losing the recall election to a lesser-skilled actor. but her career is definitely not over, what with two stories about her circulating the newsfeeds.

so yeah, carey didn't win the election but she will most likely have the best movie inspired by the election... i don't have much hope for a&e's upcoming arnold biopic. but carey will star in an uncoming porn film based on her campaign. it will star porn legend ron jeremy as one of carey's opponents, "spooge cruztamante", with some guy i've never heard of as another opponent, "ernie gropenegger". according to the afp story, 'the movie will show real footage taken from the 23-year-old Carey's campaign to become California's governor, interspersed with saucy new "behind-the-scenes footage."' if the movie is half as good as its character names, it will win a lot of awards (& carey will win a lot of erections) (sorry about that one).

on top of that, carey will also be one of the hosts for an upcoming reality tv show called can you be a porn star? the series will apparently be on pay-per-view & claims to feature "uninhibited nudity and sizzling sexuality".

seems like a pretty logical step. the obvious draw for shows like temptation island or big brother is a voyeurstic desire for sexual content, so just cut out all the other bullshit & make the show about the sex. an american idol who people can really get into. reality tv was always a lot like amateur porn anyway...

so bart peterson won, but that's not why i feel so disgusted.

fox 59 advertised that they were doing a "special report" on the 10o'clock news about the private investigator who's been casing local record stores on the behalf of the RIAA. some of you might already know that the RIAA (with IPD) has been raiding local record stores & confiscating all their mix tapes, despite the fact that the industry tacitly endorses mix tapes. so needless to say i wanted to see the report, as well as tape it for possible sampling.

naturally, since they'd been advertising this report, they waited until the end to show it. it was filmed at luna records (86 & ditch location), & included an interview with luna's todd robinson as well as the music spy, don finch.

the issue was framed as being about piracy: the real kind of piracy, not online downloading but bulk illicit duplication of cds that look & sound pretty much like the "real thing." they showed an example of a pirate beyonce cd that admittedly looked much like the original (at least over the tv), although they did not explicitly say where the cd actually came from (it is implied that the spy found it on luna's shelves; in one scene robinson is seen opening a cd & saying "i'm not surprised").

finally they got around to the mix cd issue: "finch says so-called dj mixes have become one of the most popular counterfeit products on the black market. the mixes include hit songs by popular artists, including some, like rapper 50 cent, who endorse them." then they immediately change the subject back to piracy in general.

so that's it. dj mixes are just another counterfeit product. never mind the hard work & skill that the dj has to put into making the mixes. & let's just ignore the fact that the labels happily give music to the djs specifically so it will be included in these mixes. the people who put out dj mixes are just pirates, & you know what kinds of people get into cd piracy: organized crime. hey, they must be evil! so sayeth fox 59. hang the dj.

well the gop did it again... they successfully got cbs to pull its upcoming reagan miniseries before it ever aired. apparently now the miniseries will be on showtime (also owned by viacom).

conservative critics, who had been screaming at the top of their lungs about issue for weeks now, dusted off this trusty old complaint about the miniseries: "i haven't seen it yet so i really have no clue what i'm talking about, but whatever it is, i'm offended by it." pre-emptive war, pre-emptive censorship (also called prior restraint): it's all good with these guys.

never mind that it would be exceedingly obvious that this miniseries is fictionalized (i'd like to think the average person can tell the difference between documentary & biopic)... since it's not the kind of glowing, reacharound whitewash that bush got in the recent 9/11 biopic (also aired on showtime, oddly enough), it's now been shouted off of network tv. god forbid anyone should say anything critical of ron reagan on network television! they say the miniseries will be inaccurate (even though they haven't seen it), & that's why they're censoring it, but i don't see them trying to get that jessica lynch biopic cancelled; i think we all know their big concern is that the thing will be too accurate, & people will realize what a heartless, inept jackass reagan was.

now i haven't seen the movie so i have no clue what i'm talking about, but i bet it's not vicious enough in its criticisms of reagan & his administration. yeah, i want to see him turn up his nose at the suffering of aids patients, like in one alleged scene the censors harp on so much; hell, i want to see reagan spitting on aids babies & throwing bibles at hiv+ patients. but i want to see more than that; i want to see his involvement with iran/contra: i want to see reagan snorting rails of uncut coke with the contras & personally selling them autographed guns from his personal stash. i want to see him & nancy in a 4-way with rumsfeld & saddam hussein, cracking jokes about how fun it would be to gas american minorities the way saddam was bombing his own people. i want to see reagan giving osama a one-on-one lesson on how to implement terrorist/guerilla tactics against the soviets. i want to see all that stuff & more, & i want to see it on cbs (i don't even get showtime). because you know, if people see it on a cbs biopic, they'll accept it as fact no matter how outlandish it is.

apparently i don't get to vote this year. even though we only moved a few blocks, we're in a new precinct now & i forgot to file the new address paperwork to get registered here. this is the problem you get into when your family knows all the people who work in your voting precinct; they already know we moved so if we showed up they'd know we were cheating.

it's a shame because i got all fired up by the thread on imn about how mayor bart peterson's "war on raves" & other anti-art police state tactics fly in the face of his claims about "supporting the arts". i don't really think the republican would be much better, so i likely would've voted libertarian, but it would have felt good to vote against bart regardless. at least i have plenty of time to make sure i'm registered to vote bush out in 2k4.

i'm growing really sick of all my work assignments having to be done immediately... i was just brought at least 1/2 hour's worth of work & was told it must be turned over today... never mind that i'm getting hassled about a different project with similarly unreasonable dates (dates which would be nearly impossible to hit even without other things constantly coming in that have to be done now now now)

everyone in front of me can have all the time in the world to twiddle their asses before doing their work, but naturally i don't have that kind of leeway. once it comes to me, i must do it right away to make up for all that time everyone else wasted.

sure, i spend time goofing off (like writing this blog entry), but jesus... we're talking about stuff that should've been done weeks ago, but instead it's only showing up today, which means now i need to do it all today. that only means i won't get to do the other pressing work, which only means i'm going to get nagged more, all because other people have let these files sit around on their desktops collecting e-dust.

oh yeah, & now i have to rush to get the crap done on time, which means the quality is going to suffer that much more...

damn, i'm listening to the new afx smojphace ep & tracks 2-3 are harsh noise! chaotic digital screeches, buzzing, & scraping. very unusual for an ep that starts with what's basically a dsp dancehall/jungle remix (afx mix of the bug/daddy freddy's "run the place red"). pretty much the last thing i expected from afx at this point. not necessarily innovative, but refreshing nonetheless.

on first listen the speedranch/jansky noise mi^grate & the donna summer/ove-naxx split are the standouts from this buying session, but then again it is first listen & i haven't even played everything i bought yet. i picked up the solo record by scratch, the embodiment of instrumentation & so far it seems like just a hip-hop record with beatboxing instead of drum machines. that's fine, but for a "solo" release by a "human turntablist", i was hoping for more focus on scratch himself, multitracked beatboxing & mouth noise, stuff like that. maybe i'm biased because i've done stuff like that myself, but i didn't think it necessary to bring in a bunch of MCs to legitimize this kind of record. there are plenty of "scratch" records by turntablists, so why not a pure "human turntablist" record by a man called scratch? (ps. if you haven't seen the movie scratch, watch it)

okay, i have more records to listen to before sunday night tv time, & apparently don't have anything else to say...

to those who still wonder about those missing 10 sermons from the olden days of stAllio!'s way... sometimes, when heading a religion, it's important to inspire your flock to believe in something, truly believe in some future event that most likely will never happen. whether that event ever happens is for the most part irrelevant (in fact, it's better if it doesn't); all that matters is that they patiently wait for it. for the christians, it's the second coming. for the jews, it's the first coming. for the muslims, it's... i guess mohammed's second coming? for the subgenii, it's july 5th 1998.

so yes, something like 4 years have passed & i never wrote those last 10 sermons. i don't intend to write them anytime soon, either. but that doesn't mean i never will. someday i could insert a wild hair into my ass & just write up those bad boys.

for now, i have introduced this "personal" blog so i can bring you banal observations from my life on a much more fluid schedule than the sermons would've allowed (to paraphrase the cell phone commercial, "i call it my 'whenever the hell i feel like it, so i'll do it when i'm damned good & ready plan'"). how often i will post here remains to be seen. but now that i've actually started the new blog, i'll most likely guilt myself into dropping by periodically.

got a big haul at indy cd today; picked up the new vsnares, new kid606, donna summer/ove-naxx split, & various other assorted goods. seems like every time i go there the selection is better. they have a doormouse divider now. & an ove-naxx divider! the guy at the counter said he'd been waiting for the summer/naxx split & was also waiting for ds's "this needs to be your style". it's still a bit weird & go into a local record shop & buy cds from artists i know or have in my buddy list. it also makes me wonder how easily i could get better distribution if i only got off my ass & sent demos out to labels...

this blog is brand new & is giving me grief setting up a template i like, so this entry is mostly written to take up space for layout purposes. it's better than "this is dummy text. this is dummy text. this is dummy text. this is dummy text. this is dummy text. this is dummy text. this is dummy text."

this is the new stAllio! blog, beeyatch