Month: March 2003

Today’s encounters

  1. An old man (> 80) in full naval dress uniform, at the auto repair place. I guess he had come from a funeral or some remembrance event. He was yelling at the TV. “That Bush! He’s sending those boys over there for nothing! Using them! It’s a SHAME!”

  2. A young woman at the same dealership (repair waiting room) whose boyfriend, brother, and cousin were all on duty in the war

This is a terribly sad business.

Annals of Journalism II: Perry and Me

Part of my job as junior rock critic at the Reader was to write the capsule previews and reviews of the week’s live performances, and do a “Critic’s Pick” for the pop music section. This was a lot of work, but enjoyable too. I typed them all in to the computer system and hit a button, and boom! They were in the paper.

Around this time (late ’86, early ’87), a new band showed up on the scene that a lot of my friends were excited about. This was Jane’s Addiction. I’d seen Perry’s previous band, Psi-Com, which I thought was ok but not so great. And then I saw JA. They opened for some other bands I liked over a two- or three-week period. I hated them. And I said so, in the paper, in the previews. I forget the exact phrasing but it ran something like:

“I keep hearing Next Big Thing rumors about this band, and I hope they’re not true. Not sure what’s so special about Inland Empire metal wanking, and the singer’s fake dreadlocks and cat-like screeching don’t help. It’s a double scoop of pure bullshit.”

As I had been paid a total of $2.50 for this blurb and my paper only had 80,000 readers at best, I thought not much more about it.

Apparently, Perry thought a lot about it. He devoted an entire page in his scrapbook to the thing, raged to his friends about it, and then went public. On our local hip college station (KXLU) he delivered a speech about what a loser I was, and how much he hated me. He said that he had attempted to mail one of his dreadlocks and some of his own shit (!) to me at the office, but we had moved and it didn’t work. (Thank goodness for bad post offices.)

Later, he wrote the whole thing up in a magazine, including details about the great Shit Mailing. He was also at a TV show taping I attended (The Late Show with Arsenio Hall, with Mojo Nixon as a guest!) and apparently I was pointed out to him. He had a lot of unflattering things to say about my appearance and my general importance as a person, and said he lurked behind a pillar to spit on me but I went the wrong way.

He went on stage several times and yelled FUCK THE L.A. READER and other amusing things. It went on and on, it seemed.

When the first XXX Records release of the JA album came out, I was among those thanked.

And that’s the story of Perry and me.

P.S. I met Dave and other people in the band around the same time and they were really nice. Even though I didn’t like their music.

Items

  • I saw a car today on the freeway with a sticker that said “Uncle Brains”. On closer inspection it said “UCLA Bruins”. However, Uncle Brains is now my band name.

  • Lou Dobb’s hair is a weapon of mass disgustion.

  • I made chili, and it was good. I really, really like chili.

  • I am really sad about my friend B. losing her hearing bit by bit. She now has bad tinnitus and has an annoying loud whine in one ear all the time.

  • I signed up to drive a car fast at http://www.mazdarevitup.com/ and also bought general admission tickets and parking for the Long Beach Grand Prix. I am a car nut.

  • Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps this petty pace from day to day.

YOUR FORCES ARE UNDER A TACK

I like the CNN caption bot:

lou, one other thing i would tell urk the white house announced that the president is >> judy, thank you very much for bringing us up to date, as always.

what you’re having tonight is a lot of traffic by a-10s, anti-tack weapons.

it was flying very quickly, and it had the unmistakable noise of a missile.
i certainly hadn’t heard a missile before.
they told me that’s what they sound like.

let me point out as well, people are sleeping all over the desert.

Somehow the combination of the crazy typos and the fact that their live chatter is so inane is comforting to me.

A new standard for infamy

I am a Christian, and an American. What are we, today?

We have “taken the gloves off”. We permit torture, and break laws: ours, and others. We act alone, disdaining the community of nations. We kill those who offend or defy us, for pride. We say “we’re tough and strong; we’ll do as we please”. It’s time, we say, to turn from our soft, weak, forgiving past and be a real Empire. Let’s have penal colonies, and midnight beatings, and murder our enemies in unapologetic style, like Rome or Great Britain in their heyday.

We are cowards. We shrink from any battle where we’ll be hurt. We soar high above our enemies, dropping explosives on them, or firing missiles from a thousand miles away. We talk about an “air war” without splatters of mud or human lasagna offending us. We hire mercenaries to kill for us. Any amount of death is acceptable, if it’s not our boys.

We are religious. We say: God is on our side. We command Him by bumpersticker and billboard to bless us. We say: Our God is the ruler of the Universe, and he decrees our wealth and power. We condemn our enemies as unbelievers, heretics, fanatics, fools, and devils. God, we say, has given us our bombs and our planes and our ships and our money, and we use it to carry out His will, as holy emperors of the Earth.

And when the sky cracks open and He comes to judge, what will He say of us? What could He say to such a gang of cowardly bullies, who torture and burn and lay waste to Eden all in His name?

WHAT WILL HE SAY?