Vicious Cycles

More bikers without bikes here...

Manowar on Awkward Kid's Show Doing Gloves of Metal

Check out the Ricky Schroedered out host of this show having a hard time talking to Manowar.

Are You Being Served?

I place a high priority on tradition & properness. I always have, but it's not a standard traditionalism, i make my own rules, they are of course culled from our shared reality, i don't just pull this stuff out of my bottom. Nor should you. All of these traditions & "proper ways of doing things" carry a deeper, hidden code, a way of explaining things without using too many words. So much of what has been introduced to our world through the cold conveyor belts of modernism has been without cultural presentation & is just dumped off into our lives with an instruction manual that only pertains to functional use, not symbolic cultural existence. We are all the poorer for this.

You could build an entire civilization using reruns of "Are You Being Served?" & things wouldn't be too bad, a bit tarty, but that never hurt anyone. You could build an unbelievably pleasant world using the works of Richard Scarry. If you've got a kid, make sure to include as many of his older books in your library as possible, they teach a visual cultural language that is unrivaled in picture books. Even though i grew up in a world that looked very little like that in Richard Scarry's books, i always knew his view was right, was correct & should be emulated!

From the Past Comes the Future

One of the more unfortunate elements of living in such materialistic times is the general non-understanding of what actual quality of life is about. When the majority of the culture is transmitted by quasi-demonic entities in the mass media whose first job is to control your mind & your time & whose second job is to sell you things, the culture is pretty bad off. Lots of things end up sliding through the cracks & with discipline & vision, one is able to piece something together that actually resembles how we'd like things to be. As a kid, you piece together your own culture with whatever is out there. I was always obsessed with swords & sorcery & even better, when swords & sorcery entered into the post-apocalyptic world, which gave me hope that one day, i'd be able to actually live in such a world.
There is this huge emphasis placed on visual quality & slickness which i find to be so disgusting & obnoxious. What is the point of polishing a turd? It's still a turd, no matter how many pixels it is rendered into, or how shiny & 3-dimensional its soundtrack is. However, a tiny little demon figure, sculpted by some anonymous person & sold on the cheap, or even better, bought in an enormous bag at a used toy store resonates so powerfully with me, as it was a focal point for my mighty imagination.

When all dimensions have been rendered, where is the place for the imagination, for the unknown & for further exploration? When everything is explained, where is the room to move? If all the holes have been filled in, how do we escape from the controlled reality?
This isn't an argument for rawness or unpolished facades as a means to an end, this is about understanding what the actual potential for cultural artifacts is about, as opposed to not being able to see beyond the veneer of the thing. All cultural artifacts should be keys to larger, more meaningful areas of existence, not just pretty things or wastes of time.
I have maintained a deliberately rough style in order to leave that space for imagination & for the importance of the content & for the inspiration to shine through. When everything is given, what more is there for us to do? This is the same argument i have against government handouts. What lacks in the world should be a motivator, not an impediment. People who want everything handed over to them, things done for them & things overly explained are vampiric monsters.
Doing more with less is another key lesson in all of this. Limitations bring the best out in us, as long as we do not resent the limitations. If you don't even understand the idea of limitations, the better you are off. Resentment makes you into a little bitch.
You will find that when people are presented with unlimited choice, they tend to make bad decisions.
More about Fairlight here, including MP3s of the songs.

Who Killed Bambi?

This song must be played at my funeral as loud as possible.
Murder murder murder
Someone should be angry
The crime of the century
Who shot little Bambi
Never trust a hippie
'Cause I love punky Bambi
I'll kill to find the killer
In that rotten roll army
All the spikey punkers
Believers in the ruins
With one big shout
They all cry out
Who killed Bambi?

Bikers without Bikes

Growing up in the late 70s & 80s meant alot of media exposure to "Punks as Villains", especially in English media or in movies about the eventual & dark future. Road Warrior is the best example of this. The Cartoon Punk: mohawk or charged hair, combat boots, leather jacket covered with paint & studs & spikes, bullet belt, bondage gear, torn jeans, safety pin through the eye etc, was really just the next stage of the Greaser, with just a crazier version of that type of get up. Bikers without bikes. This style is so visually powerful that it will undoubtedly last forever. There will be kids decked out in all this stuff when we're living on space stations in the Quasar 5 Galaxy. Seriously. BUT, what's kind of amusing to me is that Punk spread through a few different vehicles, & each vehicle has its own kind of adherent. One of the main ones was the written word in Maximum Rockn'Roll, which being a voice specific to the San Francisco Bay Area & all of that place's peculiarities, delivered a certain message & catered to a certain kind of uptight "progressive" record nerd that to me, is contrary to that true Rock & Roll spirit that is found in things like leather pants, razor blades, short skirts & fire. All of that rigid tribalism was really part of the national character in the 80s, but it has all pretty much disintegrated. Anyhow, the first generation of Punks was totally freaked out by this next stage of Punk: the Punk Rocker, the Street Punk, the Cartoon Punk. Thuggish, crazed & free, the working class 2nd wave Punk was a nightmare to the original art school scene. Stan from @//Political tried hard to convince me that Vyvyan from the Young Ones was not a Punk, but was a Metal Head. Gone were the artistic pretenses, obvious creativity was thrown out for a canon of symbolic concepts relating to power, fear, sex & aggression. Out went the connection with the gay scene & in came raging homo-eroticism. In came the uniform, in came tradition, in came codified behavior, all things that original Punk seemed to be against. The revolutionaries & their existencialist crises were swept away by the crazed louts who saw in the freedom of Punk a new opportunity to misbehave. And God bless them for it.
One Way System - Jerusalem & No Return

Broken Bones - Decapitated

GBH - Generals

The Exploited - Dogs of War