SCHOOL BAND: YR TICKET TO POPULARITY

Via Mostly Forbidden Zone:



How times change.

Or maybe not. Apparently you get to perform simulated sexual intercourse in high school bands, if you believe people like Frederica Wilson.

Somehow I doubt it. If that was true, high school band would be a lot more popular than it is.

DISCLAIMER: I’m assuming the school band is as “cool” today as it was when I was in high school. Which is to say, not really, no.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was never in the School Band (no electric guitar section, you see).

Smells like teen spirit,

This is dF

REMEMBER KIDS: IF YOU DO DRUGS, WE'LL SHOOT YR DOG

This has been making the rounds on the blogs and the Facebooks (thelastaerie  gets credit for hipping me to it first), so you may have seen it, but it’s worth passing on:

Reason.com’s Radley Balko has posted newly released video of a drug raid incident he wrote about a few months ago in which a SWAT team in Missouri kicked in the door, shot the family dogs in front of a seven-year-old kid and arrested his parents for “child endangerment” because they were in possession of a “small amount” of marijuana.

Jesus. Where’s the Tea Party when you need it? I ask you.

Personally I can’t bring myself to watch the video (or even embed it), but Balko says:

It's horrifying, but I'd urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.

Which is why I’m posting this.

It’s no secret anymore that the War On Drugs™ is a pointless failure. The irony is that (I suspect) most people know this, but refuse to admit it because they’re afraid of the alternative: legalizing it. (Because if it was legal, everyone would do it and we’d become a nation of stereotypical stoner slackers on the couch and then North Korea could just walk right in like they owned the place and ZOMG!)

Fear will do that. And fear is what this is all about. This is what a zero-tolerance policy will get you.

And I would say that it’s up to you to decide whether paramilitary raids like this are a small price to pay for lowering the chances of yr kids doing drugs (so long as raids like this don’t happen to you or anyone you know) ... except that it probably doesn’t matter what you think anymore.

Tell yr friends anyway.

Get down,

This is dF

LISTEN TO IT #5: SINGING ABOUT THE ATLANTIS LOVE SONGS

It may come as no surprise to any of you that I’m a Jimi Hendrix fan. Lots of really good guitarists get tagged as geniuses and innovators, but Hendrix really was the business. And he died young, which is the standard way of preserving yr legacy.

That said, I’m always skeptical when record companies start releasing “previously unreleased material” from the vaults of deceased musicians. No matter how good they were in their heyday, the odds are that, more often than not, the tracks were unreleased for a reason – namely, they either weren’t finished or weren’t good enough.

So when Experience Hendrix and Columbia issued Valleys Of Neptune, I approached with skepticism. And as it turns out, the claim that it’s an “unreleased studio album” is stretching it a bit – the songs are mainly rehearsal versions of songs that you may have heard on live bootlegs or whatever, but it’s not like this was supposed to be Jimi’s intended followup to Electric Ladyland (or even Band Of Gypsys). As such, I’m not even sure how to classify it – new album? Comp? Reissue? I don’t really know.

What I do know is that a lot of the tracks – which mostly feature the original Experience lineup, plus a few tracks with Billy Cox replacing Noel Redding – are really good. They may or may not signify where Hendrix intended to go next, and may not even rival many of the classics he’s best known for. But if the main attraction is just listening to the cat play, then this will do nicely. 

Here’s the title track to make the case.

"The Cars : Let's Go (HQ)" (Watch on YouTube)

Rise on baby,

This is dF

WE DIDN’T CROSS THE BORDER, THE BORDER CROSSED TOM TANCREDO

Previously on Senseless Acts of Bloggery:

Of course there will be some who question the judgment of Robert Rodriguez to use Machete (which featured illegal immigration as the political backdrop for the film well before the AZ law was passed) as a comment on Arizona’s new law. If someone on the conservative blogscape hasn’t already written a rant about how Machete amounts to Liberal Pro-Illegal-Immigration Hollywood advocating a declaration of war on Whitey, they probably will soon.

Cue Fox News coverage in 3, 2, 1 ...

Some outspoken critics of illegal immigration took umbrage at the movie trailer and its swipe at Arizona, which is the entry point for one-third of all illegal immigrants in the U.S.

"It's pretty ugly out there," said former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, a staunch advocate of tougher immigration laws. "Half the time that's the way all of us are depicted: corrupt, no good, racist."

"The racists who made that trailer, they are as racist as anything I have ever seen" from either side of the immigration debate, Tancredo said.

But, he added, "these guys are 'politically correct' racists, so you cannot heap indignities upon them."

See what they did there?

Some critics,

This is dF

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EDITED TO ADD [8 MAY 2010]: Def Agent dinopollard  reports that Fox News has killed the above article, possibly to do with the fact that 20th Century Fox is Machete's distributor. 

As it happens you can still read the full article on the NY Post ... which is owned by Rupert Murdoch ... who also owns Fox News and 20th Century Fox ... so I don't really get that.