I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT (MAN IN BLACK EDITION)

I am in a company boardroom where Johnny Cash is the CEO.

We are there so Johnny can see the design of the trophies we will give away for the company’s annual awards event. An employee is trying to pull a trophy out of a protective plastic case filled with spongy foam, but he can’t manage it.

I get up and try to show him how easy it is – he’s just trying too hard. The guy tells me to shut up and gets more and more frustrated as he tries to wrestle the trophy out of the case, making excuses to Johnny that sound more and more desperate, blaming the trophy designer, the manufacturer, everyone but himself.

Eventually Johnny has had enough. He gets up and says, “A CEO once said, ‘one more word and I’ll punch you in the face’. I am that CEO. Do not say one more word. Not one.”

The guy fumes and starts to respond. Johnny punches him in the face.

The guy complains: “That was uncalled for!”

Johnny punches him again.

The guy storms out of the boardroom, punching and shoving onlookers as he goes.

And then I woke up.

Wall To Wall Street,

This is dF

DEÄTHMÜFFIN UPDATE: SHE USED TO BE A BUSTY AMATEUR (NOW SHE’S A BUSTY PRO)!

Fans who have noticed the slew of cover songs we’ve been doing have asked if we still write our own stuff.

And the answer is: oh sure.

When you write yr own songs, people often ask where you get yr ideas from.

In the case of our new smash hit, it’s probably self-explanatory. NME has speculated that it’s actually about Aria Giovanni.

We can neither confirm nor deny that for legal reasons. But it COULD be.

Listen and judge for yrself!

( Sing along, kids! )

Like this song? Why not down it and other fine lo-fi tracks from the official Banäna Deäthmüffins page on Soundcloud?

Also, be the first to like us on Facebook.

Pay as you go-go,

This is dF

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

Seeing as how I have a lot of his books on my shelf, I should probably say something about Gabriel García Márquez, who is gone now. Which isn’t a huge shock – his health had been deteriorating enough that it was making news a couple of years ago.

I’ll be the first to admit that I only started reading him for two reasons:

1. Jello Biafra namedropped him on a spoken-word album as an example of foreign artists who were banned by the US Govt from entering the country. In the case of García Márquez, it was because he was critical of US foreign policy in Latin America. I figured anyone the US Govt didn’t want me exposed to was worth checking out.

2. I didn’t come across any of his work until I found some short-story collections for dirt-cheap at a wholesale warehouse bookstore whilst on vacation in Panama City in the early 90s: Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.

The impact was pretty immediate. Apart from learning about life and culture in his part of the world, I liked the way he infused his stories with dry humor and just enough strangeness and the supernatural to set them apart from typical slice-of-life literature. I’ve been a fan ever since. Even his non-fiction was good reading, though I confess I’ve only read News Of A Kidnapping.

I haven’t read everything by him, if only because some of his books aren’t easy to find. You can pretty much always find One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera (mainly because of the film version), but beyond that it’s sketchy, and odds are I’ll have already read it.

Maybe that will change once the book publishers start reprinting post-mortem editions of his books. I hope so. I’d like to read more.

Anyway, respect.

ADDENDUM: Strangely, my love of García Márquez’s works hasn’t led to exploring other Latin American writers. I’ve been told if I like García Márquez, I’ll also dig Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Lhosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño and Jose Saramago (though the latter is from Portugal, not Central/South America). But so far I haven't got around to it. I expect I will one day.

Strange pilgrims,

This is dF