#Operation Jefferson Starship

[robmillistw2]

55 years young: the true masterpiece of psychedelia

When I was 14 or 15 and had decided that the late 60s (at the time about twenty years previously) was the thing, but had exhausted all my Dad’s Stones & Cream albums and bought a few of my own from the same acts (and a couple of Hendrix LPs), I set out to discover more from the era. I can honestly say I wouldn’t be here writing this now if it wasn’t for a very, very cheap double LP compilation called ‘Back On The Road’ which I bought. It was a glorious sampler masterclass in almost everything: it had softer, folksy moments from Fairport, Roy Harper and Nick Drake. It had the heft of Sabbath, Deep Purple and Free. It had the familiarity of Cream and Hendrix. It was my first taste of Traffic & Spooky Tooth. But it was also ocean-spanning: it had the Velvet Underground, the Quicksilver Messenger Service - and Jefferson Airplane.

Despite my first taste of ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Black Night’, ‘White Rabbit’ transcended them both in terms of sheer power. I loved it: it was a bolero, reimagined by the acid rock generation. And so it was I set off to find out more about ‘the Airplane’ (as we will call them henceforth) and really began a love affair with the late sixties Bay Area arts and culture that, circa 32 years later, still rages on in my heart.

It didn’t start well. The liner notes to ‘Back On The Road’ made it clear that this band was at the very top of the family tree of what led to (then relatively recent) unavoidable atrocities ‘We Built This City’ and ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’. For a while, ‘White Rabbit’ was ruined - it was unmistakably that same, powerhouse voice: nobody sounds like Grace Slick. But I soon shrugged it off as nonsense and blamed the times, concluding that I couldn’t let ‘Valerie’ and ‘Higher Love’ put me off ‘Paper Sun’ either.

Sadly, it didn’t improve immediately: Jefferson Airplane actually reformed for one album in 1989 just as I set out to discover them for myself. It was of course this album that all the shops stocked, and I bought it. Aside from a couple of moments, it sounded way too much like Starship and not enough like 1960s San Francisco. I later learned that the couple of moments were basically Hot Tuna and the rest of it was a deluxe big-budget Starship-type operation. Jorma Kaukonen summed the reunion up almost word-for-word as I felt the album to be at age 15 in his excellent auto-bio ‘Been So Long’. Buy a copy.

I went to a better record shop the following week where - joy of joys - they actually had a Jefferson Airplane section. Kid in a toy shop moment: I held in my hands and gazed in wonder at copies of ‘Volunteers’, ‘Surrealistic Pillow’, ‘Crown of Creation’…marvelled at the flying toasters on ‘Thirty Seconds Over Winterland’….and then caught sight of ‘After Bathing At Baxters’ for the very first time.

All the others just vanished into the background. This was it: the iconic American stars and stripes bordering that great image: the old biplane made out of a typical wooden clad Victorian Haight-area house, soaring over a consumer-satire landscape. Now, this was 1989 and vinyl albums from the sixties had largely been robbed of their original gatefold sleeves - or in some cases only ever got them in their home country - and it would be another ten years before I got my hands on a USA original. In fact, it turns out that the (probably Dutch or German) pressing that I got brand new was better than the UK original sleeve which lacked the red, white and blue borders and was distinctly drab.

A brief history lesson: ‘After Bathing At Baxters’ was the third album by the Airplane, and the second with Grace Slick on vocals. The previous release ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ was the breakthrough, with the two bona-fide hits ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody To Love’ which set them apart from the rest of the freewheeling, often uncommercial (or rather, ‘unconcerned with being deliberately commercial’) San Francisco scene.

The rock and roll history books will tell you that ‘Pillow’ was a huge leap forward from the debut ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off’. Well, yes - the sound had a harder edge and not just in the vocals; it also had hits and was a true breakthrough for the band - but it was still an album of short, structured songs with a nominally folk-rock sound. For my money, the difference between ‘Pillow’ and ‘Baxters’ is immeasurably greater and possibly the most significant audible development of any one band from one album to the next that there has ever been. Even ‘Rubber Soul’ to ‘Sgt Pepper’ was a neatly calibrated climb (and that’s assuming you don’t believe ‘Revolver’ was the truly impressive one of the three; I do).

Hits. That’s what happened - and so Jefferson Airplane were given virtual carte blanche by paymasters RCA Victor to make their next record. It took most of 1967 and I’m not sure that RCA were ever ready for the results!

I’m not going to go through it track-by-track; I want you to do that for yourself if you have a mind and thus won’t pepper this missive with spoilers. Let’s just say it is one of the most successful attempts to capture the psychedelic experience on vinyl (which was always a challenge for the artists who were playing freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness improvised concerts by the seat of their pants, then faced the auspices of the studio).

Look out for Jorma Kaukonen ‘inventing Sonic Youth’ in the fuzzed and multitracked guitar solo of his own ‘Last Wall Of The Castle’. Feel the mood as Paul Kantner’s Rickenbacker XII sets up an eastern-influenced mini raga to usher in ‘Wild Tyme’, which then explodes into a mass of joyous harmonies celebrating the times. Be spellbound at Grace’s icy wit and ‘take no prisoners’ attitudes on ‘Two Heads’ and ‘Rejoice’. But above all, don’t drop your bacon sandwich during ‘Spare Chaynge’ - a wild, improvised jam between Kaukonen, the greatest bass player on the planet Jack Casady and drummer Spencer Dryden.

No man is an island - he is a peninsular.

Happy 55th Birthday to my absolute favourite long-playing record; the one that made me want to be a musician and not just a record collector. Thanks for everything.

#Youtube

[ramrodd]

COMMENTARY:

The reason why the January 6 majority has no choice but impeachment is because they ran themselves off the same cliff the neo-cons ran America off of and into Iraq and the abyss of Ivy League. Socialism..

These people are the political legacy of the stupid white slave owners who fired on Ft. Sumter and Johnathan Turley is the Thomas Jefferson of the January 6 Republicans. Fredrick Nietzsche is a down-stream consequence of Thomas Jefferson's full throttle self-indulgent libertarianism of inherited wealth and privilege and virtually no social restrictions. Thomas Jefferson personifies the nobility of Ayn Rand's "Virtue of Selfishness".

William F. Buckley made Fascism both charming and elegant and intellectually superior. That's the Young American's for Freedom Brand: the Big Men on Campus, the white jocks and Greeks, which, in 1960 was a reflection of The Great Gatsby" on the American college campus. I'm a Theta Chi and I'm all for the Greek system, but it needed reform in 1960, Theta Chi actually went through a serious schism in the 50s resulting from the integration of the Army, My dad was on the integration side of the conflict and his best friend from his pledge class was a Segregation Forever Indiana Copper Head, like Dan Burton and the Pence family country club. Dad's side won, but I was never in an integrated living community like Animal House but the Salt Water Economics of the Indiana School of Business and generally aligned with the Ivy League Socialism of Firing Line. Most of them avoided miliary service like Dan Quayle or Dick Cheney.

And they were largely from the Ozzie and Harriet world of the Country Club Republican. Their career path had been set at birth, like Brett Kavanagh, to work their way up the Corporate Ladder and join their daddy's country club. That's what The Graduate is all about: "Plastics". Frank Sinatra's cover of "My Way!" is like "God Bless the USA": the National Anthem of Draft Dodgers and the MAGA nation. That's who is represented by the January 6 majority trapped into impeaching Biden. As a woke Biden voter, that is exactly what I want other woke Biden voters to see as more validation of the wisdom of their vote for Paul Krugman's Peddling Prosperity as Presidential policy.

Boden's $7 Trillion Build Back Better capital budget is the down payment on a permanent colony on Mars in the next 30 years and the cunt hair America needs to complete Eisenhower's paradigm shift from the Military Industrial Complex to Stage 3 of his mobilization for WWIII, which looks like the Starship Capitalism of 2001:A Space Odyssey.

All the structures are in place for the Star Wars economic infrastructure, especially the combination of the US Constitution and the internet, but we are stuck in the operational paradigm of the Harvard MBA program that forms the basis of the business model of the Studio Executives who are opposed to the Quality Assurance business model of Fran Drescher and SAG. The Harvard MBA program is the distilled legacy of the Ivy League Socialism that was defeated by Marxism in Vietnam. The popular mythology, of course, is that it was the draftees who fucked up Vietnam, because Harvard could not conceive of its self as anything but the hero in the Romantic Fiction of Atlas Shrugged and William F. Buckley's Sharon Statement that fired the first shot in what became the 60s campus cultural warfare that persists. ' Well, becoming woke will fix the Harvard MBA program. The processes that must play out to implement Biden's $7 Trillion Build Back Better capital budget are already working to fix Harvard as voters aim at a permanent Starship Trooper lunar base by 2028 and the Green New Deal will achieve warp speed.

The only thing standing in the way is the continuing January 6 rebellion by political obstructionism. The woke Republican Congressional Women of the Party of Lincoln can vacate the Speaker's Chair,, re=do the rules in collaboration with the Squad and Nancy Pelosi and then vote McCarthy back in and let him lead the way into the Green New Deal.

[chancebirch74]

How To Show New York City To Newark Airport

No, there isn't any direct train from New York JFK Airport (JFK) to 229 West 43rd Road station. Sure, the driving distance between New York JFK Airport (JFK) to 229 West 43rd Road is 18 miles. New York JFK Airport (JFK) to 229 West 43rd Avenue bus services, operated by MTA, arrive at 6 Av/W forty four St station. The gap between New York JFK Airport (JFK) and 229 West 43rd Road is thirteen miles. What corporations run services between New York JFK Airport (JFK), USA and 92nd Road Y, NY, USA? What companies run companies between New York JFK Airport (JFK), USA and Ace Lodge New York, NY, USA? The quickest way to get from New York JFK Airport (JFK) to 270 Park Avenue is to taxi which costs $ninety five - $120 and takes 21 min. The fast response of Buffalo Police might have prevented the dying toll from surpassing the ten victims who were slain at Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue on Saturday, authorities said. Might 13, 2022 starship leisure trainee woman . As soon as you are on the airplane, Delta needs to enhance your in-flight leisure as effectively. As you might expect, on longer flights there are more decisions obtainable, however in all instances the meals are tasty and well ready and higher quality than typical airplane meals.

No, there is no direct train from New York JFK Airport (JFK) to Ace Hotel New York station. The quickest solution to get from New York JFK Airport (JFK) to Bentley Resort is to taxi. There are even many taxi providers that present shuttles to. Nonetheless, there are services departing from Terminal 4 and arriving at Roosevelt Island by way of Sutphin Blvd. New York JFK Airport (JFK) to Bentley Resort practice providers, operated by MTA, arrive at Roosevelt Island station. New York JFK Airport (JFK) to The Peninsula New York bus services, operated by MTA, depart from S Cargo Rd/Cargo Plz station. The Peninsula New York is 13 miles. Rockefeller College is 12 miles. The cheapest technique to get from New York JFK Airport (JFK) to Rockefeller College is to drive which costs $1 - $three and takes 23 min. Yes, the driving distance between New York JFK Airport (JFK) to Rockefeller College is 18 miles. For the solo traveler journeying lengthy distances, airplanes are sometimes probably the most inexpensive possibility, whereas driving is the least economical. When the window is at its darkest setting, gentle will not enter the cabin, however we were still in a position to see particulars outside -- in brilliant daylight, a minimum of.

E-book not less than 2 weeks before departure so as to get a under-common worth. We'll get you to your flight, enterprise meeting, or different vacation spot with fear-free, fairly priced transportation anyplace in the Tri-State area. Sit again and loosen up while our professionally trained chauffeur will take you to your vacation spot in a well timed and protected manner. When Amparo Ramirez was informed final yr that Sky Chefs was recalling her, “I ran proper back to work,” she said. It's the one last time you possibly can exit as a single man with your buddies to have some good crazy enjoyable, so do it with type with one among our limo buses. Nevertheless, relying on the place you’re going, a taxi cab experience to and from the airport can simply put you out $100 except you’re sharing a cab. This information will also assist you figure out one of the best solution to get from JFK to Manhattan.

All our LaGuardia Airport chauffeurs will meet you at the airport arrivals gate, utilizing a name board containing information to your specification. Moreover you'll have to purchase the rides.. As beforehand mentioned, we are conscious that traveling could be traumatic when you have got to fret about dealing with the rush hour visitors and carrying essential baggage. The scheduled bus service to Benidorm takes about an hour. The journey, together with transfers, takes roughly fifty six min. The journey, including transfers, takes roughly fifty five min. The quickest technique to get from New York JFK Airport (JFK) to New York City Hall is to taxi which prices $eighty five - $110 and takes 25 min. No, there isn't a direct train from New York JFK Airport (JFK) to New York City Corridor. However, there are companies departing from Terminal 4 and arriving at 5 Av/fifty three St by way of Sutphin Blvd-Archer Av-JFK Airport. No, there isn't https://jetblacktransportation.com/ from New York JFK Airport (JFK) to Ace Hotel New York. New York JFK Airport (JFK) to Ace Lodge New York practice services, operated by Lengthy Island Rail Highway, arrive at New York Penn Station. New York JFK Airport (JFK) to Ace Hotel New York practice providers, operated by JFK Airtrain, depart from Terminal four station.

#airport transportation new york ny

[moonlight--falls]

Meanwhile, a girl the triplets invited over turned into a zombie. 

Not great. 

#ts3 #sims 3 #ts3 gameplay #sims 3 gameplay #sims gameplay #click for hq #Operation Jefferson Starship #SuraStarship #i could have let her bite someone #but nah

[chaunceyandchumleysdad]

Maywood Park Racetrack

One of my lifetime landmarks is disappearing with a wrecking ball take-down of Maywood Park Racetrack. Located less than five miles from where I grew up on Chicago’s far west side, it was always an iconic figure to me, even though I never set foot in the facility. There was a radio jingle when I was a kid that went, “Let’s all go to Maywood Park, North Avenue and River Rooooooad!” It was really at the southwest corner of North Ave. and First Ave., with River Road branching off of First Avenue just a bit to the north. But I guess River Road worked better for the jingle. That corner was a microcosm of post-World War II Americana. On the northwest corner was Kiddieland, a beautiful little amusement park that we worshipped as kids. Fortunately, it was still opened while my kids were growing up. (Kiddieland closed in 2009 and there is now a Costco on the property.) On the southeast corner, there was a small carnival-like amusement park with a giant slide and batting cages. The northeast corner, abutting the Des Plaines River, is forest preserve.

Maywood Park opened in 1946 and was used for harness racing of standardbred horses. It had a small one-half mile oval track. Although I had never been inside the facility, as a kid, it always fascinated me with it’s enclosed grandstand and bright floodlights at night. The family that owned Maywood Park also owned Balmoral Park in south suburban Crete. They were finding it difficult to sustain the business as interest in horse racing, particularly harness racing, has waned significantly with younger generations. When video gambling was legalized in Illinois a few years ago, allowing for slot machines in bars and mini storefront casinos, revenues at Maywood diminished further. Another factor was “pay to play.” According to the Chicago Tribune:

By 2012, video gaming machines at bars, restaurants and truck stops were legalized in Illinois, cutting deeper into harness racing's popularity. But the ultimate undoing of harness racing in the Chicago area is tied to an alleged "pay-to-play" scheme that involved campaign contributions to now-imprisoned Gov. Rod Blagojevich for legislation benefiting the racetracks. The U.S. Court of Appeals in 2014 ordered the racetracks to pay several local casinos $77.8 million in restitution. Balmoral and Maywood sought bankruptcy protection. A court later sharply reduced the judgment, but the racetracks were already on the way out. Races were conducted in 2015, but the Illinois Racing Board denied requests for 2016 dates and the tracks were forced out of business.

That was the death knell for Maywood Park as they could no longer compete for the available gambling dollars. The family closed the facility and sold the property. It will be developed into industrial buildings and a shopping center.

I am an infrequent visitor to race tracks, maybe once every two years during my adult life. This is a brief history of other Chicago area race tracks that are familiar to me:

Balmoral Park – Crete, IL

A harness racing track and owned by the same family as Maywood Park, it fell victim to the same circumstances as Maywood Park. However, it was purchased and repurposed as a horse “show” facility featuring show jumping and show hunting competition. I have never been to Balmoral Park.

Arlington Park – Arlington Heights, IL

This is the track I have been to the most. It is a beautiful facility for thoroughbred racing. It is open May through September. They have a myriad of promotions and special events including live music and they have family days on the last Sunday of each month. A day at Arlington is always a fun summer outing. Although Arlington Park has been around since 1927, a fire burned down the clubhouse and grandstand in 1985. The facility was rebuilt and has a much more modern and cleaner look than other area racetracks.

Hawthorne Race Course – Cicero, IL

I’ve been to this track four or five times. Located on Chicago’s southwest side, it has an older, grittier feel to it as compared to Arlington. Like Arlington, the grandstand was destroyed by fire in 1978. So the new grandstand is not much older than the new Arlington grandstand, but still feels much older. Over the years, this track has featured both thoroughbred racing and standardbred harness racing. I have only been there for thoroughbred racing. What I do like about this track is that it is open year-round. It is fun to attend during the cold weather months as it gives you a little taste of an outdoor sport during an otherwise non-outdoor season.

Sportman’s Park – Cicero, IL

Located across the street from Hawthorne Race Track, Sportman’s operated jointly with Hawthorne back in the heyday of horseracing. I was never in Sportman’s, but I remember being able to see it from the grandstand building at Hawthorne. In 1999, it was converted to an auto racetrack, and renamed Chicago Motor Speedway at Sportsman’s Park. However, it was short-lived as a motor speedway. In 2001, the Chicagoland Speedway opened in Joliet and all the major races moved there. By 2003, the old facility closed and was later demolished.

Washington Park Race Track – Homewood, IL

This track first opened in 1884 in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, across the street from it’s namesake Washington Park at 61st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. In 1926, it moved to south suburban Homewood, IL. I was at this track once, but not for horse racing. On the Bicentennial day of July 4, 1976, I was there for a concert seeing Jefferson Starship and The Marshall Tucker Band. I took my little sister Peggy. She was 15 at the time and it was her first concert. We had great seats, just a few rows back from the stage. (That was back in the day when SRO general admission shows were rare.) Seven months later, on February 5, 1977, Washington Park burned down and was never rebuilt.

#maywood park racetrack #chicago #arlington park race track #hawthorne race track #sportsman's park #washington park #balmoral park #chicago motor speedway #chicagoland speedway #horse racing

[how2to18]

DURING THE POSTWAR PERIOD, the genres of the fantastic — especially science fiction — have been deeply intertwined with the genres of popular music, especially rock ’n’ roll. Both appeal to youthful audiences, and both make the familiar strange, seeking escape in enchantment and metamorphosis. As Steppenwolf sang in 1968: “Fantasy will set you free […] to the stars away from here.” Two recent books — one a nonfiction survey of 1970s pop music, the other a horror novel about heavy metal — explore this heady intermingling of rock and the fantastic.

As Jason Heller details in his new book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded, the magic carpet rides of the youth counterculture encompassed both the amorphous yearnings of acid rock and the hard-edged visions of science fiction. In Heller’s account, virtually all the major rock icons — from Jimi Hendrix to David Crosby, from Pete Townshend to Ian Curtis — were avid SF fans; not only was their music strongly influenced by Heinlein, Clarke, Ballard, and other authors, but it also amounted to a significant body of popular SF in its own right. As Heller shows, many rock stars were aspiring SF writers, while established authors in the field sometimes wrote lyrics for popular bands, and a few became rockers themselves. British fantasist Michael Moorcock, for example, fronted an outfit called The Deep Fix while also penning songs for — and performing with — the space-rock group Hawkwind (once memorably described, by Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, as “Star Trek with long hair and drugs”).

Heller’s book focuses on the “explosion” of SF music during the 1970s, with chapters chronicling, year by year, the exhilarating debut of fresh music subcultures — prog rock, glam rock, Krautrock, disco — and their saturation with themes of space/time travel, alien visitation, and futuristic (d)evolution. He writes, “’70s pop culture forged a special interface with the future.” Many of its key songs and albums “didn’t just contain sci-fi lyrics,” but they were “reflection[s] of sci-fi” themselves, “full of futuristic tones and the innovative manipulation of studio gadgetry” — such as the vocoder, with its robotic simulacrum of the human voice. Heller’s discussion moves from the hallucinatory utopianism of the late 1960s to the “cool, plastic futurism” of the early 1980s with intelligence and panache.

The dominant figure in Heller’s study is, unsurprisingly, David Bowie, the delirious career of whose space-age antihero, Major Tom, bookended the decade — from “Space Oddity” in 1969 to “Ashes to Ashes” in 1980. Bowie’s 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a full-blown SF extravaganza, its freaky starman representing “some new hybrid of thespian rocker and sci-fi myth,” but it had a lot of company during the decade. Heller insightfully analyzes a wide range of SF “concept albums,” from Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire (1970), the first rock record to be nominated for a Hugo Award, to Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975), which “reprogramm[ed] funk in order to launch it into tomorrow,” to Gary Numan and Tubeway Army’s Replicas (1979), an album “steeped in the technological estrangement and psychological dystopianism of Dick and Ballard.”

Heller’s coverage of these peaks of achievement is interspersed with amusing asides on more minor, “novelty” phenomena, such as “the robot dance craze of the late ’60s and early ’70s,” and compelling analyses of obscure artists, such as French synthesizer wizard Richard Pinhas, who released (with his band Heldon) abrasive critiques of industrial society — for example, Electronique Guerilla (1974) — while pursuing a dissertation on science fiction under the direction of Gilles Deleuze at the Sorbonne. He also writes astutely about the impact of major SF films on the development of 1970s pop music: Monardo’s Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (1977), for example, turned the cantina scene from Star Wars into a synth-pop dance-floor hit. At the same time, Heller is shrewdly alert to the historical importance of grassroots venues such as London’s UFO Club, which incubated the early dimensional fantasies of Pink Floyd and the off-the-wall protopunk effusions of the Deviants (whose frontman, Mick Farren, had a long career as an SF novelist and, in 1978, released an album with my favorite title ever: Vampires Stole My Lunch Money). Finally, Heller reconstructs some fascinating, but sadly abortive, collaborations — Theodore Sturgeon working to adapt Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Wooden Ships” as a screenplay, Paul McCartney hiring Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry to craft a story about Wings. In some alternative universe, these weird projects came to fruition.

Heller’s erudition is astonishing, but it can also be overwhelming, drowning the reader in a welter of minutiae about one-hit wonders and the career peregrinations of minor talents. In his acknowledgments, Heller thanks his editor for helping him convert “an encyclopedia” into “a story,” but judging from the format of the finished product, this transformation was not fully complete: penetrating analyses frequently peter out into rote listings of albums and bands. There is a capping discography, but it is not comprehensive and is, strangely, organized by song title rather than by artist. The index is similarly unhelpful, containing only the proper names of individuals; one has to know, for instance, who Edgar Froese or Ralf Hütter are in order to locate the relevant passages on Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, respectively.

That said, there is no gainsaying the magisterial authority displayed in assertions such as: “The first fully formed sci-fi funk song was ‘Escape from Planet Earth’ by a vocal quartet from Camden, New Jersey, called the Continental Four.” And who else has even heard of — much less listened to — oddments like 1977’s Machines, “the sole album by the mysterious electronic group known as Lem,” who “likely took their name from sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem of Solaris fame”? Anyone interested in either popular music or science fiction of the 1970s will find countless nuggets of sheer delight in Strange Stars, and avid fans, after perusing the volume, will probably go bankrupt hunting down rare vinyl on eBay.

While Heller’s main focus is the confluence of rock ’n’ roll and science fiction, he occasionally addresses the influence of popular fantasy on major music artists of the decade. Marc Bolan, of T. Rex fame, was, we learn, a huge fan of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, while prog-rock stalwarts Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer managed “to combine science fiction and fantasy, fusing them into a metaphysical, post-hippie meditation on the nature of reality.” What’s missing from the book, however, is any serious discussion of the strain of occult and dark fantasy that ran through 1960s and ’70s rock, the shadows cast by Aleister Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft over Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and (yes) Bowie himself. After all, Jim Morrison’s muse was a Celtic high priestess named Patricia Kennealy who went on, following the death of her Lizard King, to a career as a popular fantasy author. Readers interested in this general topic should consult the idiosyncratic survey written by Gary Lachman, a member of Blondie, entitled Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001).

Heller does comment, in passing, on an incipient musical form that would, during the 1980s, emerge as the dark-fantasy genre par excellence: heavy metal. Though metal was, as Heller states, “just beginning to awaken” in the 1970s, his book includes sharp analyses of major prototypes such as Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (1970), Blue Öyster Cult’s Tyranny and Mutation (1973), and the early efforts of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. This was the technocratic lineage of heavy metal, the segment of the genre most closely aligned with science fiction, especially in its dystopian modes, and which would come to fruition, during the 1980s, in classic concept albums like Voivod’s Killing Technology (1987) and Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime (1988).

But the 1980s also saw the emergence of more fantasy-oriented strains, such as black, doom, and death metal, whose rise to dominance coincided with the sudden explosion in popularity of a fantastic genre that had, until that time, largely skulked in the shadow of SF and high fantasy: supernatural horror. Unsurprisingly, the decade saw a convergence of metal music and horror fiction that was akin to the 1970s fusion of rock and SF anatomized in Strange Stars. Here, as elsewhere, Black Sabbath was a pioneer, their self-titled 1970 debut offering a potent brew of pop paganism culled equally from low-budget Hammer films and the occult thrillers of Dennis Wheatley. By the mid-1980s, there were hundreds of bands — from Sweden’s Bathory to England’s Fields of the Nephilim to the pride of Tampa, Florida, Morbid Angel — who were offering similar fare. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos inspired songs by Metallica, Mercyful Fate, and countless other groups — including Necronomicon, a German thrash-metal outfit whose name references a fictional grimoire featured in several of the author’s stories.

By the same token, heavy metal music deeply influenced the burgeoning field of horror fiction. Several major 1980s texts treated this theme overtly: the doom-metal outfit in George R. R. Martin’s The Armageddon Rag (1983) is a twisted emanation of the worst impulses of the 1960s counterculture; the protagonist of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985) is a Gothic rocker whose performances articulate a pop mythology of glamorous undeath; and the mega-cult band in John Skipp and Craig Spector’s splatterpunk classic The Scream (1988) are literal hell-raisers, a Satanic incarnation of the most paranoid fantasies of Christian anti-rock zealots. The heady conjoining of hard rock with supernaturalism percolated down from these best sellers to the more ephemeral tomes that packed the drugstore racks during the decade, an outpouring of gory fodder affectionately surveyed in Grady Hendrix’s award-winning study Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (2017). Hendrix, himself a horror author of some note, has now published We Sold Our Souls (2018), the quintessential horror-metal novel for our times.

Hendrix has stated that, prior to embarking on this project, he was not “a natural metal fan”:

I was scared of serious metal when I was growing up. Slayer and Metallica intimidated me, and I was too unsophisticated to appreciate the fun of hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe and Twisted Sister, so I basically sucked. […] But I got really deep into metal while writing We Sold Our Souls and kind of fell in love.

The author’s immersion in — and fondness for — the genre is evident on every page of his new novel. Chapters are titled using the names of classic metal albums: “Countdown to Extinction” (Megadeth, 1992), “From Enslavement to Obliteration” (Napalm Death, 1988), “Twilight of the Gods” (Bathory, 1991), and so on. The effect is to summon a hallowed musical canon while at the same time evoking the story’s themes and imparting an emotional urgency to its events. These events also nostalgically echo 1980s rock-horror novels: like The Armageddon Rag, Hendrix’s plot chronicles the reunion of a cult outfit whose breakup decades before was enigmatically fraught; like The Scream, it features a demonic metal band that converts its worshipful fans into feral zombies; like The Vampire Lestat, it culminates in a phantasmagoric stadium concert that erupts into a brutal orgy of violence. Yet despite these pervasive allusions, the novel does not come across as mere pastiche: it has an energy and authenticity that make it feel quite original.

A large part of that originality lies in its protagonist. As the cock-rock genre par excellence, its blistering riffs and screeching solos steeped in adolescent testosterone, heavy metal has had very few notable female performers. But one of them, at least in Hendrix’s fictive history, was Kris Pulaski, lead guitarist of Dürt Würk, a legendary quintet from rural Pennsylvania that abruptly dissolved, under mysterious circumstances, in the late 1990s, just as they were poised for national fame. Kris was a scrappy bundle of nerves and talent, a kick-ass songwriter and a take-no-prisoners performer:

She had been punched in the mouth by a straight-edge vegan, had the toes of her Doc Martens kissed by too many boys to count, and been knocked unconscious after catching a boot beneath the chin from a stage diver who’d managed to do a flip into the crowd off the stage at Wally’s. She’d made the mezzanine bounce like a trampoline at Rumblestiltskins, the kids pogoing so hard flakes of paint rained down like hail.

But that was eons ago. As the story opens, she is staffing the night desk at a Best Western, burned out at 47, living in a broken-down house with her ailing mother and trying to ignore “the background hum of self-loathing that formed the backbeat of her life.” She hasn’t seen her bandmates in decades, since she drunkenly crashed their tour van and almost killed them all, and hasn’t picked up a guitar in almost as long, constrained by the terms of a draconian contract she signed with Dürt Würk’s former lead singer, Terry Hunt, who now controls the band’s backlist. While Kris has lapsed into brooding obscurity, Hunt has gone on to global success, headlining a “nu metal” outfit called Koffin (think Korn or Limp Bizkit) whose mainstream sound Kris despises: “It was all about branding, fan outreach, accessibility, spray-on attitude, moving crowds of white kids smoothly from the pit to your merch booth.” It was the exact opposite of genuine metal, which “tore the happy face off the world. It told the truth.”

To inject a hint of authenticity into Koffin’s rampant commodification, Hunt occasionally covers old Dürt Würk hits. But he avoids like the plague any songs from the band’s long-lost third album, Troglodyte, with their elaborate mythology of surveillance and domination:

[T]here is a hole in the center of the world, and inside that hole is Black Iron Mountain, an underground empire of caverns and lava seas, ruled over by the Blind King who sees everything with the help of his Hundred Handed Eye. At the root of the mountain is the Wheel. Troglodyte was chained to the Wheel along with millions of others, which they turned pointlessly in a circle, watched eternally by the Hundred Handed Eye.

Inspired by the arrival of a butterfly that proves the existence of a world beyond his bleak dungeon, Troglodyte ultimately revolts against Black Iron Mountain, overthrowing the Blind King and leading his fellow slaves into the light.

One might assume that Hunt avoids this album because the scenario it constructs can too readily be perceived as an allegory of liberation from the consumerist shackles of Koffin’s nu-metal pablum. That might be part of the reason, but Hunt’s main motivation is even more insidious: he fears Troglodyte because its eldritch tale is literally true — Koffin is a front for a shadowy supernatural agency that feeds on human souls, and Dürt Würk’s third album holds the key to unmasking and fighting it. This strange reality gradually dawns on Kris, and when Koffin announces plans for a massive series of concerts culminating in a “Hellstock” festival in the Nevada desert, she decides to combat its infernal designs with the only weapon she has: her music. Because “a song isn’t a commercial for an album. It isn’t a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains.”

This bizarre plot, like the concept albums by Mastodon or Iron Maiden it evokes, runs the risk of collapsing into grandiloquent absurdity if not carried off with true conviction. And this is Hendrix’s key achievement in the novel: he never condescends, never winks at the audience or tucks his tongue in cheek. Like the best heavy metal, We Sold Our Souls is scabrous and harrowing, its pop mythology fleshed out with vividly gruesome set pieces, as when Kris surprises the Blind King’s minions at their ghastly repast:

Its fingernails were black and it bent over Scottie, slobbering up the black foam that came boiling out of his mouth. Kris […] saw that the same thing was crouched over Bill, a starved mummy, maggot-white, its skin hanging in loose folds. A skin tag between its legs jutted from a gray pubic bush, bouncing obscenely like an engorged tick. […] Its gaze was old and cold and hungry and its chin dripped black foam like a beard. It sniffed the air and hissed, its bright yellow tongue vibrating, its gums a vivid red.

The irruption of these grisly horrors into an otherwise mundane milieu of strip malls and franchise restaurants and cookie-cutter apartments is handled brilliantly, on a par with the best of classic splatterpunk by the likes of Joe R. Lansdale or David J. Schow.

Hendrix also, like Stephen King, has a shrewd feel for true-to-life relationships, which adds a grounding of humanity to his cabalistic flights. Kris’s attempts to reconnect with her alienated bandmates — such as erstwhile drummer JD, a wannabe Viking berserker who has refashioned his mother’s basement into a “Metalhead Valhalla” — are poignantly handled, and the hesitant bond she develops with a young Koffin fan named Melanie has the convincing ring of post-feminist, intergenerational sisterhood. Throughout the novel, Hendrix tackles gender issues with an intrepid slyness, from Kris’s brawling tomboy efforts to fit into a male-dominated world to Melanie’s frustration with her lazy, lying, patronizing boyfriend, with whom she breaks up in hilarious fashion:

She screamed. She broke his housemate’s bong. She Frisbee-d the Shockwave [game] disc so hard it left a divot in the kitchen wall. She raged out of the house as his housemates came back from brunch.

“Dude,” they said to Greg as he jogged by them, “she is so on the rag.”

“Are we breaking up?” Greg asked, clueless, through her car window.

It took all her self-control not to back over him as she drove off.

Such scenes of believable banality compellingly anchor the novel’s febrile horrors, as do the passages of talk-radio blather interspersed between the chapters, which remind us that conspiratorial lunacy is always only a click of the AM dial away.

While obviously a bit of a throwback, We Sold Our Souls shows that the 1980s milieu of heavy metal and occult horror — of bootleg cassettes and battered paperbacks — continues to have resonance in our age of iPods and cell-phone apps. It also makes clear that the dreamy confluence of rock and the fantastic so ably anatomized in Heller’s Strange Stars is still going strong.

¤

Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor. His most recent book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2017.

The post Magic Carpet Rides: Rock Music and the Fantastic appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2SMN28U via IFTTT

#Blogger

[violetsystems]

#personal

After the gender reveal of Dudley the cat last week, she disappeared for more than a few days.  She was back on my porch last night after I did laundry looking a little down.  My gut is that Animal Care and Control probably picked her up and brought her to the pound.  Earlier today I had this feeling maybe I was to blame with all the attention.  Which is kind of weird to think that people pay so much attention to me and so little at the same time.  While I was somewhat relieved I haven’t seen any poop in the corridor, I’ve been bummed out consistently here and there.  It’s been a lot of things and nothing at all simultaneously.  I went and saw Ant-man and the Wasp last weekend by myself.  It was amazing in a very normal way.  I took the train behind my house out to this suburb called Cicero.  It’s still pretty much the city but it has it’s own laws which sounds more ominous than it was.  Chicago sometimes feels like it operates by it’s own hidden loopholes.  It is the most corrupt city in the nation.  That seems ridiculous to say when you look at who is president.  For the most part, Chicago for me is ok.  Or at least parts of it are learning that I know better.  The shittiest thing about being a leader is that sometimes you think you are just filling the spot.  You assume somebody with more authority and experience comes along to relieve you.  I don’t really like being told what to do or what to think.  But I also realize that society needs to get along regardless.  I’ve been doing it all by myself for a long time.  I’ve suffered a lot.  People always want you to explain these things when for years nobody was really listening.  It’s a broken record to me.  Life goes on.  The only difference is that I know better.  I know what is worth my time and what isn’t.  And I know if I remain patient another day is another day.  People take risks all the time with little or no regard for probability.  Leaps of faith into the abyss.  I’ve played Lemmings enough to know a good night’s sleep is a healthy alternative to a sharp dive into the Edgelord caverns.

Those caves are filled with the worst kinds of trolls.  Year after year their network of tunnels still exist desperately trying to connect in your inbox.  I had posted something about my Mom being excited Croatia advanced in the World Cup.  Somebody who I’ve always considered a bit sus was in my inbox trying to tell me his favorite player on the team was throwing a Nazi salute.  It basically confirmed my suspicions about that person enough to block them.  And that person is connected to another person.  A network of trolls who want nothing but for you to react.  To give them some sort of rise out of making you angry.  To have some power to manipulate, intimidate and aggravate you.  Truth is my Croatian side of the family is the gypsy side.  And somebody trying to bond with me over Croatian Nationalism made a huge fucking mistake.  In the spirit of free speech I’m supposed to tolerate that accordingly to some subterranean law.  But in the end, I just ignore it and block it.  I know better.  I know who is involved in the worst shit in this city because they don’t even try to hide it anymore.  There’s no repercussions for these people.  None that I can ever see.  So why do I even want to be in plain sight of those people.  I shut the door.  At least to my apartment anyway.  I’ve been biking a bit more to work.  We won this city wide challenge as the most bike friendly working place.  I ride fixed and a lot of my friends are messengers so it’s always been kind of a big part of my life.  There’s a lot that happens at street level that makes you forget about those sewers where the trash floats.  I’ve been getting down to work pretty early and sitting outside this coffee shop hidden between two large buildings.  Ironically the person starting shit in my inbox used to work there until he got fired.  I remember when I started going back there he was loud and obnoxious about how I shouldn’t go there.  It’s pretty quiet reading comics and drinking coffee outside at eight am.  I don’t have to listen to hipster cokehead nazi bullshit at least.  Which is a large part of my problem with this city if I were to be truthful.  Or streets and sanitation depending on which way you look at it.

Those people are bullshit anyway.  And year after year nobody addresses it.  After all the things I’ve written it’s still the same old story.  Maybe things are a little better for me.  Maybe they’re not.  I deal with difficult people so much.  I realize now that if I were to get into a relationship it would be the least difficult thing to do.  I don’t want something that is difficult.  I don’t want to be difficult.  Life is difficult and scary enough as it is.  I wouldn’t say I’m very afraid of it.  Shit is so boring right now in a lot of ways.  Everybody lives by this Jefferson Starship mantra in this town that “We built this city!”  At what cost?  Who pays the price for this literal shanty town that plays out a lot like West World when all is said and done?  Are all these traps just tests?  I’m going to go on record I’ve survived more traps in more cities I think than anyone I know.  And people still don’t want to listen or believe me when I say what’s a bad idea and what isn’t.  The truth is I’m smarter than most people.  I’m sorry for that.  I’m also very critical of myself when it comes to how it affects other people.  My position of power in the world and how that might affect somebody else.  I’m also a human fucking being who has been wronged so many times at this point it’s a fucking joke on the internet.  Like I’m some performance to be staged around.  For some people yes.  When you break free of the narrative and create your own do you break the fourth wall or something?  Sometimes it feels like it.  Like you looked behind the curtain one too many times and can’t bear to tell people how it is.  That these people have no end game other than death and reckless abandon.  They don’t want to build communities.  They want to ravage, scavenge and remake them for themselves.  They’re vampires that suck the life and the resources out of everything.  They don’t meet you halfway.  They’re too lost to know which direction is which.  And they’re too proud to admit they’re lost.  And somehow we admire them more than we admire the people paying the actual price.  I don’t ever want to be like those people.  Mostly because I want to be happy someday for the right reasons.  If Dudley can come back to me, I can break free of the quantum realm someday.  Sure are a lot of fuckboys down here though.  I’m not a fuckboy for the record.  There needs to be some sort of certification or training like CPR.  Because last time I checked this city is on life support.  <3 Tim

[123designsrq]

TRIP TO THE MOON? ELON MUSK UNVEILS SPACEX STARSHIP

BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Texas - Elon Musk includes a Starship, and something day he expects it can help SpaceX achieve other worlds. Standing beneath a towering Starship Mk1, a prototype for SpaceX's massive multiple-use launch system, Musk organized his arrange for interplanetary travel in the company's South Texas test site here on Saturday (Sept. 28) - the eleventh anniversary from the first effective orbital launch of SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1. The brand new form of Starship (and it is Super Heavy booster) can carry as much as 100 individuals to the moon, Mars or any other destinations wide or around Earth, he stated. It'll stand 387 ft (118 meters) tall and become completely multiple-use, with quick turnarounds. https://youtu.be/5UUtNR6BhjE   This is actually the rocket which will launch the millionaire Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa and a number of artists on a holiday round the moon within the 2020s. SpaceX unveiled that planned space tourist trip this past year (but didn't disclose just how much Maezawa compensated). "This really is, I believe, probably the most inspiring factor I've ever seen," Musk told an audience of approximately 200 SpaceX employees, visitors and reporters in the company's site near Boca Chica Village, just outdoors of Brownsville. "Wow, how much of an incredible job by this type of great team to construct this incredible vehicle. I am so proud to utilize this type of great team." Musk has lengthy stated the primary objective of SpaceX, since its founding in 2002, is to help to make humanity a multiplanet species. The organization is promoting multiple-use Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, in addition to multiple-use Dragon cargo capsules along with a new Crew Dragon ship for astronauts. It's launchpads in Florida, California and today Boca Chica, where the organization broke ground on its test site in 2014. But Mars, Musk has stated, has continued to be the real objective. "This is actually the fastest road to a self-sustaining city on Mars," he stated Saturday night, talking about the Starship-Super Heavy architecture. Get more information at extra space.org videos... A Starship evolution SpaceX's Starship concept has gone through a type of rocket evolution within the 3 years since Musk first unveiled it around the world in September 2016 in the Worldwide Astronautical Union meeting in Mexico. At this meeting, Musk unveiled what he known as the the Interplanetary Transport System, or ITS, for Mars colonization. The ITS known as for any fully multiple-use spacecraft (with two fins) and booster that will stand 400 ft (122 m) high when put together. Its first stage might have 42 next-generation Raptor engines, and also the booster could be 40 ft (12 m) wide. The spacecraft might have nine Raptors. (SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets have nine Merlin engines on their own first stage. Falcon Heavy beginning have 27 Merlins.) https://youtu.be/wRF41f7hPWE   Musk updated the look in 2017, calling it the large Falcon Rocket, or BFR for brief. That plan known as for any launch system that will stand 348 ft (106 meters) tall and 30 ft (9 m) wide. Its booster might have 31 Raptor engines, as the spacecraft atop it might have six. Then, in 2018, Musk unveiled another design (and also the Starship name): a sleek, stainless-steel spacecraft with three tail fins that will stand taller than its 2017 precursor, having a height of 387 ft (118 m). The spacecraft would be operated by six Raptor engines, with as many as 37 Raptors powering the booster (now known as Super Heavy). This latest design has held to the current day SpaceX continues to be shooting for any 387-feet-tall Starship-Super Heavy stack, with six Raptors around the spacecraft. The amount of engines on Super Heavy could change from flight to flight Musk stated the rocket has space for approximately 37 Raptors, and every mission will most likely require a minimum of 24. "Starship will let us inhabit other worlds," Musk authored on Twitter Friday (Sept. 27). "To create existence as you may know it interplanetary." Using the design nailed lower, SpaceX intends to move fast. The organization really wants to achieve Earth orbit having a Starship prototype within six several weeks. And individuals could start flying aboard the automobile within the next year approximately when the test program is constantly on the work well, Musk stated. A city's hope, however with critics While Musk and SpaceX happen to be lauded by their ambitious push for any Starship able to deep-space travel, the street hasn't been smooth. As the organization ramped up its testing having a smaller sized rocket, known as Starhopper, frequent road closures, launch hazard advisories along with other negative effects from the program sparked ire among some residents of Boca Chica Village, a close beachside community. SpaceX's Starship Mk1, for instance, is simply a large number of ft from the primary travel route, Boca Chica Boulevard, leading towards the village. https://youtu.be/1SLbhJ01D5c   Previously Saturday, the boulevard was the scene of the rotating gallery of onlookers and SpaceX fans posing for selfies and photos using the Starship Mk1, even while SpaceX place the finishing touches around the 165-feet (50 m) vehicle. "I'm able to summarize my first impression such as this: 'Ooo, Shiny!'" stated Roy Paul, 78, of Mebane, New York, who travelled to Houston and drove over 7 hrs having a niece, nephew as well as their five children from Beaumont to determine the Starship Mk1. He's a passionate space fan who goes as IonMars on NASASpaceflight.com forums. This month, SpaceX provided to cash out some Boca Chica Village residents following a short 500-feet (150 m) test sparked a brush fire in the test site, based on Business Insider. There are SpaceX's some other clients. NASA continues to be awaiting SpaceX to accomplish the Crew Dragon spacecraft which will fly astronauts back and forth from the Worldwide Space Station. The area agency has selected SpaceX (and the other company, Boeing) to supply commercial crew flights towards the station. While SpaceX did launch an unpiloted Crew Dragon test flight towards the space station this season, a subsequent abort system test unsuccessful, resulting in the destruction from the vehicle. SpaceX aims to resume abort system tests later this season in front of the first crewed test flight. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, it appears, isn't pleased with time-lengthy delays of Crew Dragon, in addition to Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, especially having seen SpaceX build Starship Mk1 this season in front of its very own test flight. "I'm searching toward the SpaceX announcement tomorrow," Bridenstine authored on Twitter Friday. "Meanwhile, Commercial Crew is years behind schedule. NASA expects to determine exactly the same degree of enthusiasm centered on the investments from the citizen. You're ready to deliver." https://youtu.be/TzF6ksb2ms8 Meanwhile, the town of Brownsville, remains hopeful that SpaceX's presence - and future launches from Boca Chica - might be a boon for that community. The city's mayor, Trey Mendez, an attorney and native of Brownsville, stated that within the 5 years SpaceX continues to be in the Boca Chica site, the region has witnessed some vacationers arrived at gawk in the rockets, but such visits haven't were built with a significant effect on the city's economy. That may change, Mendez stated, if SpaceX creates regular space launches from Boca Chica. However, if the area just stays an evaluation site, then it might not be as big an effect because the city would really like. "Certainly I'm able to state that the city is overall excited using the possibilities the space industry brings. And we are excited to understand more about SpaceX's plans here," Mendez told Space.com just hrs before Musk's presentation. "I certainly hope that it's something which have a measurable impact for the city, since i would certainly enjoy having that." starship songs starship band members starship website starship spacex jefferson starship starship rocket starship movie mickey thomas starship Read the full article

#Space #spaceage #spaceart #spacebuns #spacecoast #spacecraft #spacedesign #spaceexploration #spacegays #spacegrey #spaceibiza #SpaceInvader #spaceinvaders #spacejam #spaceman #spacemarines #spaceneedle #spaceoddity #spacer #spacers #spaces #spaceship #spaceshuttle #spacestation #spacesuit #spacetime #spacetravel #spacewalk #spacewheel #spacex

[the-record-columns]

March 20, 2019: Columns

Out of the ashes: An old radio from an old and dear friend…

The 1930 Crosley console radio

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

At this past Monday night's meeting of the Rotary Club of North Wilkesboro, Dr. Conrad Shaw was honored with this year’s Rotary Club Citizen of the Year Award. 

This much deserved award was received by Dr. Shaw with thankfulness and humility as he was literally surrounded by family and friends.

On a personal level, Conrad Shaw was the principal of the North Wilkesboro Elementary  School for 14 years, eight of them when I was a student there.  He was the nearest thing to God-on-this-Earth I ever knew--running a very tight ship--tough, but always fair.  And, when we left the 8th Grade for high school, we could read, write, count, and knew we had better behave.  No if's, no and's, no but's, no or's, no nor’s - PERIOD!

We were none the worse for the wear, either   

Many years later, I helped launch Thursday Magazine, predecessor to The Record.  I used the old Hoyle Hutchens house on E Street in North Wilkesboro for our offices, and it became a refuge for anything old, odd, or eclectic.  Among my favorite things in that office was my old radios.  Over the years I had bought everything from a coin-operated radio in a metal case to a wide variety of other radios out of everything from Bakelite cases to some with beautiful woodwork.  

The one common thread through all these radios was Conrad Shaw, who had become a dear friend in my adult life.  After he left NWES, he worked the rest of his education career at Wilkes Community College, He retired in 1995 and made a hobby of restoring old radios--a hobby which meshed perfectly with mine.  Over a period of time he has repaired and or restored nine radios for me.  When we had that awful fire in 2004, all of them burned up.  Not too long after the fire Conrad asked me about the radios and I told him they were all lost.

Around Christmas time of that year, I received a phone call from Conrad asking me to stop by and see him. Of course I was glad to, and even more so when I realized why he had called.  Sitting in his basement workshop was a beautiful 1930 Crosley console radio.  Conrad plugged it in and in about 30 seconds it was playing perfectly. He went on to explain the steps he had gone through in restoring the radio to its original working condition, and that it came from the home of the late musician and historian J. Jay Anderson. I told Conrad about some of the things I had purchased from that estate and my own somewhat quirky relationship with the eccentric Mr. Anderson. 

"I knew you had purchased several things from there," Conrad began. “And you had told me you had lost most of your radios in that fire. To That end, I want to make this old Crosley console a gift to you.  You can now say you are back to collecting radios again."

I was, and am, more pleased than I can say in words. Yes, I love the old radio, but more importantly, I love being thought of.  It is a wonderful feeling — the feeling of friendship I feel when Conrad makes one of his visits to the offices of The Record.

Truly, Conrad Shaw has been good to me my whole life — even before I knew it.

Congratulations again on being Rotary's Citizen of the Year, a much deserved honor.

 Time After Time By HEATHER DEAN  JOURNALIST/PHOTO JOURNALIST

Generation X: We were the most radical in so many ways. Atari was in three colors, we pulled down the Berlin wall, TV shows and movies were all original (there was no need for remakes or reality TV), the music was full of synthesizers and wicked cool guitar riffs. We were making history in all genres, especially in the areas of the World Wide Web. Star Wars was everything good in life, and the effects were cutting edge technology. David Hasselhoff was the coolest guy ever.

Fast forward to 2019. We the teens of the 80’s are now parents and some even grandparents. Cars can’t fly like we had planned, but they can talk like KITT. We hold palm sized computers in our hands, and can speak or text anyone in the world in an instant. All our Sci-Fi fantasies turned into term papers and valedictorian speeches of our well laid plans for the future, have turned into distant memories, like the fog at a Bon Jovi concert- palpable then gone.

Last week the best of the 80’s were brought back for a weekend as the Wilkes Playmakers presented the hit musical “Back to the 80’s.” All the characters had heartthrob names: Corey, Tiffany, Debbie, Ferris, Eillen, and Alf. The nerd learned karate kid moves and took down the bully at the end. The kids sang songs by WHAM, Madonna, The Buggles, Cindy Lauper, and Jefferson Starship to name just a few. (My favorite was a reference to Milli Vannili.)

During rehearsals, we had to explain why some of their lines were so funny to us, the parents. The kids just didn’t get it. Some of them had never seen the iconic movies they were playing out on stage. The Breakfast who? What’s an Atari? They had never known a time without cell phones and they certainly didn’t know the struggle to create the perfect mix tape.

So here our theatre kids were, learning 80’s dance moves, and songs, albeit with eyes rolled the first few weeks of rehearsal. Then came time for costuming; the girls were mortified at the shoulder pads, blue eye shadow, everything neon, and big hair. As they filed in for dress rehearsal I squealed and said “Oh. Em. Gee. You look AMAZING!!!” They were spot on with the help of moms who lived it. “Heather, we look stupid. I can’t believe y’all wore this mess. It’s so gross.” But that ‘gag me with a spoon’ sentiment soon led into a love of everything glossy and hot pink and was replaced with “hang on, you need more blush” and “is my hair big enough?’ Pass the Aquanet please.”

Our kids had struggled at first, but in the ‘final countdown’ they had morphed into GenX, and it showed. A packed Thursday night rarely happens, and we had to use overflow parking down the street at the First Baptist Church for every performance. Saturday sold out, something that hasn’t happened in a decade, and Sunday’s show was almost sold out, another rarity. These kids were now the history makers, as the audiences cheered and sang along with the live band. Many even dressed up in 80’s regalia to attend the show.

One night, as we were all in the dressing room helping the girls get ready, two of the girls said “If we were teens in the 80’s I bet we would be best friends” This struck me as funny. “If you were bff’s in the 80’s, you would be your mom and me now.” Eyes widened and a hush fell in the hairspray laden air. “Ladies, as cool and amazing as you are NOW, is how totally radical your parents and I were THEN.” Perspective. It will get you every time.  

Then, “Oh, Heather, you’ll always be cool.”

Bless em.

Congratulations to cast and crewmates of Back to the 80’s. It was totally tubular.

Give Peace a Chance

By EARL COX

Special to The Record

Jared Kushner, senior adviser and son-in-law to U.S. President Donald Trump, has been working on a peace plan to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Details of this plan are being kept under lock and key but will be revealed soon after the elections in Israel on April 9th.  If Benjamin Netanyahu is reelected, he will become the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history thus far.   It would be quite an achievement for both Trump and Netanyahu to have a workable peace plan with the Palestinians however, unless and until the Palestinians and all parties to any such plan agree that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, no peace plan will be possible.  Furthermore, the world must stop holding Israel to a different and higher standard.  Rules, regulations, fairness and justice must apply equally to all. 

Israel is often accused of being an apartheid state however nothing could be further from the truth.  All Israeli citizens are not Jewish however all are treated equally under the law without regard to race, religion or sexual orientation.  Muslims, Bedouins, Druze and others serve in senior level positions within the government of Israel, however the media and the liberal left want the world to believe otherwise.

Here in the United States there has been a growing movement on our college and university campuses by various pro-Palestinian organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.  These organizations, with the support of liberal professors, are promoting and engaging in BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaigns against Israel claiming they are helping the Palestinian cause. Those who promote the truth in an attempt to stop these anti-Semitic BDS campaigns are accused of stifling freedom of speech.  

The aim of the BDS movement is not to help the Palestinians.  It is to isolate Israel internationally and do as much economic harm as possible as part of the plan to erase Israel from off the face of the earth. The Palestinians are then expected to be crowned rightful heirs to inherit whatever remains of the Jewish state.

Thanks in large part to the efforts of the Israel Allies Foundation which is the international arm of the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus, a total of 27 states have passed legislation making it illegal for local governments to contract with companies that participate in the BDS movement. Opposition to such anti-BDS legislation leans heavily on the complaint that Americans’ First Amendment rights are being infringed upon. However, none of the anti-BDS legislation restricts an individual’s right to boycott Israeli products or businesses. It only restricts the government from being party to such boycotts.

The BDS movement incorrectly and unfairly places blame on Israel for all aspects of the conflict with the Palestinians despite the fact that Israel has made multiple peace offers all of which the Palestinians have rejected. Those in the BDS camp promote a distorted history that Israel is an illegal occupier of the land and maintains that Israel is responsible for Palestinian poverty and suffering. The BDS movement holds out false hope to the Palestinians that they can achieve their nationalistic aspirations without having to negotiate a deal directly with the Israelis because only Israel will be forced to compromise for peace.

By attempting to bludgeon Israel into submission through economic isolation, they believe Israel can be weakened enough to capitulate to every Palestinian demand. This is unrealistic, especially given Israel’s strong economy and superior military capabilities. In short, the Palestinians want a Jew-free state. They want Israel eliminated and replaced with a Palestinian state.  

BDS must be stopped in its tracks.  How can you help?  Ask your local grocery stores and other retailers to consider stocking Israeli products. Buy Israeli Bonds to support the booming Israeli economy and whenever you have an opportunity, speak the truth about Israel.  A loss for the BDS movement is a win for everyone else - Israelis and Palestinians. This is how to give peace a chance.   

‘I’m a Teacher and Legislator: We’re Making Strides in Increasing Teacher Pay’

By REP. JEFFREY ELMORE

N.C. House

This week, we received welcome news in our efforts to increase teacher pay in North Carolina.

According to a new report released on Tuesday by the National Education Association, one of the nation’s largest teacher unions, North  Carolina has now jumped to 29th in the nation in average teacher pay and second in the Southeast. In addition, the average teacher salary in North Carolina has now reached $53,975.

As a public-school teacher for nearly two decades in Wilkes County and a legislator in the N.C. General Assembly since 2012, I have a personal understanding of the challenges facing our teachers. Furthermore, as the only school teacher in the state legislator, I know that teacher pay is an emotional issue for many in our state, as the education system has had an impact in some way on everyone.

Regardless of political party, ensuring quality teachers in the classroom is of the upmost priority. Sadly, teacher pay has been used as a political football, even a weapon, by politicians to advance their agenda and careers for decades. For me, this is very frustrating and it is my goal to highlight the positive work being done to reward our teachers.

Make no mistake, there is more work to be done and we will continue to build on these efforts. This report is exciting news, especially when you look at how far we have come in teacher pay.  

When voters gave Republicans the majority in the General Assembly in 2011, North Carolina was ranked 47th in the nation in teacher pay. Furthermore, due to decades of irresponsible spending and budgeting, school systems across the state were considering a reduction in force, instituting hiring freezes and furloughing teachers.

That’s why we immediately went to work and laid out a plan to reward, recruit and retain teachers in North Carolina. We set out realistic goals, not based on winning votes, but actually delivering real results for our teachers, students and parents.

After five consecutive years of pay increases for our teachers, including over 9% in the past two years, we are meeting those goals and getting the results we planned for. As reported this past week, North  Carolina is now 29th in the nation and second in the Southeast in teacher pay – and has an average teacher salary of nearly $54,000.

In fact, teacher salaries in North Carolina have risen at the third highest rate in the entire country over the past five years.

While the ranking is a step in the right direction, and second in the Southeast is a great accomplishment, we must and will do more. Our goal is and has been to reward teachers for their hard work while ensuring our children are getting the best education possible to prepare them for the future.  

Since the Great Recession, our state has faced many challenges. We have made progress. We will continue to prioritize our state’s sound fiscal footing.  We will continue to save for the unexpected rainy day.  Lastly, we will continue to make strategic investments for our future.

Representative Jeffrey Elmore serves the 94th House District in the N.C. General Assembly and is the Chairman of House Education K-12 and Education Appropriations. He is also in his eighteenth year as a Wilkes County School teacher.

 Conway, a Black River and Spring Time

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

I discovered historic downtown Conway, S.C., by happenstance while on my way to Myrtle Beach for the production of our first Christmas special. On that day I was the guest for the morning show on 93.9 FM WCRE in Cheraw. When I left the studio I put the Myrtle Beach address in my GPS. Based on the displayed ETA, the drive time was about two and a half hours; this would give me plenty of time to arrive and check into our hotel before evening activities.  

About midway through the drive I realized I was seeing places and things I had never seen before. For me, this is always exciting and I was stopping more than I had planned, and before long I became aware that time was slipping away. I knew if I were not careful, I would go from having plenty of time to being late, so I got back on the road.

I soon found myself in the midst of a picturesque Southern town with charming buildings reminiscent of times before strip malls and by-passes, times when the town center was the heart of commerce, shopping, dining and entertainment.

It was late afternoon, Christmas music filled the air and the streets and storefronts were decorated, thus intensifying the feeling of being in a special place. This was a part of Conway that I had never seen before. I guess I was like the millions of other people who only knew the Conway by-pass, which, like most by-passes, has no sense of history.  

From downtown I crossed the Waccamaw River and continued to Myrtle Beach. When I arrived at the hotel, I asked the front desk staff what they could tell me about Conway. I collected some information and contact names and went on with the evening's events.

It would be some months before I could make it back to Conway, but when I did, my first stop was the Chamber of Commerce. I learned about the historic Live Oaks that some call the oldest citizens in town. It is said that some of the trees predate the founding of America.

I was given the name of Larry Biddle as a champion for all things Conway. I called Larry and asked if we could meet. He agreed and we met that afternoon and I was given the grand tour of Conway as it is today and a lesson on the founding of Conway and much of its colorful history.

While I had gone fishing in the black waters of the Waccamaw River, I did not know that the river was the highway for the Waccamaw Indians who were in the area prior to the founding of America.

The Waccamaw was also the water way that a young Englishman traveled while charting the Royal Governor, Robert Johnson's Township Plan. The King's Town was formed in 1732 and the name was shortened to Kingston before finally becoming Conway.

I enjoyed discovering this part of our history while strolling on the meandering boardwalk along the banks of the Waccamaw. This is also when I noticed the beauty of spring time in Conway. The tender green color of new leaves on the trees that border the Waccamaw River looked fresh and alive. From certain views, the moss draped ancient Live Oaks and large azaleas were spectacular.

There are many more stories for me to share about historic Conway and her people, this one is about how I first discovered this charming Southern town and the beauty she displays in spring time.

Carl White is the executive producer and host of the award winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In the Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its seventh year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte viewing market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday at 1noon.  For more on the show visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com, You can email Carl White at [email protected].  

[topmixtrends]

DURING THE POSTWAR PERIOD, the genres of the fantastic — especially science fiction — have been deeply intertwined with the genres of popular music, especially rock ’n’ roll. Both appeal to youthful audiences, and both make the familiar strange, seeking escape in enchantment and metamorphosis. As Steppenwolf sang in 1968: “Fantasy will set you free […] to the stars away from here.” Two recent books — one a nonfiction survey of 1970s pop music, the other a horror novel about heavy metal — explore this heady intermingling of rock and the fantastic.

As Jason Heller details in his new book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded, the magic carpet rides of the youth counterculture encompassed both the amorphous yearnings of acid rock and the hard-edged visions of science fiction. In Heller’s account, virtually all the major rock icons — from Jimi Hendrix to David Crosby, from Pete Townshend to Ian Curtis — were avid SF fans; not only was their music strongly influenced by Heinlein, Clarke, Ballard, and other authors, but it also amounted to a significant body of popular SF in its own right. As Heller shows, many rock stars were aspiring SF writers, while established authors in the field sometimes wrote lyrics for popular bands, and a few became rockers themselves. British fantasist Michael Moorcock, for example, fronted an outfit called The Deep Fix while also penning songs for — and performing with — the space-rock group Hawkwind (once memorably described, by Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, as “Star Trek with long hair and drugs”).

Heller’s book focuses on the “explosion” of SF music during the 1970s, with chapters chronicling, year by year, the exhilarating debut of fresh music subcultures — prog rock, glam rock, Krautrock, disco — and their saturation with themes of space/time travel, alien visitation, and futuristic (d)evolution. He writes, “’70s pop culture forged a special interface with the future.” Many of its key songs and albums “didn’t just contain sci-fi lyrics,” but they were “reflection[s] of sci-fi” themselves, “full of futuristic tones and the innovative manipulation of studio gadgetry” — such as the vocoder, with its robotic simulacrum of the human voice. Heller’s discussion moves from the hallucinatory utopianism of the late 1960s to the “cool, plastic futurism” of the early 1980s with intelligence and panache.

The dominant figure in Heller’s study is, unsurprisingly, David Bowie, the delirious career of whose space-age antihero, Major Tom, bookended the decade — from “Space Oddity” in 1969 to “Ashes to Ashes” in 1980. Bowie’s 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a full-blown SF extravaganza, its freaky starman representing “some new hybrid of thespian rocker and sci-fi myth,” but it had a lot of company during the decade. Heller insightfully analyzes a wide range of SF “concept albums,” from Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire (1970), the first rock record to be nominated for a Hugo Award, to Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975), which “reprogramm[ed] funk in order to launch it into tomorrow,” to Gary Numan and Tubeway Army’s Replicas (1979), an album “steeped in the technological estrangement and psychological dystopianism of Dick and Ballard.”

Heller’s coverage of these peaks of achievement is interspersed with amusing asides on more minor, “novelty” phenomena, such as “the robot dance craze of the late ’60s and early ’70s,” and compelling analyses of obscure artists, such as French synthesizer wizard Richard Pinhas, who released (with his band Heldon) abrasive critiques of industrial society — for example, Electronique Guerilla (1974) — while pursuing a dissertation on science fiction under the direction of Gilles Deleuze at the Sorbonne. He also writes astutely about the impact of major SF films on the development of 1970s pop music: Monardo’s Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (1977), for example, turned the cantina scene from Star Wars into a synth-pop dance-floor hit. At the same time, Heller is shrewdly alert to the historical importance of grassroots venues such as London’s UFO Club, which incubated the early dimensional fantasies of Pink Floyd and the off-the-wall protopunk effusions of the Deviants (whose frontman, Mick Farren, had a long career as an SF novelist and, in 1978, released an album with my favorite title ever: Vampires Stole My Lunch Money). Finally, Heller reconstructs some fascinating, but sadly abortive, collaborations — Theodore Sturgeon working to adapt Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Wooden Ships” as a screenplay, Paul McCartney hiring Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry to craft a story about Wings. In some alternative universe, these weird projects came to fruition.

Heller’s erudition is astonishing, but it can also be overwhelming, drowning the reader in a welter of minutiae about one-hit wonders and the career peregrinations of minor talents. In his acknowledgments, Heller thanks his editor for helping him convert “an encyclopedia” into “a story,” but judging from the format of the finished product, this transformation was not fully complete: penetrating analyses frequently peter out into rote listings of albums and bands. There is a capping discography, but it is not comprehensive and is, strangely, organized by song title rather than by artist. The index is similarly unhelpful, containing only the proper names of individuals; one has to know, for instance, who Edgar Froese or Ralf Hütter are in order to locate the relevant passages on Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, respectively.

That said, there is no gainsaying the magisterial authority displayed in assertions such as: “The first fully formed sci-fi funk song was ‘Escape from Planet Earth’ by a vocal quartet from Camden, New Jersey, called the Continental Four.” And who else has even heard of — much less listened to — oddments like 1977’s Machines, “the sole album by the mysterious electronic group known as Lem,” who “likely took their name from sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem of Solaris fame”? Anyone interested in either popular music or science fiction of the 1970s will find countless nuggets of sheer delight in Strange Stars, and avid fans, after perusing the volume, will probably go bankrupt hunting down rare vinyl on eBay.

While Heller’s main focus is the confluence of rock ’n’ roll and science fiction, he occasionally addresses the influence of popular fantasy on major music artists of the decade. Marc Bolan, of T. Rex fame, was, we learn, a huge fan of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, while prog-rock stalwarts Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer managed “to combine science fiction and fantasy, fusing them into a metaphysical, post-hippie meditation on the nature of reality.” What’s missing from the book, however, is any serious discussion of the strain of occult and dark fantasy that ran through 1960s and ’70s rock, the shadows cast by Aleister Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft over Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and (yes) Bowie himself. After all, Jim Morrison’s muse was a Celtic high priestess named Patricia Kennealy who went on, following the death of her Lizard King, to a career as a popular fantasy author. Readers interested in this general topic should consult the idiosyncratic survey written by Gary Lachman, a member of Blondie, entitled Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001).

Heller does comment, in passing, on an incipient musical form that would, during the 1980s, emerge as the dark-fantasy genre par excellence: heavy metal. Though metal was, as Heller states, “just beginning to awaken” in the 1970s, his book includes sharp analyses of major prototypes such as Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (1970), Blue Öyster Cult’s Tyranny and Mutation (1973), and the early efforts of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. This was the technocratic lineage of heavy metal, the segment of the genre most closely aligned with science fiction, especially in its dystopian modes, and which would come to fruition, during the 1980s, in classic concept albums like Voivod’s Killing Technology (1987) and Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime (1988).

But the 1980s also saw the emergence of more fantasy-oriented strains, such as black, doom, and death metal, whose rise to dominance coincided with the sudden explosion in popularity of a fantastic genre that had, until that time, largely skulked in the shadow of SF and high fantasy: supernatural horror. Unsurprisingly, the decade saw a convergence of metal music and horror fiction that was akin to the 1970s fusion of rock and SF anatomized in Strange Stars. Here, as elsewhere, Black Sabbath was a pioneer, their self-titled 1970 debut offering a potent brew of pop paganism culled equally from low-budget Hammer films and the occult thrillers of Dennis Wheatley. By the mid-1980s, there were hundreds of bands — from Sweden’s Bathory to England’s Fields of the Nephilim to the pride of Tampa, Florida, Morbid Angel — who were offering similar fare. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos inspired songs by Metallica, Mercyful Fate, and countless other groups — including Necronomicon, a German thrash-metal outfit whose name references a fictional grimoire featured in several of the author’s stories.

By the same token, heavy metal music deeply influenced the burgeoning field of horror fiction. Several major 1980s texts treated this theme overtly: the doom-metal outfit in George R. R. Martin’s The Armageddon Rag (1983) is a twisted emanation of the worst impulses of the 1960s counterculture; the protagonist of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985) is a Gothic rocker whose performances articulate a pop mythology of glamorous undeath; and the mega-cult band in John Skipp and Craig Spector’s splatterpunk classic The Scream (1988) are literal hell-raisers, a Satanic incarnation of the most paranoid fantasies of Christian anti-rock zealots. The heady conjoining of hard rock with supernaturalism percolated down from these best sellers to the more ephemeral tomes that packed the drugstore racks during the decade, an outpouring of gory fodder affectionately surveyed in Grady Hendrix’s award-winning study Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (2017). Hendrix, himself a horror author of some note, has now published We Sold Our Souls (2018), the quintessential horror-metal novel for our times.

Hendrix has stated that, prior to embarking on this project, he was not “a natural metal fan”:

I was scared of serious metal when I was growing up. Slayer and Metallica intimidated me, and I was too unsophisticated to appreciate the fun of hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe and Twisted Sister, so I basically sucked. […] But I got really deep into metal while writing We Sold Our Souls and kind of fell in love.

The author’s immersion in — and fondness for — the genre is evident on every page of his new novel. Chapters are titled using the names of classic metal albums: “Countdown to Extinction” (Megadeth, 1992), “From Enslavement to Obliteration” (Napalm Death, 1988), “Twilight of the Gods” (Bathory, 1991), and so on. The effect is to summon a hallowed musical canon while at the same time evoking the story’s themes and imparting an emotional urgency to its events. These events also nostalgically echo 1980s rock-horror novels: like The Armageddon Rag, Hendrix’s plot chronicles the reunion of a cult outfit whose breakup decades before was enigmatically fraught; like The Scream, it features a demonic metal band that converts its worshipful fans into feral zombies; like The Vampire Lestat, it culminates in a phantasmagoric stadium concert that erupts into a brutal orgy of violence. Yet despite these pervasive allusions, the novel does not come across as mere pastiche: it has an energy and authenticity that make it feel quite original.

A large part of that originality lies in its protagonist. As the cock-rock genre par excellence, its blistering riffs and screeching solos steeped in adolescent testosterone, heavy metal has had very few notable female performers. But one of them, at least in Hendrix’s fictive history, was Kris Pulaski, lead guitarist of Dürt Würk, a legendary quintet from rural Pennsylvania that abruptly dissolved, under mysterious circumstances, in the late 1990s, just as they were poised for national fame. Kris was a scrappy bundle of nerves and talent, a kick-ass songwriter and a take-no-prisoners performer:

She had been punched in the mouth by a straight-edge vegan, had the toes of her Doc Martens kissed by too many boys to count, and been knocked unconscious after catching a boot beneath the chin from a stage diver who’d managed to do a flip into the crowd off the stage at Wally’s. She’d made the mezzanine bounce like a trampoline at Rumblestiltskins, the kids pogoing so hard flakes of paint rained down like hail.

But that was eons ago. As the story opens, she is staffing the night desk at a Best Western, burned out at 47, living in a broken-down house with her ailing mother and trying to ignore “the background hum of self-loathing that formed the backbeat of her life.” She hasn’t seen her bandmates in decades, since she drunkenly crashed their tour van and almost killed them all, and hasn’t picked up a guitar in almost as long, constrained by the terms of a draconian contract she signed with Dürt Würk’s former lead singer, Terry Hunt, who now controls the band’s backlist. While Kris has lapsed into brooding obscurity, Hunt has gone on to global success, headlining a “nu metal” outfit called Koffin (think Korn or Limp Bizkit) whose mainstream sound Kris despises: “It was all about branding, fan outreach, accessibility, spray-on attitude, moving crowds of white kids smoothly from the pit to your merch booth.” It was the exact opposite of genuine metal, which “tore the happy face off the world. It told the truth.”

To inject a hint of authenticity into Koffin’s rampant commodification, Hunt occasionally covers old Dürt Würk hits. But he avoids like the plague any songs from the band’s long-lost third album, Troglodyte, with their elaborate mythology of surveillance and domination:

[T]here is a hole in the center of the world, and inside that hole is Black Iron Mountain, an underground empire of caverns and lava seas, ruled over by the Blind King who sees everything with the help of his Hundred Handed Eye. At the root of the mountain is the Wheel. Troglodyte was chained to the Wheel along with millions of others, which they turned pointlessly in a circle, watched eternally by the Hundred Handed Eye.

Inspired by the arrival of a butterfly that proves the existence of a world beyond his bleak dungeon, Troglodyte ultimately revolts against Black Iron Mountain, overthrowing the Blind King and leading his fellow slaves into the light.

One might assume that Hunt avoids this album because the scenario it constructs can too readily be perceived as an allegory of liberation from the consumerist shackles of Koffin’s nu-metal pablum. That might be part of the reason, but Hunt’s main motivation is even more insidious: he fears Troglodyte because its eldritch tale is literally true — Koffin is a front for a shadowy supernatural agency that feeds on human souls, and Dürt Würk’s third album holds the key to unmasking and fighting it. This strange reality gradually dawns on Kris, and when Koffin announces plans for a massive series of concerts culminating in a “Hellstock” festival in the Nevada desert, she decides to combat its infernal designs with the only weapon she has: her music. Because “a song isn’t a commercial for an album. It isn’t a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains.”

This bizarre plot, like the concept albums by Mastodon or Iron Maiden it evokes, runs the risk of collapsing into grandiloquent absurdity if not carried off with true conviction. And this is Hendrix’s key achievement in the novel: he never condescends, never winks at the audience or tucks his tongue in cheek. Like the best heavy metal, We Sold Our Souls is scabrous and harrowing, its pop mythology fleshed out with vividly gruesome set pieces, as when Kris surprises the Blind King’s minions at their ghastly repast:

Its fingernails were black and it bent over Scottie, slobbering up the black foam that came boiling out of his mouth. Kris […] saw that the same thing was crouched over Bill, a starved mummy, maggot-white, its skin hanging in loose folds. A skin tag between its legs jutted from a gray pubic bush, bouncing obscenely like an engorged tick. […] Its gaze was old and cold and hungry and its chin dripped black foam like a beard. It sniffed the air and hissed, its bright yellow tongue vibrating, its gums a vivid red.

The irruption of these grisly horrors into an otherwise mundane milieu of strip malls and franchise restaurants and cookie-cutter apartments is handled brilliantly, on a par with the best of classic splatterpunk by the likes of Joe R. Lansdale or David J. Schow.

Hendrix also, like Stephen King, has a shrewd feel for true-to-life relationships, which adds a grounding of humanity to his cabalistic flights. Kris’s attempts to reconnect with her alienated bandmates — such as erstwhile drummer JD, a wannabe Viking berserker who has refashioned his mother’s basement into a “Metalhead Valhalla” — are poignantly handled, and the hesitant bond she develops with a young Koffin fan named Melanie has the convincing ring of post-feminist, intergenerational sisterhood. Throughout the novel, Hendrix tackles gender issues with an intrepid slyness, from Kris’s brawling tomboy efforts to fit into a male-dominated world to Melanie’s frustration with her lazy, lying, patronizing boyfriend, with whom she breaks up in hilarious fashion:

She screamed. She broke his housemate’s bong. She Frisbee-d the Shockwave [game] disc so hard it left a divot in the kitchen wall. She raged out of the house as his housemates came back from brunch.

“Dude,” they said to Greg as he jogged by them, “she is so on the rag.”

“Are we breaking up?” Greg asked, clueless, through her car window.

It took all her self-control not to back over him as she drove off.

Such scenes of believable banality compellingly anchor the novel’s febrile horrors, as do the passages of talk-radio blather interspersed between the chapters, which remind us that conspiratorial lunacy is always only a click of the AM dial away.

While obviously a bit of a throwback, We Sold Our Souls shows that the 1980s milieu of heavy metal and occult horror — of bootleg cassettes and battered paperbacks — continues to have resonance in our age of iPods and cell-phone apps. It also makes clear that the dreamy confluence of rock and the fantastic so ably anatomized in Heller’s Strange Stars is still going strong.

¤

Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor. His most recent book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2017.

The post Magic Carpet Rides: Rock Music and the Fantastic appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2SMN28U

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

[ramrodd]

What are the criticisms of Das Kapital by Karl Marx? Why should we avoid reading it?

COMMENTARY:

You should read it. Marxism is a fairy tale, but it is intellectually superior to the basis of Supply-Side economics. Do not avoid reading Marx. It’s a study in fallacy. 

Marx held an intellectual enchantment over Marxist that was as entrancing as Ayn Rand’s emotional enchantment over Objectivists and her Atlas Shrugged demographic.

The difference between Marxists and Objectivist is that Marxist arrived at the same conclusion regarding Marxism being untenable during the 70s that Brezhnev and Mao realized after Apollo 11 and had the moral clarity and intellectual honesty to abandon his dictates, while Objectivists basically doubled down with the Reagan/Trump cult of personality and January 6.

The primary fallacy of Marxism is that he violates the 4th Law of Logic by proposing to eliminating all the contradictions in the Tory Capitalism of the Industrial revolution. Marx basically made the same mistake that Thomas Jefferson made when he edited God out of his version of the Bible. The contradictions Marx sought to eliminate were generally the paradox in any social system that makes the system dynamical.

Marx was trying to create a social system that operated with the same mechanical principles as the steam engine, which was the engine of the dominant economic paradigm. The Scientific Management of the Harvard Business School employs the same metaphor, Ray Dalio has substituted the T Model Ford for the steam engine and improved the metaphor (because the spark plug represents the entrepreneurial impulse made possible by life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) but it’s still a mechanical paradigm. It’s why Dilbert is Scott Adam’s archetype for the Harvard MBA program’s performance  based on  Rosabeth Moss Kantor’s HR paradigm.

The key to the organic characteristic of the Starship Capitalism described by Werner von Braun and Robert Heinlein is the dynamical modeling of Paul Krugman’s _Peddling Prosperity”. If you replace the water in Krugman’s model with the physical infrastructure of the Federal Reserve and the internet and the flame of the candle with the Federal Reserve, Wall Street and the SEC, and assume the surface of the water is the grass foots strata of American constitutional capitalism, you have a working model of why Keynesian policies are four or 5 limens more effective than the static austerity policies of the Austrian economics of Ayn Rand and the John Birch Society conceits of the William F. Buckley’s Sophist Fascism of the National Review and Yale University.

As Putin observed, Marxism is a fairy tale, but it is a very intellectually rigorous fairy tale. If you read Marx, the soaring intellectual superstructures of the construct in contrast to the emotional slop of Reaganomics and Objectivism will become stark. Both schools violate the 4th Law of Logic, which dictates that paradox cannot be reduced,

Like Marxism, the 18th Amendment and the current War on Drugs violates the 4th Law of Logic.

[dalaznews-blog]

Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin sues hospital, claiming he lost part of his tongue after botched surgery

http://dalaznews.com/news/most-popular/jefferson-airplane-singer-marty-balin-sues-hospital-claiming-he-lost-part-of-his-tongue-after-botched-surgery/

Marty Balin filed a lawsuit in opposition to a New York Town healthcare facility following he claimed a botched surgery ruined his vocation.  (Getty Photographs )

The co-founder of the 1960s rock band Jefferson Plane claimed in a lawsuit that a New York City health-related center ruined his musical profession with a botch tracheotomy right after open up-coronary heart surgery in 2016.

Marty Balin, 76, filed a lawsuit against the operators of Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital alleging he lost element of his tongue and has a paralyzed vocal twine owing to injuries brought on by the well being care provider who did the remedy. The lawsuit also claimed his left thumb had to be amputated merely simply because of care that was “reckless, careless and negligent.”

‘JANE THE VIRGIN’ STAR GINA RODRIGUEZ TALKS #METOO Aid, AMERICA’S ‘DEVASTATING’ IMMIGRATION POLICIES 

The singer and guitarist was hospitalized in 2016 with heart concerns right after touring from his household in Tampa, Fla., to New York Metropolis for a show at a Manhattan nightclub. He completed up owning lucrative “open-heart surgical remedy a triple bypass and a valve replacement,” the New York Place up reported. Nevertheless, a recovery device was not staffed with personnel who knew how to offer you with his restoration, the match stated.

The band Jefferson Plane from remaining: Marty Balin, Grace Slick, Spencer Dryden, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady.  (AP)

The accommodate also alleged Balin endured from bedsores and kidney harm as properly. He vital dialysis and just can't “care for his distinctive-demands daughter who has spina bifida,” the New York Write-up noted.

"By the time Mr. Balin was eventually unveiled from the hospital, he knowledgeable misplaced fifty % his tongue so that he merely can't converse or consume appropriately. ... He knowledgeable turn out to be entirely disabled and has hardly ever recovered completely," the match pointed out.

MARY JO BUTTAFUOCO SPEAKS OUT IN NEW DOCUMENTARY, Claims SHE FORGIVES ‘LONG ISLAND LOLITA’ AMY FISHER

Balin and his spouse sued Thursday in federal court in Manhattan. They are looking for unspecified damages.

A assertion by the Mount Sinai Effectively becoming Plan on Friday explained it "are not in a position to comment on the specifics of this case for the cause that it is a pending legal matter but we can share our highest precedence is providing the optimum stage of compassionate remedy to our folks."

Balin and guitarist Paul Kantner fashioned Jefferson in San Francisco in the mid-1960s at the height of the psychedelic rock period. The band’s hits supplied “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” Later in his vocation, Balin and Kantner teamed up after once more for the band’s successor group, Jefferson Starship. He nonetheless left the band in 1978.

The Involved Push contributed to this report.

Kathleen Joyce is a breaking/trending data producer for FoxNews.com. You can observe her at @Kathleen_Joyce8 on Twitter.

[moonlight--falls]

It was Love Day, and raining, so I sent the kids to all do their own thing. 

#ts3 #sims 3 #ts3 gameplay #sims 3 gameplay #sims gameplay #click for hq #Operation Jefferson Starship #SuraStarship #IlithyiaStarship #LucretiaStarship #NaeviaStarship #LiciniaStarship #AureliaStarship

[midnightputdown]

Tears for Fears - Head Over Heels, Gogol Bordello - Alcohol, David Bowie - Starman, Kool and the Gang - Get Down On It, The Who - Baba O'riley, Buzzcocks - Orgasm Addict, The Adicts - Steamroller, The Notorious B.I.G. - Suicidal Thoughts, The Kinks - All Day and All of the Night, MF Doom - Hoe Cakes, Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hell, Real Big Fish - Sell Out, NOFX - Please Play This Song On The Radio, Jim Croce - You Don't mess Around With Jim, The Zombies - She's Not There, Misfits - Die, Die My Darling, Jefferson Starship - Jane, DMX - Look Thru My Eyes, Bee Gees - How Deep is Your Love, Blink 182 - Dammit, Garfunkel and Oates - This Party Took a Turn for the Douche, Guttermouth - I'm Destroying the World, George Michael - Faith, Richard Harris - MacArthur Park, The Dwarves - Pimp, DJ Khaled - All I Do is Win, Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl, Rolling Stones - Brown Sugar, Operation Ivy - Smiling, Michael McDonald - I Keep Forgettin (Every Time You're Near), Dusty Springfield - Don't Forget About Me, Symphony X - Incantations of the Apprentice, Guttermouth - Bruce Lee Vs The Kiss Army, Gwar - Saddam A Gogo, and Iron Maiden - Murder in the Rue Morgue.

[moonlight--falls]

You’ve been a teen for two seconds, and you already want to beat up your sister. 

Wow. 

#ts3 #sims 3 #ts3 gameplay #sims 3 gameplay #click for hq #Operation Jefferson Starship #IlithyiaStarship #NaeviaStarship #LiciniaStarship

[moonlight--falls]

I’ve never been so jealous of a sim eating fries... 

Also, why is she eating it with a fork? She’s a slob? 

#ts3 #sims 3 #ts3 gameplay #sims 3 gameplay #sims gameplay #click for hq #Operation Jefferson Starship #AureliaStarship #my town fair got canceled last year because of covid #and probably will get canceled this year too :/