Excerpts from Electric Degeneration, Degenerate Press' semi-weekly e-zine, free and ad-free. A full episode contains sections for music reviews, upcoming events, blasphemy, classifieds, and anything else we feel like saying. If you'd like to subscribe just contact us.
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2/11/2002
DEGENERATE (ELECTRONIC) PRESS
Reviews of Ancient Rome, The Italian Renaissance, and Postmodern Love are trickling
in and thus far the audience has voted to spare our lives (thumbs up!) Thanks
to all those that have given it a look, and special thanks to those that have
sent us feedback! If you haven't done so yourself check it out:
http://www.degeneratepress.com/postmodernlove/index.html
In other Degenerate Press web efforts, we finally archived the last half of
2001's Electric Degeneration episodes so if you need a blast from the past head
to the catacombs:
http://www.degeneratepress.com/earplugs/archive/
We're even working on the missing years from 1998 - 2000, which would put almost
the entire history of Electric Degeneration online, all the way back through
1995.
EAR PLUGS
Saturday a few degenerates hooked up at El Myr in L5P for early evening drinks.
As the service disappeared it turned into late evening drinks but fortunately
we weren't in a hurry. Eventually we headed over to Northside Tavern to catch
Sean Costello, only to find the joint packed wall to wall and an $8 cover -
for Northside Tavern?!? Sheesh! A glance around the parking lot showed us how
they could get away with such outrageous prices for such a dive - Lincoln Navigators,
Mercedes, BMW... I moved out of Midtown because this type of invader had overcrowded
and outpriced me, now it's happening to one of my favorite bars. I'm willing
to put up with a crowd, or I'm willing to pay $8 for a good show, but I'm not
willing to do both, not for Northside Tavern anyhow.
So we decided it was time to find a new dive bar, something cheap, not too crowded,
with good live music. Any and all hints are greatly appreciated since our search
was basically a failure, as you'll see.
We headed up the road to The Library, a bar I've been curious about since it's
on my side of town but I've been hesitant 'cause it's next to Tech. Bars in
that neighborhood are often packed with future engineers, nothing but 21 year
old white males in baseball caps, a rather dull crowd.
The crowd milling about in the parking lot wasn't a good omen - a mix of the
Tech types along with the overly-made-up women in search of them, all with faces
so young I instantly felt like I was ancient.
Another bad omen - the band was already packing up and the booming sounds of
DJ music pounded out the open door.
But we were feeling adventurous so we coughed up $5 each and headed in. It should
have been another bad omen that they issued us wrist bands when we showed our
ID's, an indicator that they allow the under 21 crowd in as well.
I always wondered where strippers learn their trade. Sure, I've been to the
bottom of the barrel strip clubs where many get their start and don't yet have
all the moves down yet, but I always wondered where they learned those moves
in the first place. Apparently it's at The Library. A few scantily clad teenage
girls had the moves down pat and gave instruction to those wanting to learn,
and there were many under their tutelage. The instructor would hold the student
by the hips and say "No, shake up and down, no, harder." The student's
butt would get that jiggly thing going and everyone would clap in joy. Then
they'd wander into a group of males and ply their newfound talents. The problem
was neither the students nor instructors really seemed to know what to do next
- there wasn't the ever-present offering of dollar bills as there is in an actual
strip club. Instead the males just gawked more often than not. Sometimes the
males would try to dance with them but the girls seemed to sense something was
missing and would wander off after they'd tried the three standard stripper
moves. They'd head back to their friends or instructors for another round of
lessons and dancing with each other rather than their future clients. (It should
be noted that The Library is next door to Dancers Elite, a strip club serving
the black neighborhoods surrounding Tech.)
On the other hand, the guys also seemed a bit lost. The music would've been
perfect for a millennial version of Breakin' 2, The Electric Boogaloo, but I
only spotted one or two males in the whole joint that could dance even a little,
and they only kept it up for a few seconds at a time before stopping and looking
for something else to do. But what was really odd was every white male in the
joint ached to be black. They had all the lyrics memorized, they threw their
hands in the air and waved 'em like they only cared about the latest hip hop
sound and style.
Mixed in with whitie was a healthy portion of black guys but only one black
girl. Most of the black guys couldn't dance either, but at least they didn't
look like posers next to their white counterparts. It made for a strange scene.
It later occurred to me that none of these posers were imitating actual African-Americans,
but instead the image of them created by eMpTyV - everywhere you looked you
saw a crowd that looked like they belonged in the background of the latest booty-shakin',
bass-heavy ode to mo' money an' mo' ho's.
No, I don't care if "white" people "act black", or vice
versa. And, unlike the vast majority of aging rock critics, I don't have anything
against hip hop music. Like it or not, it IS the next rock and roll and as we
aging rockers get jobs/wives/kids/lives our music will be relegated to the oldies/classic
rock stations while hip hop takes over every new music station, and club, in
town, if not the entire planet. But I'm going to stay on the rock ship anyhow,
even as it sinks slowly into history. It's a lovely ship, launched with the
labor of black artist, taken over by white imitators and used to get the kids
dancing while their parents reeled in horror until eventually it sailed proudly
down the mainstream. You'd think with hip hop having an identical background
I'd be able to jump on board but I think I'd look out of place on the young-dumb-and-full-of-cum
cruise.
In other news, we got this from a subscriber:
I am happy to announce the completion of Episode 3 of The Dot Matrix Project:
Dot Matrix and the Chinese Restaurant Vortex.
This video will be screened for the very first time at bluemilk Paradigm Artspace
next Wednesday, February 13, at 8 pm. (Please email me, andrew@holistic-design.com,
for directions.)
Refreshments are provided (absolutely free), both alcoholic and non-alcoholic,
as well as finger foods. "Your fingers, they will smell good."
The program of videos will start with Dot Matrix's earliest appearances on the
bluemilk Show, and will proceed through The Dot Matrix Project's episodes 1
and 2. Then we show the new episode. We will also show interesting out-takes
from the making of episode 3.
Please bring any one you like to the event. To make sure I have enough beverages,
I would appreciate you responding to this email and tell me how many people
in your party are coming.
BLASPHEMY
Degenerate JDP sent us this rant, which works well with the last few episodes
regarding Enron:
<RANT>
I was reading comments from other unemployed IT workers on one of the bazillion
Internet head-hunter sites when I came across the inevitable Libertarian who
was so successful that he had time to tell all of the former employers that
they were all just lazy and that we live in a capitalist country and that they
should just get used to it.
Then I reread the Constitution of the United States of America. Nowhere within
that document does the word capitalism appear. Theoretically, the electorate
(us), through their (our) representatives, could exercise their (our) power
and change our economic system into anything they (we) wished, provided they
(we) did not violate same said Constitution. Of course, in reality, anyone (us)
who advocated such a change with any measure of moderate success would be assassinated
by some capitalist (who, after all, would not really believe in liberty and
justice for All, and in that respect, could not be considered a strict constructionist
-- I digress). Nonetheless, the power is there, and just because some moron
says so (and because all the major corporate owned "Liberal" media
outlets drill it into our heads 24-7), we are not a capitalist country any more
than our media is liberal. We just happen to be presently in an socio-political
system that values individual wealth more than any other single factor (even
football).
Sorry for the rant. It's just that that draft-dodging (yet hawkish, though he
never served) son-of-a-bitch, corporate cum-sucking bastard, the aptly named
Dick Cheney, who made his fortune partly from Halliburton, Inc., which had the
exclusive government contract to rebuild the Kuwaiti oil fields after 1992,
not only claimed in the corporate VP debates that the government never had anything
to do with his financial success...,
(Intermission)
... but he will not release to the country the list of advisors on Bush Baby's
Energy Policy Board, who may or may not have been directly or indirectly responsible
for this past summer's energy crisis, "proving," as Robert Graves
wrote, "that above all, mankind needs its sense of smell."
-- JDP
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger
of state and corporate power."
-- Benito Mussolini (an authority on fascism)
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