How you feeling out there? I SAID, HOW YOU FEELING OUT THERE? Oops, sorry about that, for a minute I thought I was onstage fronting an arena rocking super-group.
Another individual who will never rock an arena but is nonetheless worthy of your attention is Dispatch #6’s musical spotlight artist Eugene Chadbourne, the avant-garde guitar whiz and father of the low-fi musical mashup. Off kilter country, gonzo acid rock, comedic free jazz, oddball improvisation … Eugene does it all. Alas, in waxing rhapsodic about the man’s work last time around I mistakenly wrote that his lyric “I had a real good line that goes right here but I left it in the wash” was from the song “God Made Country Music For Good People Like Y’all.” In fact, that lyric can be heard on “We Tried To Make a Record But We Couldn’t Get It Together” (both numbers appear on on the killer album Vermin of the Blues, which features stellar back up from one of the greatest rock and roll bands of the 1980s, Evan Johns and the H-Bombs) .
“Play the songs I want to hear or I’m rippin’ off your balls” is just one priceless lyric that can actually be heard in “God Made Country Music For Good People Like Y’all,” an at least partly autobiographical number based on Eugene’s experiences playing for humorless rednecks only interested faithful covers of country chart-toppers they had already heard a million times.
I complemented Doc Chad (as he sometimes calls himself) over email on the stellar qualities of Vermin of the Blues. He wrote back with memories of that recording session: “‘We Tried to Make a Record’ hah, I don't think I have ever come up with a song that so completely relaxed the musicians in the band I was working with, it always seems in these collaborations there would be someone enthusiastic about it and some band members that were frightened to death. Telling people you want them to make mistakes! Talk about an ice breaker.”
See links in the notes below for more on the man some also call Eddie Chatterbox. You won’t find them on your damn social media feed. As always, you’re welcome!
My comments on Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana (still not the dead president) last week drew heated communiques from several readers. I had cited the following quote from the esteemed hick Senator: “What has happened in the last few days, what’s happened in the last years, is, of course, tragic. And I’m not — I’m not trying to perfectly equate these two, but we have a lot of drunk drivers in America that kill a lot of people. We ought to try to combat that, too. But I think what many folks on my side of the aisle are saying is that the answer is not to get rid of all sober drivers. The answer is to concentrate on the problem.”
My friend Monica replied: “I usually skim your columns reluctantly, as you always force me to read about political stuff I’m trying to ignore. However for the first time I must respond: I’m shocked that you didn’t take the LA senator’s remarks vis-à-vis the gun violence=drunk driving to the logical conclusion: obviously we should get rid of the sober drivers! Not only are the sober texters worse than drunks, but this would combat climate change as well! A twofer! Too radical, huh? I never figured you for a moderate!”
Food for thought. After all, it’s hard to defend people who text and drive, and who likes climate change? Not me!
Ozzabilly (aka “Bill”), my good buddy from the blurry ‘80s, also wrote in regarding Senator Kennedy’s oddball elocution: “Kennedy is a piece of work. Sadly, I believe he truly is a deep thinker of sorts. His aw shucks persona is a ruse to throw off his constituents lest they see him for the smart elitist Rhodes scholar that he is. He makes smart look really stupid.” Too bad Mr. O didn’t elaborate on Kennedy’s masterplan, apparently tiring of texting, which I can understand as I often run out of steam when communicating in that fashion. Why get carpal tunnel in the service of scattershot, short-circuited free association (not in any way a commentary on Mr. O’s message to me)?
Ha ha (notice the infectious laughter which arises when I begin a sentence in that fashion!), the truth is I tend to text as if I’m paying by the word via Western Union. Thankfully I’m now typing on an ergonomic keyboard. No sentences that read like desperate messages fired off in haste across a telegraph wire for my readers!
Of course, there will be edginess. Though I’m far less anxious than I was from late 2016 through all of 2020, things still get to be a bit much when I take in even a minimal daily maintenance dose of news (kind of like homeopathy except there’s no healing). Lately the main thing that gnaws at me continues to be the need for Dems to get rid of the much-abused filibuster which, as I have explained in past run-on paragraphs, Toxic Turtle McConnell uses to block any even vaguely progressive legislation from making its way through the Senate.
Apparently the two Democrats in that august house of millionaires who won’t commit to getting rid of the filibuster, Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), still haven’t read the memo about the need to maintain a united front against the evil that is today’s Republican Party. Manchin recently said “I’m not killing the filibuster” because he believes in working with his Repug counterparts. Attempting to explain his inexplicable faith in a broken process, Manchin riffed, “January 6 changed me. I never thought in my life, I never read in history books to where our form of government had been attacked, at our seat of government, which is Washington, DC, at our Capitol, by our own people. So, something told me, ‘Wait a minute. Pause. Hit the pause button.’” Hey, I didn’t say he waxed eloquent, but he seems to be sticking to his guns, and yes he likes his guns too. Oy vey.
In government sleaze news, CNN ran a piece on Matt Gaetz, famous for being one of the most odious members of Congress, which included this: “Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor.” The euphemism “slept with” is fairly hilarious in this context, or it would be if Gaetz wasn’t such a repulsive predatory pig. Also, the CNN reporters who threw the article together phrased their revelation in such a way that it sounds like some of the “sleeping” was done on the House floor. My nominee for sentence of the month!
Speaking of blatant abuse of the English language, what’s with the continued use of the word “conservative” to describe racist, moronic macho man wannabe-fascists? I still see Proud Boys (I’m not the first person to wonder what they have to be proud of) and Boogaloo Boogers called conservative in mainstream news stories. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the word in question used to describe individuals who wanted to conserve, not destroy. In the pre-Fox News days, though usually assholes, such people would sometimes engage in respectful debate. They tended to be more like today’s Corporate Democrats than latter-day Repugs. Clearly this revolting tendency to avoid using the terms white supremacist, domestic terrorist, or KKK/Nazi motherfuckers to describe the vile scum that Trump encouraged to come out of their backwoods cellars is just another thread in the byzantine international conspiracy to keep me permanently pissed off.
But don’t despair, the human comedy keeps throwing up twisted reasons to laugh in spite of it all. Case in point: the most hysterical courtroom argument of recent years, which came from wacko Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s legal team in late March. Powell is being sued by the voting machine company Dominion for spreading falsehoods about their technology, including its having been developed in Venezuela to help steal elections for the late Hugo Chavez. Her lawyers argued, “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements [made by Powell] were truly statements of fact,” which is fair enough but a more than slightly odd defense. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen twittered in reaction, “[Powell] should have gone with an insanity defense due to #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.” That is certainly a more compelling argument, annoying hashtag notwithstanding.
One last news item to tide you over until next time: the far right nut job Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has called proposed vaccine passports “Biden’s mark of the beast.” She’s certainly not keen on understatement!
This is the month of my birthday, though unlike when I turned 21 I’ve chosen not to celebrate for all of April. However I feel it is incumbent upon me to steer you to an article about one of the two people responsible for my being here in the first place, Robert Terrall (aka Dad). I’m grateful to Eddie Muller for giving me the opportunity to write the piece for Noir City magazine; I later ran it in Namaste, Motherfucker! #7, and more recently Crime Reads brought it back. See interweb locale of the piece below, and don’t expect me to apologize for not embedding the link here (ever notice what all that clicking in the midst of reading does to your attention span?).
I seem to be slipping into the hack columnist mode of slapping together a list of “items” with little or no attention to transitions between paragraphs (see the newspaper work of San Francisco’s own Herb Caen for prime examples of that approach). But that’s ok!* Just pretend I’m at the end of a particularly annoying cornball cinematic montage as I prepare to lurch into yet another Namaste, Motherfucker! moment.
My N,MF! “Editor’s Corner” concludes with an RIP section consisting of individuals gone but not forgotten who I admire and/or acknowledge the impact of. The list that's accumulated since the last issue of the mag is too long to subject you to at this time, but one public figure who stood tall among global dissidents even when he was slouching was David Graeber, who died too young in 2020. I highly recommend his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). Amazing scholarship, sharp analysis, and funny as hell.
Two friends also died too young last year: Rob Eshelman-Håkansson and Julia Dyett. I hadn’t seen Rob for years but he was an impressive fixture in San Francisco radical politics in a period when I was attempting to be a more effective movement participant. He was a mover and shaker, the real deal and a sweet guy, and I wanted to be like him when I grew up (which, alas, never happened). Julia was another force of nature who was a mainstay of the ace Tuesday lunch shift at Martin De Porres House of Hospitality, a wonderful person with a great laugh who always had time to lend a sympathetic ear to virtually anyone. Like Rob she did an amazing amount of impressive things in a life cut short way too soon.
More recently, that same Tuesday lunch crew said goodbye to our dear friend Carmela Nilan, who lived to be 95 and was still ordering Tuesday lunch dishwashers to give her clean spoons at 94. As our pal Michael said, “She was witty and good and strong.” She was also as big a fan of Fred Astaire as yours truly.
To state the obvious, they will all be missed.
* I used to hate exclamation points but as I enter my “who gives a shit” dotage I do seem to be fast and loose with the damn things, don’t I?
Robert Terrall revisited: https://crimereads.com/how-shane-blacks-love-letter-to-1970s-crime-fiction-put-a-spotlight-on-robert-terrall/
Death to the filibuster!: https://votesaveamerica.com/forthepeople/
Manchin speaks:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/08/politics/joe-manchin-bipartisanship-januar-6-cnntv/index.html
Powell dissembles: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/23/sidney-powell-trump-election-fraud-claims
Gaetz gets sleazy on the House floor: https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/01/politics/matt-gaetz-photos-women/index.html
Christian Parenti’s obituary for Rob: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/07/robert-eshelman-hakansson-obituary
Eugene Chadbourne’s House of Chadula: https://eugenechadbourne.com/
Nice Eugene C. Interview with choice musical interludes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIXKhryDvTw&list=TLGG_YlkaCRpSi4xNTA0MjAyMQ